System Shock Remake - Reviews, Impressions & Hot Takes

F. J. Rothchild III on 8/6/2023 at 08:48

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.

heywood on 8/6/2023 at 15:05

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...

ZylonBane on 8/6/2023 at 15:54

Quote Posted by F. J. Rothchild III

Secondly, the power glove comparison is apt, but douchebro? A petulant, anti-authority punk hacker wouldn't wear gloves like that?

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".

Quote:

The original version's hacker wore basic gloves.

No, he didn't.

Nameless Voice on 8/6/2023 at 16:24

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.

pain on 9/6/2023 at 14:30

Quote Posted by D'Arcy

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.

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/1598858095/system-shock/posts/3827788)

ZylonBane on 9/6/2023 at 14:40

Bread is correct.

D'Arcy on 9/6/2023 at 17:09

Quote Posted by pain

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.

pain on 9/6/2023 at 17:46

Quote Posted by D'Arcy

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.

pain on 10/6/2023 at 13:59

My game just got patched. The patch notes include a fix for the Reactor bug.

Renault on 10/6/2023 at 17:08

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).