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Welcome to Citadel Station What is System Shock? A bit of history. System Shock was released by the now defunct Looking Glass Studios on September 22nd, 1994. System shock is old. Really. I am a year and a half older than it, and I’m certain some goons will be pretty surprised to remember just how old this thing is. It was the company’s second release under the Looking Glass name, to great acclaim and raving critics, but to less than stellar sales. Produced by Warren Spector, additionally of Deus Ex fame today, it was a different kind of game. It was recognizable as a shooter in concept, but it introduced levels of complexity that hadn’t yet been seen in the genre. You had an inventory to manage; of the sixteen weapons in the game you could only carry seven at one time. You could hack computer terminals to access a 3D cyberspace environment. You could sprint to flee from enemies, and vault onto and over the environment to reach new locations. You could crouch, go prone, and even lean left and right. You had a HUD that took up like loving three-fifths of the screen, unless of course you were a dirty plebeian who removed the HUD because oh no i can only see in 5 a foot cone! However, while the game added so much, it also focused on paring itself down so that experience would be streamlined as possible. There aren’t really any characters, there’s character: the antagonist, SHODAN. There are no friendly NPCs with which to converse, you are all alone on an isolated research station by Saturn. There are no cutscenes, all story content comes from text and audio logs that are scattered around the station that you can listen to at your leisure. Or at least as much leisure as you’ll have. This is how I write when I’m trying to be informative. What makes System Shock such a great game is that it feels natural. Nearly everything in the game fits in and works with the other pieces to further your enjoyment. It’s a game that you play today and wonder how we didn’t follow its example. Insert whatever Bioshock joke you feel appropriate here. Maybe Ken Levine! you see it’s because given his recent track record he has become something of a walking joke due our initial expections of him setting us up for him to just punch us in the face with a line. a line of bullshit. Wow this game sounds absolutely baller, where do I get it?!?!?! Well that’s the bad news. Looking Glass is out of business, and obviously the game isn’t being manufactured any more. Thus there will never be any more copies of it. Ever. If you want it you better start saving up because such a national treasure goes for no less than $10000 at auction, and those are damaged copies. I, however, am lucky enough to have one of the real, totally one hundred percent actually real no i swear guys my dad works at nintendo copies. I’m kidding. (except my dad does work at nintendo though serious) System Shock’s status is officially abandonware at this point. Basically all that means is that whoever holds the rights to it doesn’t care what anyone does with it, thus it is technically public domain and anyone can do with it what they wish. So of course this means that you are free to download the game for, uh, free. But, the difficulty is that if you do that, you’ll have to use DOSBox. The game can’t run on our fancy modern machines so you need to emulate a terrible computer. And if you’re someone who never used a machine like that, it could be a bit annoying or frustrating getting DOSBox to work properly. But don’t fret! A group of kind souls over at SystemShock.org have put together a simple .exe version of the game, called System Shock Portable. And here it is. So for all those of you who want to play along at home, here’s your chance. A warning though: the game has a steep learning curve, arguably one of the reasons its sales were lacking. The game doesn’t just throw you into the deep-end, it handcuffs you to a weight, hands you a lockpick, and rolls in the weight, and that metaphor doesn’t look as good on paper (screen?) as I had hoped it would. Oh, okay. So what’s going to happen with this Let’s Play? This will be a screenshot LP. Though I don’t want to get anyone thinking that there definitely will be, there may be some videos if I find a section that isn’t well captured with screenshots or if anyone wants me to show off the game in motion. The reason this first person shooter will be a screenshot LP is because the game is very methodical. It has a tense atmosphere and sometimes you’ll need quick reflexes but a lot of the game is walking through corridors, searching for doors and items. It is difficult to give informative, colorful, and interesting commentary on the game for ten minutes of a twenty minute video which are taken up by just walking around looking for junk to jam down my pants, and I'll be playing the game. However, with screenshots we can keep the game flowing onward and remain informative and ‘colorful.’ However some people are probably familiar with the fact that one of the biggest attributes of the story in System Shock is that it is told in the form of text and audio logs, probably because I told you that a few paragraphs up. Additionally, the music and sound design in the game is fantastic. Each tune begins in a specific way, then from there the program randomly chooses out of about 20 or so sections to play every sixteen measures or something. The music is great just by itself even without that, and thus I will be linking it whenever appropriate. The same for audio logs, of course, which will be indicated by the icon that names the audio log and whomever left it. I will upload them to Tindeck so you can listen along with them too. Anything else I should know? I’m leaving this section open-ish. Let’s begin with a simple request: spoilers.  Spoiler Recommendations:
Next I would like to elucidate the difficulty settings of this game. There are four categories each with four levels.  Hopefully what the difficulties do in general is self-explanatory from the levels. The only one that really needs any sort of explanation is Mission 3, which adds a 7 hour time-limit to the game. But we aren’t trying to speed run this game and we’ll be looking around a little bit so we’re not going to dick with that, and we’re actually going to play the whole game on level 2 difficulty for all categories Additionally I said I would be posting the music for each of the floors when we get to them. Given that this is a DOS / really early game, how the music sounded is dependent upon your sound card. As such, what I’m posting will almost certainly not be what you heard when you first played the game, or what you will hear if you play along. Plus, given the music’s nature of being somewhat randomly played, most of the tracks that I have that have been recorded from the game are incomplete, that is they are missing key sections or location dependent tracks. I an effort to combat this, I also have versions of the music by an band called Tribe, formed in part by Eric and Teri Brosius and Greg LoPiccolo, all of whom went on to work for Looking Glass, and remakes and remixes by an artist called Chicajo. I will post whichever one best matches the music for the area the first time we get there, then switch it up a bit when we go back. There might be some kind of contest too, we'll see what happens. CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Skip me past the first update! Table of Contents
Paper Contest Entrants Hafl: Conquering the Mother: The Conflict of Masculine and Feminine in System Shock (tw: spoilers, castration, forced feminization, rape, male privilege, bodily functions, pregnancy, abortion, spoilers, penis, patriarchy, incest, Oedipal complex, major spoilers, Lacan, lesbian erasure, sex=gender, gender essentialism, violence) [Warnings added out of respect for the author] CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Aug 25, 2014 |
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Update 1: Motivational Speaker First off, watch this cutscene: Now update’s over, time to vote for a name.  ah ha ha ha ha i  seriously the height of comedy   Welcome to System Shock. More specifically, welcome to the Medical level of Citadel Station.  To our immediate right is a med-patch. These patches, one kind of several, enable you to slowly regenerate health over time, about a fifth of your total health can be regained from a single patch. They’re also the only patches worth using. Let’s take a look at that door down there on the left.  It’s full of goodies. The pipe is...a pipe, and it’s our first actual weapon in the game. The brown patch is a staminup stimulant. The purple patch is a berserker combat patch. Stamunip patches enable you to sprint at full speed unlimitedly for a short period of time; usually when you sprint you begin at full-tilt, then slow down as time passes until you’re going at barely above normal speed almost like how a normal loving person runs. You can tell how much longer you sprint by watching the heart rate monitor in the upper left hand corner of the screen. As you would expect, when you begin to experience symptoms of tachycardia you will know that you probably won’t be able to sprint too good anymore. The berserk patches cause you to be able to  Our first log, and the device that enables us to listen to audio logs and e-mails. We only got a neural implant, didn’t we? Where are we putting all this poo poo? Are we just jamming the logs into our ear or do we have some kind of convenient disc drive to store them that pops out of our forehead? Looks like Diego’s happy with my work…they’re firing up the sleep machine for me now. Gotta admit, when the goons (I am obligated to point out the usage of the word ‘goons’ here so the thread doesn’t) from Tri-Op caught me I thought for sure they’d take me off line. Instead, Diego just asks for a “favor.” Hack him into SHODAN, and all is forgiven. Plus, six months in a healing coma earns me a cyberjack interface even TriOp’s execs couldn’t swing. I’ll be king of the Net. Even so, I have just handed the most powerful AI in the system to a fumbling corp VP, and there’s no telling what’ll happen. They tell me the coma leaves you foggy, so I’ll leave myself some reminders. First off, the combo to the healing suite is 451. Second I’ve stashed some useful stuff in the maintenance hatch under the grating “north” of the healing suite. Last and best, I finished the system analyzer which’ll let me keep an eye of Shodan’s processes (Oh, that’s what it does. Also nice consistency there in your capitalization, Looking Glass.) It’s in the storage closet outside the sleep machine. In ten minutes it’s off to bed for half a year. Good night. I would complain about transcribing all that but I did write about that much to explain patches so why even bother? If you’ve played other Shock games, by the way, as well as some of the other games made by Looking Glass alumni, you should take note of the code of the door being 451; each game made in this ‘series’ and by Looking Glass dudes at places like Arkane Studios, Ion Storm, Irrational games, etc. (games like Dishonored, Deus Ex and Human Revolution) use 451 as their (usually) first combo-lock combination as a rather unsubtle reference to Farenheit 451.  