News System Shock 2 gets reborn after 14 years

Beware the screaming monkeys!!

 

Beware the EA!!

 

This is a proper scary game lol

hope they don't change that

 

**** yeah.

Missed this the first time around. Not gonna happen twice.

 

I just peed a little.

 

I have always wanted play system shock 2. Will definitely buy it now.

 

Can someone get that guy to convince *insert company/companies here* to release G-Police 3?

 

The guy that sorted all this out deserves a medal.

 

If memory serves me correctly I've actually got two copies of SS2. One opened and one shrink-wrapped. But then again I also have at least 3 copies of Blade Runner (the game).

Well, seems I'm about to get myself another copy of SS2...

 

I tried to revisit it a couple of years ago but it hasn't aged well.

 

I remember playing the demo as a kid and nearly shitting myself. After watching nanosuitninja's play through it really shows how big a classic this was. Deus ex and dead space love child would come close to a perfect sequel.

 

The original System Shock was actually even scarier. What I wouldn't give for that game with updated graphics (and no other kind of tampering)...

 

^ You can have that, I played it last year. There are HD textures etc, and also the all important "Mouse Look" patch because the original game was just prior to mouse look becoming standard. There is also a widescreen tweak. Takes some faffing but once it's running it's such a great game. I played through to the end last year, and then went straight through SS2 as well.

 

Dolphie, where can I find this miracle that you speak of?

 

I really wish I could give you an easy answer

Usually I leave myself notes when I do something like this, so I can do it again a year or two later (like now...). But I think in this case it was taking so long and too much effort and I was losing hope, and then I think I ended up stumbling across a solution and then playing the game and not writing any notes because I wasn't even sure how I got it working... Or something.

I own the original game on floppies, but with no floppy drive, everything I got was downloaded from bit torrent and web pages, so you guys should be able to get it working too. But finding how to do it will really test your technical skills, patience, and determination to play this old classic

Anyway, I still have the folder on my PC and it contains the following stuff:

System_Shock_Enhanced.mdf (375mb)
System Shock WINDOWS project (folder)
System Shock Portable (folder)
XCDSHOCK.zip
SDL_mixer-1.2.8-win32.zip
SDL-1.2.13-win32.zip

XCDSHOCK is just the mouse look patch and some higher resolution tweaks. The .mdf file is the full game, and it's a CD version too so I think it contains some extra music or movies or something. You can mount this and it all seems fine, although it wont run from windows and has issues with 64bit I think.

The Windows Project is some user made conversion/hack/mod thingy. That folder only seems to contain several files though, so presumably you need to copy that over something. There is no doubt documentation on the web that explains this though.

System Shock Portable, is something I can actually play right now. I think it was made by fans to let you just run the game from windows and without needing to be installed or something. In that, is an .exe and I can run the game and it works (from windows 7 64bit). Although it uses lots of batch files and stuff and takes some setting up.

But, there is a sub folder in there called RES, and I think what I might have done is copy the CD version of the game and various mods in to that folder to make it work more to my liking. It contains the mouse look mod, and some higher resolution patches. It goes up to 1024x768 but I think there might be ways to make it higher, can't remember. I'm not sure if this stuff was originally part of SS Portable or if I copied it in there.

Also in that folder is a DosBox executable, and if I run that, it runs the CD version of the game with music and sound, but the mouse look patch doesn't seem to be active. But I think this is where I was when I started getting fed up. I think what I ended up doing was making my own separate folder using this stuff, and then applying the mouse look and higher resolution tweaks myself.

The only note I have is that I set up my own dosbox line, which mounts the folder, and then mounts the CD too.


TL-DR, I think all of those things 'sort of' work to some extent. But I think in the end, I ended up hacking them all to pieces and making my own folder and throwing trial and error stuff at it until it eventually worked. I may well have played with none widescreen actually, but the game still looks pretty good with those higher resolution textures, and the important thing was getting mouse look to work properly. I couldn't have brought myself to play it at all without that.

Hope this helps?

p.s. System Shock 2 was far easier to make work, even before GoG. All that needed was the widescreen patch and a modern OS patch which I think stopped crashes on multi cores or something. It was all pretty easy though, unlike the first game :/

 

It took me less than 3 to register on the site then find the BUY button. I have dreamed of this game on a modern operating system over and over again. And there is a bonus pack of awesome in game music tracks included in the purchase package.

 

Doplhie - Thank you for your reply, I did find an old copy of SS1 on Home of the Underdogs a long time ago but couldn't get it to work with XP. Admitedly I didn't spend too much time on it and now I can't find the cd I saved it to, it was only after I read your message that I remembred that I had it - somewhere.

With a bit of luck now that SS2 is out in the open againg SS1 might make an appearance at some point in the future. My other big wish (apart from MW2) is Terra Nova which is another old Looking Glass game.

 

Yeah I really hope they do SS1, it needs a GoG overhaul even more than SS2. But both would be sweeeet. And yeah, Terra Nova was one of my favourite games ever at the time.