[Review] System Shock

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System Shock is a 1994 first-person action-adventure video game developed by Looking Glass Technologies and published by Origin Systems. It was directed by Doug Church with Warren Spector serving as producer. The game is set aboard a space station in a cyberpunk vision of the year 2072. Assuming the role of a nameless hacker, the player attempts to hinder the plans of a malevolent artificial intelligence called SHODAN.

System Shock's 3D engine, physics simulation and complex gameplay have been cited as both innovative and influential. The developers sought to build on the emergent gameplay and immersive environments of their previous games, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss and Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, by streamlining their mechanics into a more "integrated whole".

Critics praised System Shock and hailed it as a major breakthrough in its genre. It was later placed on multiple hall of fame lists. The game was a moderate commercial success, with sales exceeding 170,000 copies, but Looking Glass ultimately lost money on the project. A sequel, System Shock 2, was released by Looking Glass Studios and offshoot developer Irrational Games in 1999. The 2000 game Deus Ex (also produced by Spector) and the 2007 game BioShock are spiritual successors to the two games. A remade version of the original game by Night Dive Studios is scheduled for release in 2020.

System Shock takes place from a first-person perspective in a three-dimensional (3D) graphical environment.The game is set inside a large, multi-level space station, in which players explore, combat enemies and solve puzzles.Progress is largely non-linear and the game is designed to allow for emergent gameplay. As in Ultima Underworld,the player uses a freely movable mouse cursor to aim weapons, to interact with objects and to mani[CENSORED]te the heads-up display (HUD) interface.View and posture controls on the HUD allow the player to lean left or right, look up or down, crouch, and crawl. Practical uses for these actions include taking cover, retrieving items from beneath the player character and navigating small passages, respectively. The HUD also features three "Multi-Function Displays", which may be configured to display information such as weapon readouts, an automap and an inventory.

The player advances the plot by acquiring log discs and e-mails: the game contains no non-player characters with which to converse.Throughout the game, an evil artificial intelligence called SHODAN hinders the player's progress with traps and blocked pathways.Specific computer terminals allow the player to temporarily enter Cyberspace; inside, the player moves weightlessly through a wire frame 3D environment, while collecting data and fighting SHODAN's security programs. Actions in Cyberspace sometimes cause events in the game's physical world; for example, certain locked doors may only be opened in Cyberspace.Outside of Cyberspace, the player uses the game's sixteen weapons, of which a maximum of seven may be carried at one time, to combat robots, cyborgs and mutants controlled by SHODAN. Projectile weapons often have selectable ammunition types with varying effects; for example, the "dart pistol" may fire either explosive needles or tranquilizers. Energy weapons and several types of explosives may also be found, with the latter ranging from concussion grenades to land mines.

Along with weapons, the player collects items such as dermal patches and first-aid kits. Dermal patches provide the character with beneficial effects—such as regeneration or increased melee attack power—but can cause detrimental side-effects, such as fatigue and distorted color perception.Attachable "hardware" may also be found, including energy shields and head-mounted lanterns. Increasingly advanced versions of this hardware may be obtained as the game progresses. When activated, most hardware drains from a main energy reserve, which necessitates economization.Certain hardware displays the effectiveness of attacks when active, with messages such as "Normal damage".When an enemy is attacked, the damage is calculated by armor absorption, vulnerabilities, critical hits and a degree of randomness.Weapons and munitions deal specific kinds of damage, and certain enemies are immune, or more vulnerable, to particular types. For example, electromagnetic pulse weapons heavily damage robots, but do not affect mutants. Conversely, gas grenades are effective against mutants, but do not damage robots.

Set in the year 2072, the protagonist—a nameless hacker—is caught while attempting to access files concerning Citadel Station, a space station owned by the TriOptimum Corporation. The hacker is taken to Citadel Station and brought before Edward Diego, a TriOptimum executive. Diego offers to drop all charges against the hacker in exchange for a confidential hacking of SHODAN, the artificial intelligence that controls the station. Diego secretly plans to steal an experimental mutagenic virus being tested on Citadel Station, and to sell it on the black market as a biological weapon.To entice cooperation, Diego promises the hacker a valuable military grade neural implant.After hacking SHODAN, removing the AI's ethical constraints, and handing control over to Diego, the protagonist undergoes surgery to implant the promised neural interface.Following the operation, the hacker is put into a six-month healing coma. The game begins as the protagonist awakens from his coma, and finds that SHODAN has commandeered the station. All robots aboard have been reprogrammed for hostility, and the crew have been either mutated, transformed into cyborgs, or killed.

Rebecca Lansing, a TriOptimum counter-terrorism consultant, contacts the player and claims that Citadel Station's mining laser is being powered up to attack Earth. SHODAN's plan is to destroy all major cities on the planet, in a bid to establish itself as a god. Rebecca says that a certain crew member knows how to deactivate the laser, and promises to destroy the records of the hacker's incriminating exchange with Diego if the strike is stopped. With information gleaned from log discs, the hacker destroys the laser by firing it into Citadel Station's own shields. Foiled by the hacker's work, SHODAN prepares to seed Earth with the virus Diego planned to steal—the same one responsible for turning the station's crew into mutants.The hacker, while attempting to jettison the chambers used to cultivate the virus, confronts and defeats Diego, who has been transformed into a powerful cyborg by SHODAN. Next, SHODAN begins an attempt to upload itself into Earth's computer networks.Following Rebecca's advice, the hacker prevents the download's completion by destroying the four antennas that SHODAN is using to send data.

