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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."
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.)
I must object to the phrase "a truly unique character" with one simple retort:
*cough*Durandal*cough*.
Right, so Bungie ripped off System Shock - which I had better specify was released nearly a year before Marathon and widely publicised long before that, since Bungie fanboys are rarely willing to believe that Bungie weren't the first to do everything (a characteristic they doubtless derive from having been Apple fanboys first; everybody knows it was Steve Jobs who discovered electricity and invented the computer!)
SHODAN was truly unique when she was created. The mere fact that Bungie ripped her off when they discovered they weren't creative enough to come up with an original AI character doesn't do anything to reduce that achievement.
Doesn't exist, her voice was a normal human voice, emotive behind a false attempt to sound detatched and then processed with FX and further manipulated by cutting and pasting sections. They did a superb job of making her sound more crazed and frantic as you progress further into the game.
Ditto to the GP... Karma's a bitch I suppose. Virtual mod points awarded. AC unnecessary.
I have seen comments to the effect that people never played Marathon. Now is the time.
Hey, I had to do something useful with the post.