|
Seeing you saving in the same slot all the time makes me nervous that you'll accidentally save right before something is about to kill you  When I played this way back when, I went way overboard on keeping different saves just in case!
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2022 19:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 07:09 |
|
|
Ah, the science level. I remember this one and Medical pretty well, as well as some of the reactor level - but everything else is pretty blurry It was cool to play the System Shock Remake demo (whole medical level), then watch you play through the original version, they did a pretty good job of recreating the feel of it. I love the elevator muzak, always made me feel nice and safe when I heard that! Although I don't remember that mutant gank squad at the start of the science level! Speaking of the music, a number of people have made remixes of the level music over the years. Some of the original web sites have vanished but some of the remixes can still be found in a couple of places if anyone wanted to give them a listen https://www.ttlg.com/ss1/music/ https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=11631 https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=8637
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2022 13:17
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:This level design is so spaghettified, just a big ol' pile of noodly corridors. And I love that secret entrance to D'Arcy's office which requires you to lie on your stomach and wriggle out through a bookshelf? cupboard? whatever that thing was!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2022 21:13
|
|
|
Kangra posted:They actually did a ground-up rewrite of the engine, but one imagines it would have been heavily influenced by Ultima Underworld at least in design choices. The other major thing they did was implement physics based on a flight sim they'd written. This is something that only has a minor effect on gameplay outside of cyberspace, but adds to the verisimilitude, since the character movement actually has a slight amount of momentum to it. Ultima Underworld was crazy at the time - going from something like Wolfenstein 3D which was all flat corridors and right angles, to massive levels with multiple levels, slopes, areas above areas (which even Doom couldn't do), spells which let you fly.... it was just amazing technology. Myself and my brother sunk a huge number of hours into Underworld 1 and 2.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2022 21:17
|
|
|
Crazy Achmed posted:Yeah, I enjoyed your LP of UU, Rojo - you should do UU2 at some point in the future if you haven't already Oh, I hadn't realised it was Rojo who'd done that UU LP a few years back! Yeah that was a good LP as well, I'd definitely watch one for UU2 if Rojo isn't too burned out after System Shock!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2022 15:36
|
|
|
I think the wiring puzzle you solved in the library which didn't seem to do anything, may have changed something on one of the screens to the right of the puzzle? The one with the black screen and red text looks like it was behaving differently after you solved it.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2022 14:17
|
|
|
Nice, the reactor level - this is where my memory starts to get fuzzy, except for one very special room! I do remember the hoppers lurking around every corner though... One advantage of you using the pipe a lot earlier on I guess is that you have a load of normal and teflon pistol ammo, so along with the umpteen battery packs you've got you should be ok for ammo for this level! You mentioned the target analyser briefly - so one thing the V1 target analyser is doing is telling you if you actually hit an enemy. Before you got that, it was hard to tell whether you were hitting a wall or the target itself, but now you get some handy targeting brackets. One little thing to mention, you may have noticed this already while going back over the video - you missed something just as you stepped out of the elevator onto the R level. On a general note, I'm impressed by how smoothly and troublefree the game is playing, apart from the occassional brief pause before it plays some audio which I assume is loading from the CD. You're playing this on an actual physical MS-DOS PC, right - how much hassle did you have setting it up in the first place with getting enough free memory and so on? I have bad memories of spending ages trying to create a boot disk which let me play things like TIE Fighter with a joystick plus a sound card
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2022 01:53
|
|
|
Ouch, those respawns on the reactor level were insane! I'm not sure if they were supposed to be respawning right behind your back like that, seems a bit extreme, especially as those hoppers don't drop anything.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2022 09:54
|
|
|
It's strange how much damage the invisible mutants can take, compared to cyborgs or robots which seem to go down after a few shots. At least the laser rapier makes short work of them!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2022 11:03
|
|
|
rojovision posted:Hey, everyone. Just a heads up that today's episode will either be a bit late either coming out tomorrow or possibly late tonight. No worries, take as much time as you need! We can cope with a day or two without our dose of a shock to the system 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2022 01:16
|
|
|
