System Shock 2 first time, 14 years after the fact.

System Shock 2 has been on my "Games I should really play" list for a really long time. Primarily I kept away because the operation of the multiplayer function eluded me, and I had resolved to play it with Maestro. I really do mean resolve, because we've been trying to get this thing working since at least early 2000 with absolutely no luck. Well, we finally got it working (mostly thanks to the steam release of the game), and I am placed in a very interesting position whereby I get to play this game for the first time...14 years after the fact.

What

Having never played the game when it was initially released, and having only played in multiplayer mode it actually works pretty well. We are absolutely awful at videogames...So despite the fact that we're currently playing on "normal" mode, it's incredibly common that the most standard of enemies destroy us with little effort. It was incredibly important for us to coordinate our attacks, as I was a psi user who's spells would hit my ally if I wasn't careful . This caused us to overly abuse the use of the wrench as our primary weapon, which was only occasionally supplemented by maestro's use of a gun. But at the end of the day, when his gun was jamming, broken, or out of ammo we had to rely on the good old wrench. All of this meant that we needed to coordinate, and cooperate to the highest degree of our ability. Not really, we basically just zerged everything kekeke.

You know, there's this thing about incredibly old RPGish games like this: if you fuck your skills up in the slightest, you could very well completely gimp yourself. That's basically what I've done in our current playthrough. I went the psi side of things, which should have been "pew pew pew fire laser beams" and whatnot. But what it turned out to be was  "oh hey I'm out of mana again time to use the wrench". I'm very clearly doing something wrong, but it's basically come down to focusing on melee attacks, and spells that buff / heal me. So the one hand there's the fact that I feel like I could have gimped myself, but on the other hand I seem to have developed this odd balance with the game.

HOW TO I HOLD WRENCH?

For all it's quirks and weird shit going down completely out of nowhere, the game seems to stand the test of time. It's still really fun, especially with the cooperative play available, and the learning curve really isn't that massive for a game from this era. I'm kind of at the point with videogames where my suggestion for this game would be "try it or something whatever".