"IT'S AN ISLAND, NOT A FAIRY TALE!!!" exclaimed the expendable Treasure Planet extra in the intro to this dark machewr fantasy story where the not-catholic church is as affable as usual (thank G*d, I hate subverted expectations!), later followed up by the stronk rebellious gUrl archetype yelling out and echoing the same very much evident sentiment. And naturally the following cutscene in this grounded tale has a cameo from everyone's favorite Dishonored assasination target portraying a DiDney villain (your royal highness Farquaad). The point I'm making is that this "Revolutionary ARPG taking inspiration from Diablo", where you start the game proper as a hobo washed up on a beach and go around punching crabs, is clearly made by earnest and most of all humble people not unwilling to own up to what kind of work this is. That being a "fantastical story" backed up by a score from the composer of soundtracks for the likes of Command & Conquer 4, F3AR, Tomb Raider 2013, plus all those horror stingers from Dead Space You fondly remember and didNot set the volume for to zer0. Instead of the guy who merely got a Jerry Goldsmith award for his previous work, whom a certain someone claimed would be doing the muzak for all of His studio's future titles.

ThatsRight boys+gurls the day has finally arrived, Runic Games has finally brought us the long-awaited successor to Dark Souls 2 Last Epoch Hob "Us gAmers" and all my fellow Torchlight fans definitely have been waiting for years for (yes I have indeed beaten the better of those two games on "HC" my fellow ARPG enJoYers, Dont Believ Me?????). Get ready to partake early in the next step in the evolution of action role-playing games by chopping down trees for crafting materials as you hunt for fat epic l00t such as apples or swords with riveting attributes like +20% damage against LARGE enemies, or ones with an ego as big as Thomas Mahler's (EAT YOUR HEART OUT NIOH DIABLO 4), so that the upcoming session of iframing through Defanatus the Sordid Executioner's attacks will hopefully end 20% sooner and in turn allow you to move on to the next fleeting distraction being advertised to you in your youtube subscription feed that much quicker.

Just like all the buzzword laden marketing speak promovideos on yootoob and blurbs on your favorite digital storefront purport, this topdown DarkSåul clone with exploration that's as rewarding as in the game they took the stamina wheel from (YaHaHa you found coppercoin$), and itemization that makes Diablo 4 look good in comparison, is a revolutionary take on the genre of games where you clip your sword through enemies because... it just is, OKAY!!! There's all sorts of much needed innovations here like magic that requires you to hit enemies with your stick to fill up your rage meter before you can cast a single heroic strike I mean fireball, an exciting progression system for unlocking more slots in each individual inventory tab, and of course player homes (SimS fans rejoice!) where you get show off to all your justin.tv viewers how close to the entrance you placed your stash and crafting stations that you had to commit deforestation for. I could bring up all sorts of constructive criticisms but that'd be quite redundant since this is an early access game after all, so ResT assured folx, the developers will arduously spend a lot of time on working up excuses for the lack of updates or changes to the unfinished game they've already managed to sell to you without any stated estimation or even a vague guess on how long "EA" might last in the roadmap they refer to. That happens to be a pedantic requirement about semantics mandated by GabeN bytheway, justice shall be servd to teh wickd.....

Ps: SalutationS to any&all gAmers!! go away and take your reactionary 'upvotes' with you, ThanX :~D

The 1.2 update is a fucking disgrace. Nightdive delayed the release of the update by several months to coincide with some console bullshit, and it turns out the PC version of 1.2 wasn't even fit to be shipped as evidenced by the fact that the game is now even buggier than before. They stated this update was done MONTHS ago. I guess all those months weren't long enough to do any QA.
All previous saves are now broken. Dropping the default melee pipe can allegedly crash the game. HUD opacity is broken. Key rebinding access is still only partially provided. All GOG achievements are broken. Access to the builds required to revert to a previous version in GOG Galaxy has been REMOVED for some unknowable reason. Cutscene subtitles disregard user configuration. And to top it all off I've heard that the revamped Shodan fight which was terrible at release is now somehow even worse. I wouldn't be surprised if the random crashes that drove me to give up my last 3,3,3,3 run are still in the game.
Great fucking work Nightdive. Both Steam and GOG forums are full of threads complaining about bugs.
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I want to love the remake but it's riddled with so many small irritations, both technical and tonal, and coupled with Nightdive's scummy behavior in the years leading up to the release that my view of the project is repeatedly soured. The remake is so frustratingly close to being excellent.
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Yeah the new Shodan fight is fucking terrible.
Bugs I ran into in this playthrough:
Vaporize All hotkey vaporizes scrap.
Z-fighting on elevators during transitions.
Enemy giblets frequently display graphical errors.
HUD Opacity cannot be configured.
Cutscene subtitles cannot be disabled.
Map markers cannot be placed.
Camera map icons sometimes persist on the minimap after camera destruction.
Damage sound effect from getting hit by a plant mutant's attack persisted until I reloaded from the title screen.
The Executive level railgun disappeared as I picked it up. The interstitial animation played out, but there was no visible model of the weapon. The railgun was nowhere to be found thereafter. Eventually I was able to acquire one of the later instances of a railgun, but this still isn't something that should have happened.