Let’s listen to that first e-mail as we go through to the rest of the healing suite. Immediately in front of us is a surgery machine, which heals us to full health whenever it is used. LOG Employee two-dash-four-six-oh-one, listen carefully. My name is Rebecca Lansing, and I’m a counter-terrorism consultant to Tri-Optimum . We’re tracking a disruption on Citadel Station; something involving an on-board AI called SHODAN. You are Tri-Op’s only contact on station. Communications are out, and there is evidence of biological contamination. The mining laser is charging for a possible strike against Earth. There’s a man named Nathan D’Arcy, who may know something about taking the laser offline. His office is near the central hub on your level. The AI is on the bridge. Once the laser is out, look for the source of the problem there. And by the way...We know all about you and your friend Diego. Pull this off, and we’ll clear your record. That implant you’re wearing is military grade hardware. Use it well. Lansing out. Boom, goal and motivation. Well, as you might have already guessed, everything’s gone to poo poo. The most pressing issue is the mining laser that’s going to strike Earth, and now we’ve got a name to go on, one Nathan D’Arcy. Let’s keep a look out for him. Addendum: User 'Sakako' pointed out that 2-4601 could actually be another incredibly unsubtle reference, this time to Les Miserables. I'm willing to believe this but I'm having a hard time drawing the parallels given my minimal exposure to the work.  Hello, first enemy. These are serv-bots and they are complete pushovers. They have okay reach, but are limited to melee. This works well for us as we only have a melee weapon with slightly longer reach. A word on melee weapons: I still can’t loving tell how to accurately hit something. It appears to take into account both your location relative to the object, your view of the object, and where your crosshair is pointing when you swing. It’s not as much a problem in big open spaces with big targets, but it makes finesse rather difficult.   Up atop the ramp we realize we aggro’d another one of those bots. Pathfinding is such that it appears that enemies always attempt to take the straightest path to you, without taking elevation into account. So luckily he’ll just stay down there while we dick around up here.  One of the coolest parts of System Shock (I will say this a lot) is that all enemy corpses, corpses in general, and random boxes scattered around the stations contain semi-random loot. This bot, for example, contains two soda cans, which do absolutely nothing of use. About half the loot you find is junk and the other half is ammo, health, batteries, what have you.  Killing the robot leads us to a little alcove that contains our first ranged weapon, the dart gun. It’s useless against these bots as what is a tiny little dart gonna go do to a presumably steel construct?  Returning up the ramp, we find this box that always contains a fragmentation grenade, which we will probably have about three causes to use over the course of the LP. Grenades are good and all but often large groups of enemies aggro one at a time provided you are careful, and ammo ceases to be much of a concern after the first two floors. The blue thing in front of us a power station which lets us harness the power of 80s supergroups to recharge whatever batteries we have in our magical brain pack interface thing. Apparently our pocket dimension doesn’t take any power to use, though we are low on power for some reason so we’ll fill up here.  Just in case you forgot where we were.  By the door we discover some poor soul and his last audio log, as well as the door to exit the healing suite and access Medical proper. Let’s mosey on over and pick that thing up.  Uh oh. LOG Welcome back to Citadel Station. We hope your somnolent healing stage went well. Today is the sixth day of November, year two oh seven two. You are currently in the healing suites located on the first level. Level two contains the research laboratories. Three houses the department of maintenance, and the storage cells are on level four. The flight deck is on level five. Level six holds crew facilities, and executive suites. Level seven is systems engineering. Level eight houses the department of security. The bridge is located on level nine, and energy systems on level R. All levels can be accessed by the elevator in Alpha Quadrant. We hope you have a pleasant stay on Citadel Station. Oh thank Christ it’s only an automated greeting. Take note of the date, it’s November 6th, 2072, this will be important for determining the timeline of events on the station. I really like this e-mail; mostly because I really like hearing SHODAN’s vocal glitches, something about them is wonderfully off-putting. Plus, we now have a idea of map of the station:
LOG SHODAN’s securities closing down on us. The elevators are frozen...Mira keeps saying that it’s the cameras -- and the medical CPU core -- That SHODAN’s using these to hold onto the level. That’s all fine but I don’t really see how it helps. The thing is everywhere… Cameras eh? This introduces one of the main ‘search quests’ the game gives us. Each level has a series of cameras as well as CPU cores that lock out certain areas or objects on the level. By destroying them we can lessen SHODAN’s hold on the station and give ourselves access to more of the area. Come to think of it, I saw some cameras in here.  Here’s one. Whenever you see a red dot on the map in the lower right, that indicates the presence of a camera at that location. Additionally, it also indicates a camera that I forgot and will have to hunt for in about four hours when we need to remove the rest of the security on the level.  We have a long way to go on these things. Let’s get out of here.   Come here, Chuckles.  This is a Humanoid Mutant. As far as we are concerned, at the moment we have no idea how the hell these things are on that station, other than it may have something to do with biological contamination that Rebecca mentioned. They’re also only melee attackers and go down smooth. They are also highly susceptible to the dart gun and have terribly degraded senses so we will often get the first shot on them.   The first view of the exterior of the healing suite. Storage 3 over there is locked to anyone who doesn’t have Group-1 access, which we don’t have, so we’ll have to swing by later when we can open the door. Let’s check out that the door in front of us.  A log and a Group-1 access card. Great, now we can get into that storage room. LOG Gunther was killed today. I can’t let myself think about it…I think I understand how SHODAN is doing it. When we destroy the cameras and CPU nodes, SHODAN loses some of its control over the station functions -- at least on this level. I think I can restore manual control in the hosptial. Yes, thank you Mira, I already explained that. So what’s in the Storage room then?  Oh boy boxes my favorite. A few grenades, and a couple of rounds for some kind of pistol? i dont know whats up with that man im just playin the game. What’s up with that panel out in the hall?  Here’s our first puzzle. Pretty straightforward this, you have to complete the circuit from left to right. This is, pretty obviously, the easiest of all the puzzles in the game, being the first one. To complete the circuit, we click on the X’s to turn them into +’s which actually enable to current to flow to any of the prongs of said +. There’s not even any tricks to this one, you click an X and it changes to a +. Can be done in a maximum of four moves then if you want to try for the speed run record.  ’Solving’ this ’’’’’’’puzzle’’’’’’’’’’’(''''''') causes the not at all out of place or suspicious platform in front of us to start lowering into the floor, revealing a corridor.  We find a dart gun on the floor here, which means more ammo. Probably time to explain how guns work in System Shock. See most games enable you to reload with the push of the button on your keyboard, which the PLEBEIAN MASSES devour like the PIGS THEY ARE. System Shock respects your intelligence. It makes you move your mouse AND click a button to reload, sometimes as many as THREE TIMES. That menu in the lower left there is our weapon information. By double clicking on the needle icon with the green border and red pips, we can remove the magazine or clip, I assume the dart gun uses a clip, along with all the ammo inside the gun. Clicking again on an ammo type will load that ammo into the gun. This isn’t done automatically, as of course System Shock understands we aren’t babies who can’t keep track of ammo; when you run out of ammo you have to load more in yourself. So because we found a dart gun on the floor, that was still loaded for some reason, we can remove its clip and take the ammo inside for ourselves, then throw it away because there’s no point to keeping two dart guns around.  Oh what is this. It’s too loving dark.  getitoffgetitoffgetitoffgetitoff  Enemies often have very satisfying deaths. They pretty much always explode into whatever guts are appropriate for their make-up. Bots explode in fire balls, mutant’s heads explode in blood…Plus they’re accompanied by a great screech of an electrical short or an anguished death cry. That isn’t weird to comment on at all.  Nobody panic I found the light switch. Finally...Finally got it. Yeah. Not much else in these  If we went down here we wouldn’t be able to go back to where we were previously. I genuinely do not remember exactly where this tunnel goes so we’ll instead back up and exit the maintenance tunnels.   The tunnels spit us out in an area near some kind of armory with a key-pad lock. We don’t know the code and I’m not gonna sit here trying out the literal thousand of possible combinations to break into the drat thing. I’m certain we’ll find a code somewhere. Suddenly and for reasons I can’t quite explain I feel a strong urge to turn back and check out that bulkhead door outside the healing suite.   About what I expected. Hey mutants, how’s it going. Entering the door on the left brings us into:  what the hell you doin up there duder On the table there is LOG Status report: We’re holed up in the Beta quadrant behind a radioactive trench. The mutants are scavenging for food in the corridors and nesting in Gamma! I sent a party to the west wing for supplies maybe twelve hours ago. (Quick get away from Bartlet! JENKINS, NO!) Nathan D’Arcy is thinking of ways to disable the mining laser. It looks like we might hold them off. Now we’ve got Nathan D’Arcy’s last known location as of four days ago: behind a radioactive trench somewhere. I have no idea what crazy future OSHA authority gave the go ahead for the building of a radioactive trench on the medical level of the station.  