Alinestra Covelia on 5/12/2007 at 19:28

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I got this game when it first came out and played it. Then I got it working on XP thanks to you excellent people here (esp. Kolya, who made the process dummyproof). This time I spent time to try out a load of stuff I'd never done before (like using the Fusion Cannon and Stasis Generator for once). I noticed a few things I hadn't noticed before.

Spoilers follow, needless to say.

1. The shotgun pellets require some minimum space between you and the target to work best. If you're right up against a rumbler and you shoot with the anti-personnel pellets, they do very little damage. Obviously if you're too far away the pellets spread and don't do much damage either. A few steps away seems to be the optimal distance.

1a. As a corollary to 1. above, I'm not sure how the pellets mechanics are calculated. In some games, like Blood and Goldeneye, the shotgun actually produces pellets and calculates the trajectory for each one. In some other (simpler) games, it's just a simple cone with a "reduce damage as per distance" calculation. Here, in SS2, when you fire the shotgun pellets against a wall, you can see the separate pellets hitting, so that would suggest the Blood/Goldeneye method. But certain targets, especially arachnids, are extremely variable in how much damage they take from the shotgun (probably because they're small, although I also suspect the hitbox may be unconventionally shaped for them).

2. The portable electronic batteries restore only a tiny amount of charge for your stuff while you're on the Von Braun or the Rickenbacker. However, once you're in the Body of the Many, they restore full charge for each use. I guess this is more for game balance (there is only one charge unit in all of the Many's Body) than realism.

3. I have never found the actual log that tells you what the Deck 2 armory code is. I do know the code itself from a FAQ/walkthrough, but I have never found it on my own.

4. Once you have a certain Agility rating, it appears that in some places you can vault over fences and railings. In one such place (a steaming pool of water near the two parallel hallways of eggs, in Hydroponics) if you do this, you cannot get back out and have to reload. This might be a bug.

5. The shotgun has a little mechanism on the side that automates the slide-shuck pump action. I never noticed that before and it's faintly to moderately awesome. :)

6. If a bot is standing right up against a crate, it can shoot through the crate and hit you.

7. I suspect there's a (fairly low) maximum number of simultaneous explosions the game can have, though I might well be mistaken. In the Recreation level near the piano lounge, I usually set a Proximity Grenade trap for the Cyber Assassins. Only the first few grenades tend to injure them. The others seem to just vanish. (Although it might just be they're detonated by the first few and are too distant to affect the assassins.)

8. In the Brain of the Many with the respawning Rumblers, I've run against the parallel walls and then found myself suddenly stuck. Perhaps when a Rumbler gets up too close to you and its polygons clip through the wall, it might take you with it. It's fun to shoot Rumblers and Arachnids as they come after you while you're stuck, but it can get a bit repetitive and once you run out of ammo it's not much fun after that. :)

8a. A possible fun in-game rationalization for that is that the Many is assimilating you in an organic Borg-esque way.


I've also wondered why SHODAN doesn't just strip you of your cybernetic stuff when you become her enemy. In fact, there are a few points where she basically has you running around being a janitor for her (get this key here, put it in that device there) when I wonder why she can't do it herself. Resetting the engineer core to destroy the Von Braun was something I thought she could do better than a human.

A few questions on the game generally:

a) Has anybody modded this so the "unpopular" fields (psi usage, exotic weaponry) are feasible? I'd imagine making the exotic weapons available earlier would be a decent workaround. As it is, they come so late in the game that you practically need to have spent your modules on mundane survival stuff just to get to them.

b) Has anybody made a System Shock 1 mod for the SS2 engine? I am aware that I can get SS1 to run on an XP system, and better still I actually own an old copy of SSS1, but I never played that and I suspect the SS1 engine may have a steep learning curve too. (SS2 certainly did - I died many many times in the Cargo Bays on my first few runthroughs.)

c) Can the same thing be done with Ultima Underworld? Again, I own those games but have never played them. I enjoyed the Ultima series by Origin immensely and look forward to trying UU1 and 2 sometime.

Anybody else have thoughts, observations, comments?

P.S. Where the heck is Schechter these days anyway?

Assidragon on 5/12/2007 at 21:45

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No, it's a bug to do with level transitions and item ID nutfuckery. Suffice to say, the recharge rate's pretty random sometimes. NV told me once you can fix it with throwing one away and then shuffling the stack somehow, but I forgot it. There are fixes for this in some mods, I think.

SulphurPuttyPancake on 6/12/2007 at 16:57

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I noticed this early on (Hydro / Ops), to save ammo (I wasn't using the AP shotgun ammo much, so kept it for worms and eggs) I would search the eggs, then destroy them before it could release a worm / toxin but sometimes one shot with the AP wouldn't do it.

I found after experimenting that it was best to aim slightly above the top of the egg graphic, standing a few paces back to get one-hit kill every time, odd!

The rifled slugs always seemed to work much better against hybrids than AP also. Occasionally I would get it just right with AP and score 1-hit-ko from quite a long way off, anyone know how the game calculates the shots / damage?