Improvements:
The level 7 trap finally kills the player after all this time.
That's it. That's the only improvement after a year.
You know what, since all achievements are currently bugged, I'm not even going to suffer through the 1.2 Shodan fight. They had a year to implement a healthbar and post boss monologue autosave. Yet somehow failed to realize how crucial such features are. For reference, the current 1.2 final boss is a long enemy gauntlet where you only have access to one shitty weapon at a time and cannot see your healthbar. There are no checkpoints. There are no health pickups. It is long. It is boring. There is an unskippable boss intro. I'm not willing to waste any more of my time on this shit that is somehow worse than the 1994 Shodan encounter. I'm marking this as done.

After being severely disappointed that I am presently unable to achievement whore in the System Shock remake due to technical difficulties, I decided to revisit the original, albeit with the un-enhanced control scheme this time. Oh boy, this is uh ... kinda not that fun. Especially on Combat 3. [Future Nilichi here: Skill Issue.]
Playing System Shock blind for the first time has a lot of value as a pure exploration and "pay-attention-to-every-piece-of-text" game. However now that I know where everything is, all that I'm left with for this 3,2,3,3 run is a lot of aggravation at obnoxious highly damaging and sometimes respawning hitscan enemies. I now see why this game only became a cult hit, it is actually physically painful to play in its unaltered DOS form. [FYI I actually had to reduce DOSBOX CPU cycle usage down to 40%, otherwise Shodan was invincible since her attack logic runs on a frame dependent timer.]

Anyway this has been a wonderful refresher on how Immersive Sim design principles can be implemented outside of an ARPG context. Believe it or not there are multiple solutions to many of the roadblocks ahead. I realized after I spent far too long on the first mastermind-wire-puzzle that I could have just used my sprinting velocity off of some ramped geometry to clear a pit. Though what I find more interesting is how ammunition management and player movement are handled. Your avatar can lean, crouch, and go prone. Which you're expected to make use of to minimize your hitbox to RNG your way through encounters. Firearms often accept multiple different types of ammunition, and loading is handled by physically moving the mouse around. You're still just clicking buttons in a UI, but this small change leads to a much greater sense of physicality for your actions.
Grenades, finnicky as they are, effectively require you to reach into your inventory and then manually toss them one at a time.
While System Shock doesn't have as many obviously abuseable player abilities that facilitate a higher degree of emergent problem solving as in its descendants, the base philosophy of providing the player with a toolset to forge their own path forwards is very much present here. The simulationist and immersion focused mindset that guided LGS are clear in how players are expected to piece together their objectives from scattered audio logs, loose pieces of paper, and the occasional email beamed into their cranium. Dropped items persist throughout level transitions and corpses linger. Actually come to think of it, with the way resource management is handled along with the pacing of combat, this is a Survival Horror game from before Survival Horror was called Survival Horror.

My main issues really are how clumsy it can feel to actually use the QWERTASDFGZXCVB movement bindings to direct the Hacker. Yes that is actually what they're using by default instead of WASD or ESDF. It's an extension of SZXC, with keys for turning, leaning, angling, and recentering the main view, along with height-stance control, all arranged to be within reach of the left hand. Honestly if I could look up and down with the mouse wheel it probably wouldn't even be that bad. I think you can actually rebind the keys in dosbox, but I'm here to suffer.

Second main issue, which is shared with Enhanced Edition, is how this is yet another game with an inverse difficulty curve ... kinda. The regeneration bays, they're unlockable vita chambers. Or rather vita chambers and all "checkpoints-that-respawn-you-with-all-defeated-and-damaged-enemies-persisting" descend from System Shock regen bays. Anyway this allows for the developers to expect you to deal with some incredibly dickish hitscan ambushes. I must have played SSEE on combat level 2 for my first run, because holy shit this is brutal. The Reactor is especially obnoxious. I can see how to trivialize it in hindsight by grabbing equipment around the station in a certain order, but there's a real chance that first time players will have an awful time down there. Now, I think this design is kinda interesting when you're trying to beat the 7hr time limit, and first time players can experience the novelty of being able to explore more of the station after bruteforcing the encounters with the regen bays online. However for people that already know the general layout of the game very well, I've found it rapidly devolves into frustrating tedium. There's also some weird hitbox jank that's a lot more noticeable to me now. Melee seems to be affected by how you angle your view, which is ... weird.