At 25:50 it looks like there's a switch panel to the left of that locked iris door, it's hidden pretty well in the gloom unfortunately! May have been another way out of that pit? Good work anyway on coaxing enough out of the jump jets to escape via the landing. Regarding Shodan's plans from that last log, it's nice of her to wait until after her original plans have failed before putting that into action! But I guess there wouldn't be much of a game if Shodan had already won before you even woke up... I'm getting really hyped now for the remake to be released, hopefully that'll be early next year. I was looking at my Kickstarter account the other day and I've had the remake kickstarted since 2016, it's been a long wait!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2022 13:19
|
|
|
rojovision posted:I'm looking forward to the remake as well. It seems like it's had a bit of a troubled history, but Nightdive's other work seems to be mostly well received overall, so I think SS Remake will at least be competent. I played the demo which is the entire medical level, and it definitely seems to have the right SS feel about it... plus a few quality of life improvements like marking power and health stations on your map! About the last video - that ambush was pretty brutal! But luckily you were very well kitted out from your explorations of all the other decks, so those poor cyborgs didn't stand a chance.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2022 10:54
|
|
|
I was going to say that whatever cyber-security training the Citadel staff had to go through has obviously been forgotten after being converted into cyborgs.... but the humans seem to be even worse at just leaving their logs scattered around everywhere! Maybe we can be a bit generous and say that they are encrypted, but it's trivial for the hacker's military grade hardware to break through it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2022 20:16
|
|
|
That painting looked a little familiar so I did a quick google, and of course there's a wiki entry! https://shodan.fandom.com/wiki/Paintings quote:At least one artwork exists in real life. This is the known artist and his painting: I wonder if they had to get proper copyright permission to use it or if they just snuck it in? Looks like it's in the public domain now, since 2015. Will have to keep an eye out to see if it's still there in the remake!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2022 18:56
|
|
|
The mutants down on level 1 are farmable and drop medipatches, so if Rojo wanted to do some offscreen grinding it should work out ok.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2022 18:17
|
|
|
Ah, this bit where it literally turns into a corridor shooter... luckily your reflexes are on top of things!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2022 01:52
|
|
|
Ok, so I got thinking about System Shock and the other similar games that were coming out at the same time, and I ended up writing a longer post than I originally intended to! Apologies Rojo for dumping this in the middle of your LP, but I thought it might be of interest to people who don't know all that much about the era. TL;DR - Looking Glass Studios were WAY ahead of their time, and you should go back and watch Rojo's LP of Ultima Underworld if you haven't already!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2022 03:48
|
|
|
So the return to this level in particular is very two dimensional - a bunch of corridors, no ups or downs or big open spaces. It got me thinking about how the progression of engines went, and I ended up writing this possibly far too long post! So the first games I played which I class as being part of the System Shock DNA was Catacomb 3D and Catacomb Abyss, all the way back in 1991 and 1992. Big sprawling levels, fluid '3d' movement but always constrained to a flat playing field. Having to collect keys in order to unlock later parts of the levels, backtracking, picking up better spells and splatting enemies which gave you trouble earlier. Also in 92 by the same developers, ID systems, was Wolfenstein 3D, using the same basic engine as Catacomb Abyss, but with the added benefit of getting to shoot Nazis and in particular Hitler himself. The Catacomb games never really got a great following, but it turned out that people liked killing Nazis, and so Wolfenstein started to attract interest. At the same time Origin / Looking Glass Studios / Electronic Arts (complicated business agreements which I can't be bothered untangling) had been working on their own 3D engine which had started as a flight simulator. Someone had the idea to merge the full 3D movement possibilities with the traditionally 2D roleplaying games of the Ultima series - and Ultima Underworld was born and unleashed on the public in early 1992. (If you want to see more at this point, there is an LP of Underworld by Rojo that you should probably go and watch!) UU was a step up in many ways - not restrained to flat corridors and square rooms like Catacomb/Wolfenstein, it could render massive caverns, underground rivers, slopes, and entities being above or below each other. However navigating through a fully 3D world was a very new concept and it was far too different to the old 2D Ultima games to convince those fans that this was the way forward. A sequel Ultima Underworld 2 was released in January of 1993 - and even though this was back in the days when a sequel could be cranked out in months with a bit of reskinning, UU 2 was a massive advance on UU 1 in so many ways. A persistent world (actually multiple parallel worlds!) with NPCs who had their own agendas, and a plot that twisted depending on what choices you'd made - this was the point that actually brought the lore and politics of the classic Ultima universe together with a free roaming 3D adventure. I don't feel embarrassed to say that as a kid, at points UU2 went over my head (the servant rebellion), or absolutely terrified me (falling into a pit, being sucked through an underground sewer and then being murdered by a tentacled lurker). Then later in 1993 Doom was released, and changed the world of video games. As a Looking Glass fan I will always hold the position that Doom and ID software got lucky - it was way less technologically advanced than Underworld, had no NPCs, no plot to