System Shock 2. I was going to suggest you play that actually, so Caaroid (sp) suggesting it only makes my case stronger :)

I bought it a couple of years ago for $9.95 in the bargain bin; I suspect you might have trouble buying it new in USA anywhere at all, might have to hit an online website or Ebay.

I -strongly- suggest it. It has a very very good storyline and it is more of an RPG than an FPS. Just watch out - the first few levels are quite difficult and can be discouraging. Definately choose Marine as your training and get Maintanence (I think, the one that lets you repair weapons) because you need that the most when you first start out because most of the guns you find for the first 3-4 levels have durability of 1-3 and they are usually worthless after about 10 shots, sometimes fewer. The higher the quality of the weapon, the slower it degrades, but its on an exponential curve which means that once the weapon gets to 5 or lower durability it drops pretty damn quick. For this reason, Melee weapons are other good things to invest in, particularly the Laser Rapier and the Crystal (very strong), especially when you get the 2 special add-on modules for melee weapons.

Storyline in a nutshell: Sequal to System Shock, where SHODAN, an AI, took over Citadel station. You join a starship on a deep space mission and get put into statis, and when you wake up almost all of the rest of the crew is dead and you have been given special implants. You find out that some kind of virus has taken over the crew and they've turned into weird crazed zombies and that the ships computer, Xerxes, has been taken over by some outside force. Obviously SHODAN is involved somehow, and when you finally come face to face with her, it is done extremely well. The plot thickens, and then twists, and twists some more.

Here's the leading fansite on it. Go to the info datanode for "about the game" type overview.

http://www.sshock2.com/

And if you do get it, make sure you get this mod, it greatly improves the graphical detail of the game, particulary the models (which looked like really peculiar crash-test dummies, rather than people).

http://home.att.net/~shtup/index.html

 

Oh, and the company also made Deus Ex, a spiritual sequal to SS2. I only played the demo of that, and it was interesting, but not nerely as immersive or cool as System Shock and it was also much more of an action/FPS type game.

Deus Ex 2 was a lot of shit, don't touch it.


Oh, and a really cool thing about SS2 is that you're slightly psychic and you keep seeing and hearing the ghosts of the dead crew, some of which can be very emotional and scary, particularly one scene in a large dining hall that is all messed up with big blood stains everywhere and you can hear the people screaming and the battle waging, and then see the results all around you.


One of my favorite quotes from the game; can't find any audio of it online unfortunately, its got multiple overlapping and pitch changing voices, really atmospheric, and is spoken by the mysterious alien entity aboard the ship. This happens when you come across a room full of alien eggs:

"Babies must rest, babies must sleep. Wise is the one who does not awaken them. Leave this place now, or we shall wound you, as you have us.


Also my code is almost a word this time: rgreat

 

System shock 2 and deus ex were the best games I ever played :). Those games were more like shooters though while HG:L seems more like an action/adventure type game.

I found some good screencaptured movies of HG over at: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/hellgatelondon/media.html
but they're very small I'm afraid.

 

That's http://www.gamespot.com/
pc/rpg/hellgatelondon/media.html
sorry, no edit function.

 

I can also recommend Deus Ex. However, I haven't really grasped whether this game you're looking for necessarily ahs to be sci-fi. If not, you certainly should check out morrowind, teh third game in teh elder scrolls series, with the fourth coming out this spring, Oblivion. These are full-fledged RPG's with FPS view, intricate skill systems, and completely open-ended gameplay.I cant recommend this enough.

 

I've always heard system shock and deus ex were good games, but do they really follow the projected HGL model, with stats and skill points and all of that? Or are they just FPS games that aren't all out shooting warfare, but involve more strategy and creeping around and talking to NPCs and other RPG elements?

HGL isn't that sort of game at all, from what I can see. It's going to play just like D2, with very fast action and tons of monsters to blow away. It's just doing it from the FPS viewpoint, which occasional shifts to 3rd person overhead, when you go into melee mode with a sword. Oh, and it's all randomly-generated, much more so than even D2 was, which should make for more long term fun. I assume that people get sick of the levels on other shooters once they've got them memorized?

I've got no idea of HGL will be a great game with long term fun, like D2 was. Have to play it and see for that, but I like the concept and I know the designers have done it in the past.

 

There are lots of stats, and generally each type of character (Marine, Navy, Psi-ops) will get some of each:

Tech skills:
Hacking, Maintainence (needed), Modification, Repair (useless), Research

Weapon skills:
Standard, Energy, Heavy, Exotic

Psionic skills:
(5 levels, I think 8 skills per level, however according to this guide only about 6 are really useful).

Stats:
Strength, Agility, Cyber-affinity, Endurance, Psi.

All of these are bought from upgrade stations using Cyber Modules, which you can discover through exploration (generally in the earlier part of the game) and you get credited for completing tasks ('quests') on the main storyline of the game. There are also 4 extra OS upgrades that give you extra special advantages that are found throughout the game, although the last one doesn't come until very late.

Marines are the all-out warriors, relying on weapons, Navy are the tech experts, relying on hacking and repairing things for advantages and Psi-ops use psionics to alter the world around them (spells, basically).

I got confuzzled earlier, you should play as the Navy, rather than the Marine, as Hacking gives you a huge advantage in the early game.

oopfas.

 

I believe the System Shock 2(SS2) engine was the same as that used in the original Thief engine, if you ever played that. To me, the movement and environment interaction feel about the same.. Thief requires a lot more sneaking around of course. It is much slower paced than quake and its bretheren.

So as to keep you from getting any work done on the novel, here is an easy link to the download :)

http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=3924

Its a decent site that I've used for a long time to get old abandoned games. They won't offer a download for games that can still be bought, but they will archive ones that are no longer available (and whos owners havn't asked them to take the download off the site).

I believe this download version has no end game cutscene, so you should defintely try to find the cd if you'd like to see that.

I don't think that http address is going to go through properly, so here it is broken up:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/
/game.php?id=3924