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Have you seen http://sshock2.com/ ? ;)

... System Shock 2.

I'm looking for depth, meaning and message in computer games. (or should I say waiting for?)

Because I believe it's the most exciting entertainment development since Cinema.

And here we are at it's conception. We're just 40 years into the rest of it's life.

Ico and Colossus are two good examples.

I would love to say System Shock 2 was in there, but there is nothing highbrow about insane computers, evil aliens and sci-fi weapons and trappings. It was just really really really good.

I think (hope) that Bioshock will be the next game added to this list. The spiritual successor to SS2, it's hopefully shaping up to be something very special.

From and interview with Ken Levine of Irrational Games:

How do you induce players to reflect upon the morality of their own actions in an environment where survival overrides other goals? Is the existence of a Higher Authority passing judgment necessary for a system of morality?

Read the answer and the rest of the review here (bit big to copy and paste)

J1M.

If you put untold developer hours into a game to make it The Awesomest Game Ever, you're going to fall into a lot of traps, but the biggest trap of all is the cost of all of those developer hours; unless your game is an unmitigated hit, you're never going to make that money back.

Remember Novalogic? They haven't had an honest-to-goodness hit since that voxel helicopter game back in the early 90's. And they're still around because they understand this basic principle: Ship the game when you know that it's good enough to generate enough sales to cover your costs, and not one day later. As long as your staff is marginally competent and decently paid, you can always meet that goal.

Origin never saw a deadline they couldn't miss. They, Sierra and Black Isle were increasing their budgets, only to essentially remake the same games that people had played a decade before. Atari failed because most of their games were crap, and the bad games typically had as big or bigger budgets than the good ones. (Remember the horrible Indiana Jones and Return of the Jedi games?)

The only real tragedy in this list is Looking Glass, who was killed off because Eidos would rather divert funds to help Daikatana limp along -- Eidos failing to recognize the common sense of NovaLogic. (In the end, John Romero really did make us his bitch, by denying us more great Thief games.) But at least there's BioShock to look forward to, so this story is not yet over.

But in the end, your game's budget should be less than your expected revenue for said game. If you don't expect the game to sell more than 20,000 full-price copies, you should plan the project -- marketing, development, everything -- starting from that point.

System Shock 2 also did also a good job with its graphics (good during those days) and sounds.

HL2 had some innovative elements though, like characters that had been turned into zombies by an alien parasite. Never heard that before

Still HL2 was fun. And I shoot people on my computer because it's cheaper than doing it in the real world, not because it's intellectually stimulating.

Irrational was known to be shopping for a publisher -- especially to EA, since it had been made clear they no longer wanted to work with EA.

A quick google, and it turns out the rumors of Take2 publishing BS (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) were seriously around as early as 11/30/05, which fits our timeline pretty nicely -- Take2 filed for the Bioshock trademark on 11/16.

Also, see this thread from last November, there's a post from 11/12 that gives a tip:

I think Irrational will avoid EA at all costs. Shock fans are rather ticked at them, and Bioshock is not permitted to have explicit connections with those games because EA isn't letting anyone near the IP. -TheGreatGodPan of TTLG. Don't know if he's an insider or not, but it's checked out well.

Not a sequel, but there's always BioShock, which everyone seems to be describing as the "spiritual successor" to System Shock 2.

I haven't heard anything new about the game for ages now, so I can only hope it's still in development - but it's one of the few games I'm actively looking forwards to!

Personally, the only game that managed to scare me shitless was System Shock 2. That game was excellent in many levels, and one was its superb atmosphere.

    Never cried with a game though :)

My version of SS2 works fine in XP, though I have to run as an Administrator for some reason. I have the "Classics" version, though, not the original release. You might find something here that helps.

I'm surprised no one has gone back and remade it, or touched it up.

They have. The folks over at http://sshock2.com keep up to date on all the information. One of the upgrades is an increase in detail to the models of the AI figures. It's called Rebirth. I love it, it really gives an upgrade to the "ghosts" you see in the game who have pointy hands (anyone who's played SS2 knows what I'm talking about).

On the heels of Rebirth came the hi-res texture mod called SHTUP (pronounced shtoop).

There was also an upgrade to the cutscenes in the game, by a group called Wuggles Unlimited, but they seem to have disappeared (lack of hosting).

