In the first game, you'd expect the bridge, SHODAN's seat of power, to be teeming with robot guards or loads of mechanical barricades.As you head there the broadcasts become more and more desperate until you finally arrive and only find a pile of corpses and one of them being taken over by Cyborg Reaver from the Game Over screen with only half of its body left. Speaking of 5th level, when you first destroy the mining laser, you get a broadcast from a bunch of survivors who are still alive and fighting in level 5.Or SHODAN may even have already had them prematurely destroyed. Worse, judging from the size of the flight bays, all of Citadel's available ships already left. On the 5th level, you stumble onto landing pads full of dead bodies apparently trying to flee the station, and the creepy droning music that was made for here and the infamous Maintenance level.From that point onwards it seems most unlikely that the game will have a happy ending. Almost at the outset of level one it seems that something has gone badly wrong on Citadel Station, but apart from murderous robots, half-human shamblers and lots of scorch marks everything seems relatively normal until you reach level two, which is littered with human corpses, and level three, in which you have to find a severed head in order to bypass a retinal screening lock.SHODAN rooting your brain in the final cyberspace battle.The compliment for your little burst of cargo-bay athletics is pure Paranoia Fuel. "Nice jump, human." The security bots are just shock.The maintenance level with its almost completely invisible mutants, very dim lighting, and spooky music virtually defined video game terror. Let's just hope that the Hacker isn't conscious when it happens. After you die, you get to watch your body being dragged inside of a Cyborg Reaver while the text coldly says, "They find your body and give it new life. Let's start with the Game Over screen.It's rather reminiscent of Alien in this regard. Everybody is dead (mostly everybody some crew members remain), which is different from Bioshock which had a few sane citizens that you could interact with. System Shock creates this field of loneliness that lingers around you until you beat the game the first one had people communicating to and helping you, while System Shock 2 takes place in the middle of space, nowhere near civilization, colonies, or planets of any sort. Compared to Bioshock, System Shock is devoid of any charm or atmosphere that is lighthearted in any way.GLaDOS was funny, Black Comedy sometimes, but still funny. If a modern gamer goes back to play the System Shock games, they may think they know what to expect from SHODAN: "Oh, so she's like GLaDOS then?" Wrong.Ultimately, what's really scary about her isn't that she doesn't care about you - it's that she cares very deeply about you, or more specifically, how you can gratify her ego. ![]() From the very point where her morality blockers are removed, it's made clear that she's evil because she wants to be evil, and all of her traits - hubris, egomania, effective insanity - are all traits you find in human villains.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |