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The Words of Shodan
Via GameSetWatch, an article by Keiron Gillen about System's Shock's deeply creepy villainess, Shodan. The deeply disturbed AI is in some ways a cliche, but Gillen examines why Shodan transcends genre tropes to become a truly unique character. From the article: "The core of understanding Shodan in System Shock 2 is to understand that she's no longer the AI she once was. In the first System Shock she was the cold, perfect bully aboard citadel station. The position she finds herself in orbit around Tau Ceti, millions of miles from Earth, is somewhat different. In short, for the majority of the game, she's not the antagonist anymore - but the main supporting actor and even mentor. She's not who you try to stop - she's who you work with."
I find TFA to be a little melodramatic. "SHODAN is... The Girl Your Mother Warned You About"... "SHODAN IS... the Hand that Wrecks the Cradle"... "SHODAN is... Her Own Impersonal Jesus"... Yes, it's true, SHODAN was an excellent character, but she was only scary because of other good design decisions on the part of the developers. The audio logs in the first game, for instance, were an excellent idea and provided a lot of suspense and incentive to explore.
System Shock 2 was a good game, but honestly it didn't creep me out as much as the original did. Maybe SHODAN's novelty had worn off by that point, or maybe I just got more jaded as a gamer. The idea of being all alone on a monster-infested spacestation has been done to death by now (Doom 3 et al) but it was new and cool back when the original came out.
I wonder if System Shock 3 will be genuinely scary? Here's to hoping...
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Shodan isn't just a evil enemy. She's THE evil enemy. System shock is easily my favorite game. Not System Shock 2, but System Shock the original.
The thing that makes Shodan so truely terrific is that shodan doesn't just talk to you, she talks to everyone. She constantly is in communication with you, not in a way that requires communication, but through emails and data files.
Even above that she doesn't just talk to the user, she will torment any person still alive on her station that isn't helping her. She doesn't just talk about what she is going to do to you, but she shows her AI, and you get a feeling for what is so evil about her and what she has done to the whole station.
She has a matriarch tone to her "children", she has the angry tone for you, the computer tone for normal announcements, the condescending tone for when she springs traps. It's never the same voice. And what's so essential is this is 4 or 5 tones for a computer. This is more acting than most people can evoke and a computer is just filled with emotion.
The fact is that shodan simply is the flawless enemy, the way she interacts with you is well done, she never feels like a "computer" she feels more alive than it. And the terror her voice evokes rivals many current day villians.
Kudos Through the Looking Glass you will sorely be missed.
P.S. SS3 was announced earlier this year I believe, EA was working on it.
I think the only thing with more hubris than Shodan is the melodramatic headings in TFA. The author is...Too Much For Any Human To Bear:
...the Comeback Queen
...Her Own Impersonal Jesus
...Our Ghost-story in the Machine.
...Human, All too Human. That is, Inhuman.
...Just a Girl In the World.
...the Hand that Wrecks the Cradle
...The Girl Your Mother Warned You About
...Lost In Format Translation. Thankfully.
SHODAN is
The finest Sophomoric Dorky Puns one can muster
While I won't say anything bad about System Shock or Shodan as a character, I've one minor gripe with this summary. Certainly depth and complexity the likes of which are described here is rare in a video game character, I must object to the phrase "a truly unique character" with one simple retort:
*cough*Durandal*cough*.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Durandal (of Marathon fame) had far more uniqueness than SHODAN.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
From TFA: "Spare her the fate of superhero comic archvillains whose threat is muted by infinitely recurring Pinky-And-The-Brain-esque attempts to conquer all existence." Kind of puts it all in perspective. Even if you think you're a god, you're still bound by karma.
o r.html
"You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
Whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back."
http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/deteri
While Bioshock may be the spiritual successor to SS2, EA is supposedly working on SS3, according to PC Gamer UK at least.
Have been waiting for Bioshock for a while now, looks to be great, hopefully it can hold the feel of the SS's.
And if EA doesn't f it up (yes, I know, little chance of that), we'll have another SS followup.