Turning on the light switch on the pillar at the end of the hall enrages this humanoid mutant because holy gently caress dude do you know what time it is jesus christ im tryin to fuckin sleep here you are the worst room mate ever dont think you can just turn on the light when you get back at night you know i go to bed at 10pm sharp every day why do you always loving do this  The storage area to the left is closed for now so we’ll have to simply proceed down the corridor. On the ground here we find a log from one Abe Ghiran. LOG If any survivors can hear me, please, some of us are still resisting SHODAN. We have a sanctuary, in Beta quadrant, guarded by a radioactive trench. There’s a force bridge that operates off a wiring panel. If you’re coming in from Alpha, our guards will extend the bridge for you. Be very careful, mutants are all over the corridors. Good luck. Well now we have a better idea of where to find D’Arcy; we need to head to Beta Quadrant to find this trench. Hopefully the whole ‘quadrant’ thing is fairly self-explanatory: each level of the station is divided into four quadrants: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta.  At the end of the hall we find...This thing, which the game helpfully labels a cyberspace terminal, along with a note on the ground. You have to wonder how the hell this thing even works. Do I just bash my head into the thing until I connect, or is there some magical USB 5.7 dongle that extends out of my nose? Engineer’s Report -- Arnold Hessman 22.SEP.2072 As I feared, SHODAN’s malfunctions are manifesting in Citadel’s cyberspace net. Several storage lockers and rooms have been sealed, with their controls put on ‘cybertoggles’ only accessible in cyberspace. Also, some codes to sensitive areas on the station have been encoded onto loose data fragments. Although all station personnel capable of entering cyberspace have clearance for those codes, I’m very concerned about the potential security hazard. I’ll try to have SHODAN introduce defensive programs into cyberspace, to keep potential intruders from floating data and cybertoggles. So for those of you keeping track of the timeline, we assumedly turned SHODAN’s ethical constraints in May or late April. By late September, people still hadn’t figured something was up in a massive way. Also this rear end in a top hat decided that putting some defender programs into cyberspace would be a good idea. I question the point of this. He says IN THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE that everyone who can get into cyberspace has clearance for the codes in cyberspace, and this is a research station owned by a corporation, does he think they don’t screen ships that dock in the flight bay? What intruders are they going to run into? You might say corporate espionage but, I mean, all the things in cyberspace are specific to the station; there aren’t any corporate secrets kept there, at least none that I can remember. And when you see how cyberspace is laid out you’ll realize that somebody would have to be pretty high up in the food chain to access a lot of the more sensitive data. I mean, there are also cameras everywhere. Does this dude seriously think that if some guy just kind of blanks out in front of the cyberspace terminal for ten minutes that security will just say, “Oh, good old person I’ve never seen before in my life, always staring at those terminals.” You know, here, let me show what I’m talking about with the cyberspace thing.   This is the portion of the game that you should be glad someone else is playing for. Cyberspace has some crazy poo poo going on; the barriers to the area you are in are wireframes that occasionally get filled with flat color, and the controls are like you’re in space. If you’ve ever played Descent (I only played Descent 3) it’s a little bit like that, but there’s not really any direction that could be referred to as Universal Space Up here.  The red crosses we saw early just restore your health; you don’t use the same health bar as you do when you’re in meatspace here. Instead you have ‘integrity,’ as the the text on the screen so helpfully indicates. When you run out of integrity you take a good chunk of damage, your heart rate skyrockets, and an annoying little siren plays for a few seconds. So obviously we won’t be doing that very often. Those weird boxes are bits of data. They range from programs that we can use to games and other things. Truly, the legacy of this game lives on SwineKeeper.  Prior to this lovely dutch angle we picked up one such data bit, which gives us the pulser, our first cyberspace weapon. This square being accosted by four rhombi is what I will call a data node. They make a bit of text flash up on the screen in the lower right corner. If they ever say anything important I’ll let you guys know. This one just so happens to say something very important: level 1 elevator taken off line - SHODAN security block establish 04.NOV.72 So apparently the elevator on this floor has been disabled by SHODAN’s security. Here’s why we need to break those cameras: if we can loosen SHODAN’s hold on the level enough then SHODAN will be unable to lock us out of the elevator.  Now we enter the tunnel to the next location. Cyberspace is laid out such that you begin in one ‘location,’ with tunnels linking that initial location to the other sections of the map. To assist in finding these tunnels there are various arrows pointing to them and the other ways you can go, you can see one in the distance in that screenshot. Those yellow squares with the brown cubes are mines. When you touch them you lose a small amount of your integrity. You would think they aren’t dangerous, but for one you always moving forward in cyberspace, hitting the ‘forward’ key just makes you move faster. For two, these tunnels force you to move along in whatever direction you entered them in, with the forward key just making you go even faster. Thus you are basically taken along a current to the next location, making the mines almost a threat. Almost.  This is one of those security programs that Arnold requested SHODAN to add. These programs are not very dangerous as they move rather slowly and have very short range for their attacks. The only thing you need to worry about is running into them, which given that you need to look at them to attack them and you constantly move forward there's a non-zero possibility of that happening. Running into security programs is probably the biggest danger you encounter in cyberspace.     hope you dont get motion sickness nerds  The stop sign over there is a label pointing to a cybertoggle with the stick coming out of it. Running into it tells us that the cybertoggle below it is the Medical security door lock, which is the storage room we passed to reach the terminal we’re in right now.  This is said cybertoggle. The signs are a bit redundant as using a toggle tells you what it does any way.  Let’s get out of here. These are cyberspace exits. You better hope you don’t run into one when you aren’t done in a section of cyberspace because when log back in to a terminal it takes you to original starting zone of that area of cyberspace.   And this is why you check everywhere. This is a medical access card hidden in the corner of the room. We need this to proceed. Imagine missing this thing then scouring the level to try to find it. I’m lucky I turned to the right to walk away from the terminal.   Hey there, baby. What’s your name?  Say hello to the magpulse.  Basically a minor BFG9000, though not quite as devastating. Plus, it takes ammunition and we won’t find any magpulse ammo for like two floors or something stupid like that. So were gonna have to sit on her for a while, but don’t worry we’ll bring her back out eventually.  This power station is currently blocked by SHODAN’s security so we’ll have to destroy a few more cameras before we can access it. SHODAN security blocks are indicated by a picture of SHODAN’s face in the lower left info box on our HUD. The amount of her face that is visible indicates the level of security left controlling it. If the entirety of her face is visible then you haven’t even made a dent in security. If most of her face is visible then her control is weakening. If only her eyes are visible then she’s barely locking you out.  Behind our power station is this happy fellow. He’s a cyborg under the control of SHODAN, and armed with a pistol. These guys are pretty harmless, but definitely more of a threat than the mutants or robots we’ve seen so far.  well this certainly doesn’t look out of place   i am absolutely shocked That panel on the ground is an anti-gravity panel, for lack of a better term. When red it allows you to gently float down the ground, while green panels let you float to some pre-determined height. Up in that alcove there is another panel-puzzle, so we need to change the anti-grav panel to green to get at it.  What idiot put this switch here? hey dave i gotta go open the door to med bay oh yeah steve just go into the secret elevator under the main pillar then rewire the circuits next to our cc-tv feed that’s watching it to open it up then. oh yeah and if the magical anti-gravity panel you need to use to do this is set wrong youll have to hit the switch hidden under the sceen on the east side of the room you are a terrible supervisor watch out for the radioactive trench  This puzzle is a bit less straight forward than the first. Clicking on an X causes all the adjacent X’s to change to +’s. Of course, this actually means that you only need two clicks to do anything. Solving opens that door on the screen there. Now we just need to find it and find out where it leads.  LOG The resistance faction led by Keith Swanson left a week ago. We found the mutants fighting over their remains this morning. We’re caught between the mutants and the cyborgs, so I’m worried whether we can carry out D’Arcy’s plan. We’re going to send Alan and Carl through the cyborg territory to reach the elevator. So cyborgs have taken control of the area between the trench and the elevator, and D’Arcy actually has a plan! I’m liking this guy more and more. Then again all I know is that he exists and has a plan so I may be a bit hasty on judging him.  Atop the ladder are these boxes, one of which yields a biological process monitor.  Which is also not very useful, though may be more useful than the Sense-around because it at least gives a quantification of our fatigue. Otherwise you have to just monitor your heart rate and guess when you’re running on fumes.   