This blog was supposedly for point-and-click adventure games. Namely to take everyone with me on my discovery of this sort-of-dead but still annoying alive genre. I mean to keep that promise, mostly because I still really want to play Under a Killing Moon and I just recently bought Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned off of gog at a nice discount. Sneak peek and all that. Anyways, the game I decided to write about today isn't really an adventure game, but there are things you pick up and put in/on other things to acheive your goals. Does that count?

What's that? Oh, that's just a game in general? Okay, then.

So it's a game, and that's a good enough correlation to warrant me piggybacking this blog with a slight detour. Into space. With robots.

Cyborgs, cyberpunk and whatnot.

When I started this dumb quest to find out just what the hell people twenty-plus years ago found entertaining about silly joke output-machines I was also taking solace in the fact that I was catching up on games I really ought to have played. I like old games, and I like laughing. It made sense to me at the time, to a version of myself that hadn't yet crawled through the sludge throughout the second Gabriel Knight game. In keeping with my bright-eyed hopes of unveiling greatness that I've missed I dug my dirty, single-minded man-paws into:

System Shock 2 - WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP

If you noticed my overwhelming cleverness in the title, this is in fact just the first part of a two-part extravaganza. Unlike the adventure games I've been playing for this blog, System Shock 2 is a fairly long game. I couldn't sit down and play it to completion in 2-3 serious afternoons with a few pages of scribbled nonsense notes and complaints. Being that I've decided to continue writing this while still doing that whole "getting an education" thing, carving out the time to really finish a game of this magnitude was something else. Basically, I forgot what sleep was because the insane drum and bass blaring over the loudspeakers of the Von Braun never let me do anything other than devolve into a paranoid, psycho-kinetic plumber.

Sound design is immensely important to to bringing the atmosphere of a game together in a way that's concrete. In the pitch-black corners of this ship the only sound dancing through the otherwise naked hallways are my footsteps. The occasional synth pad leaves an oftentimes distorted and shaky bed for the noises of the ship to come alive. She's poorly maintained, and I can hear it. I can see it and feel it.

Then a groan comes from the Crew's quarters just ahead, a pleading moan of warning. It's telling me to stay away. Naturally, I investigate and before I know it my skull is being hammered in by a combination of wild, pounding snares and an oversized, rusty wrench. Lucky for me, I have magic nano-space-cyborg abilities that leave me slightly more resilient to wrench smashes. I turn around and smack this voice modulated horror to death with my own oversized, rusty wrench.

Half of the time, System Shock 2 revels in its ability to leave you feeling safe but with the impending sense of dread that marks the best horror and suspense. The music swells die down, sometimes with an anticlimactic sputter, and you're free to explore an area of the ship until the voices - I say voices because the modulation is the always creepy layering of several different tones and actors altogether - of the infected crew flitter through your robot-ears and you have to remember how to properly wrench-at-face. Then the incredible soundtrack amps back up and I'm wondering just how many times I could listen to this on loop without slowly going mad myself. Instead of worrying about that, I dash through corridors rewiring security cameras, turrets, and doing the aforementioned wrenching.

The combat, at least so far, has become a game of waiting for the crazed hunchbacks to swing at me so I can walk up to them and hit them then retreat to relative safety. Then rinse and repeat. At least, that's the melee combat as relying on guns isn't completely viable at this point. Why have guns anyway, when I can hack to pieces just about anything that won't explode on death. Which is, sadly, more frequent than I'd like. Having enemies explode on death, and as their means of attack, is just about the most uninspired and tedious enemy design possible. I can't actually think of anything worse than that, because it's the pits.

The plot of the game, however, isn't. The integration of the character's background and training as tutorials is really well done. Having you choose skills and stats seemingly at random, though? Yeah, that sucks. I knew from the word go that I wanted to play this as a hacking whiz who had a penchant for melee weapons so, after reading the manual I learned that I wanted some strength and hacking. Well, I could have figured that out myself now couldn't I have? It's still a poor excuse to force the player to make seemingly random, non-arbitrary decisions. Luckily the game gets rather judicious with the skill point equivalents and rewiring your build isn't that difficult and doesn't really screw you up, at least from my experience so far. Now that I've done a handful of years worth of training with the UNN and other organizations, I've signed up for the Von Braun, an experimental FTL ship built by the omnipresent TriOptimum corporation. All hail our glorious TriOp overlords.

Anyway, there's some kind of distress beacon that the ship responds to on a planet called Tau Ceti V. And that's where the game picks up, with you awakening from cryostasis and getting immediately contacted by someone who seems to have an immense amount of control over the ship's computers - Dr. Polito. It's clearly her. How could it be anyone else?

At this point I'm following the instructions of "Dr. Polito" (because, really, who at this point doesn't make the connection that it isn't actually her?) and running around the Von Braun looking for a way to rendezvous with her. The storytelling itself is mostly through the use of audio logs which, for the most part, make the ship come alive and feel vibrant. The other times its almost quite literally the trope of someone writing down their death screams. At least with an audio log it's somewhat better... right? I guess for all of these death-logs their recording device switched off automatically/lost power...?

I don't know, but I do know that it's not worth thinking about.

Instead, I'm going to continue my trip through this dying hulk. I've just purged the elevators of some mysterious growth in the Hydroponics lab, and the meeting with "Dr. Polito" is nigh.