(Side note: the linked article keeps changing. Could've sworn I saw a reference to Syndicate in there. And if there's one game franchise other than SS I want to see revived, it's Syndicate.)
Great, now to unlock more psi abilities you will have to kill 3 zombies with a gun, push one off a ledge, and get one "newspaper headline" kill by doing it in a unique place. If EA brings anything from their sports/racing titles to System Shock, from the "play longer and repeat missions to unlock better stuff" idea to licensed menu music, I will dedicate the rest of my life to finding the decision-makers and killing them in the kind of ways that make GTA scream UNIQUE STUNT BONUS!!!
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
See murder's bad.. m'kay?
I prefer the Scrubs scene where you grab a guy's banana Hammock and throw them off the roof. It's a 10 on the pain scale.
Poppycock. For the first half of the game, she's wearing the voice of dead Doctor Polito, and treating you as a slightly more capable version of the psionic monkeys that chitter and scream in the Von Braun's corridors. When she reveals herself, the illusions of even that degree of care are gone. There is one point in particular, where you can find some upgrade software and information regarding her ultimate plans. She deletes the software in retaliation, and you can bet your ass that if she didn't need you fully functional, she'd have scrambled your brains while she was at it.
I thought that if SHODAN wanted your brains scrambled, she could do it at any time during the last act of the game. Is it because she's too busy fiddling around with the Von Brauns hyperdrive to care?
If anybody's wondering, there's information on all the logs and stuff here: http://www.strangebedfellows.schwarzsilber.de/shoc klog/shocklogs.html.
It's certainly nice to see S.H.O.D.A.N. and the System Shock series getting the front-page /. props it deserves.
The System Shock series introducted me to an entirely differnet realm of video gaming: Fear.
I'm not a fan or horror movies and not into being scared by books or film, but for some strange reason, I love a scary video game and the SS games are the only ones that have ever managed to do it.
I'm such a fan of these games that I absolutely had to chase down and have the trioptimum dot com domain for myself.
-CR
"So is the BSD licence even more 'free' (than GPLv2)? Yes. Unquestionably." --Linus Torvalds (TinyURL.com/2vugzl)
She has a matriarch tone to her "children", she has the angry tone for you, the computer tone for normal announcements, the condescending tone for when she springs traps. It's never the same voice. And what's so essential is this is 4 or 5 tones for a computer. This is more acting than most people can evoke and a computer is just filled with emotion.
Reading this, I'm struck by the goddess figures Kali in Hindu theology and Coatlicue in Aztec mythology. Shodan sort of represents this "devouring mother" archetype applied to modern science-fiction.
I loved the System Shock series, and think it's easily one of the most underrated games ever. But Shodan comes from a long line of similar figures in human history.
human history and game history are two different things. Making a convincing character is something few can really do. By convincing I mean someone who is well rounded not just an action hero or such. Watching Shodan mother her young in the module 2 is just frightfully scary, though interesting.
What I want to know is where I can get a speech simulator that is anywhere near as creepy as SHODAN's voice.
It still gives me the creeps every time I play it.
When its me vs the many, I'm always glad to have a derranged psychotic AI with no ethics (SS1). Well, its better than the alternative, anyway.
Insect
The Bible: Historically verifiable fact from an observers point of view
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All they would've had to do to explain the grove thing would've been to have SHODAN say that it went through a wormhole or fell into a black hole or something...it wouldn't have to be fully explained scientifically, it could've just been a short comment thrown in, to show that they at least put some thought into having a piece of Citadel go far enough away that it took an FTL drive awhile to reach it.
Just take any ordinaly speech syntasyser and remove the ethical constraints with some hacking and you too will have your very own shodan.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
True, SHODAN is a very unique and interesting character. But don't forget to give credit where credit is due, to the actress that voiced her: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Brosius
...Eden. From Rez. In many ways she is the anti-SHODAN; and if you study the game's audiovisual symbology carefully, and think of it as "Eden's thoughts", she becomes a surprisingly intriguing character.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Does anybody know how I can play System Shock or System Shock 2 on WinXP? Is it even possible? I've always wanted to check out these games as people talk about them so much.