![]() ![]() It was baffling to me that I hadn't already heard about this going in. But on the other hand, how could I have possibly seen this coming? Of course, I should have seen this coming, I admit. I felt rewarded, riding off the high of the scrappy ingenuity - beating a challenging, mechanically immersive string of obstacles which truly gave me something no other game has ever given me. I literally just took the damage in the zappy pools and hacked very fast, and ended up using,literally, every last resource at my disposal to defeat her, finishing it off with my last available psi blast. I used invisibility to sneak the whole way through and made it to the final chamber where SHODAN awaited me. SHODAN had somehow hacked into reality itself, and twisted the brig I once recognized into a digital simulacrum of the previous game's opening was ominous but nostalgic. ![]() I had literally no ammo, but there was still one final level. I had assumed that was the final boss, but there was one final level. I'd also periodically use the invisibility to get a safe vantage point to kill one of the floating head things from half life.) (For those who are curious, I ran in circles using a pistol to shoot each of the brains and then turned around periodically to shoot the wormy ape closest to me, causing it to stagger and block the path behind it, giving me barely enough space to safely grenade the entire conga line without damaging myself. Making it to/through The Many's lair was a hair raising testament to luck and skill as I managed to squeeze through with enough grenades to eventually finish the penultimate boss arena through smart use of psi stealth and the health stealing ability. Of course, I had a weird zappy space twig and my psi arm, but that's not particularly useful when going up against hairless polar bears and giant mechs. The only weapons I had on me for the final, epic act of this Gigerian nightmare odyssey was my trusty pistol, a shotgun, an assault rifle and a grenade launcher. The ONLY reason I survived is because while cowering behind some physics effected boxes I attempted to climb onto one thus causing the engine to glitch and phase everything in the area except me through the metal grated floor and into the area below, allowing me to move on safely until I had the stones to actually go down the ladder in my own time. When I entered the area just before the fleshy hellscape that was soon to come, I found myself facing off against TWO of those giant quake enemies (with the zappy hands, you know the ones) and a big spider, with like a half loaded pistol and a single grenade round. My character build, I have to assume, was substandard for this far into the game, because I was having a lot of difficulty actually maintaining enough ammo to kill enemies. I'd been playing for four hours, driving myself off the high that I had to be near the end of the game. System Shock 2, I had already guessed, would be similar to Shock 1 and Bioshock, and it was in some ways, but in other ways it was more different than I could possibly imagine. B)Īnd Bioshock's end cutscene is similarly intensely sentimental and strange and far too short to really give the player any closure, but Bioshock 2's end cutscene is more grounded (although unfortunately grounded in a pretty poor final encounter imo), and Infinite seems deliberately designed for the ending to be impactful so it gets a bit better there. System Shock ends with a silly, overly quick end cutscene which reveals that hacker is still hacking away to this day, cuz some habits die hard. ![]() This usually manifests in absurd sentimentality which comes out of nowhere. One thing I've been making fun of since the start of the series was the often inexplicable, underwhelming end cutscenes. Uh, I played all of them but in reverse order from that list, so I started with system shock, played all of bioshock out of order, and finally finished just a few days ago with system shock 2. If somebody asked you what order you should play it in, ranked so that the "Best" games come first and the "Worst" games come later, and so that you can gain an appreciation for the genre, I'd say So, I played the shock series in what most people would probably agree is the worst conceivable order. ![]()
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