speak of - just a mindless shooter! But what it did, it did very well - it could run on even the most bog standard of 386 PCs and the freeware version fitted on a couple of floppy disks, which made it easy to share between people. A big thing it could do was fake 3D environments - Doom was basically a 2D game, with certain bits shifted up or down to make the appearance of a fully 3D environment. It couldn't cope with floors or entities being above or below each other, and it didn't allow slopes. If anyone reading this who edited Doom levels at the time will know, a Doom level was basically a Wolfenstein level with higher ceilings and larger rooms, with moving floors pretending to be elevators to give the impression of multiple levels. Looking Glass and Origin then released System Shock in September 1994. It took the sprawling environments of Ultima Underworld and some of the the role playing elements of the 2d Ultimas (unfortunately losing the NPC interaction of UU1 and classic Ultimas) and combined them with the sci-fi aspects and shooter gameplay of Doom to make an entirely new beastie. As we've seen it allowed an entirely new level of control over your avatars body (stand, crouch, lie flat, lean left or right, look up and down) combined with combat controls - unfortunatley this was before mouse and keyboard controls had been standardised, and so it brought its own entirely new paradigm to the table. It didn't quite suit people who just wanted a Wolfenstein/Doom style shooter, and it didn't quite suit people who wanted a more laid back RPG type experience. But luckily there were enough people who wanted a shooter/RPG hybrid and who could put up with the controls, and it eventually became a cult classic in its own right! Unfortunately (for System Shock) Doom 2 was released in October 1994 and did everything that Doom did, but better - and System Shock never really got its chance to shine. I think I've written enough for now, if Rojo decides to do an LP of System Shock 2 I may do another effort post about that generation of games!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2022 03:50
|
|
|
Tiggum posted:That's not exactly true. Solid objects (ie. those that block each other) can't occupy the same horizontal coordinates (so a cacodemon floating up in the sky will prevent you from walking underneath it), but intangible objects (such as projectiles and items) can. Missiles can even pass under or over other objects that they would normally hit (eg. monsters). It's not a matter of the game not being 3D, but certain limitations added intentionally for various reasons. This video explains in more detail. I guess it says something about the trickery / wizardry that they had to employ in these early games that I'm always finding out new bits of info which turn what I thought I knew on my head! I hacked about with making a few Doom levels and mods back in the day and from what I remember I was 100% sure that hit detection for both hitscan and projectile weapons was compressed to a 2d plane, but the fact that projectiles like rockets use a 3d vector and avoid the infinitely tall monsters is new to me! Thank you for linking that video, it actually overlaps with a video I saw when I was checking some info for my earlier word dump - about halfway down this page, which I shamelessly took bits from before without attribution - https://www.filfre.net/2019/01/life-off-the-grid-part-1-making-ultima-underworld/ They couldn't figure out a quick way to map textures to look realistic when looking up and down - so just chose to allow textures to be distorted vertically, but restrict the viewing angle so that you'd have to be very up close to a wall and looking extremely up or down before it distorted too much. It did the job at the time!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2022 02:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 07:09 |
|
|
rojovision posted:
(apologies this reply is rather late, didn't get back around to checking on this thread for a bit!) I have to admit I was a bit on the drunk side when I got around to writing that post so it may have rambled on too long or got some stuff entirely wrong! But the reason I wrote it is because I have a huge soft spot for these games, they were some of the most influential games I played back in my formative years and they've always been at the back of my mind when playing newer games. I've tried to revisit them on occasion but never quite been able to get into them because of how old school the controls are - which is why I love that you pick these games to LP and commit to learning their idiosyncrasies. I hope you keep going if you're not getting burnt out on them yet! Fingers crossed for Underworld 2 or System Shock 2.... maybe there's an opportunity for a multiplayer LP of SS2 somehow? As for later games, Arx Fatalis came close but I ended up getting stuck in an area with what seemed to be unkillable enemies and gave up on it. I'm a big fan of the Dishonoured series which are kind of an evolution of Thief, some of the level design in those games is astounding but the actual combat lets it down unfortunately. 2017 Prey was pretty much the exact game I had been waiting for after so many years, the blend of exploration, story, combat, freedom of movement and light RPG elements hit exactly the perfect spot for me. The Mooncrash DLC is pretty good as well if you've not played that, it takes away some of the story elements and strips it down to a more basic gameplay loop, but it's still very satisfying. After Dishonoured, Prey and Mooncrash I was expecting big things from Arkane's next game Deathloop which I was hoping was going to be similar to Prey and Mooncrash - but ended up being a stripped down version. I assume there isn't going to be a Prey 2, but hopefully there's still a market for another big budget immersive sim!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2022 03:12
|
|