10 Classic PC Games That Have Been Fixed To Run On Modern Devices

4. System Shock 2 (1999)

It's great to have this game out of legal hell and back among us. Your mileage may vary with System Shock 2, depending on whether you've already played Bioshock. In retrospect, it's surprising how few new tricks Ken Levine came up with for Bioshock. In both games, you wake up in an expansive but contained environment after its collapse. Two factions with wildly different ideologies are fighting over the wreckage, though their ideologies are much more similar than they care to admit. Both games even have the same big plot twist at pretty much the same time. I'm not trying knock Ken Levine for this, either. The world he helped build for Bioshock is without equal - the most thought-provoking and emotionally-rewarding video game we have. Since System Shock 2 sold less than 60,000 copies in its first year of release, few saw any of Bioshock's surprises coming. If I was sitting on a story that good, I'd want to take another crack at it, too. There is one big difference between the two games. System Shock 2 is a true RPG, with a punishing level of difficulty. In System Shock 2, you pick a class. You'll fiddle with stats and powers. You have to manage an inventory that's never big enough to suit your needs. And each bullet you fire - and boy, is ammo scarce in this one - is one step closer to your gun jamming or breaking, which you may or may not be able to fix. Most likely, the first character you build will be lousy, and you won't get very far into the game before reaching a dead-end, with no ammo and no way to defeat your enemies. Like the current generation of Bethesda RPGs such as Fallout 3 and Skyrim, a dilettante is a dead dilettante. You have to settle at being good at a few things and sucking at everything else. System Shock 2 is a more complex game than Bioshock, with more risk and more reward. Also, it's a pretty damn scary game - scarier than Bioshock, even. Bioshock still beats it out, I think, due to its imagination and vision. But you're doing yourself a disservice if you've never played System Shock 2.