LOG Carl has come back from recon without Alan. He says they took Alan into a room marked ‘Cyborg Conversion,’ and now he’s a cyborg assassin! Carl marked the room with the word ‘here’ before he ran. One of the technicians says we can just...flip a switch and make the converter a surgery unit again. With only twelve of us left, though, it may be an academic point. Maybe someone else should have been leader. Oh don’t beat yourself up Althea. I have no idea how you guys loving survived this long any way. They were at least alive four days ago which is certainly better than I would probably do. Well, it’s alright, doing the best you can, it’s alright; as long as you lend a hand. You can sit around and wait for the phone to ring, waiting for someone to tell you everything. It don’t matter if your by my side. I’m satisfied. So now we have a nice little sub-quest to take care of. On (just about) every floor there’s a surgery unit that has been modified to convert everyone that’s taken into it into a cyborg to do SHODAN’s bidding. If we can reach the surgery unit, then we can restore it to its original function. What this does for us is make it impossible to die on a floor. People make fun of Bioshock for Vita-Chambers and System Shock 2 for its reconstitution stations but they have always been a staple of the series. Plus, I think this game has the best method for using them. You have to work to get them activated, but you don’t need to worry about keeping some stupid credits around to use the thing. Plus, it doesn’t always resurrect you at full health, some of the machines bring you back with about thirty percent of your health. This is much more pressing if you go to a floor that hasn’t had its cyborg conversion process reversed.  Hey, it’s that  Oh.  I think we found that other group Todd mentioned. CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Apr 16, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 19:13
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Glad to see this being LPed, I played just System Shock 2 and loved it, and I always wanted to play this game but never could because it's a loving DOS game and I can't get used to the controls. How is it when you put the Plot on 0 and 1 difficulty? I never understood that, unless it just means some plot elements are removed to make the game quicker or something.
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Apr 13, 2014 19:19
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As far as I remember, Plot 0 literally removes all elements, so no logs or SHODAN, and Plot 1 just keeps the broad strokes. I never played either but Plot 1 is the one that I'm honestly most intrigued by. I think they keep D'Arcy and most of the major motivators but other than that a lot of the fluff is stripped. Experimenting with Plot 0, I'm already at Level R after about 5 minutes, which we won't reach until about update 7 or so by my reckoning. Plot 1 seems to mostly abridge things; the note you leave yourself is one page instead of three, and some combo-locks solve themselves automatically. Audio logs are the same for medical level as far as I can see, and I think the text logs are shorter, though because I don't read the text versions of the audio logs I can't be entirely sure. CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 19:28
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neetengie posted:Glad to see this being LPed, I played just System Shock 2 and loved it, and I always wanted to play this game but never could because it's a loving DOS game and I can't get used to the controls. How is it when you put the Plot on 0 and 1 difficulty? I never understood that, unless it just means some plot elements are removed to make the game quicker or something. If you haven't already tried it then I'd suggest tracking down a copy of System Shock portable which contains a number of popular mods for the game including higher resolutions and a functional mouse look. It's probably sacrilege to some but I honestly prefer SS1 to SS2. It's a much tighter focused game and I've always loved the variety in the difficulty settings meaning you could play it in a range of ways from pure shooter all to way to graphic adventure. CARRIERHASARRIVED posted:Plot 1 seems to mostly abridge things; the note you leave yourself is one page instead of three, and some combo-locks solve themselves automatically. Audio logs are the same for medical level as far as I can see, and I think the text logs are shorter, though because I don't read the text versions of the audio logs I can't be entirely sure. This is correct. I have dump of the text logs in front of me. This is the entry for the note you leave for yourself: quote:27 quote:I'm getting my neural implant, in exchange for hacking SHODAN for I can see a few similar entries in the file but I won't post them due to spoilers.
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Apr 13, 2014 20:24
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I like games with multimodal difficulty and it's interesting to see that this was one.
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Apr 13, 2014 22:51
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Awesome. Did they take the heads out? IIRC you've gone past Althea's and Mira's already...
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Apr 14, 2014 02:05
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Seyser Koze posted:Awesome. I don't often pick up heads but the third update will be dealing with unfinished business in Medical so I can go check for those. I broke my own rule for a moment there CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 05:21
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Conversely, is the time limit on Plot 3 a large burden, or is it mostly just a 'don't screw off too long' limit? And is the time limit folded in to the action, or is it just a 'whoops, game over, time's up' sort of thing?
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Apr 14, 2014 06:46
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I'm happy you're doing this LP. There's a lot to love about System Shock and it's good you're putting in the logs so we can get the most of it. By the way, how did they make the portraits for the logs? Did they digitize photos and use algorithms or did they draw them? I like that early-to-mid 90's style
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Apr 14, 2014 07:47
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System Shock is a game that's been recommended to me for quite some time, but never had time to actually play it. Glad to be following along, nice first part! Also, is it just me, or is 2-4601 actually a very unsubtle Les Miserables reference?
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Apr 14, 2014 12:50
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Coolguye posted:Conversely, is the time limit on Plot 3 a large burden, or is it mostly just a 'don't screw off too long' limit? And is the time limit folded in to the action, or is it just a 'whoops, game over, time's up' sort of thing? It's a little like Silent Hill or a similar game with a "How the hell am I supposed to beat this in 45 minutes?" challenge in that once you know where the required stuff is, you can usually just bolt past half the level. There's more required stuff to get, of course, because you're not going to be putting down cyborg enforcers and sec-2 bots with a dart gun.
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Apr 14, 2014 14:42
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Sakako posted:System Shock is a game that's been recommended to me for quite some time, but never had time to actually play it. Glad to be following along, nice first part! I never got that, probably because my only exposure to Les Miserables was the movie that came out a year ago. Now that I think about it sure why not. Coolguye posted:Conversely, is the time limit on Plot 3 a large burden, or is it mostly just a 'don't screw off too long' limit? And is the time limit folded in to the action, or is it just a 'whoops, game over, time's up' sort of thing? This gets loud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSxgh5HVaZs I should have said then when I posted this a while ago I have no idea why I didn't. I was saying things at the end but the game got super loud and I hadn't thought to move my microphone nearer to me. CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 16:48 on May 15, 2014 |
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Apr 15, 2014 03:26
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Well THAT'S somewhat disappointing.
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Apr 15, 2014 08:01
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So I got a quick question for everyone about update scheduling. I was thinking about updating once every week on Sunday but I can probably go instead for posting an update every five days. I know there's not really anything wrong with updating whenever I want but I want to try keep to a schedule so there's always stuff to talk about. Basically this just a simple thread poll, should I still go for once a week or update a little sooner? Additionally I can't find Mira's head on the medical level which has delayed me from beginning work on the third update. e: VVVVV thanks broski CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Apr 17, 2014 |
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Apr 17, 2014 01:56
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CARRIERHASARRIVED posted:So I got a quick question for everyone about update scheduling. I was thinking about updating once every week on Sunday but I can probably go instead for posting an update every five days. I know there's not really anything wrong with updating whenever I want but I want to try keep to a schedule so there's always stuff to talk about. It's in her office across from the med bay where you wake up. Go inside, turn around, and look up above the door you came in through. You may have to stand back a ways to see it. I think hers, Althea's, and the other guy's may actually be the only recognizable heads in the game. I don't remember finding any others. I'm pretty much indifferent to the poll, so I vote once a week unless you happen to have something done sooner.
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Apr 17, 2014 02:12
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I suggest you work to get one post ahead of schedule to buffer agaisnt real life issues. Then post once a week. Mainly just posting to say thanks for LPing this. The ending design and graphic assets for the end of SS2 make a lot more sense now. I tried playing it but the control were terrible. The cyberspace part looks cool, though i doubt the game offers the same control options as descent.
