System Shock 2 - Retrospective / Review
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ย. 2024
- System Shock may be a classic, but so is System Shock 2, and arguably even more so than the first game. How does it hold up today, and why does it have a fond place in the hearts of many players and game developers?
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For being built on the Dark Engine, which famously prioritized features like complex dynamic lighting, large open levels, and interactivity over visual fidelity and polygon counts compared to its contemporaries, System Shock 2 really is a very nice looking game. The art style alone could shoulder the entire game but they also did a really good job of making the most of what the engine was good at, like those dynamic lighting effects as well as fairly detailed level geometry and detailed environmental props, and between that and the memorable enemy designs it really helps to make up for the filtered low-res textures and very blocky character models. There are only four games I leave texture filtering on for, and three of them are Dark Engine games because in both the Thief games and this gem the artistry and atmosphere are so good that I don't even notice that the textures are covered in grease and the character models have pointy Phineas and Ferb heads.
(The fourth game is Unreal, if anyone is curious, it just doesn't really look right without the filtering, the textures in that game were definitely designed to be viewed with the filtering on imo)
Not the first review of System Shock 2 I've seen, but the first I've seen make mention of the cliffhanger ending. I never knew about that and it makes it even more sad we haven't seen a SS3 yet.
Great job as always, Finn! And love the Monolith cameo reprisal, too 😂
Thank you!
It's quite a surprise if the cliffhanger hasn't been mentioned before! To me it was one of the more memorable parts, so I couldn't leave it out. :P
Shodan is the best toxic relationship I've ever had. I do the work, you do the insults and give me cyberparts as rewards. We can work this out, babe.
@@yaldabaoth2 She's just harsh because she cares.
I can fix her
The best improvement from SS to SS2 is that places almost look like places now.
The tutorial and character creation being so in universe was just great
@@Iymarra Indeed! If there are tutorials, I like it when they make some sense within the context of the universe, and aren't too long if unskippable.
One of my fav sci fi horror titles. An all time great for sure. Shodan and The Many are such a well written antagonists.
Great stuff! Would like Serious Sam 1 retrospective, if you do these type of games. I was on of the first people downloading demo from 56k modem all night, sunday before school, ah the memories... greetings to all old gamers like me
Finn is slowly but surely taking over IndigoGaming's gaming nostalgia crown, and it is glorious to behold.
@@Grogeous_Maximus Hmm. Maybe I should change my name to Nostalgia Critic?
Nah. Too silly.
Who knows, maybe Finn will make his own documentary about a genre :P
@@RTheren Is cats as protagonist a genre? Because that's how my gaming began. :P
That comment/tangent about the Many being space commies and the worst nightmare of future-hyper capitalism cracked me up, I didn't see it coming :)
@1:03:10 You have no chance to survive, move every map...
Ah, the jokes you've peppered through this really do make me chuckle. That poor Many, having a cybernetic stone to pass...
Well done and thank you for sharing :) (I'm catching up!)
one of the best game ever made
@@MaitreMechant Hear, hear!
Played it last year, was absolutely amazingly horrifying experience.
Great vids bangers as usual
@@stephenmccabe1489 Much appreciated!
Saving this for tomorrow's yard work, but advance thumbs up today :)
One of the best games ever made. I've completed it twice. Great video!
@@sebastiang.5032 Thanks!
Really well done! Thank you for another excellent video!
@@paradiseregaind Thanks!
Another banger of a review. As a teen System Shock 2 was a bit too much for me, but I throughly enjoy seeing a quality review of it.
I love how "Deus Ex" used a heavily modified version of this engine. Such a great game, too. And--of course--System Shock 2 was really awesome as well. A bit heavy-handed for certain, but hey... they threw ALL the bells and whistles at this one for the time period! :) Nothin' like it.
Deus Ex was built in Unreal, not Dark Engine.
Thief 1 and 2 shared the engine and both series benefitted from advances in the other game. That's also why the mutants hold their shotguns like swords - it's just copied over from the guards in thief.
Great stuff as always! Like Christmas every time!
@@fleischer444 Thank you!
YESSSSSS IT'S HERE LET'S GOOOOOOOOOO stoked to see this out! proud of you homie!
@@yindeejay Thanks!
My favourite game ever. System Shock 2 is so good. Time for a (5th) replay...
@@TheGunnarRoxen Enjoy!
After a _very_ stressful 6-day work week, your video has premiered at a perfect time for me to relax and enjoy. Thank you! I greatly enjoy your perspective, word choice, and vocal cadence. Perfect mix.
@@TheChronozoan Thank you!
Enjoy your time off, and hopefully next week will be less stressful.
