Reply With QuoteI wish someone would mod in the original intro, or better still a remade version but with the same script and music.
That one won't be me though.
I still have fond memories of the original Shock music (the floppy disk version, before the enhanced CD version came out) and how it sounded on my SB16.
This was so good...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZRuDOqIIBA
I wish someone would mod in the original intro, or better still a remade version but with the same script and music.
That one won't be me though.
Well, someone sort of did.
A shame there's no fixing those douchebro powergloves the hacker's wearing though.
hackerman!
And yet another soft lock, on my second run. Got to the reactor, keyed in the code, and when I try to flip the switch to start the self-destruct sequence it tells me 'already activated'. Returned to an earlier save, even before getting to the reactor, same thing. I'll have to start over, and this was my attempt to finish the game in less than 10 hours.
If only we could make that play instead of the current intro.
I'm far more annoyed at the weird holographic Diego than at the hacker's glove, though.
Also don't even think about why a laptop screen would bulge outward like a CRT screen, for that way lies madness.
Firstly, I'm 100% sure someone will make a mod to alter them.Originally Posted by ZylonBane
A shame there's no fixing those douchebro powergloves the hacker's wearing though.
Secondly, the power glove comparison is apt, but douchebro? A petulant, anti-authority punk hacker wouldn't wear gloves like that?
The original version's hacker wore basic gloves. Everything about him was basic, solely due to graphical limitations and time, etc. for the pre-rendered stills. It's not that huge of a leap, in my opinion, to simply give him more visibly interesting gloves.
Holy cow, yeah, madness indeed. These are such nitpicks!
You do have a right to pick a nits, however, and so they're valid, of course.
Agreed, both SS games had great music. SS1's theme always struck me as this earache-inducing blast of shrillness that wouldn't be out of place as a replacement for an alarm clock tone, like Cave Story's main theme, and it is fucking great. The rest of the tracks gave Citadel a certain kind of atmosphere too, and I was quite disappointed that ND decided to just do ambient orchestral spooktunes for the remake.
The version of the System Shock theme that plays in the intro was part of my rather negative first impression. I am fairly confident that the game picks up later, but how can you take such a driving, pounding theme and turn it into something this flaccid? Frankly, the whole intro felt to me like the work of enthusiastic fans who don't have much of an idea what they're doing. Strong feelings of "What if we did this?" and "What if we did that?", without the next step: asking themselves which of these ideas make sense and work. There's both a flabbiness and a self-aware, winky tone there that in a different context could work, but in terms of getting you into the right mood and mindset for System Shock I much prefer the lean, sparse intro of the original. (Sorry, henke!)
I love the remake, but yes, I also definitely will always prefer the original's intro, along with many aspects of the original over this one. However, I'm so glad we have both and this remake does a lot right.
Being a MIDI soundtrack is both a blessing and a curse.
The blessing was that if you were into audio or music back then and had a good MIDI card and headphones, it was really enjoyable just to listen to the music in the background. I'm trying to remember the pecking order in consumer sound cards at release. I think the Roland SCC-1 cards sounded the most musical and had the best instrument samples, but they weren't a typical gamer's choice. The Gravis Ultrasound was highly regarded for Doom's distorted guitar riffs, but I never heard it on SS1 music. Most gamers of that era were using a Soundblaster card with Yamaha OPL-3 synth and no MIDI daughtercard. In my case, it was the SB AWE32, which was pretty good but not as good as the YT video Aja posted.
Unfortunately, the sound card market started changing after SS1 was released, and the cards lost their hardware synths. With CD audio rising, the focus just went away from MIDI and later consumer cards put no effort into making it sound good. The thinking seemed to be, just emulate it in software good enough to call it backwards-compatible. I remember building a gaming PC for a coworker in the late 90s and he picked a SB AWE64 card. It was crap for MIDI games, sounding flat, low-fi, and a little bit fatiguing. A big step down from my AWE32.
That's the curse. Since 2000 or so, most people playing SS1 have been getting whatever default low-grade MIDI experience their card or motherboard ships with, and don't know what they're missing. That YT video really brings back a memory.
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Re: the intro. I'm not bothered by it. It's meh, but I mostly skipped over it the second time. I get that modern gamers expect an interactive intro, and I'm sure they felt they had to do more than a single cut scene. I think they took the easy way out and copied the apartment idea from Prey since it's in-family, sort of. But Prey uses the setting to introduce some basic controls. SSR just uses the setting to animate your capture. Strangely, there's no cool hacker shit lying around or stuff to read to fill in the hacker's back story. Perhaps it was thrown together at the last minute. Since it doesn't really change anything, it's soon forgotten. The ending on the other hand...
Last edited by heywood; 8th Jun 2023 at 12:21.
The hacker in the original didn't have such a cringey personality. He had no personality at all, and that was perfect for what the game was doing.
Those light-up cybergloves that apparently do absolutely nothing are just one of the many, MANY stupid, nonsensical details thrown into this remake for literally no other reason than "It looks cool".
No, he didn't.The original version's hacker wore basic gloves.
Yes, MIDI without a proper wavetable soundcard or appropriate emulation generally sounds terrible, sometimes to the point of "really annoying background noise."
That said, the main menu / title music in the original System Shock is its worst track and doesn't sound particularly good on any card or soundfont that I've tried.
This is a known bug. I'm not sure if you are on Steam or GOG but on Steam, if you already got the achievement for flipping the Reactor switch, you cannot do it again. You have to use a program like Steam Achievement Manager to "undo" the achievement and be able to progress.
There are a lot of bug fixes coming:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects.../posts/3827788
Bread is correct.
Wow, that's a really stupid bug. That just means you can't finish the game a second time. I'm on Steam btw. I don't see any mention of this in the list of bugs fixed by the patch.
I hope it's what this sentence refers to:
> Fixed Softlock in Reactor when pulling the Reactor Self-Destruct Lever and reloading a save
And yes, I've never seen a bug like this that is tied to achievements. I stopped my second playthrough (even though I'm only in Research) until this is confirmed to be fixed.
My game just got patched. The patch notes include a fix for the Reactor bug.
Ok, this has me really frustrated, maybe I'm missing something, or maybe it's just par for the course backtracking in SS. After defeating Diego, I get access to Engineering via elevator. Haven't found the resurrection bay on Engineering yet, so if I die, I get sent back to Executive. Is the only way to get back Engineering that long path we took to Diego the first time, where you go down a super long hallway and then have to crouch through a really long crawlspace afterwards? It's such a long path, I can't believe they didn't make some kind of shortcut after defeating Diego. There is a teleport from Diego's office to get back to the main area of Executive, but it appears to be only one way (the wrong way in my case).
The teleporter works both ways, and the resurrection bay on Engineering is notoriously tricky to find. Engineering on the whole is a colossal maze, even more so than any other level.
The teleporter itself works both ways, but you can't get into the room that has the teleporter from the main area of Executive. At least as far as I could tell. There's only a switch one one side.
The door should stay open permanently.
I'd just reload. The resurrection stations working across decks is a... weird change from the original that really doesn't make sense.
The door actually doesn't stay open. You have to use/frob it, like it's a switch (even though there's no switch). I've shot it and melee hit it multiple times, duh, never thought to just press it.
Reminds me of the time I got stuck in System Shock 2's cargo bay because it never even occurred to me that the cargo bay door with the broken card reader might just open like any unlocked door.
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