Lo-lo-look at you, Hacker. A pa-pa-pathetic creature of meat

the many are far creepier
but I always thought hiveminds, and being absorbed by them, to be the worst thing ever (the oil monster from phantoms also comes to mind)

>>3811170
>perfect machine
>stutters more than me
Ha!

>>3811170
>panting and sweating as you ru-run through my corridors-s
Why does this sound so lewd?

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>>3811170
>H-h-how can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine

>>3811393
SHODAN is lewd af tbqfhwy

beatiful woman

>>3811170
Childhood was idolizing SS2
Adulthood is realizing that SS1 was the only masterpiece in the series

>>3811532
tfw i played SS1 when i was 15 (I'm 21 and thought it was legit better

>>3811567
Reminder that only hipsters like ss1

>>3811391
Explain to me why she didn't stutter that much when she was disguised as Polito?

Nah

>>3811532
contrarian/10

>>3811532
childhood is enjoying games
adulthood is being a contrarian on anonymous imageboards

>>3811880
>>3811882
is it really that contrarian? SS2 is a very flawed game imo, the RPG system feels tacked on and a last hour addition, very unbalanced in general. The game itself is good until "the revelation", then goes free-falling mode and the last third is near atrocious. The only thing it has over SS1 is more modern gameplay and atmosphere

>>3811203
Maybe she's gotten the impression somewhere that stuttering is necessary for perfection. Politio, being imperfect, would therefore not stutter.

>>3811170
...and I thought I wasn't gonna fap today...

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SS3 when?

>>3813659
That was Bioshock.
When it started development, the Bio was a reference to the end of SS2 where SHODAN was now a fusion of machine and flesh by stealing whatshername's body
Then like a decade of development happened and it had almost nothing in common aside from some of the mechanics. That's why there's a hacking minigame in Art Deco Atlantis, because there was Hacking in SS1/2. Splicers are all basically Cyborg Midwives, just not as terrifying.

The other reason we don't have a proper 3 is SHODAN won. She survived. XERXES did not, there is nothing to prevent her ascension to real godhood now.

>>3813739
But I heard they were working on legit SS3.

>>3811797
I like to think that SHODAN considers her stuttering a divine feature that further separates her from the crew and the pathetic Xerxes who do not have such speech impediments.

>>3811905
Len Levine was honestly never good. He's only famous for shitting our second rate sequels of established franchises like Tribes, System Shock, and SWAT.

>>3813750
>>3813739
Yes. System Shock 3 is in active development. Warren Epic Mickey was awesome, fuck you Spector is in charge of it.

>how can you challenge a perfect machine

with this
*unzip dick*

>>3817201
I bet if Shodan got some good dicking, she would drop this whole shtick with being superior and killing all humans like a sack of potatoes.

>>3817714
She would say that she is not compatible with 3½" floppies.

>>3817730
Holly shit thats the good one!

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I played SS2 when I was 16 and now at 23 played SS1.

Have to admit, I enjoyed SS1 way more.
It has real cyberpunk feel, the the kind of which no game has not successfully replicated till this day.

SS1 is a cyberpunk scifi game, where as SS2 is a survival horror game with scifi elements.

>>3818386
I played both SS1 and SS2 when I was 25 and I vastly prefer the former because it's just an expertly-designed game, one of the very few games that I feel is actually both ambitious and perfect. SS2 on the other hand has too many flaws ranging from the poorly balanced character building system, to the constrictive level design, to the lack of enemy variety, to the self-defeating story that tries to portray SHODAN as a threatening antagonist just as she was in SS1 but at the same time makes her wholly dependent on the protagonist's cooperation, etc.

>>3817730
I legit laughed my ass off. Well done, anon!

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>>3818539
>>3818539
Destroying the first nodes in SS1 and Shodan commenting " What are you doing? Who are you? "was so cool, and yet somehow in SS2 it feels like Shodan is even LESS powerful than in SS1.
Also the developer said they wanted SS1 to be very immersive which it still is, if one can ignore the graphics. The augmentations are proof of that.

