A lot of people I talk to rave on about how good Bioshock was, but they don’t seem to realise that Bioshock is the spiritual successor to two great roleplaying first person shooters – System Shock and System Shock 2.
My favourite of the two is System Shock 2 (SS2), a dark, gritty shooter with heavy roleplaying and an atmosphere you could drown a cat in.
If you’ve never played SS2 before, I highly recommend that you track down a copy and install it – even if it is just to compare it to Bioshock and the Steampunk/Cyberpunk dichotomy of the two.
Like most older games, SS2 is a bit finicky to get running on modern versions of Windows – but not impossible.
- Insert your SS2 CD (or mount the ISO)
- Open a command prompt (windows + R, then type CMD and press enter)
- Browse to your CD drive by typing its drive letter followed by a colon and enter (e.g. E:)
- Run the setup program by typing “setup.exe -lgntforce”
- Install game normally and decline when asked to install DirectX
- Browse to StrangeBedFellows and grab a copy of SS2Tool at the bottom of the post
- Run SS2Tool and select Patching Up, Getting Mod Ready and Bug Fixes
- Choose Widescreen Mod and DDFix if you have a widescreen monitor
- Press Ok. Most options will flicker by, with the exception of the widescreen mod, which will ask for your screen res
- Enjoy the game!
If you have any problems with items (for example, if you can’t pick something up or use a switch) then go to the game menu, options, controls and save your key bindings.
irrationale 
Oh, very cool. Love that game. Had quite a time getting it to work in XP. š Wonder if I can use wine to get it runnin in osx.
According to our chums at WineHQ, the wine engine should be able to handle it without a strain: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=2270
You’re running wineskin, yes?
http://wineskin.doh123.com/