Reminiscing about some old GREAT games!

I just joined 2old2play and have been reviewing a lot of the forum posts. This has got me thinking about the early PC games I used to play a decade or more ago (when Xbox 360 and PS3 weren’t even dreamed of yet). It occurs to me that the original PC games, while crude by today’s standards, were the stepping stones that got me hooked on the whole genre. I think they also provided the foundation that the current games and gaming platforms are all built upon. With this in mind, I wanted to reminisce a bit and pay homage to one of my all time favorite games System Shock (and of course System Shock 2).

For those who haven’t played the game, System Shock was a first-person computer game released in 1994. The game is set aboard the fictional Citadel Space Station in a cyberpunk vision of 2072. Assuming the role of a nameless hacker, your mission is shut down the station’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) that has had a serious breakdown after its “moral and ethical subroutines” are deleted. Unlike other first-person games of the time, System Shock featured true 3D environments, allowing you to look up and down, climb, duck, jump, and lean to the side. It also had primitive learning capabilities so it could begin to adapt to, and counter you based on your gaming strategy.

One of the best things about the game was SHODAN (Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network) the games AI and the main antagonist. I’ll just say that SHODAN was an AI with seriously bad attitude (and a sarcastic one at that)! Two of her most notable aspects are her malevolent personality and chaotic, stuttering speech. SHODAN was notorious for trying to get under your skin while you played the game. She often challenged you with comments like “look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?" Better yet, her tone and overall demeanor (as well as her verbal challenges) became much more aggressive and threatening as you got closer and closer to winning the game. Just reminiscing about the game brings back great memories of playing it along with several friends from work. That such good memories stick with you for more than a decade says something about the quality of the game and the experience you got from playing it!