While you’re waiting for BioShock Infinite to be released next month, you might as well catch up on your Shock-based history, and play System Shock 2. Even though the game is largely touted as a fantastic, popular gaming experience, it has always been oddly difficult to find due to rights and trademark issues. Once you do find it, it was then oddly difficult to get running on a modern machine. Now, instead of using one of the most amusing torrents on the internet — titled “Everything I Use to Play System Shock 1 and 2 on Win 7 64-bit” — to get SS2 up and running, you can simply spend $9.99 on Good Old Games.
If you missed out on what laid the groundwork for the BioShock series, you can finally see where your favorite unsettling underwater adventure came from, and even why some might say BioShock sort of shoehorned some pseudo-RPG systems (the item gathering and the upgrades, to name a couple) into the game.
The game is 363MB, and thanks to Night Dive Studios, it will happily run on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8, no longer needing workarounds to get the thing loading. Even better, Night Dive says that all of your favorite mods can be applied to the new version, and the studio put hard work into tweaking the game to make sure it is as stable as possible.
Along with the purchase, you’ll get the soundtrack as well as a developer interview and artwork. Night Dive Studios also announced that the game will be coming to Steam, so if you don’t want to deal with yet another digital games distribution service, you can simply wait until SS2 hits Valve’s platform, though there is no solid date announced as of yet. If you can’t wait, it’s only $9.99 and less than half a gig. Get going.