steo on 1/4/2011 at 21:40

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Completed System Shock recently after not having played in a while - since SSP 0.6. This time I was on SSP 1.2 with mouselook mod enabled. Anyway, after I completed it once, I decided to play it again, this time with everything set to hardest, and trying to play a bit faster while still role playing a bit - i.e. listening to all logs, not exploiting prior knowledge of access codes, backtracking to get all the digits of the self destruct code and rushing to try and save the survivors on flight deck.

In the end I got the following score:
http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/8324/ssscore.png
Time: 4:10:32, Kills: 692, Regenerations: 41, Difficulty index: 36, Score: 4999222

Which I think may have been my fastest run ever. Following this, I decided to try something along the lines of a speedrun, which I've just completed. This time I was trying to skip as much of the game as possible, and get as fast a time as possible without bothering to repeat slow segments or even plan my route at all. I was lucky in that I managed to find a sparq on the first corpse in the med area (which I didn't drop until I got the skorpion on L7!) but unlucky (or stupid) in that I wasted a lot of time looking for the speed skates on level 1 and pretty much ended up exploring the entire level.

I think mouselook helps a great deal when moving around with the speed skates, you can really fly around corners and without them you're just perpetually fatigued. I also used them for the cheap trick of skipping most of Level eight - by managing to jump between the energy drain mines without enabling the force bridge. With enough batteries, I think it's also possible to jump-jet right to the very top of the level to get to deck 9, but I didn't have jump-jets or a decent supply of batteries.

The other big time-saver I had was skipping flight deck and guessing the fifth digit of the destruct code. Since it's actually two three digit codes, you could also guess one of the codes from levels 1-3, but since you're required to destroy or go past them to get to the elevator it's probably worth the extra effort.

Ammo wasn't a problem in the slightest, even skipping huge portions of the game. I went out of my way to get some of the better secrets, like the magnum and laser rapier on level 3, the flechette (definitely the most useful weapon imo) on the reactor level, the skorpion on L7 and other rooms with ammo/bombs here and there. I guess despite finding a hell of a lot less ammo, I killed a lot less and sometimes just ran away/past stuff.

Obviously I missed quite a lot of things, most notably any kind of environment suit and the assault rifle - which I did pick up on L8 but never fired. Even so I never ran out of ammo for the magnum or the flechette and could have used the skorpion a hell of a lot more. I also missed the jumpjets until L9, went straight from shield V1-V4 (this actually isn't a bad progression at all, because V2 and V3 use shed loads of power and V1 is still enough to stop you from being instantly raped by Shodan's meaner denizens. I suppose the speed at which I went through the game also contributed a lot to me not having to worry about shield power consumption. In cyberspace, I only went in on levels 1, 6 and 9 - and if I were to try again I'd skip the one on level 1. I thought it would be a necessity to get the magpulse, but in reality you don't get any ammo for it until level 6 and there's a gun in the bit with the ATMs near the first railgun as well as one in Beta grove. I am right in thinking the only way to unlock beta grove is in cspace, right?

Anyway, those are all the thoughts I can think to write on the run, hopefully some of you care.

The final score was:

http://img861.imageshack.us/img861/8355/ssscore2.png

Time: 2:00:20, Kills: 417, Regenerations: 36, Difficulty index: 36, Score: 3592222

I saw a (http://acantophis3rd.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/system-shock-speedrun/) speedrun of SS1 done in around an hour and a half, but he has combat on 1 and puzzles on 0 - a little bizzare, since you could quite easily write down all the solutions, and there's easily enough logic probes around without even looking. In fact the only necessary puzzle that I find difficult is the one to get into the regen area on level 7, which I probed in the latest run. The force doors on L9 look like they might be hard, but all of them are only one or two moves away from the solution. I did use a probe for the autobomb maze one though. There's always genius patches as well, which don't take up inventory space, but aren't as useful. In fact, now that I think about it, most of the puzzles in the game don't need to be solved anyway.

So I actually got a lower score than the previous run, despite being done in less than half of the time. I think the scoring system is a bit borked. So anyway shockers, what are your fastest runs or best scores?

steo on 2/4/2011 at 00:00

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That's 1.5 times faster, so about 1 hour 48 minutes for his run, and he's on combat 1, plot 3, puzzle 2 and cyber 1. I have no idea why you would speed up the video.

Mouselook is no doubt a huge help when it comes to moving around, even more so with the skates, and yes, a true speedrun should be done without it. I don't really have any intention of making a proper speedrun for the game though, I certainly don't have time to bother working out how to record DOSBox video and free up space for hundreds of gigs of raw video on my hard drives.

I reckon it would be possible to have a split segment run done in under an hour on the hardest skill though. In a split segment run, you could even have the hacker appear to just guess the destruct code correctly on the first attempt.

steo on 2/4/2011 at 18:14

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I was aware of the force bridge jump trick, mentioned that I used it on my last run, but importantly the video just showed me that there are two settings for the turbo skates! I cannot believe I didn't know this until now.

Also I'm pretty certain that SpeedDemosArchive wouldn't accept a run with mouselook mod enabled, they would probably allow you to run SSP though.