System Shock: Enhanced Edition

This was on my "to play" list for quite some years. Overall, a surprisingly immersive and engaging experience. Not for faint of heart: there are mutilated bodies everywhere. World-building and atmosphere are the game's highpoints and stand strong to this day. Citadel station immerses the player easily thanks to excellent lighting design, compelling backstory, and an ever-present sense of tension and despair. The game follows a linear plot and you must explore to uncover the clues to SHODAN's schemes and how to stop them. Exploration rewards you well with plenty of additional backstory, items, and weaponry. SHODAN is a menacing villain, who instills far more dread than the typical 90s bad-guy. Between her visage, unsettling communications, and relentlessness, SHODAN is classic and memorable. The gameplay is a mx of between first-person combat, puzzle solving, and implant-driven cyberspace romps. Of course, no one in the 90s could use the internet without cybernetic implants. The game boasts a strong variety of weapons, items, and implants to aid your cause. Enhanced edition includes mouse-look but it is unresponsive; otherwise you can drive turning and moving with the mouse like an old-school dungeon crawler. It can be awkward to aim or react quickly. On the plus side, there are many interesting enemy types and plenty of ammo to go around. Puzzles are usually "you're getting warmer"-style guessing games, with a few genuine brain-teasers here and there. Cyberspace is easily the weakest part of the game; unfortunately, it is required to progress. The 6 DOF movement and wireframe virtual world might have been spectacle at the time, but it is a chore to play. Nonetheless, you can change the difficulty of each part of the game individually, in case one would break your experience. All in all, this is a journey worth taking. Though, I did find the final stretch underwhelming.

Running Manjaro 5.17.15-1, wine 8.8-1. Installed from offline installer no problem. Haven't tested all features yet, but make sure you don't have any midi interfaces or loopbacks, it will try to talk to them, and the setting cannot be disabled from the menus.

OK, I completed System Shock 2 twice. I enjoyed each time immensely, not because I was a huge fan of Looking Glass games, which I was, but because it was a great game. I rushed out and purchased System Shock in order to play the game that led to this amazing game that was System Shock 2. It wouldn't work. No matter what I did, it wouldn't work. Oh, I could watch the video fine, just couldn't play the game. Now, I can finally play this game. Thank you, GOG. btw...I still own the cd version, box and all, of this game...always held out hope of getting it to run. So far, I have been enjoying this a lot, if perhaps far to late in the game.

If you don't own a copy of this game, buy it. The original version was about as difficult to play as Ultima Underworld, thanks to the atrocious controls. The addition of mouse look and key remapping really fixed the game without altering the intended experience. Yes, it's quite dated compared to modern games, but it still has both cerebral and visceral impact. And SHODAN remains one of the most terrifying antagonists of all time.

Don't get me wrong. System Shock 1 is eternal classic. For quite a long time it was possible to run it (even for free or using previously bought copy) inside dosbox / via community crafted version called SSP. But the selling point of this particular enhanced edition is the inclusion of the new engine called SHLINK. And that's where the problems start. Literally minutes after release this appeared: https://www.gog.com/forum/system_shock_series/sshock_enhanced_edition_crashes_2_sec_after_intro_started . Meaning: for large group of ppl this game crashes immediately after running it. As time goes, it starts to be pretty clear the bug manifests itself under very different conditions for different ppl, which is never a good sign. So what's here to blame is the fact almost week after release with known showstopper GOG is still selling it and announcing as some feat. Which it is not, usual practice in industry has reversed logic - you pay alphatesters to do work for you, NOT you let customers pay to do alphatesters for you.