My system is shocked. Doomed, even.

So, figured I'd get straight in there....

Recently, I've been playing quite a few FPS/horror games. Which is great, because the more I play the further distanced I feel from the scared little boy I used to be. I couldn't even play Tomb Raider without getting scared of the friggin' wolves. Half Life nearly put me into therapy.

I spent the last week replaying Doom 3 + Resurrection of Evil. Doom 3 is an interesting game - a halfway house between the mindless shooting and painfully obvious ambush zones of the original and the flashy story driven complex modern FPSs. No matter how many times I hear other people bitch about how "there's no duct tape on Mars tahts y they cant put a flashlite on a gun rofl" I just roll my eyes and think - if they managed to end up with chainsaws on Mars, then not having any tape is child's play by comparison.

It does play remarkably like the original. Whether by accident or design, you usually pick one weapon and use it repeatedly until its ammo is gone. Also, I think I can recall about two curved corridors in the entire game. However, the atmosphere is definitely different. Doom 3 keeps you feeling isolated and two seconds away from being immolated and eviscerated for about 95% of the game time. It's completely different from, say, Quake 4, which is very much an America-fuck-yeah style of squaddie shooter.

Let it be known that Cherubs and Trites still scare the living crap out of me.I mean come on. Upsidedown walking heads and psychotic insect babies. That bite. Who comes up with this shit?

Anyhow, after spending about 4 hours fruitlessly trying to download, install, run and fix the Bioshock demo (fucking useless DirectX 8 graphics card - never EVER buying a craptop again) I decided, fuck it, I'll download System Shock 2. For those of you who haven't heard, System Shock 2 is a spiritual ancestor to Bioshock. Both involve isolated scientific communities doing silly things and destroying themselves - except where Bioshock is set underwater in the 1960s, System Shock is set in a spaceship in the 2010s.

I'd like to take a moment to rant at Microsoft in the form of a conversation.
Microsoft: Hey guys, with Service Pack 1 you can play lots of old games, including ones that run on the Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2, etc)
Gamers: Holy shit, we can! Nice one! w00t ZOMG LOL
*Time passes*
Gamers: So, yeah, that Service Pack 2 you guys just made...
Microsoft: Yeah?
Gamers: It's only gone and rendered all our old games unplayable again.

Fucktards.

Anyway, when System Shock 2 isn't crashing to the desktop, I've been wandering about the Von Braun starship trying not to die. It's a tough game. A very tough game. Weapons degrade and break, ammo is scarce, the security systems can wipe you out very quickly. Running round a cargo hold dodging blasts from 3 heavy security robots just to get a door code was never part of Deus Ex. Or having a bunch of transport pods burst open to reveal a ton of kamikaze protocol droids.

Then there's the whole RPG side of things (I've gotta be honest, I suck at RPGs. Too many variables to keep track of.) Your RPG skills are what you need to repair and modify your weapons, use psychic attacks, hack computers, and use different weaponry as well as your usual strength/endurance/agility stats.

Right now, I have barely any ammo or nanites (help you resurrect). Or health for that matter. And all I can wield is a pistol (that's almost broken) and a wrench. Wonderful.
Yes, as you've guessed, it's every bit as tough as I'd imagined. What isn't as I expected was it's scariness. So far I've jumped about once. I'm hoping it gets scarier. What with the constant crashing, this game will have to deliver the goods to keep me playing it. Something's got to keep me happy until I have a system capable of playing Bioshock.