Thank you! I did very much enjoy the video. Your passion for this game as well as gaming as a whole just oozes through in every sentence, and I can't properly encapsulate in words how enjoyable that is. So many channels lately seem to thrive in a sort of this negativity whirlwind in which they do nothing but complain about this or that. Even some of the channels that I have been told are more positive are still said negativity whirlwind but with a small section at the back in which they talk about this or that mechanic they enjoyed. Like a single sad candle on a very large stale cake. You and Majuular are in a league all your own, in all regards. Excellent and unique perspectives, that passion I mentioned, and you clearly have an intellect to be envied. To continue the analogy, you're a Michelin starred bakery of a person.
Okay, I shouldn't overdo the praises _too_ much, haha. Thank you for your kind words! I hope you are doing well too ❤
Comparing both games to each other, System Shock 2 is much more pleasant to look at. The UI of the first game is too full for my likings, too much is going on. So the improvements of the sequel regarding this aspect are very visible.
Also: I enjoy that there is another Mono cameo. :-D
@@Chaosherold The first one came at a time when some devs were considering that you have to be able to control absolutely everything in the game with the mouse alone, which resulted in having to have everything on screen.
Thankfully that era was short.
35:10
"Silence the discord!"
Wait.
SHOCK2 HAD MULTIPLAYER?!
@@NemesisTWarlock Full campaign co-op!
Hieno kanava. Ei muuta kuin jatka samaa rataa, näitä videoita on ilo katsella :)
@@terskatti4994 Kiitos! Näin olisi tarkoitus tehdä. :P
Näiden tekeminen ollut hauskaa ja se, että niistä pitävät muutkin kuin minä on ollut todella mukava yllätys.
Delicious low-poly cyberpunk bread. Yummy!
Funny how the melee enemies use animations from Thief, since it's the same engine.
Gotta love old inventory tetris.... Gotta love good NEW inventory tetris! Inventory tetris is something I actually like... then again, I AM a weirdo. xD
Also... Them chemicals you mention... are they related in any way to the changing sexuality of amfibians?
@@shanara99 We never find out, but perhaps the simians would know?
inventory tetris gives a game a nice way to force the player to make choices and be a little bit creative about what they haul around. prey(2017) that is basically a homage to ss2 does the inventory tetris as well.
@@lasskinn474 I need to play that one day. Heard mostly positive things.
Good box dnd game reviews
At the end of the game shodan should have allied with u to take down the greater threat in exchange for letting her escape from the solar system
"Nah."
Is tenchu on your list if games
@@camrunner6633 It is now. Thanks for reminding me they exist!
@@finntrovert excellent, look forward to those videos
Did you ever play ico and shadow of the colossus
@@camrunner6633 Not yet. I've been a PC gamer for most of my life, and still catching up on all the things I missed on various consoles.
Been getting a lot of good recommends, including those, which I have as a combined release.
Ho is this Won Bron? XD
Is this a retrospective or how to play the game I'm still waiting on hearing about how the developers made the game and the insights and behind the scenes and decision-making were made I apologize but this is just gibberish going on and on about this is what happens and that was that is what happens
@@andrewmangum8391 Thankfully, there are many channels that do content in many different ways, so I'm sure somewhere else will fit you better!
Unless someone is forcing you to watch this, in which case? Well, that's a bummer.
I don't know. To me SS2 was overhyped title. I somehow missed the game for long and completed it was it las year. It's not bad at all, but I was expecting something a bit more. It felt that game got a lot worse in like 3/4 of the game and I absolutely hated the last levels. SS1 felt much more interesting.
I found SS2 to be a bit overrated. The skills and abilities are highly unbalanced, the last third to a quarter of the game is mediocre, and there's a lot of messing around with inventory stuff and bottles of chemicals.
Great thing about SS2 - it is short. Overall the game is massively overrated, even if youtubers so afraid to notice that in order not to lose that sweet subs who wearing pink nostalgia glasses.
RPG system is garbage and it is aged horribly. Abuse it - or lose it. Wow much fun, such old skool. Does Thief needed RPG elements? No.
Enemies respawns - when you go through certain waypoints. You may repeatedly go forth and back through certain places and the game gonna despawn/respawn NPC every time at certain respawns... You will encounter respawning enemies in places that make no sense at all.
Yes -- an immersive sim that punish you for exploring and wandering around. This is a space ship, not a city under water, and Bioshock doesnt have unlimited enemies. Do you have unlimited ammo?.. Too bad for you.
Horror and "role play" will go away fast and the game become a Benny Hill show. This is a junk.
BTW the same goes for the music - tracks will REPEAT at certain waypoints... yes, every time you go there... enjoy your funky dnb tracks
The game is 7.5/10. There is no forgotten masterpiece like Thief here. Today SS2 feeling like a good indie game.
Opinions are like buttholes. Everyone has one.
Still better than everything that came after.
It's not that developers don't want to put Q E lean into games, it's because controllers have limited buttons - so leaning became an relic feature for changing game pacing.