Artificial Intelligence is a massive component of System Shock 2 on both narrative and mechanical levels. The former explores grand political and philosophical ideas, the latter simply presents to us a struggle for existence, as the squishy, organic Many clash with synthetic AI, with you trapped in the middle of this inedible sandwich. The Bioshock games are a cataclysm within a circus, all action and spectacle, whereas System Shock 2 is about scavenging and survival. “Yet whilst they are structurally similar, the two games play in strikingly different ways. The tools at your disposal range from conventional weapons to hacking abilities to psionic powers analogous to Bioshock’s plasmids. Most of the crew have been infected by a hive-minded alien organism known as the Many, and are less extroverted, more unsettling versions of Bioshock’s Splicers. The story is largely told through recordings made by the ship’s inhabitants. The spacecraft is divided into a sequence of open environments, each with its own particular flavour. In both form and function, so much was carried over from the harrowing hallways of SS2’s Von Braun to the underwater dystopia of Rapture. Bioshock and System Shock 2 are linked by far more than spirit. But now, finally, that's all be resolved, and Good Old Games has released a version of it optimised for modern PCs. For more thirteen years, legal problems have kept it locked in cyberspace, inaccessible to anyone who didn't buy it in 1999. The alluring monster in question is, of course, System Shock 2, often referred to as the spiritual predecessor to Bioshock, the game that earned Ken Levine a place in the virtual hall of fame.
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