About audio in this version of System Shock; unless I'm mistaken, there have been less abrasive tones than in the Enhanced Edition. Something that really stands out to me with the mixing is that large mechanical doors and moving platforms feel too loud. I think the DOS version of the soundtrack sounds slightly nicer than in enhanced edition by default for some reason, but I'm not sure. The adaptive score can be rather harsh depending on how the MIDI messages are being interpreted but here they've been quite nice.

Anyway this game is fundamentally really cool and should be played by all hardcore PC addicts, but esoteric UX prevents making a general recommendation.

We don't talk about the autobomb maze.

this whole series is like the guy who wears a star trek costume to the renaissance faire (as opposed to wizardry, which is like the guy who wears a wizard hat to a linux convention). personally i find that kind of charming.

that said, xeen is probably where m&m peaked for me, and it's still not as interesting as wizardry or etrian or old school roguelikes. probably because it's very easy. it might be a good entry point to dungeon crawlers, but who's getting a DOS game for that purpose today?

Quest for Glory is a series that blew my mind back in the day. I always loved adventure games, but I've never truly cared about Sierra games for some reason. The fact that you could die in King's Quest made me always favor the LucasArts games. I decided to take on Quest for Glory because I love RPGs and someone said it is one of the best RPGs out there. The first game was insane, it had the dialog trees and C&C that I love, so of course I fell in love with it and transferred my character across two other games in the series (QfG2 and QfG3). When it came to the fourth game, I was so burned out, that I just didn't play. For years I heard this was the best in the series. Well, I finally got to play it. The story didn't catch me as much as the first one, for most of the game I didn't really understand the plot, nor the motivation of my character besides going home. The combat is, how should I say, weird, taking inspiration from Street Fighter. But I don't know if it was the charming voice acting or the writing, by the end, I was hooked. Just like with the games that came before, Corey and Lori had another masterpiece. I wouldn't put it as the best in the series, I still think the first game is groundbreaking in many ways, but QfG4 is still very magic and a game I recommend to every adventure and RPG fan out there.

I'm so fucking tired of people claiming that Warren Spector coined the concept of Immersive Sims, when the man himself will tell you it was Doug Church, all the while these people bash the concept of such a genre even existing. Their arguments are uniformly rooted in prejudicial ignorance every single fucking time. Often making some idiotic remark about how the name is misleading because flight simulators have nothing to do with them, WHEN THE ACTUAL OG IMSIM DEVS MADE FLIGHT SIMS TOO. The entirety of the Looking Glass output were ALWAYS simulations. I'm inclined to believe that the people who were the original developers at the forefront of Simulation focused game development are right in attaching such a denomination in one form or another to their RPG and FPS outputs as well. There's a very simple litmus test you can employ to discern why the bulk of modern first person video games do not deserve to be brought up in conversation by halfwits mistakenly complaining about the genre being "meaningless" because "all games strive to be immersive" (lmao even) or what have you when that's clearly not true. The litmus is whether or not the game is implementing its mechanics via scripted interactions or SIMULATING systems to allow for a rationally comprehensible and predictable game world. Yet somehow people keep bringing up Elder Scrolls, Metroid Prime, et al, in conversation.
I suspect this is an unfortunate effect of general human neurology struggling with comprehending nuance and abstractions, all the while putting much too much emphasis on definitions. Thus the incessant roundabout arguments throughout all of history that often boil down to nothing more than fucking pedantry.

Anyway, as I see it what makes ImSims most consistently identifiable, rather than pedantic slavish insistence of finding individual shared mechanics, is observing how systemically implemented game mechanics end up informing and recontextualizing a game's Level Design.
I feel the need to point this out because I've seen far too many people think that statpoints and skill trees are of chief significance, when they're really just a tool by which developers can choose to allow players influence over their characters. Too few people have played the OG System Shock which is quite lacking in all the ARPG frills that have come to define a particular subset of this criminally misunderstood peak genre of PC gaming. A genre that arguably IS PC gaming.

Oh, yeah, the game. Deus Ex is okay. I made the mistake of playing on Hard and had to suffer through the mediocre gunplay. It was still good though and definitely a must-play. I willfully restarted the Hong Kong level a few times because I wasn't ready to move on before trying several different approaches just for the hell of it. Truly an excellent level.

For all my complaining of pedantry, I wish such widespread flagrant misunderstanding and misapplication of terminology didn't piss me off so much, but I simply can't tolerate besmirchment of PC gaming's most engrossing lineage.

BioShock is a corridor shooter.