T w e n t y S i d e d

Reading the show notes in the original entry has reminded me that this game used the C key for crouch and Ctrl for sprint, which is just silly bananas. However, maybe they’re just trying to capture the true spirit of System Shock, which has always used goofy and unconventional controls.

In the original System Shock (drink!) there was no concept of mouselook. All looking, turning, and movement was done with the keyboard. The advantage of this system was that you could shoot at things that were anywhere in view just by clicking on them. The downside of this system was that it was completely horrible.

System Shock 2 had basically normal controls by modern standards, except the default key mappings were really goofy. The A and D keys were used for turning. If you wanted to step to the side, you used Z and C. Mouselook was a few years old by this point, so this was a break from convention. I do wonder how many people used the controls with these defaults? I hope not many, since the resulting muscle-memory would ruin you for all other first-person PC games until you could learn to walk all over again.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Now that the third BioShock game is out, it’s about time to release the first episode of our third season of Spoiler Warning for the second time. The first thing to note is that this introduces our fifth host and the first BioShock game (which is our second first-person shooter and the second game where Josh gets to chug a fifth to cure secondary wounds) as well as our first session to feature a fourth commentator.

Got it? Super.

And so begins the re-release of our BioShock season. This season has kind of become shorthand among the crew for “season which began well but which descended into bile and madness by the end”. We’ll say things in conversation like, “I’m not sure I want to cover Metro. I’m afraid it’ll turn into another BioShock.”

Remember that this game is one of the big catalysts of the still-ongoing DRM debates. Sure, we’ve had bad DRM before BioShock and we’ve had worse since then, but I see this as a point where the debate got hot enough that it began showing up in the news and “what kind of DRM does it have?” became an important question for customers to ask. It’s certainly the point where I entered the fray and became known as “that crank who’s obsessed with DRM”.

Even years later, I’m still not sure what I think of the game. Like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it’s pretty good by modern standards, but pretty thin compared to its System Shock grandsire. I’ve played through BioShock once, and I don’t have any particular desire to do it again.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.