Looking Glass Studios cyberpunk first person shooter System Shock, released in 1994, spent many long years as abandonware. Then last year, Night Dive Studios came along, sorted out the legal rights, and released an enhanced version via digital distribution. It was recompiled to run natively in Windows, and featured slightly sharper graphics and greatly improved mouselook controls. There was much rejoicing from certain sections of PC gaming, fanboys like yours truly who hold up Shock as one of the classics of the 90s.

However, Night Dive have clearly decided Shock deserves a more extensive modernisation. In fact they’re going and totally remaking the game, using the Unity engine and have released a bit of pre-alpha footage to show us how its going.

(brought to our attention by RPS)

Looks like they’re keeping the original level geometry. The level of detailing has been greatly improved – see those pipes along the maintenance corridors, and we have modern fancy lighting and texturing. Still, it’s all based around those square-cross-section corridors. I can see that being divisive, since gamers might not see the point on piling details on such old fashioned, blocky geometry. Or they might find it still feels suitably claustrophobic, like something out of Aliens. I’m more in the latter camp right now.

One highlight of the vid is that chamber with the windows. In the original game at this point, you just see pixel stars scrolling past. So okay, space, but you quickly move on. Now we see Saturn, half in shadow from the distant sun, moving across as the station rotates. That’s rather more impressive, the sort of thing that prompts you stop to look at for a moment and consider your situation. You’re utterly isolated, a zillion miles from earth. It’s a good example of adding something to the game’s atmosphere, without having to really change anything fundamental.

I’m less keen on the lack of music. An interview with polygon states they are ” Changing up the classic chiptune soundtrack to something a bit more subtle”. I realise strong melodies as you play are a bit out of fashion nowadays, but the old tunes really helped set the scene. They were moody, haunting, ideal for wandering an abandoned station filled with murderous cyborgs.

It’s very early days yet, of course. Here are some things I am pondering!
-how will this handle Cyberspace? A lot of players found these sections, where you float around in wireframe tunnels, to be disorienting and irritating.
-Shock, being of the old school, isn’t the sort of game to put pointers onscreen telling you exactly where to go next. Information isn’t super hard to find, but you do have to search a bit and pay attention to instructions and clues. I wonder if any concessions will be made to modern gaming.
-Energy weapons could do with some sort of boost; it always seemed preferable to save batteries for cyber upgrades and stick to regular guns.
-I hope the rocket boots remain, even if they served basically no purpose other than to fling you into a wall.

A couple of years back I talked about the Morrowind Overhaul, a huge bundle package of graphics upgrades for the third Elder Scrolls title. That’s one way to modernise an RPG that’s now over a decade old. Another approach is to recreate all of its content as a total conversion for one of its own sequels.

And thus, as I was reminded recently in a post on RPS we have: skywind. You’re playing Skyrim, but you’re back in Morrowind, complete with crabshell towns, spiky purple ruined temples, and… maybe Cliff racers. Oh god. I guess if this is to be properly authentic they have to bring back Cliff Racers.

I can see a few of advantages to going down this route. I’m not a graphics wizard but as great as the Overhaul looked, I imagine you can get even more impressive and convincing results using a modern engine, rather than just sticking sharper textures and more foliage into an outdated one.

Apart from the graphics, Skyrim is also a product of steady refinement towards more slick and user-friendly gameplay rules and mechanic. I won’t miss the old Morrowind combat with its invisible dice-rolls, leading to lots of frustrating flailing at bandits at early levels. In modern Elder Scrolls, if it looks like you hit that bandit, you actually did.

Modern fast-travel systems are appreciated too. Morrowind used to make you walk to your boat (or giant bug-taxi), or use teleport systems with limited options for destinations, and many remote locations could only be reached on foot. Now you only have to walk anywhere the first time; subsequent trips can be done instantly with a click of a mouse on the map. While I feel like I lose Serious RPG Fan points for admitting it, that’s kind of a relief. These games are time consuming enough that I don’t want to be forced to repeat any journeys.

I might miss the old spell-making system though. It gave great freedom to tinker, experiment and produce spells to your specifications, mixing various spell effects, strengths and durations. You could do a straight fireball, you could balance fire damage with more subtle “weakness to fire” effects, you could do slow damage over time instead of all the power hitting in one go, you could mix in some lightning too.

It also let you produce ridiculous, pointless or just plain broken effects but that was part of the charm. If you really wanted to paralyse yourself, or make your enenemies harder to hit with chameleon spell, or boost the agility of mudcrabs then sure. Morrowind wouldn’t try to stop your madness. Nowadays though you just have a set of premade spells, and I do feel something has been lost in the process of streamlining.

