Moral Combat: Video Games in our Culture vs. Anarchy Media’s WP Plugin

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It’s interesting. I’ve been involved in gaming myself, with The WildWest (link). So this stuff catches my eye. WW has fallen on my priority list, as some of the really important things have taken its place, but I still like to keep tabs on the industry. The most exciting news I’ve heard lately is that the “intellectual sequel” to System Shock 2 is in production.

System Shock 2 is nearing a decade old. It was never made to run on Windows XP, but it still has a devoted community who have come out with binary hacks to get it to run on XP, high resolution replacement textures, high detail models, all to keep this game in running competition with the games running on the newest engines like those that arrived with Half Life 2, FarCry, Quake IV and Doom III in the last two years.

Gamespot named SS2 was # 15 in the “The Greatest Games of All Time” list at Game Spot http://www.gamespot.com/features/6130956/index.html. There are about 100 games on the list, Everquest was around 22 and Civilization was around 30. There’s even an active torrent out there that will get you all of the mods. Note that Electronic Arts has declared that this game is not “abandonware”.

BTW, if you don’t know it already, Doom III was a total rip off of SS2. Even some of the corridors looked similar. The only differences were that DIII had better graphics and poorer gameplay, limited strategy, and a poor user interface.

The authors, Looking Glass Studios, of System Shock2 decided that they would not be able to get the System Shock title back and that a System Shock 3 would not be allowed to become what it could be with the current management. So, they started a new company and created a game with a new title: BioShock.