System Shock/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Keiron Gillen: Yeah, you filthy bitch, talk dirty to me. Meat? Bone? Panting? Sweating? Even "running through my corridors"�. Listen to the theatrical voluptuousness of the performance. We don't have to draw many diagrams to stress what she's actually talking about.

    • Even the box says: "She doesn't need to use her body to get what she wants… she's got yours."
  • Genius Bonus: The "randomly" flickering squares in cyberspace in System Shock 1? Actually running Conway's Game of Life.
  • Goddamn Bats:
    • The psychic monkeys eventually become nothing more than a minor irritation.
    • Annelid swarms. You can't kill them, all you can do is run away and wait for them to die off. Annelid worms also count, being small and hard to hit with a wrench.
      • The Viral Proliferator and the Annelid Launcher are the only two weapons that can actually kill the Annelid swarm, but they degrade ridiculously fast after each shot, so you must carefully manage the use of both of these weapons. For the Viral Proliferator, set the weapon to Annelid mode, and simultaneously fire and hold down the fire button to hit the swarm. It takes about 2-4 held shots to kill a swarm. It isn't worth using the Launcher, however, as it takes about 8 shots to kill a swarm, wasting the use of an already fragile late-game weapon.
    • Auto-bombs. Small, hard to hit, fast, silent.
    • Turrets. What's most annoying about them is that they are almost always around a corner, so you're almost guaranteed to get blindsided by them before you can react.
  • Hell Is That Noise: Every sound that is not caused by you or constant background machinery is this, especially in the sequel. For those who played the first System Shock, entering Polito's office and hearing that VERY familiar background noise DEFINITELY counts.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: One of Korenchkin's logs says that he has found "the boarders of rapture." Hmmm...
  • It Was His Sled: A lot of what made System Shock 2 such a shocking and swerving game became common gaming knowledge pretty quickly. Also, the fact that SHODAN was on the cover and the icon for the game's .exe didn't help things.
  • Magnificent Bastard: SHODAN, especially in the second game.
  • Most Annoying Sound: The laser rapier, a weapon that many players will use as their primary melee one as soon as it becomes available, makes annoying droning noises whenever it's selected, even if it's not being swung.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: "Research Complete". Yeah! Now you monsters die 25% faster!
    • The sound of any successful technical operation, especially when that leering ICE node you took a chance on played along.
  • Narm Charm: "Nah."
  • Paranoia Fuel: The monkeys, which chatter eerily at you before proceeding to pound you with psychic powers. The cameras, which are everywhere, hard to spot, and will call down every enemy in the level to kill you if you set one off. But mainly, it's the fact that you hear all the enemies before you see them, so if you hear almost any noise you start looking around nervously. Oh, and the original has invisible mutants, which don't make any noise until they attack, so you can be scared of the silence too.
    • The invisible mutants don't make any noise while attacking you!
    • At one point on a given deck, you find audio logs including a gruesome account of a woman being overwhelmed by spiders when her gun jams and a warning that a certain section of the deck crawls. You expect to be up to your armpits in Giant Spiders, but you only find a few of the small ones that die in one hit.
    • The sound of an Annelid egg whenever you enter a new area. You just know they're around somewhere, and one wrong step can get you blindsided by Annelid swarms/worms.
  • Sacred Cow/Defensive Fans: Try saying anything negative about this game. You will be lucky to walk away with your life. The notable exception would be...
  • Scrappy Mechanic: The weapon degradation system. So much so that some of the most popular mods are ones that just purge it entirely.
    • It doesn't help that some weapons seem to degrade unnaturally fast and have an irritating habit of jamming at the worst possible time.
  • Sequel Displacement: Gamers are more familiar with the sequel than the original (even the "look at you, hacker" quote is known thanks to being featured in the intro of the sequel).
    • The "Look at you, Hacker" quote is actually not used in the original game. It was specifically recorded for sound-testing purposes on the installation program.
  • That One Level:
    • For System Shock 1, Deck 7 is a serous step up in challenge compared to the earlier levels. For starters, the resurrection booth isn't found until the end of the level, meaning that you'll be save-scumming the whole way through. It's a massive labyrinth of twisting halls and chambers that's incredibly easy to get lost in, not to mention the high volume of very powerful robotic enemies that can slice off massive chunks of your health if you're not careful. Hope you brought enough first aid kits...
    • For System Shock 2, there's the Body of the Many, which doesn't have a resurrection booth and is filled up to the brim with the most dangerous annelid creatures (expect to get blindsided by Rumblers and Spiders a lot). In particular is the gauntlet at the end, which a serious test how how fast you can take out targets with at least seven dangerous enemies coming at you from all sides.
  • Uncanny Valley: SHODAN's design looks to be a deliberate use of this.
  • Vindicated by History: While System Shock 2 received good reviews when it came out it was still a commercial failure and many critics still failed to see how important it was to game industry. It wasn't until years later that gamers discovered it, its influence became known, and it's now considered to be one of the greatest games in history. In late 2013, it was released on Steam, even being ported to Mac, which introduced it to a whole new generation of fans.
    • Only if you even know System Shock 2 exists.
    • Not to mention, you'd be surprised to see who the publisher was... Yep, that's right. It was apparently even their idea to make it into System Shock 2.
    • The first game came out in 1994. That was during a time when DOOM II was released. The idea of a first person shooter with a story and RPG elements was unheard of, long before 2000's Deus Ex would popularize the genre.
  • What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic: Not long after the Gravity Screw, you come across a chapel, and since the gravity currently thinks that you're supposed to walk on ceilings, the crosses are now inverted, further enforcing the hellish landscape that the ships had become. EA executives were a little disturbed by it, and sent a message to the developers asking if they noticed it looked a little sacrilegious.
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