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Apr 17, 2014 05:20
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Armadillo Tank posted:I suggest you work to get one post ahead of schedule to buffer agaisnt real life issues. Then post once a week. Yeah, that was the plan. Glad to see that other people think that's how I should be doing it. quote:Mainly just posting to say thanks for LPing this. The ending design and graphic assets for the end of SS2 make a lot more sense now. I tried playing it but the control were terrible. The cyberspace part looks cool, though i doubt the game offers the same control options as descent. Yeah when I got to that ending in System Shock 2 I was so happy because I'VE PLAYED THIS GAME BEFORE WOW! And I admit the Descent comparison is probably poor, I only made it because both are dependent upon movement in a three dimensions from a first person perspective with something similar to dog-fighting elements. If only cyberspace controlled like Descent, it would make it so much simpler and fun. edit: VVVV I think what I'll go for is I will guarantee each update at most a week after the previous one. I originally envisioned the week off period to give people time to discuss things in the game but since the game is only just starting there isn't much to talk about so more updates need to be put through before a full week is an appropriate amount of time to discuss. CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 17, 2014 05:32
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I'm all for more frequent updates. An update once a week makes me reread the previous ones to remember there the LP was.
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Apr 19, 2014 06:44
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and now that ive drafted update 3 we can continue Update 2: Spat  Last time you remember we found the remains of a secondary group of survivors that split from Althea’s group. At least I assume that’s who these corpses are, I can’t really think of a better group that would be here.  They may be dead but that won’t stop me from looting all their corpses. (they dont have anything) Let’s go get that log and check out that briefcase.  Another Group-1 Access card, which is redundant, and a log from someone whose log that I was unable to find online, so I had to record it myself. Never let it be said I am not putting in the effort for this mess. I only mention this so you guys understand why it has a little too much echo. LOG We’re finished. Keith and the others went down the access corridor an hour ago to fight mutants. None of them have come back. Soon the mutants will come for the rest of us. Yep, this is Keith’s group. Poor souls. Wait, so this log was left on the seventeenth of October, and Todd found the remains of their group on the twenty-fifth. Keith’s people left ‘a week ago’ according to Todd, which would be the eighteenth of October. Uh. I’ll chalk the discrepancy up to it being difficult to keep dates straight during this kerfuffle. By the way, the voiced audio logs are different from their text counter-parts; if you turn off the sound for the game then all logs are readable, and they can vary wildly from what the voiced stuff says. For example, Ozark is much more dramatic in her text form than the spoken form. Here’s a sample: Horrible. We are all finished...the echoes of the screams have only just stopped. None of them have come back in the minutes since. None of them. Soon the mutants will come for us. Alas, poor Yorick. (This is what we call allusion for the sake of allusion)  The door to the right opens to a big, open room so we’ll check out the door on the left first.  You would think this room is empty. This is why I’m playing the game.  There’s a gas grenade hidden between the table and the wall. Gas grenades do what you would expect them to. But instead of generating some kind of smoke screen or using a tranquilizing agent, these grenades apparently have mustard gas in them and kill anything organic caught in them. They are most effective against mutants, do nothing to robots, and I think they do half damage to cyborgs.  The door on the right leads here, to another log left by Lawton Kirby. Whenever a recording cuts out or I can’t be certain what is said, I’ll use #’s to let you know where what’s been said is ambiguous or inaudible. LOG Got the supplies from the west wing. Hanson and Raines -- killed -- by mutants nesting##the access corridor! Recording ends, and then begins again. Also holy poo poo, what did they do to Bartlet to make him so violent? We can’t just hide here! They’re killing us one by one! In an hour, about twenty of us are gonna rush them! We’ll try and break through the access corridor, get to the bridge. If we fail…God save our souls... So the resistance factions clearly knew that the best course of action was get to the bridge. Okay, so I know this is a video game and everything and we’re the protagonist, but how the hell did these groups fail so miserably at accomplishing the task of staying alive? We’re just playing as one guy who has access to everything the people on the station did, except they had better ideas of the layout of the entire station; these people all worked and lived here so they would know how to get from point A to point B far more efficiently, and they would know the best defensible locations. How do they keep getting picked off and stuff? Further down the corridor, I assume actually that this is the access corridor everyone keeps talking about, we find our third weapon.  The stun gun. I’ll be holding onto it for now because a weapon is a weapon, but the stun gun is not very useful, given that it doesn’t kill anything, it just stuns it and takes up battery power to do so. I suppose it could be helpful for stunning enemies then beating them to death with the pipe, but there’s -- Well, you’ll see why that’s stupid in a little bit.  At least it has a cool projectile.  Wait. Do you see something?  poo poo These are cyborg assassins. Players of System Shock 2 will recognize these as a mid-to-late game enemy. In System Shock, they are introduced in the first level as perhaps the second hardest foe on the level. They’re actually quite dangerous, as they have more health and do more damage than regular cyborgs. They attack by tossing shurikens at you, and firing at you with their rifle thingy but they seem to prefer tossing the ninja stars. The cool thing about this is that if you’re quick or lucky, you can shoot a shuriken in the air and deflect it.  It looks like there might be something over there in the left corner…  Ah, finally, here he is. This is the Sparq Beam. This weapon renders the stun gun obsolete as far as I am concerned.  The Sparq is a weapon that uses battery power to fire, and has variable damage depending on the energy setting you have it at, as well as whether or not you’re overloading it. Additionally, it can overheat if you fire it too fast, which prevents you from firing until it has cooled down. Setting the energy usage higher, and overloading, takes more energy and makes the gun overheat faster. Keeping the gun at about three-quarters of its energy setting meter is the best place for it, as it allows you to fire some rather strong shots, fairly quickly, with little worry about overheating.  yes this is definitely a real wall not a secret door what no of course it isnt a secret door whatever gave you that idea lets move one Oh fine we’ll check it out.  Oh boy, we have a long way to go to get at this thing. I guess we really will just have to leave it alone for now and come back after we get some more cameras.  Finally we’ve arrived at Beta quadrant. Let’s keep an eye out for survivors, we’ve gotten a lot of logs from people telling us to go here.  And here’s a shot of the Sparq in action. Let’s get to work on that panel and see what it does.  This is one of the other puzzle types in the game. You have to rewire each of the three wires so that enough power flows through to push the green bar past the red line. I don’t think these puzzles are anything but trial and error because there aren’t any real distinguishing marks to indicate what a wire box is going to do if you re-wire to that spot.  Whoa hey, a force bridge? This is where Althea’s group is supposed to be! Where are all of them? did they fall into the radioactive trench  cause i did  Climbing out of the stupid loving radioactive trench brings us to this battery. Batteries restore a portion of your own battery when used as you might expect. This battery will only give us about a quarter of our total battery back, but something is better than nothing when you have a weapon that drains your power supply with every use.  Look, I don’t care if this area is radioactive because of some kind of malfunction or something broke, what is the loving design philosophy behind this section of the station? Yeah we’re just gonna throw some force bridges over some easily broken radioactive tiles no biggie.  It’s unclear from the image but we’ve effectively crossed the force bridge we saw earlier. When I climbed up to get to that battery I thought there would be some way to get back to where we started from there. Turns out it was a dead end. I didn’t want to go back down into the radioactive trench, but I noticed that I the area across the force bridge was nearby. So I took a sprinting start and leapt the approximately twenty feet to reach this spot. Maybe the reason everybody died was that they weren’t amazing supermen like us.  Contrary to what you may think, radiation poisoning is actually an almost instantaneous occurrence when you come into contact with any radioactive materials (like trenches) and how much you are poisoned is limited by the radioactivity of the material in question. The only symptoms are much more mild than you have been led to believe. All that happens is you get a little hurt for the next few minutes while it wears off. You don’t even lose any hair or anything. Addendum: Faust IX posted:Radiation and Bio-Contamination in System Shock are measured in Level of Biological Poisoning units, aka LBP (I had no idea what the LBP stood for before now), and are essentially damage over time. Since the Hacker probably isn't going to be running into a clean-suit or something like it out in the open, he's basically a Hazard Sponge. Compared to System Shock 2 and its abrupt death-by-toxin/radiation, LBP is more of a silent but deadly poison. You know the more I and others experiment with the Hacker's abilities the more I think he may just be Doom Guy: The Early Years.  