A combination of superior scripting and excellent voice acting transformed SHODAN from a stock villain into a memorably sexy computer dominatrix from hell she is by far the most memorable character in the series, and is considered one of the best video game villains in general.
From the CD version onwards SHODAN was explicitly female, voiced with cool command by Terri Brosius. Several times the evil computer was described as a "he", and the character art was ambiguous. The original, floppy disc-based version of System Shock played fast-and-loose with SHODAN's gender.
These don't seem like much now, but the game was considered mind-blowing at the time it could do everything other games at the time (up to and including Quake) could do and more, with the exceptions of liquid physics and 16-bit color. The game features dynamic lights that can pulsate or be toggled on and off. Objects can be pushed, picked up, and thrown. It also had a really slick physics system: objects you throw bounce off the walls and roll down inclines, if you shoot a robot on a ledge it may fall off (and even crush another robot below), and the player can jump, crouch, crawl, lean, dodge, or do combinations of those. Although sprites were used for smaller objects, larger objects were 3D, were fully destructable, and could be stood upon. It also has angled floors, like ramps - ie the walls and floors aren't all at 90 degrees to one another, so you can be walking down an octagon shaped corridor, for example. note The maps are true multi-leveled, and the world is rendered in full-3D polygons. The game is notable for being a story-driven action game at a time when this was not the norm, as well as being extraordinarily high-tech for its time. The Hacker must stop SHODAN from destroying the earth and wipes her completely from the database. After the six-month coma needed to heal from his surgery, the Hacker finds that SHODAN has gone haywire from having her ethical controls removed, and has transformed the entire crew into cyborgs and mutated monsters devoted entirely to her. " The Hacker," caught breaking into the mainframe of the Tri-Optimum Corporation, is offered a chance at freedom and a prime-grade neural interface by CEO Edward Diego, in return for performing nonstandard modifications to the Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network (SHODAN), the AI on the corporation's space station. A sequel, System Shock 2, was released on August 11, 1999.
It wasn't exactly a smashing success in sales, but it was massively influencial and spawned one of the most memorable villains in all of video games.
System Shock by Looking Glass Studios is a groundbreaking First-Person Shooter/ Immersive Sim with Survival Horror and RPG Elements set in a Cyberpunk future.
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