System Shock Original 1994
System Shock was released by Looking Glass Technologies in September of 1994 for PC DOS 5.0. System Shock is a cyberpunk-themed FPS.
System Shock employs crouching, jumping and up/down looks.
System Shock is a Rational Systems' DOS/4GW Protected Mode Run-time. System Shock requires an i80486DX-33 MHz CPU with 4½ megs of RAM (for 128x128 textures).
Displaying in 256-color VGA 320x200, System Shock features a full-screen 3D render-field. However, objects are sprite-scaled.
Distributed on 9x 3.5" HD diskettes, the original System Shock installs to hard disk drive via System Shock Installation Program, with a 24 meg install size consisting of 132 files.
The CD-ROM version of System Shock was released in December of 1994. Most notably, this enhanced version (which should have been the initial version) features SVGA resolutions of 640x400 and square-pixel SVGA 640x480. That means a render-field of 640x480 by Dec. 1994.
The CD-ROM version requires 530K of free conventional memory, 3,072K of XMS memory and 7,168K of EMS memory for digitized speech and SVGA VESA.
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System Shock 2 Windows PC 1999
Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios released System Shock 2 for Windows 95/98 DirectX 6.1 in Aug. of 1999.
System Shock 2 is a first-person cyberpunk- and horror-themed aRPG; it was the best 3D aRPG before Deus Ex of 2000. System Shock 2 was built on the Dark Engine that originated in Thief of 1998.
In System Shock 2 players assume the role of a space soldier who has come out of cryosleep with amnesia but learned that the starship has been hijacked by a parasite that has infected the crew members. The soldier takes on hostile zombified crew members (hybrids) and hacked security systems while seeking out the source of the genetic infection. The soldier's ace-card is an upgradeable cyber-rig that was surgically-implanted during cryosleep.
Exploration of the Von Braun starship is non-linear and multi-decked.
The space soldier can walk, run, strafe, jump, crouch, crawl, fire weapons, swing weapons, lean left and right, lean forward and climb up and down ladders. Many placeables are interactable and some are destructible.
Back in 1999, wielding a mere wrench against zombies was doubly scary due to the long reload times that would result from being killed by the zombies. Note that, even in the early game, players can encounter a shambling stream of one dozen pipe-wielding zombies that require at least two hits each to put down. That said, the targets are bounding-boxed, their swing-speed is slow and they can be put into hit-recovery. In addition, zombies cannot pursue the character between decks of the starship even though the transition is vertically seamless; if they have LoS, they wait, watch and murmur -- unless they wield shotguns.
Two modes of operation can be switched between via Tab-key: shoot-mode and use-mode. Shoot-mode is where the full-screen action takes place; use-mode calls up the inventory, character sheet and other info. The grid-based inventory is drag-click-drop. Use-mode (HUD) does not fully block off the action: the character can still move about while listening to audio-logs that are played from the PDA in use-mode.
Players can choose between three main character build foundations: combat-based UNN Marine, utility-based UNN Naval officer and psionic-based OSA agent. This choice is made interactively, within the gameworld; there is no character creation screen.
System Shock 2 characters consist of five primary stats, four combat skills, five tech skills and five tiers of psionic disciplines each consisting of eight psionic powers ("spells"). Characters are progressively built over the course of the game by spending cyber modules at upgrade terminals. The soldier's cyber-rig can be installed with O/S upgrades as well. Overall, different playstyles are facilitated by the build opportunities.
System Shock 2 features four difficulty levels. The difficulty of the game can be switched on the fly.
System Shock 2 displays in 16-bit color depth at 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768 resolution.
Audio-wise, System Shock 2 supports 4-16 audio channels. 8 channels play all audio. EAX is toggleable, stereo is reversible, and master volume, music volume and positional sound bias are tailorable.
Control-wise, System Shock 2 supports keyboard, 3-button mouse, lookspring, freelook and inversion. Mouse-movement sensitivity is tailorable and hotkeys are fully customizable.
System Shock 2 requires Intel Pentium 200 MHz CPU, 32 megs of RAM and 4 megs of vRAM, but Pentium 300 MHz and 64 megs of RAM is recommended.
System Shock 2 3D acceleration supports 3Dfx Voodoo1, Voodoo2, Voodoo Rush and Voodoo Banshee; Nvidia RIVA 128, RIVA ZX and RIVA TNT; Matrox G200; Intel/Real 3D i740; S3 Savage 3D; ATI Rage Pro and Rage 128. System Shock 2 FMV playback requires Intel Indeo Video 5.0.
System Shock 2 was distributed on 1x CD-ROM and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via SS2 installer. The full install size of v1.15 is 500 megs and consists of 84 files.
The v2.3 patch of Sept. of 1999 added multiplayer support, made the game much easier, and fixed some bugs. v2.3 is the final official patch released for System Shock 2.
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