Every Gamer Should Play...

[Mr. Johnson]

I know very little about flight sims, but the game that introduced it to me was IL-2 sturmovik. The great thing about that game was that you could tweak the realism any way you wanted, you could go for the full flight sim experience with blackouts, stalls, turbulence, etc... or you could turn all that real stuff off and just enjoy a casual flight game. The insane amount of detail that went into every aircraft seemed pretty unrivalled to me at the time, and our little family pc could barely render it all.
Also, the included mission editor meant that you could pretty much play the game indefinitely. I even knew a guy that was part of an online WWII nerd squadron (is this a thing yet?). Me, I just like to pretend I'm good at flying by turning all the realistic options off and and shooting down the slowest planes in the game. Then I go back and shoot the bailing pilots and crewmen.

[Chickenz]

Doom 3 purely for the whole freaky jumpy lights out of it.

[fabyak]

UT2004 on 400% speed

That is all

[TezzRexx]

UT2004 on 400% speed

That is all

[deject]

I swept up System Shock 2 ages ago, and I have played all the way through it to the end. My point was that it is extremely rare and expensive. This does not help spread knowledge of it at all.

[Dog Pants]

Well it's a fair argument - SS2 is to the FPS genre what Planescape Torment is to RPGs - rare and elusive but brilliant. It certainly is the oldest decent example I've played of RPG elements in an FPS, but is it more essential than Deus Ex?

[deject]

Well it's a fair argument - SS2 is to the FPS genre what Planescape Torment is to RPGs - rare and elusive but brilliant. It certainly is the oldest decent example I've played of RPG elements in an FPS, but is it more essential than Deus Ex?

Well, I'd say Deus Ex is at least on the same level of importance, if not more. It was absolutely influenced by System Shock 2, but it does a lot in terms of improved gameplay design and player choice. Deus Ex gives you more room to explore and choose what to do, whereas System Shock 2 is a linear story in an open world. You can go anywhere on the ship, but there really is no reason to do so. In Deus Ex you have a choice of quests to do and a choice of how to accomplish them. What Deus Ex does that Bioshock does not is that Deus Ex expands on the concepts and really comes into its own, whereas anyone who has played System Shock 2 instantly recognizes that Bioshock really does straight up copy everything from System Shock 2 and just change a few details. It does it incredibly well, and I personally think that people tend to put too much emphasis on being original. Picking what you want to do and doing it really well matters more than doing something completely new if you ask me. I don't begrudge Bioshock for ripping off System Shock 2 so well at all, because in the end you get largely the same sensations, and most people just never will experience System Shock 2.

[Dog Pants]

Well Bioshock is an unofficial sequel to System Shock anyway isn't it? Does it count as a ripoff in that case? At any rate I think we've come to the same conclusion - SS2 was a pioneering game which Bioshock did very well and was much more polished, but they're both trumped by Deus Ex as the pinnacle of the sub-genre.

[friznit]

I'm actually playing through System Shock II at the moment with the updated hi res texture packs. It's actually perfectly easy on the eye very playable (and incidentally supports coop). But dammit this game is bloody difficult compared to more modern ones! It has me jumping in shock even now, so for that at least it deserves to be played by everyone at least once. I am firmly of the opinion that this set a standard for FPS RPG and probably influenced the development of Deus Ex (released a year later). Both were excellent games, but SS2 is the one I'm still playing 14 years later - go figure (YMMV, YOMD, IMHO etc etc etc)

In terms of flight sims, while Microsoft certainly defined the Civilian genre, I'd have to give the prize to Falcon 4 for setting the bar on high fidelity combat in a massive dynamic campaign environment - something that has yet to be matched (or even attempted) over 15 years on. Thankfully, the mod community is alive and well and Falcon 4 BMS turns it into a very playable DX9 compatible multiplayer stable game - I'm still playing regularly with a flight of 4-6 dudes (at least once a week). Flight Sims have enjoyed a bit of a resurgence (if you can call a minute niche market that) with Digital Combat Simulator's A10, which is incredibly detailed but lacks any sort of campaign so longevity suffers.

In the Space Sim genre, we've already mentioned Wing Commander (and anyone who is not excited by Chris Robert's Squadron 42 cannot call themselves a PC gamer). It would be remiss not to mention Freelancer and Freespace 2 (both still playable with fan made graphics patches - notice a pattern with genre defining and still active mod communities?) but the defining game has to be TIE Fighter (or X Wing vs TIE Fighter).

A couple of a more esoteric nature that will probably pass most 5punkers by, but deserve a play through just for being wildly different: Carrier Command has had a recent makeover by Bohemia (of Op Flashpoint / ArmA / Don't mention the zombies fame). While the modern sibling is a faithful rendition, it inevitably suffers from a lack of depth that you would expect from a game essentially designed in 1988. But it was the first (and for a long time, only) open world sandbox strategy game. Mount & Blade also gets a mention for being a one-of-a-kind open world strategy FPS RPG (and various other genres besides no doubt). For the sake of completeness, I have to mention I-War 2, Hardwar and Battlezone here. Dammit, 1999 - 2001 was an epic time for PC games.