Ah good, we’ve finally found a first aid kit. First aid kits instantaneously heal you to full health, and as such are invaluable. However, first aid kits, batteries, and other objects like those soda cans I mentioned in the first update take up space in a general inventory, which can only hold about fifteen items maximum, so you need to prioritize healing items and, obviously, not pick up useless junk.    Another cyborg assassin we make quick work of. You know for all their implants and cybernetic parts, the cyborgs don’t seem to be all that attentive.  If you’re wondering why sometimes the cross hair has arrows pointing in various directions, (like here it’s an arc to the left) it’s because that indicates that if you hold down the left mouse button, right mouse button for you lefties, you can move in that direction. Thus in this case you could hold down mouse-one and you would turn left. Theoretically you could play the whole game using the mouse, as those two things in the middle of the top of HUD enable you to control view-pitch and crouching, prone, and leaning, but this is even slower than using the keyboard so it’s a bit of a moot point. Plus it means you can’t move and shoot, which is a rather massive handicap.  Looks like this fellow was guarding the switch right here. Let’s give her a flip.  Well that’s a force bridge extended to where that cyborg assassin was.  There’s also a storage area and log near the switch. LOG I must be one of the last one’s who hasn’t changed. SHODAN must have altered the healing machine I installed in Alpha quadrant. It does things to people now. I uh...I think I saw Beth yesterday, but...she had so many implants I c--couldn’t be sure. If...If I can get to the machine...Uh...I know I can set things right again. Seriously listen to this log, it’s one of my favorites in the game. The first Honig log doesn’t have the best voice acting, but I really love how detached he seems in this one. He has just the right amount of quaver in his voice to make you really feel for him. Poor guy is just barely holding it together.  This is the only thing in the storage room, and boy am I happy it is. Now we have two first aid kits, and a few spare med-patches. We’re getting harder to kill by the minute.    Well how nice of SHODAN to label her nefarious  Then again given the usual intelligence level of her cyborgs maybe it is necessary. Hey buddy, I’m right down here, just gonna shoot you in the foot until you fall over is that alright.  Yeah I thought it would be.  Say here’s that door we opened last update. Even though it goes back to where we were before, let’s check it out cause we didn’t fully explore there last time.    agh This is a hopper turret, that attacks by expounding on what a genius Marlon Brando. I--I mean I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s, he’s a great man. Addendum: Seyser Koze posted:Hoppers are actually welding bots of some kind, although I have no idea how a welding torch can pew-pew somebody from across the room. My strategy for taking them out was usually to pop a berserk patch and go nuts with the pipe.  Additionally when they die they melt into a puddle for some reason. Let’s get back to that conversion area, that’s a far more pressing matter. According to Althea we should be able to reverse the conversion modifications and change the machine back to a surgery unit.   I got into a tense fire-fight here and ended up sprinting back into a corner and accidentally finding…   This hidden storage area with two gas grenades. I really must wonder why there are so many hidden doors and storage areas on this station. Thinking about it now, maybe this is why all the people who lived died all the time. There’s secret doors and poo poo everywhere for no reason. Why is this station designed with a poo poo load of secret passageways and doors anyway, this isn’t a loving castle in a horror movie. Though if that was the design inspiration that was some brilliant forethought on the part of the architect. Space architect. I don’t know what the title is for someone who designs space stations.  Ah, finally, we’ve found the cyborg conversion machine. Before we go in there though we should probably heal up. I’ll also pop a berserk patch and dash in there with the pipe to  Oh poo poo I forgot about you.    the colors The entirety of the berserk patches side effects last for about twenty seconds. I don’t know if the main effects last longer after that, but the color palette shift is such that it can be very difficult to spot enemies so it’s not as useful as you may have hoped it would be. However, I did smash all the cyborgs I encountered to death in a single hit, so I may have been a bit too hasty in writing these things off.   We eliminate the guards / recent converts and our reward is an audio log. LOG We underestimated SHODAN. He is re- -- I mean it’s reprogrammed regeneration rooms all over the station into cyborg conversion chambers. Anyone going in to get healed comes out as a cyborg. I’ve disconnected the medical CPUs from SHODAN’s main databank, so we can reset them to their normal healing functions without SHODAN noticing. I’m on my way now to reset the one on the hospital level. So Kevin here managed to disconnect the healing station status from SHODAN, eh? I have absolutely no idea how he did this without SHODAN noticing that occurring but hey whatever works. Still a problem though! Just because SHODAN doesn’t know the status doesn’t mean that she won’t be able to tell if they’re being used. She still has cameras all over the station; if she watches us die then we just come back good as new five minutes later, won’t she know something is up? Why don’t her cyborgs ever bother to reset the healing station statuses themselves when they see the switch is in the wrong position? And I’m not kidding about the switch thing:   CYBORG CONVERSION CANCELLED. STANDARD STATION RESTORATION PROCEDURES ONLINE That line is just spoken by a speech generator. It has a great pronunciation of the word ‘Pro-see-djee-ors.’ Now whenever we die on this floor, instead of having to watch a terrifying (or hilarious) death video, we get revived at this surgery unit with about thirty percent of our health. Pretty sweet. And no, I’m not going to miss addressing the SHODAN pronoun difference. See, when the game’s logs were initially written, SHODAN was described using neuter or masculine gender. Unsurprising, given the propensity of many people to assign gender based on arbitrary criteria, with plenty of people often defaulting to masculine pronouns. Examining SHODAN’s face (as well as cyberspace representation which we saw in the intro) in System Shock 1 enables us to see why this is so. The face is only vaguely human in its construction; it has the main identifying features of a face with eyes, a nose and a mouth, but it’s highly distorted and very twisted. The first image illustrates this nicely, being incredibly stretched and alien-looking. Additionally, the closest thing to the actual representation of SHODAN in the second image doesn’t even come remotely close to appearing human. In short, the human face of SHODAN is pretty much just an abstraction to make communication with the AI easier. Although the inhuman and frankly disturbing proportions of it kind of undermine this idea. I can only hope that SHODAN came up with that representation herself because you have to be a pretty lovely artist (in-universe of course) to believe that is definitely something you want to hold an extended conversation with, i mean it clearly just radiates warmth and friendship doesn’t it. So for the logs that reference SHODAN in text, gender was primarily assigned as masculine, despite the fact its actually a little weird to assign a gender to an AI construct when you think about it, or neuter. But when the lines were recorded for CD version, they obviously had to pick a voice for the thing, and they eventually settled on getting a woman, Teri Brosius, to voice it. SHODAN thus ended up being identified by players as feminine for fairly obvious reasons. Even I still see SHODAN’s face in System Shock 1 as being rather feminine, although I’m almost certain this is a bias based on Teri’s voice. This brings us rather neatly to the first, and overarching contest for this LP: Write 2500 words critiquing the application and understanding of gender in System Shock 1, preferably drawing from such authors as Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Jacques Lacan. Extra credit will be given if you can make the writings of Valerie Solanas central to your critique. The 2500 words are merely a guideline, it need not be that long or short. This paper is due by the time the LP ends, but can obviously be turned in before then. Please include a works cited page and use APA citation format. Somebody was gonna write on this poo poo when it was brought up may as well make a game out of it. Moving on.  Now that we’ve turned off the conversion device we have very little to fear on the level. But just because we know we have nothing to fear it doesn’t mean we should be any less careful.  Down the hall we find this, our first SHODAN log. LOG Directive to cyborg F Seventy One: We will now test the virus in a proper environment. Move mutagen experiment V five to Beta Grove, on the Executive level. Let the virus infect the grove, and observe its effects on vegetable and animal life forms. When the strain is perfected, we will release it on the Earth, where it will facilitate our conquest. Well that’s where the biological contamination came from. Apparently SHODAN has created a virus to do something. I assume its meant to simply mutate organic life forms. That’s all it’s done here as far as we can tell. I guess that her ultimate plan is use the virus to weaken the population of Earth and make it easier for her to finally take over the planet. We should probably think about stopping that. However it will probably take time for the virus to reach its full potency, so the laser still takes precedence.   This hallway is crawling with cyborgs. They’re all standing in those little alcoves on the sides of the halls. I think that they’re in some kind of sleep mode because they’re all very bad at noticing us until they’re dead. I’m serious, even after being shot, they pretty much just stand there and take it. Addendum: Seyser Koze posted:I think all those sleeping cyborgs will actually wake up if you take out the nodes first. I don't think anybody ever does that though.   This area down here only has this switch, which opens a door behind us. This switch is usually locked by security, but we’ve destroyed enough cameras for SHODAN to be unable to keep us out.   