Looking at other matters, I guess they’ll be keeping skill perks, ie that tree of options for boosts to each of your abilties, which makes raising skills like Alchemy a bit more interesting than just slowly climbing numbers. I wonder if they’ll bring back skills that have been lost over iterations of Elder Scrolls, like Medium Armour or individual weapon types. I don’t really know how much freedom they have to alter the basics!

Anyway Skywind is currently in a closed alpha. Given my huge backlog of unplayed games, and limited gaming time, I’m not sure I can really justify returning to Morrowind Yet Again anyway. But if I get a chance to try this I’ll post again with my thoughts.

And so we come to the end of this anniversary series of articles. We’ve gone from a glossy video-laden epic, to a flawed movie spin-off, via whatever football or racing games happened to be cheap that week.

In the last piece, it all got slightly serious as I talked a bit about Deus Ex and how it helped me when I wasn’t having a great time health-wise. That theme sort of continues here. (And, sorry Sid Meier fans, there isn’t a lot about the game itself).

Hope you’ve enjoyed this series. We might have more anniversary things planned, but if not, there’ll certainly be some more reviews of old games at some point.

When I played…Covert Action continued »

Good evening.

In a rare case of us actually covering successive games in a series in the right order and in a relatively timely fashion, here’s a review of Striker ’95.

Our weekly series continues, as I take a look back at some of the games I played during the site’s first few years. If you’ve missed any of the previous pieces, go here for the first, or find them all here.

Hopefully if you’ve read this far you’ve enjoyed these articles. Part four is about the time I played Deus Ex. Unlike all of the previous titles covered in this series, it’s not a game that I reviewed for FFG, and I won’t be revisiting much of my experience in this piece (for reasons that will become apparent). So if you’re expecting nostalgic ramblings about Walton Simons et al, you won’t find them here (although we sort have already done that).

Also I should warn you that there’s quite a lot of personal stuff in here, a lot more than there is about Deus Ex. Really this bit should be called “When I got into a bit of a serious pickle and didn’t know how to get out of it or what to do at all” but that’s not really very catchy. I know that this kind of thing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and if it doesn’t sound like yours, feel free to give it a miss.

I promise, though, that there is a point to sharing this story with you, and it’s one that’s relevant to the site history. Hopefully all will become apparent by the time part five is done.

When I played…Deus Ex continued »

Hi there.

It’s time for some midweek football action, with our review of Striker.

As part of the site’s 15-year anniversary, I’m doing a few articles looking back at games I covered for FFG in the early days. They’re not the usual reviews or discussion pieces but hopefully you might find them interesting. The first piece, with a bit more explanation, can be found here, and all of the articles in the series can be found by clicking here.

This week, we’re looking at Blade Runner, and I should warn you that there are some mild spoilers for the early stages of the game (as well as for my never-to-be-published autobiography) ahead.

When I played…Blade Runner continued »

Hello!

Just popping in with a quick review, of the 90s kart racer SuperKarts.

More soon, I hope.

This is the second piece of a series of articles I’m doing about some of the games I covered for FFG in our earliest days. It’s a way of looking back at those games, at the site, and at my own gaming history, as part of the site’s 15-year anniversary. The first piece, and a bit more preamble, is here.

Today we’re looking at a variety of titles, under the vague (and slightly misleading) heading of ‘multiplayer games’.

When I played…multiplayer games continued »

Somehow we’ve been going 15 years, and without wanting veer too much into the area of excessive self-congratulation, we figured it’d be nice to mark the occasion somehow.

As regular readers will know, we’re not the most frequently updated of sites, and so any time spent looking back at, and/or rehashing, old content is time we could be spending on something new. We’d like any anniversary content to add to what’s on the site already.

To that end, I thought it might be worth trying something a little bit different, with a series of articles that do look back at some of the games covered in the early days, but without following the traditional review format.

When we first started, our mantra was to not look back at old games with dewy-eyed nostalgia, but these pieces will pretty much be doing exactly that. To varying extents, they’ll also tend to be less about the games and a bit more about the person writing about them (i.e. me).

Viewing games through personal and life experiences is not necessarily everyone’s preferred approach, but it is a valid one and can be interesting, I think. If you like series like Gaming Made Me on Rock Paper Shotgun and Digitiser 2000’s Games of My Years, you’ll have an idea of the kind of thing we’re aiming for.

It’s possible this series – which I’ve chosen to call “When I played…” – might not be to everyone’s tastes, but let’s see how it goes. If it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, we’ll have plenty of new reviews of old games to come, too.

Anyway, here’s part 1 of 5, about Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger.

When I played…Wing Commander III continued »