>>3816835
SWAT 4 was still a goodass game.

>>3818615
The story of SS2 necessitates that SHODAN needed to rely on the player to give her power. It's a doomed concept. They tried to compensate for her powerlessness by making her hurl all sorts of threats at the player while she was making her requests, but that just ended up making her character come across as petulant. I don't know how someone like Ken Levine who considers himself to be such a huge fanboy of SHODAN can allow something like that to happen in a game he's directing.

>>3818647
I think most people enter the system shock games through the second first so they have no idea what it was supposed to be like.
Also SS2 is mostly known for its horror atmosphere instead of it being a sequel to a 10/10 game.

>>3818647

I didn't think SHODAN being weaker in SS2 necessarily made the story worse. It was a very interesting relationship because it was about an awful being being dwarfed by its own creation, something even more terrible than SHODAN herself and having to work with an evil being who you knew all along would screw you as soon as The Many were taken care of.

I'm not saying this narrative is superior to the first one just that I think it was better that SHODAN had a different dynamic with the player than the first game. Would the plot have really been better if it was "SHODAN does it AGAIN, this time in 3D!"? If nothing else I liked how SS2 flipped the narrative progression. In fact I'm wondering how Warren Spector is going to keep the story fresh for SS3.

>>3818615
>doom 4

>>3818741
It's an inferior story for a videogame. When you cheapen the antagonist, you also cheapen the player character's role in the story.

Even if we ignore the whole aspect of the story belonging to a videogame, I think the relationship was not interesting and was very poorly executed. The dynamic may be different, but SHODAN behaves exactly the same, which is part of the problem. They make her do her shtick of denigrating the player and calling him insect, even though she's supposed to deceive him and get on his good side so she can more easily betray him when he's no longer needed. Was there even a point to her revealing her true identity before she got the player to do everything she needed him to do? It makes little sense, it's like they did that just so they can have SHODAN return in time so she can be present for a significant portion of the game and say all those lines of calling the player insect just like she did in SS1. They sacrificed the plot and character for fanservice. They come up with a different character dynamic but they have SHODAN, an AI, act irrationally and foolishly just so they can rehash the kind of lines she'd say in SS1.

And no one said anything about rehashing SS1's plot. Surely there are ways to make SHODAN remain a powerful and threatening opponent while still telling a different type of story. You say that SS2's story was doing something new and that makes it good, but I say that the developers only made a half-assed effort of telling a new story because they let the story they came up with get undermined by SHODAN fanservice.

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>>3818741
>interesting relationship

yes, i've deleted and remade this post a billion times because i always find more to say

>>3818860

I actually kind of agree that Shock 2's interesting narrative conceit wasn't executed as well as it should have been, but it's still a conceit that doesn't show up as often as it should.

In fact, there's a particular game series that SHODAN and System Shock 2 remind me of that came out around the same time. Marathon.

If you want an AI that is narratively sold as a legitimate threat, Durandal is it. He surreptitiously sets in motion the events of the first game, resulting in needless deaths of the people aboard the Marathon, just so he can free himself. Over the course of the game, he interferes with the "good" AI's plans so he mess around with you, taunt you about your pathetic existence in his newfound rampant state, and send you on errands. At the end of the game you don't fight him or anything, he successfully escapes on a commandeered alien ship. And when the second game rolls around, surprise, you've been abducted by him to be his personal lapdog.

That said, Marathon is not a horror game and Durandal is not necessarily your enemy, just a rogue AI with unknowable intentions that just so happen to intersect with saving the Earth from an alien menace. Plus a sense of humor that occasionally puts your life at risk. But ever since I played both games I always wondered what the narrative intersection of Marathon and System Shock would look like.

Should I bother with System Shock 1 or just go straight to 2?

I got them during the Humble Freedom Bundle last week.

>>3818919
SS1 is better so the answer should be obvious.

>>3818919
If you want horror SS2, if you want a better game with better plot and godtier atmosphere, SS1.

>>3818950
>>3819369
OK cool, thanks.