Sadly, the room we’ve opened is actually fairly devoid of goodies. The only thing of note is this frag grenade, though there is another biological systems monitor in here that is redundant. Returning to the main corridor, we are rewarded with:  More cyborg hall. I really have to wonder what kind of mental augmentations SHODAN gave these things because they clearly don’t work as well as she must have thought they would.    When we reach the COMPUTER, we are given a forceful message from SHODAN herself.  : You are not welcomed here. Remove yourself.Nah.  Oh boy, well that certainly changes a few things. This is a cyborg warrior, and it’s the first enemy we have encountered that was actually designed for direct combat. They are rather hardy, as you would expect, and take minimal damage from our dart gun, so the Sparq is the weapon of choice here. A classic strategy to deal with enemies in this game, which I abuse here and will continue to do so in many other scenarios, is to stand at the edge of a wall and slowly lean to peek out at whatever enemy is on the other side. Often you can find just the right spot where the enemy doesn’t see you and you can wail on them with abandon. It’s especially useful against early-game tough enemies like our cyborg warrior friend here. This warrior has something called ‘AM Hornet Rounds’ on his body. Just thought you would all like to know that.  : Enter that room, insect, and it will become your graveOh buzz off, what are you going to do about it?    What did I tell you. All talk, nothing to back it up. Now that we’ve destroyed her CPU nodes, SHODAN’s lost a lot of control on this floor. Oh, she sent us an e-mail; time to gloat. LOG Who are you? The computer nodes can be repaired but you...Who are you? My cameras and probes scan your body, but you do not match any employee file. When my cyborgs bring you to an electrified interrogation bench, I will have your secrets. And you will learn more about pain than you ever wanted to know. Oh big woop SHODAN, have you been paying attention? Those cyborgs you put so much faith in are just walking heaps of junk! I mean, seriously now    owwahahahAHAHAHA thats a few cyborgs    THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT In retaliation for destroying her CPU nodes Shodan sends about eleven cyborgs after us. I think we have her attention now. CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 22:06
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Didn't expect to see an LP of this one. I look forward to seeing the rest of this game done. By the way, that graph in the top part of your HUD may look like decoration, but it actually is everything you would ever need to know about your character. It's called the Bio-Monitor, it monitors your biometric feedback. Red Line: Your Fatigue (technically your heartbeat) Light Blue/Cyan Line: Your Energy usage (from the cool installable hardware you plug in to the USB ports in your head) Purple Line: Chi brain wave (I think it's measuring patches and their effects, like Berserk's altered state of mind) Yellow Line: Your Current Bio-contaminant Exposure Dark Blue: Your Current Radiation Exposure Now, that's a lot of information to take in all at once and chances are if you have time to look at that you aren't most likely in a very bad situation, but the Radiation and Biohazard lines are all you really need to pay attention to. Its certainly a cool thing that makes sense in this futuristic universe. EDIT: The Radiation line is really hard to see, it blends in with the background so well. However, its also not reading a lot of radiation, at least not in those screenshots. Maybe that trench wasn't as irradiated as it's implied to be. Faust IX fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 23:29
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Faust IX posted:Didn't expect to see an LP of this one. I look forward to seeing the rest of this game done. I wanted to add what you said, but I remembered that the features you describe are only present in later versions of the biological systems monitor; we only have version one right now so radiation and bio-contamination aren't present. I will remember to post your explanation when we get later versions though. Also, I tested the berserk patch and brain waves seemed unaffected. e: Seyser Koze posted:EDIT x2: You used the dartgun against the terrifying drone assault? There's a new toy right there in the node room begging to be used... I genuinely never found it before. I always wondered if there was a guaranteed way to get the pistol before level 2 and I guess this answers that question. In my defense, it kind of blends into the ground. Now it really bothers me because it's glaringly obvious on the ground. I'll have to work it into update 3. CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 00:36
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I think all those sleeping cyborgs will actually wake up if you take out the nodes first. I don't think anybody ever does that though. A nice trick for taking out tougher enemies like the cyborg warrior in the early game is to pick up a bunch of sparqbeams (I think you can find three or four just lying around the medical level), set them all to overload, and then Tab through your weapon supply, firing them all off in succession. Hoppers are actually welding bots of some kind, although I have no idea how a welding torch can pew-pew somebody from across the room. My strategy for taking them out was usually to pop a berserk patch and go nuts with the pipe. EDIT: Regarding the chi wave, on the highest cyberspace difficulty you suffer a permanent penalty to your available cyberspacin' time when you a) get kicked out of cyberspace by security programs, and b) get killed in meatspace. I've never tested it, but the chi wave might be affected by that. EDIT x2: You used the dartgun against the terrifying drone assault? There's a new toy right there in the node room begging to be used... Seyser Koze fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 04:25
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"I thought I saw Beth the other day, but she was so covered in implants it was hard to tell." Brrr. Yeah, even with the now super-duper dated graphics, that's still a pretty chilling line.
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Apr 20, 2014 07:05
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Radiation seems waaaay milder than in SS2. Like early in Med Sci you just get hosed up by the radiation.
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Apr 20, 2014 07:46
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Spookydonut posted:Radiation seems waaaay milder than in SS2. Like early in Med Sci you just get hosed up by the radiation. Higher levels of rad/bio actually damage you more quickly in addition to taking longer to wear off once you leave. In areas with a hazard level of over 100 you'll be losing a couple ticks of your health meter every few seconds if you're not protected.
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Apr 20, 2014 16:43
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Seyser Koze posted:Higher levels of rad/bio actually damage you more quickly in addition to taking longer to wear off once you leave. In areas with a hazard level of over 100 you'll be losing a couple ticks of your health meter every few seconds if you're not protected. Yeah, I decided to test this out. Well, at least part of it, because I'm kind of stunned at the results. Radiation and Bio-Contamination in System Shock are measured in Level of Biological Poisoning units, aka LBP (I had no idea what the LBP stood for before now), and are essentially damage over time. Since the Hacker probably isn't going to be running into a clean-suit or something like it out in the open, he's basically a Hazard Sponge. Compared to System Shock 2 and its abrupt death-by-toxin/radiation, LBP is more of a silent but deadly poison. At this point, there has been one radioactive barrel hallway that I think you missed, where you can literally just stand next to a tank of radioactive slush (right next to three other biochemical hazard tanks!) and just bash it so hard with your pipe that it explodes, giving off a pretty hefty dose of radiation and slightly making the room around it irradiated. It went away at 2 to 4 LBP per second, and that test was kind of biased because of the slight variable of the exploding tank at point blank range in a tiny hallway. So, to make it slightly more accurate to the game, what better place to get an accurate reading than Level R that SHODAN mentioned? The Station's Reactor. Just jump straight into that thing. Highest I got was 176 LBP before I went back to check how quickly it would kill me. I think there may be some hidden detail in one of the difficulties, because it was still going down pretty drat fast, on a 0/0/0/0 game (this is also the only way you can die in a 0/0/0/0 game, creative suicide). I know from prior experience goofing around on a 3/3/3/3 run that can't possibly be to scale (somewhere above 300). I may experiment further later on the biohazard part of that. The thing is, well, its still just damage. You can literally Med-Patch and Med-Kit your way through it, as long as you aren't in a contaminated area.
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Apr 20, 2014 22:23
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Faust IX posted:Highest I got was 176 LBP before I went back to check how quickly it would kill me. I think there may be some hidden detail in one of the difficulties, because it was still going down pretty drat fast, on a 0/0/0/0 game (this is also the only way you can die in a 0/0/0/0 game, creative suicide). Picking up live landmines was my recurring accidental 0/0/0/0 death.
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Apr 21, 2014 03:01
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Am I the only one who finds it kind of funny that SHODAN apparently has an interrogation room? It just seems oddly mundane in a situation where we have mutants and cyborgs running around. Granted I still would not want to be caught and tortured. On another note, having played this sequel, I am kind of sad we really don't have games like this anymore.
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Apr 21, 2014 04:52
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Does the radiation level decrease as you take damage like it does in SS2?
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Apr 21, 2014 05:30
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Random blabber posted:On another note, having played this sequel, I am kind of sad we really don't have games like this anymore. I do too.  But at the same time, I lack the time these days for games this involved. I rarely even have the time for 4X games anymore.
