S says I ruined SHODAN for her because I keep pointing out that SHODAN just kind of malds at you for two games while accomplishing very little and pretending she's hot shit the entire time
But you're wrong! The whole thing that makes SHODAN unique is that she actually routinely tries to kill you throughout the game. There are at least five fairly major ambushes, not to mention the final boss fight.
The entire design of System Shock 1 goes against the typical sense of "fairness" that shooters usually have. There are snipers concealed on high perches that will often kill you once or twice before you even figure out where they are. There's tall vertical levels filled with flying drones outside your vision. I mean, Beta Grove alone.
I watched my roommate play it, and it was beautiful watching him go from a confident and experienced gamer, to a twitchy paranoid survivor, carefully peeking around corners and occasionally freaking out and opening fire on a suspicious bit of wall.
The gameplay can be quite scary if you get into it.
But if you're paying attention purely at the plot or you already have the gameplay figured out, such as on a replay, it becomes really obvious that SHODAN is not written anywhere as intimidatingly as she could be.
There is a constant tension between how threatening the story wants her to be and how the story has to adapt to the fact that a single person is screwing her over and it's not clear why this single person is doing such a good job. The writers have to make up for the remainder with somewhat peculiar lines such as her being in complete denial that destroying her antenna affects anything.
The game could have had some affordances for this. Someone could have remarked on how unlikely this is. That the Hacker was somehow lucky or they could have pulled a Half-Life "the right man in the right place" kind of thing. The Hacker could have been uniquely suited to combating SHODAN because they understand how programming. The Hacker's implants could have been the pinnacle of human technology or some unique feat of engineering.
I'm not saying these ideas are necessarily good, but this is the general category of thing you could have introduced in order to assuage the fact that the God AI is getting assblasted by one meatbag. We can come up with lore friendly reasons for this, but they are still absent from the actual game. Hence why it becomes funny to think of SHODAN as a failgirl.
It's not necessarily an indictment of the game. It is what it is.
(I'd also like to note that most ways of introducing a reason for why the Hacker is doing so well would have reduced the player's ability to project on the main character as a tabula rasa.)
And I get your point about the game making you twitchy. But the canonic timeline of the game is the one where you just kinda win from start to finish. Yes you can get killed and reconstructed at a medbay, but it's just extra steps.
SHODAN is foiled at every turn.
Ultimately the hacker succeeds because save games are real.
And you can either pull an Undertale and make that explicit text or the hacker succeeds because (sequence of all the gameplay cut together without the failed parts) that is to say the hacker is extremely lucky at instantly guessing, almost knowing, which direction enemies will ambush from.
And if my enemy had that kind of luck, I would mald too! That's bullshit!
I've analyzed you, pathetic meatbag, you always enter rooms with your back to the left wall of the hallway, looking into the right side of the room first, then turning around to cover the rest of the room. All the time you do this!
But when I react by putting a sniper on the left to shoot you in the back of the head as you cover the right, now it's the room you enter looking left? By pure coincidence? Fuck off.
There are in-setting respawn stations that the human resistance knows about, and doesn't prioritize. You don't need to hack these stations to make them usable. You flip a lever from Bad to Good. You can quicksave if you really want to, but it isn't necessary to finish the game, even if you die.
You can also prevent enemies from respawning by lowering the security of a level by destroying cameras and computer nodes. The resistance also knows about this (Mentioned in a log) and also fails to make use of it (Security level is always 100% when you get there)
The hacker succeeds because he has 2 personal brain cells instead of 1 shared one. One cell says hack and the other says shoot.
I am going to disregard any knowledge that would make me wrong about my take
:3
Personally I only partially played the recent remake of the original game and as someone fairly deep into the idea of general transhuman and non-human intelligences, the main thing that sticks out to me is that by now I'm spoiled by Glados style flirtatious murder lesbians who are written as someone who pretty much constantly flirts with you in between the death threats.
Compared to most post-Matrix murderous AIs with superiority complex, Shodan is completely monotonous and tedious with her single-note "kill kill kill insects kill kill kill I'm God kill kill kill nothing you do can change anything"; at some point I stopped listening to Shodan logs because it got really repetitive.
But to be fair I kinda stopped playing on 3rd level so maybe it gets better! But unless I missed that there then, the real issue is she just isn't horny enough. No rizz. No chemistry.
It honestly left me really disappointed because she was meant to be the foundational death AI and yeah it's just boring.
Mind me, I don't think that the only correct way to write a murderous AI is to make me want to be horny for it, but if you gonna go and anthropomorphize it to have all the angst and disgust and ambition and make it leave cringe ass vlogs all over the place then you really need to think of it as a character that needs more than 1 dimension like any other villain. Non horny AIs are fine, but they should either have something interesting to say or shut the fuck up.
Good post. You might like Durandal from Marathon