I should also mention that Train game, but it'd just make me want to play it again and I'm living in denial at the moment.

[deject]

Well Bioshock is an unofficial sequel to System Shock anyway isn't it? Does it count as a ripoff in that case? At any rate I think we've come to the same conclusion - SS2 was a pioneering game which Bioshock did very well and was much more polished, but they're both trumped by Deus Ex as the pinnacle of the sub-genre.

It is a spiritual successor sure, but I think the extent to which they wholesale lifted ideas and just dropped them in qualifies it as a ripoff.

[Dog Pants]

I had wondered about the graphical update actually. And Shodan is certainly one of videogaming's most memorable bad guys (gals?). Also, I preferred X Wing Alliance to X Wing Vs TIE - XvT was seriously missing a decent campaign mode, and Balance of Power wasn't that great.

[friznit]

If you do install SS2 with updates, I'd be up for a Coop play through. I'm stuck currently in SP and need some help!

[buzzmong]

Well Bioshock is an unofficial sequel to System Shock anyway isn't it? Does it count as a ripoff in that case? At any rate I think we've come to the same conclusion - SS2 was a pioneering game which Bioshock did very well and was much more polished, but they're both trumped by Deus Ex as the pinnacle of the sub-genre.

Bioshock wasn't and isn't the unoffical sequel.
It was planned to be and if you go off and read the original design documents that Ken Levine put out last year (maybe year before) you'll see what the original plan was, but it was changed to what we got which only carried over certain elements.

Not to say it wasn't a great game as it was rather good, but the plans in the original design would have been much more akin to SS2/Deus Ex and possibly genre defining had they managed to pull it all off.

[shot2bits]

Bioshock was a very good and well executed game by its own merits , but compared to system shock 2 i found it seemed to be lacking in pretty much every area except the graphical side of things and despite that i still think system shock 2 manages to create a better atmosphere, Plus system shock 2 seemed to be so much more interesting mechanically speaking.

saying that i never actually got more than a few hours through system shock 2 for whatever reason but i finished both the Bioshock games, but i found most of Bioshock fairly forgettable whereas a lot from just those few hours of system shock 2 have stuck with me as some of the more atmospheric and interesting moments of gaming.

[Chickenz]

Metro 2033 should be on the list! Loved that game.

[FatherJack]

Metro 2033 should be on the list! Loved that game.

I loved the atmosphere at the start, but it quickly seemed to turn into an on-rails shooter - most obviously because the first parts actually were on railtracks, and I didn't get a lot further into it than that.

Atmosphere though is a proper thing, or actually more precisely in the System/Bio Shock debate I probably mean environment. It's been forever since I played SS2 and in truth I only really played it as much as I did Deus Ex the first time around, which was not very much, such that when Bioshock came around I had forgotten how much they had taken from it.

System Shock 2 until you got into the story, being based on a space ship looked initially very similar to XYZ corrridor shooter if you only scratched the surface, but Bioshock's visual impact was immediate - where you are plunged into cinematics of decending into the ocean, catching glimpses of this strange art-deco/steampunk world the scope and promise of which was probably let down a bit by the actual game mechanics. Splicers notwithstanding, this wasn't a place I wanted to just explore, I wanted to live there.

[Dog Pants]

Yeah, the art deco theme in Bioshock was inspiring, and certain set piece splicers like the woman with the pram and the guy with the plaster dancers were great. On the other hand SS2 was much more oppressive and Shodan a much better antagonist. Theme is a good thing to pick out too, the other game I remember being struck by for that was the neo-renaissance thing in Deus Ex HR.

[deject]

Atmosphere though is a proper thing, or actually more precisely in the System/Bio Shock debate I probably mean environment. It's been forever since I played SS2 and in truth I only really played it as much as I did Deus Ex the first time around, which was not very much, such that when Bioshock came around I had forgotten how much they had taken from it.

System Shock 2 until you got into the story, being based on a space ship looked initially very similar to XYZ corrridor shooter if you only scratched the surface, but Bioshock's visual impact was immediate - where you are plunged into cinematics of decending into the ocean, catching glimpses of this strange art-deco/steampunk world the scope and promise of which was probably let down a bit by the actual game mechanics. Splicers notwithstanding, this wasn't a place I wanted to just explore, I wanted to live there.

Yeah that's part of what I meant when I said that Bioshock was executed so well. I'd say that's what happens with bigger budgets and more dev time. System Shock 2 apparently had a $1.7 million budget, and in comparison, Costume Quest and Stacking from Double Fine cost about $2 million each to make. I am guessing Bioshock's budget is at least ten times larger than SS2's budget. Irrational is a very talented team of developers and they did an amazing job with Bioshock. Sure a lot of the concepts of the game are taken from SS2, but I see that as a good thing because those concepts deserve to be revisited after so largely being ignored. To combine them with such a beautifully crafted and detailed world is truly what they deserve.

Not to say that System Shock 2's world is boring, just that the benefits of time and money are very apparent.