Corridors, panting and sweating
Well, the last month has actually been quite busy with all the requisite writing of articles and grant applications that comes with my new territory of PhD studentness, but thankfully not quite busy enough to entirely keep me from my recent streak of actually *gasp* playing games. And so, lately, I've been plumbing the lowest depths of grognardom by replaying the original System Shock. Lo and behold, like the monument to a lost era it actually is, it's all kinds of fantastic, in all of its pixellated 640x480 glory.
I could go on about everything that is just great about this game - the gradually unfolding, persistent world, the clever quests that take you up and down Citadel Station foiling SHODAN's diabolical master plan layer by layer, the bleak audio logs that actually give useful information, but what really matters is how well all of this works as a whole. What it comes down to is how utterly non-gimmicky System Shock actually is. It's... pure.
Playing games on the way to work, it seems, has become my new ironclad litmus test for game design quality; you either have fun playing a game in a twenty-minute chunk or not. And really, by conventional wisdom, System Shock shouldn't be even remotely accessible. I mean, for one thing, while there were a lot of unfriendly control schemes in the early 90s, System Shock may be the only one which expects players to possess three hands. Beyond that, System Shock isn't simply a maze, it's ten mazes piled on top of one another like an elaborate, delicious sandwich cake seeking your destruction, packed full of secret areas, loot, hideous mutants and killer robots. Directions? Please, this is the DOS era, you'll figure where to go on your own and you'll like it.
The thing is... I really do. You can play System Shock for twenty minutes and feel like you're making meaningful progress in that time. The reason for this is that there is nothing trivial or extraneous in the game; the game drops you right into the good stuff of getting lost into mazes, clobbering and shooting robots and finding bigger and better sticks and guns to clobber and shoot them with, and it never lets up until the game is actually over.
Making games like this is almost a lost art, these days. System Shock is a stand-out, to be sure, but there were a lot of games with this sensibility, back in the day. Somewhere down the line, though, developers lost the arrogant conviction that a 3D shooter might be sufficiently compelling that the actual game can be put front-and-center to stand on its own merits, without extra cinematic flourishes. Which are nice, occasionally, but with it, a lot has been lost. Already in System Shock 2, just starting the game has you slog through a cutscene, a tutorial, another tutorial, a character creation montage, an "interactive cutscene", yet another tutorial... it takes like an hour before you even run into your first real enemy. Definitely not something to play on your way to work.
How fortunate, then, that DOSBox exists and runs well on laptops!
I could go on about everything that is just great about this game - the gradually unfolding, persistent world, the clever quests that take you up and down Citadel Station foiling SHODAN's diabolical master plan layer by layer, the bleak audio logs that actually give useful information, but what really matters is how well all of this works as a whole. What it comes down to is how utterly non-gimmicky System Shock actually is. It's... pure.
Playing games on the way to work, it seems, has become my new ironclad litmus test for game design quality; you either have fun playing a game in a twenty-minute chunk or not. And really, by conventional wisdom, System Shock shouldn't be even remotely accessible. I mean, for one thing, while there were a lot of unfriendly control schemes in the early 90s, System Shock may be the only one which expects players to possess three hands. Beyond that, System Shock isn't simply a maze, it's ten mazes piled on top of one another like an elaborate, delicious sandwich cake seeking your destruction, packed full of secret areas, loot, hideous mutants and killer robots. Directions? Please, this is the DOS era, you'll figure where to go on your own and you'll like it.
The thing is... I really do. You can play System Shock for twenty minutes and feel like you're making meaningful progress in that time. The reason for this is that there is nothing trivial or extraneous in the game; the game drops you right into the good stuff of getting lost into mazes, clobbering and shooting robots and finding bigger and better sticks and guns to clobber and shoot them with, and it never lets up until the game is actually over.
Making games like this is almost a lost art, these days. System Shock is a stand-out, to be sure, but there were a lot of games with this sensibility, back in the day. Somewhere down the line, though, developers lost the arrogant conviction that a 3D shooter might be sufficiently compelling that the actual game can be put front-and-center to stand on its own merits, without extra cinematic flourishes. Which are nice, occasionally, but with it, a lot has been lost. Already in System Shock 2, just starting the game has you slog through a cutscene, a tutorial, another tutorial, a character creation montage, an "interactive cutscene", yet another tutorial... it takes like an hour before you even run into your first real enemy. Definitely not something to play on your way to work.
How fortunate, then, that DOSBox exists and runs well on laptops!