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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."
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.