Soon after, Rebecca contacts the hacker, and says that she has convinced TriOptimum to authorize the station's destruction; she provides him with details on how to do this.After obtaining the necessary codes, the hacker initiates the station's self-destruct sequence and flees to the escape pod bay. There, the hacker defeats Diego a second time, then attempts to disembark. However, SHODAN prevents the pod from launching; it seeks to keep the player aboard the station, while the bridge—which contains SHODAN—is jettisoned to a safe distance.Rebecca tells the hacker that he can still escape if he reaches the bridge; SHODAN then intercepts and jams the transmission.After defeating Diego for the third time and killing him for good, the hacker makes it to the bridge as it is released from the main station, which soon detonates. He is then contacted by a technician who managed to circumvent SHODAN's jamming signal. The technician informs him that SHODAN can only be defeated in cyberspace, due to the powerful shields that protect its mainframe computers.Using a terminal near the mainframe, the hacker enters cyberspace and destroys SHODAN. After his rescue, the hacker is offered a job at TriOptimum, but he declines in favor of continuing his life as a hacker.

System Shock was first conceived during the final stages of Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds' development, between December 1992 and January 1993. Designer and programmer Doug Church spent this period at the Texas headquarters of publisher Origin Systems, and discussions about Looking Glass Technologies' next project occurred between him and producer Warren Spector, with input from designer Austin Grossman and company head Paul Neurath in Massachusetts.According to Church, the team believed that they had made "too many dungeon games"; and Neurath later explained that they were experiencing burnout after the rushed development of Ultima Underworld II.As a result, they decided to create another "immersive simulation game", but without a fantasy setting. They briefly considered placing the game in modern day, but Church said that the idea was rejected because "it  just beg so many questions: why can't I pick up the phone, why can't I get on the train, and so on". Church returned to Looking Glass in Massachusetts, where he, Neurath and Grossman brainstormed possible science fiction settings for the game.According to Spector, the game was initially titled "Alien Commander" and was a spin-off of the Wing Commander series; however, this idea was soon replaced entirely. Spector said that they enjoyed not being attached to an existing franchise, because it meant that they "could basically do whatever liked".

The four collaborated to write numerous "minutes of gameplay" documents, which conveyed how the game would feel. Church later gave the example, "You hear the sound of a security camera swiveling, and then the beep of it acquiring you as a target, so you duck behind the crate and then you hear the door open so you throw a grenade and run out of the way". The documents would "hint" at the gameplay systems involved, and at the emergent possibilities in each situation. Although Neurath was involved in these initial design sessions, he believed that the project "was always Doug Church's vision at heart". Church and Grossman refined several of the team's documents and defined the game's design and direction,and Grossman wrote the game's original design document.Grossman built on ideas that he first explored while writing and designing Ultima Underworld II's tomb dimension, which he later called a "mini-prototype" for System Shock. These concepts included the minimization of dialogue trees and a greater focus on exploration. The team believed that dialogue trees "broke the fiction" of games; Church later commented that the dialogue trees in the Ultima Underworld series were like separate games in themselves, disconnected from main experience of being immersed in the environment. There were also concerns about realism.

To eliminate dialogue trees from System Shock, the team prevented the player from ever meeting a living non-player character (NPC): the plot is instead conveyed by e-mail messages and log discs, many of which were recorded by dead NPCs. Here, Grossman took influence from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems written as the epitaphs of fictional individuals. Grossman later summarized the idea as "a series of short speeches from people, that when put together, gave you a history of a place."The removal of conversations was an attempt by the team to make the game a more "integrated whole" than was Ultima Underworld--one with a greater focus on immersion, atmosphere and "the feeling of 'being there'". They sought to "plunge into the fiction and never provide an opportunity for breaking that fiction" and so they tried to erase the distinction between plot and exploration.Church considered this direction to be an organic progression from Ultima Underworld and he later said, "On some level it's still just a dungeon simulator, and we're still just trying to evolve that idea."Shortly before production began, Tribe bassist Greg LoPiccolo was contracted to work on the game's music He had visited his friend Rex Bradford at the company,and was spontaneously asked by the game's programmers—many of whom were fans of the band—if he would take the roleThe game entered production in February 1993. Although Grossman was heavily involved in the game's early planning, he had little to do with its production, aside from providing assistance with writing and voice acting.

System Requirements

Minimum Requirements

• CPU: Intel Core i5-2400/AMD FX-8320 or better
• CPU SPEED: Info
• RAM: 8 GB
• OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions)
• VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GTX 670 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or better
• PIXEL SHADER: 5.0
• VERTEX SHADER: 5.0
• FREE DISK SPACE: 2 GB
• DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 2048 MB

Re command Requirements

• CPU: Intel Core i7-3770/AMD FX-8350 or better
• CPU SPEED: Info
• RAM: 16 GB
• OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions)
• VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GTX 970 4GB/AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB or better
• PIXEL SHADER: 5.1
• VERTEX SHADER: 5.1
• FREE DISK SPACE: 2 GB
• DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 4096 MB