The firefights themselves aren't much fun, in shooter terms, but the guns feel like guns. The permanent upgrades to your cybernetics are much more meaningful and exciting than Deus Ex's augs, and the frightening ammo drought has you frantically reconfiguring your weapons mid-fight to spend your shots more efficiently. Survival horror is really just the cooler cousin of resource management, and in a nerdy way I think that's what keeps me coming back to System Shock. And it's the incidental stuff that kept me company as I crept through Shock 2's endless corridors. Since SHODAN's influence is unknown at first, little of the incidental plot actually relates to her.
It was these smaller stories I spent my time thinking about: Tommy Suarez and Rebecca Siddons' impossible quest to find each other in the chaos, Delacroix's rising panic long before anyone else saw the problem, Diego's subtle transition from proud UNN officer to servant of the enemy, Bronson's ruthless measures to curb the threat - and her utter defiance to the last breath. Most articles about System Shock 2 are primarily about SHODAN, but for me she was never the focus. Most are just people talking, which simply doesn't call for acting with a capital A. It might not have had Quark from Deep Space Nine in it, but the non-actors give the kind of naturalistic performances you rarely hear anymore. Most were messages from one crew member to another, and sometimes you'd find the reply. Audio diaries have become a cliché since, but that's not what these were. The people who lived there are all dead, infested or fleeing, but their lives were still in evidence through their recorded messages to each other. That's partly why it's frightening: it's hard not to associate yourself with this fragile body lurching around the corridors of the Von Braun, being bludgeoned with lead pipes and frazzled by green laser pips. You're not just a camera zooming around to the next thing to shoot. But you have a sense of yourself in this place. The result is a game where you feel weighty, real, even a tiny bit cumbersome. You also have no air control: the moment your feet leave the ground, your trajectory to hit it again is completely predetermined.
And you come to a stop smoothly too, which screws you up the first time you try to do some fiddly jumping.
You don't burst into a full-blown sprint the moment you touch the forward key, you build up to it smoothly. Shock 2 has a very different feel, and it comes out in your movement too. First-person games often make your viewpoint lower than it realistically would be, to avoid environments feeling claustrophobic when viewed through the small window of your monitor. Fire it up, and the first thing you notice is you're tall.
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