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Apr 21, 2014 12:03
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Seyser Koze posted:Picking up live landmines was my recurring accidental 0/0/0/0 death. There's actually a brilliant solution to how to move armed landmines without doing suicide runs to clear them out, and not make them explode in the process of moving them. It's one of the later items that's both in plain sight and completely useless for anything else. Being creative in System Shock is so much fun, setting up traps and Rube Goldberg Machines of death. Spookydonut posted:Does the radiation level decrease as you take damage like it does in SS2? Yeah, radiation drains away like in SS2 more or less, with it seemingly getting out of your system faster the higher up you are. Like, running into and out of the Reactor deck, it was ticking away the LBP 4, maybe 5 units a second. 4 or 5 LBP is one of those little health >>>>> in the top right. You can certainly outlast low enough doses of radiation by just covering yourself in med-patches, higher levels you would probably end up mummifying yourself if you wasted all of your med-patches and med-kits. That's all you really have at the moment. SS2 threw Anti-Rad and Anti-Toxin hypos at you within about 2 minutes of starting Medical there: System Shock isn't quite as forgiving. Biohazard levels on the other hand are kind of like standing in a burning building and asking why its so hard to breathe. We haven't seen biohazards in the game yet (except for the tanks of the stuff in that hidden room past that first circuit puzzle) other than the mutated crew who were exposed to the stuff during the time for Hacker to heal up from getting his head lasered open and having a Neural Cyberspace Interface(tm) by TriOptimum jacked into his central nervous system. That counter-terrorism operative sounded kind of concerned about that "evidence of biological contamination", but significantly more concerned about that mining laser charging and blowing up Earth. Those mutants were weak, and saving the world from being blown up might not get our Hacker shot by TriOp security as soon as he gets back from Citadel Station. Hey, OP, is it all right if I keep adding details here and there (without spoiling stuff that hasn't been shown yet) about the game and the world its set in? Its pretty drat cool.
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Apr 21, 2014 12:29
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Thanks for playing this, OP. I'm interested in the game but it looks like a right pain in the arse to play.
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Apr 21, 2014 13:26
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Faust IX posted:Hey, OP, is it all right if I keep adding details here and there (without spoiling stuff that hasn't been shown yet) about the game and the world its set in? Its pretty drat cool. Dude, go nuts. I don't know everything and I've been trying to add useful stuff that people say into the updates. I would really appreciate it if I didn't have to answer every question too.
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Apr 21, 2014 16:00
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CARRIERHASARRIVED posted:Write 2500 words critiquing the application and understanding of gender in System Shock 1, preferably drawing from such authors as Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Jacques Lacan. Extra credit will be given if you can make the writings of Valerie Solanas central to your critique. The 2500 words are merely a guideline, it need not be that long or short. This paper is due by the time the LP ends, but can obviously be turned in before then. Please include a works cited page and use APA citation format. Hey, I decided to give it a try. Not 2500 words, because seriously, this game is not that deep and I don't remember every detail about it. Contains spoilers for the entire game + little about System Shock 2. (tw: spoilers, castration, forced feminization, rape, male privilege, bodily functions, pregnancy, abortion, spoilers, penis, patriarchy, incest, Oedipal complex, major spoilers, Lacan, lesbian erasure, sex=gender, gender essentialism, violence) Link, because it's still loving long.
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Apr 21, 2014 21:48
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Went back on a 2/2/2/2 run to go and test the same stuff as before. It's kind of more difficult when you are actually having to play and progress through the story to get to places irradiated or contaminated enough to kill off the Hacker. Biohazard exposure takes significantly longer to tank through, presumably because its something like acid splashing all over you, however you would still have enough time with med-patches to tank a decent amount of it without serious risk of death. When it got down to 10, it was literally only losing one LBP per second, so I think it's safe to say that bio-chemical damage is more likely in the long run to kill you just playing through the game. There's a couple of neat ways to get around this problem, but we'll get to those later. Instead, lets focus on weapons. I am almost positive you cannot make it through to the next floor without having a Pipe in your inventory because there is literally a pipe right next to the elevator. The lead pipe is a fairly brutal weapon, and is capable of killing every enemy in the game under certain conditions. One of those conditions is the Berserker Patch, which turns an already strong melee weapon and your visuals into something you wouldn't be surprised to find in Hotline Miami. Think of it as an amazing technicolor mercy killing and just keep on running, because while you are strong, you are incredibly vulnerable at close range and can and probably will die if you don't hit and run. The second condition is knowing that your pipe hits farther away than it looks like its going to. It's a graphical field of depth sorta thing, and you can and should use that distance to your advantage. (Walking backwards does not make you run. Strafing left or right and walking backwards does. I dunno why.) The SV-23 Dart Pistol, aka the Dartgun is a clever intentional weapon choice for waking up in a hospital level, because it is literally firing off syringes instead of conventional pistol rounds. You have two kinds of syringes to fire: Needles, which are fitted with an explosive charge in them (how else can they blow up cameras? Not kidding about that) and Tranquilizer Darts, which do 1/3rd of the damage a Needle shot does, has no armor penetration strength, and is filled with a neurotoxin that paralyzes the target, until it can be killed outright by other means, like a lead pipe. The guys in Medical Bay miiiiiight have been a bit trigger happy, and these were just owned by the surgical staff. The Researchers and higher authorized doctors, like Nathan D'Arcy, that guy who was coming up with a plan, were no exception to this, but they got way cooler toys to play with. The Sparq Beam Sidearm/Laser Pistol is the first thing in the game that actually requires energy to operate. I'd like to think its literally hooked directly into your arm behind the wrist, because if you run out of power, it can't fire at all. You're technically a walking battery powered human at this point, so don't go wasting your shots. The Sparq fires out an Electron Burst at whatever you pointed at, using 2V per shot on the lowest setting to a stable high setting at 8V. But 8V isn't really enough to show off how good this thing is, so you can disable the safety and Overload the Sparq, taking up 24V of power, vaporizing whatever you aimed at (hopefully) and nearly catching fire from the overheat. You have to wait for it to cool down before you can use it again, even if you do nothing but spam 2V shots. The Sparq is only as powerful as you want it to be, and 1/3rd to 1/2 power is usually more than enough to not leave you backed into a corner without any energy. If you look around Med, you'll also find the DH-07 Stun Gun, a much "safer" alternative to the Sparq, supposedly dealing a low-intensity concentric energy burst. It's lowest setting takes 3V, its highest takes 30V, and it does not have an Overload toggle, but why would it? Its a Stun-Gun, it STUNS. It's non-lethal, right? Well, kind of. See, the lowest setting on the Sparq is 3 damage per blast, and the Stun Gun is 2 damage per blast at its lowest setting. For highest, the difference is 36 damage to 15, and Sparq Overload is 60 damage. It seems like Looking Glass might have wanted to go somewhere with their "non-lethal" weapons, but they're still pretty inefficient if you just turn up the power one notch. If nothing else, you can use Energy Weapons to vaporize junk on the ground: they will not vaporize key items, patches, access cards, and you could essentially just go around being the most badass space janitor of all time, cleaning with science!  (they will probably detonate land mines though, so consider the small controlled Sparq-Shot instead of a grenade) You probably noticed I didn't put the stats up for the Mag-Pulse Rifle. There's a good reason for that, but it won't happen for a couple of updates, I think. There's a whole lot of stuff to say about the grenades, but this post is long enough as is. I'm pretty sure the Sparq was the prototype that got modified to become the Laser Pistol in SS2, or something along those lines. RIP Sparq, the best weapon.
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Apr 21, 2014 23:39
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The Sparq gun looks... kinda like a gas pump nozzle? THE FUTURE IS NOW.
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Apr 22, 2014 03:43
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Glazius posted:The Sparq gun looks... kinda like a gas pump nozzle? It reminds me more of a phaser from Star Trek than anything else.
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Apr 22, 2014 08:20
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Bonus Update: Changeling (Transmission 1) Something I've neglected to mention is that the music for each floor changes in certain areas, so I've got a video here to demonstrate that. I give my own theory as to why in the video but hopefully there might be someone else who can shed some more light on this because I haven't been able to find anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBuns0AlrE8 Faust IX does have a little bit to say here. I briefly touched on some of this stuff in OP but they explain it in more detail. Faust IX posted:Oh boy, you have no idea. There's a bit of a history lesson involved here. There once was a rock band named Tribe, and they were pretty cool. Several of its members were hired for Looking Glass for System Shock, and way way later became the guys who founded Harmonix and Guitar Hero. CARRIERHASARRIVED fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 17:08
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