Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN JUNE 2025?

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:

* System Shock 2 25th Anniversary Remaster
>
There are a few things I didn't like. They took out the hack to
disable the weapon degradation. I always hated how guns in "System
Shock 2" broke after firing them a dozen times; originally you could
edit a config file to minimize this annoyance. That's gone now. The
developers also added a really annoying head-bob animation too;

They *added* head-bob? In my recent playthrough I found the game really
looked like you were rolling around on a bent unicycle. I thought it
silly and also that's just how you rolled in the '90s :) But maybe that
was included in the fan patch I used? I noticed some things were changed
that didn't need to be changed which is my usual beef with fan
patches. OTOH, the original's rampant respawning was really low but I
thought it was due to the easy difficulty level I chose.

Or how is it in "vanilla" SS2, is it safe to visit med/sci (surgery) and
hydroponics (convenient charging station right next to the elevator)
when you're working on the upper decks, operations and recreation? Or do
enemies just keep on respawning there?

I don't think I touched the weapon degradation in that play through but
again, I don't know if the fan patch tweaked it. More than enough
maintenance tools available anyways.

Anyways, I have the anniversary edition installed and patched, it was a
freebie as I prepaid for the SS remake.

What Have You Been Playing... IN JUNE 2025?

I thought I played more than one game but June seemed to go by
quickly. Well, it's the month of graduation parties and my favorite, the
entirely pagan summer solstice celebration. So it looks like all I
played was:

* Outlaws

Yes, the 1997 Outlaws. Waited for a sale since $6/€6 seemed oh so
steep. Or more realistically, I wanted to finish the other Outlaws, Star
Wars Outlaws, first.

I didn't play this back in 1997 but for the time it feels surprisingly
advanced. I mean, sure, the graphics are just awful but it has the
rudiments of more modern games. Then again, the naughties was an awful
time for PC gaming, too many games were just badly ported from PS2 or
Xbox0.

But this has features. Houses have windows you can shoot through, some
of them even have breakable glass, cover is there even if crude, sounds
fade with distance, there are dark areas and you have a lantern to light
them up, with limited oil capacity. There's a remarkably useful map,
even though it's 2D and this is definitely 3D, houses have floors and
stairs go up and down. The engine apparently can't do ladders so
there're some pretty weird looking steep ramps instead. Motion speed and
perspective seem a little odd, you move really fast and go really low
when crouching. Shooting enemies below you seems to work quite poorly
but at least shooting above you works fine and is much more common.

I tried some mods to increase resolution but unfortunately those didn't
work. As shipped by GoG the game defaults to nglide and a config prog is
included, another way to go is dgvoodoo2 which I understand maps glide
calls to directx. Some old guide from 2017 recommended v2.54 of that
with this game but I didn't find it anywhere and other versions had the
same issue as nglide, my mouse was restricted to top left quarter of the
screen if I tried to increase resolution. Also with the versions of
dgvoodoo2 the in-game graphics were a complete blinking mess. So
plodding on in unenhanced 640x480.

Gameplay then, it's pretty much straight up shoot everyone, find keys,
open doors, kill boss, rinse and repeat. Sometimes there are civilians
but shooting them or not shooting them doesn't seem to matter. The
game's a little weird like that. There's a sheriff's star pickup too but
picking it up doesn't seem to do anything.

Some puzzling but I think it's mostly on one level. Enemy motion and
shooting seems pretty random but I still got killed a lot at
first. Restarted with the easiest difficulty and now it feels too easy.

Restarted one more time as I missed a critical weapon pickup or actually
it's a scope for your rifle which is, if not quite mandatory, a major
pain if you don't have it. Oh well, that's some fairly unforgiving
design right out of the '90s. At least the levels aren't that long. I
think I'm over the halfway point so maybe four levels to go. Kind of
feels like I've had enough but I'll try to finish.