System Shock 2 is one of my favorite games ever, hands down, so keep that in mind as I proceed to complain about it.
I actually really enjoyed playing it the past few days, it just has imperfections...
Tiny enemies you have to crouch to hit, especially when it really looks like you have plenty of reach.
* Somewhat justified in that the wrench is very short range, the sword and crystal shard are significantly longer... but still sometimes miss absurdly.
Tiny enemies which "poison" you, in the worst way: Poison *NEVER* wears off without using up a pretty unusual chem. So often it's better just to let yourself die and be cloned.
* Mitigated in that you can buy the antidotes at a few points, and they only take up 1 space.
** UNMITIGATED in that certain tiny worm-piles will inflict this poison as well, and are completely invincible (unless you research and use a very rare implant in order to EAT them off the floor.)
*** The player character often slips along sloped ground, too, and sometimes they put those worm piles in doorways such that you have to awkwardly hop over them. These are *tiny* piles, diameter about a foot. It would be trivial to step over them.
Sorta related, the game is dark as fuck, there's no flashlight, and the gamma adjustment doesn't work in windowed mode
* Mitigated/almost worse in that windowed mode is unsupported, requiring an INI tweak. It is an old game though.
I ended up using Psi Set Yourself On Fire a lot simply for the light source. (Also it was kinda handy for clearing egg clutches)
Completely invincible "swarms" enemies that you just have to run away from for a while.
* Of course, you can just destroy the eggs from a range.
** Except that they're often literally around blind corners, including jumping down into them
** Also you can harvest healing items from the eggs IF you don't blow them up. Sometimes.
A really cool map system which lets you take notes and provides a decent minimap!
* It's gone for the ENTIRE SECOND HALF
** Quarter 3 is an absurdly dark, incredibly *vertical* ship full of turrets and enemies that excel at ambush.
*** There's a respawn point but it's over halfway in
*** Why do the maintenance tunnels have this many rocket-launcher turrets? Why do they have ANY ROCKET-LAUNCHER TURRETS
** Quarter 4 is brighter but the walls are all samey fleshy pink, it's a maze with interconnecting branches, plus you have to swim through unexplained radiation zones ASAP (hope you stocked up on rad-x, that mechanic basically only comes up one other time near the start of the game!)
At least you can still drop nav beacons into the world like breadcrumbs.
Useful
magic psi buffs for a reasonable resource cost... Except you have to manually recast them, and you cannot bind them to hotkeys. To get to the tier 1 psi shield, you have to first equip the psi-amp then hit F1 until it comes up. Then charge it into the zone, unless you want it to end sooner.
* Okay now do that for the other two shields and the fire aura and maybe agility and fuck, being a
mage psionic is suffering
A cool in-universe respawn mechanic which should defeat quicksave/quickload. I love that in games!
* Except basically everything above makes you quicksave/quickload constantly.
* Also you have to find the respawn devices, which are typically several rooms away from the zone transition.
* Shoot, there just aren't any in the final quarter of the game anyway.
* And hell if I'm wandering through the pitch dark 3rd quarter 3D maze just because I crawled out of a maintenance shaft into two laser turrets and two shuriken assassins who killed me, literally, in less than a second despite me having powered armor and 5/6 stamina.
OH RIGHT I almost forgot that some of the poisonous spiders are translucent. I actually didn't notice at first because the level was so dark, I was basically locating them by sound anyway. They're pretty loud.
Also the spiders specifically give you three tiers of toxin, which requires two hypos of antitox. For some reason.
Also also, ahehe, ONCE a spider dropped an antitox hypo. Literally once. I think it might have been a preset spawn.
OKAY LAST BIG PET PEEVE ABOUT SYSTEM SHOCK 2:
I wish there was a nonstandard game over where Shodan wins. Even/especially if it's "accidental", like in System Shock 1...
Credit to
http://it-he.org , the best source of horrifically wrong screenshot LPs of Ultima, Morrowind, Deus Ex, Thief, and some "newer" stuff like Fallout NV and Oblivion but the old stuff is better really.
No Thi4f, I think he's insisting that game never existed.
Actually yeah there's another pet peeve, fricken Thief and Doom and Prince of Persia and XBOX ONE arrrgh WHY
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Topic: Gaming Pet Peeves (Read 519545 times)