Look around, there are still fans of SS2 doing work with it!

Heh, i think i've figured out, on some (possibly very deep) subconcious level, why we found SS2 so scary. Not only did Shodan say those things to us, she was a woman, and a babe. Those flashbacks are of your first date, or if you haven't had one, what your nightmares are about. It's all very Freudian.

(this post semi-serious).

Some cool SHODAN's quotes to give you the chills and flashbacks:

"Step right into my trap, little hacker!"

"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?"

"Welcome, to my DEATH MACHINE, interloper!!"

The rest of cool quotes can be found here: http://www.ttlg.com/ss1/archive/voice.htm

http://www.sshock2.com/ is still an awesome Web site. Don't forget its forum.

I never did get to play co-operative play with SS2. I heard it is pretty cool. Did anyone play it?

Well, I use my PC as a game box with some browsing only (with SSH if I need to access one of the unixish machines) so here's my stuff:

10 : Spybot Search & Destroy (Excellent spyware killer)
9 : Spyware Blaster (Recommended by Spybot author to run concurrently)
8 : Some form of browser.
7 : PuTTY (SSH client w/ tunnelling)
6 : Thief (awesome game)
5 : Thief 2 (more Thief!)
4 : Darkloader (allows one to run custom fan missions in the Thief games)
3 : System Shock 2 (creepy sci-fi rp/fps)
2 : For those days I feel like a slug-fest? Doomsday and the ol' Doom games. (adds real 3D and all the video card eye candy to Doom/Heretic/etc. A MUST HAVE!)
1 : Half Life You know it! (still has one of the best stories of any game around)

I remember the days I played addons and mods with my buddies in DOOM 1 and 2 over dial-up modems and SirDOOM (lets you do 4 players on BBS' with dialup modems). It was much more fun when playing maps that we haven't played before.

I was hoping DOOM 3 (PC port) would have co-operative play like System Shock 2. I guess not. Maybe someone can hack DOOM 3 to have co-op like Sven Co-op.

Helped 'a bit'? Ken Levine is the co founder, general manager and creative director of Irrational Games and he used to work at Looking Glass. Look at their US team (the link to their Australian office is down unfortunately) and count for yourself how many people used to work at Looking Glass. To say ex-looking glass employees only helped IR 'a bit' is way understating th role they're playing in making IR such a success.

Do you have a link saying Doug Church retired from the gaming industry? He's credited with working on 'Backyard Wrestling: Don't try this at Home' and that only came out this year. Its also rumoured he's working closely with Warren to bring System Shock 3 to light.

ION Storm had a burn rate over a million dollars a month. Eidos had to squeeze the life from a couple of other game companies to maintain John-boy's Ferrari for him. Among those was Looking Glass, the group that made Flight Unlimited, Thief and System Shock. Wow! What a great decision that was.

It isn't just the crappy game that JR made, but the wake of destruction he left behind him was incredible and did great harm to the gaming industry.

Check out TTLG, SShock2 and GameSpy for info on the people hoping to keep these games alive.

Oh well:

Iä, Iä, SHODAN Phtagn!!!

Sigh, just have to wait for SHODAN to get here, she'll purge the world of non-believers...

Brutus.1 represents the first step in engineering an artificial agent that "appears" to be genuinely creative. We have attempted to do that by, among other things, mathematizing the concept of betrayal through a series of algorithms and data structures, and then vesting Brutus.1 with these concepts. The result, Brutus.1, is the world's most advanced story generator. We use Brutus.1 in support of our philosophy of Weak Artificial Intelligence -- basically, the view that computers will never be genuinely conscious, but computers can be cleverly programmed to "appear" to be, in this case, literarily creative. Put another way -- as explained in Bringsjord's book What Robots Can & Can't Be -- we both agree that AI is moving us toward a real-life version of the movie Blade Runner, in which, behaviorally speaking, humans and androids are pretty much indistinguishable.

In this case, the scientists involved came up with a mathematical algorithm for the concept of betrayal and programmed a computer to write stories based on that concept.

Of course, I don't think I'd have chosed "betrayal" as the first concept to train a computer in Artificial Intelligence, but anything to get us closer to SHODAN is cool in my book.

Iä Iä SHODAN phtagn!!