Thank you for all the advices. I will try it again with this knowledge. For my first post, I was used (by Bioshock...) that destroying a camera starts the alarm. If that's not the case in SS2, it's much easier of course.

One thing:
"they make the game hard initially so that you feel more scared"
No. Definately no. Dieing means frustration, not horror. I did not die once in Dead Space and still it scared me big time ;)


Also, the hold-the-mouse-button-trick for the wrench is great :D



Thanks for all the advice

The hardest part of starting SS2 as a new player is getting used to how the enemies work, and the fact that you do NOT get a gun to start. (even when you get a gun, try and use your wrench as much as possible since you save ammunition.) With enemies - when you only have a wrench, try and sneak up behind them. If they see you first, duck into a room or around a corner, and wait for the to approach and you can ambush them.

As for hacking security terminals, you really should only need to do that before you get a gun. Once you get a gun just shoot the cameras. (if a camera sees you, hide, wait 10 seconds until you hear it 'beep' to reset - then pull out your gun and shoot it.)

Now that you can wrench kill enemies and you can kill cameras, the game becomes one of exploration. Try and explore as much as possible, finding items and audio logs that tell the story.

Also handy to know is that if you travel through an airlock or with an elevator (where you see a loading screen) the game makes a save at this point. So if you go into your load menu, at the bottom it says "auto save" and you can load that game to restart that level if you need to.

Once you finish the first level, you'll get the hang of it. Then you can come back if you need more tips and we'll be happy to help.

Let me give one other small bit of advice if I may.

In games like SS2 your ears are often as important as your eyes when it comes to surviving. The advice was already given to turn down the in game music but I would also suggest playing with a decent quality headset in a relatively quiet room. I'm often warned by the sounds way before I ever see something.

Death is how SS2 tells you that you haven't been playing with a sufficient sense of self-preservation.

The first few levels are tough. It's supposed to be. Deck 1 (Engineering) will really test you. But hang on (HINT: Save your rad-hypos) and once you hit deck 3-4 you will be able to start stockpiling extra ammo/guns.

Try and enjoy it as much as possible. Clearing the Deck 1 cargo bays while armed with a half-broken pistol? There's little in gaming that comes close ;)

It's interesting actually. I mean, I can enjoy games where you press A and something awesome happens, they're fun too. I do feel there's been a kind of "dumbing down" of games in a sense, but as someone said above, it's not necessarily the case the "dumbed down" games are bad games, they can definitely be fun in their own right.

But they are "dumbed down", they usually don't give you as many options and choices to fiddle around with. They're more streamlined so that you can get into them quickly and easily (especially with controllers).

And that's a fine thing for controller-based games.

But it does mean that if most games are made for controller-based systems, with that easy-to-get-into mentality, there's this whole other possibility of gameplay, represented by pre-Xbox/Playstation game designs, that's sort of been neglected.

Basically, there's more "headroom" with games that were designed around mouse and keyboard input, a higher ceiling for the possibility of a better balance of gameplay and immersion, as an ideal that was lost sight of to some extent in the last decade or so.

Hopefully, the popularity of this SS2 release (and the popularity of some of the Kickstarters that are promising to be based more around the possibilities that PC gaming offers, like Star Citizen) will remind the industry that there's still some mileage in games that are designed primarily for the PC (which basically means designed around mouse/keyboard input, with controller input being a secondary consideration, instead of the other way around, as it is nowadays).

Not everyone likes "more complicated", but it's obvious from the love that some of these older, more complicated games have, that there's still a sizeable number of people who do.

Well, this whole "dumbed down" versus "oldschool" business basically boils down to two things.

1. Lots of people on the receiving end equal "dumbed down" with "bad". And although I don't dispute the fact that there are people who use it with that meaning, they aren't the majority. There are lots of people who just use it as the fact that it is without the judgement and/or evaluation of the quality of games these receivers immediately assume. Saying a game is dumbed down compared to a game from 1996 is not the same as saying a game is bad or shitty or whatever. ^^

2. Games are as diverse as every other form of art. An Umberto Eco novel is not the same as an R.A. Salvatore novel. And a Michael Bay action shlock is not the same as and Paul Thomas Anderson picture. One is there to kill some time in your day the other is there to let your brain work. Call of Halo's Space Medal #829 is a game to switch your brain off and just do the mechanical motions of playing it. Just like watching Transformers. Kill time and don't use your brain after a hard day. SS2, lots of the indie games nowadays and a couple of AAA games provide the experience where you have to think and do stuff. Neither type of game is better then the other, but of course this is highly debatable in this world of ours where everybody beliefs his/her opinion is the universal truth.

I think the "dumbing down" of games we are discussing is driven, at least in part, by keeping them simple enough to be played on a console. I don't mean that in a negative way, I own a few consoles and enjoy playing their games. But as has been mentioned, keyboard and mouse open up possibilities that seem difficult or impossible to do with a typical console controller.

In other words, in my opinion it's a question of cost savings. If you can write one game that can work on PC and multiple consoles with minimal fuss in the porting process it saves money. Write one game, play multiple places...makes sense to me. The end result of this I think is that games are written for consoles and then ported over to the PC not because of any conscious intent make games "dumber" but because it's easier to port a console game to PC rather than a PC game to console generally speaking.

I'm not a game developer but that's the logic that seems to make sense to me.

I'm interested in this response. Whenever I use the recycler, I have to pick it up and place it over the top of a one inventory space item to recycle it. It will not work over things like shotguns that take multiple spaces. Am I using it wrong?

Weapons can't be recycled.

Yeah, can you imagine how many nanites you could rake in if you could recycle weapons? Just sit in a hallway and wait for respawns. :)

Like he said though, weapons can't be recycled. The three basic things you can/will recycle are ammo, implants and hypos/medkits. You can also recycle things like magazines and coffee cups for one nanite each, but unless you're really poor it's not worth it.

As the others said, it doesn't work with weapons(I had a brainfart moment and forgot you can't recycle weapons.....sorry about that.).

True, but the devs could have easily allowed weapon recycling with a bit of effort(By lessening the chance that a dead hybrid will carry a shotgun/weapon and/or setting the value of recycled weapons to a low value).
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Sometimes when I played the game I would collect all the recyclable "junk" items and recycle them to "tidy up" the area I was in. Anyone else ever do this?

You mean by having the shotgun that they were just shooting at you with magically evaporate? I don't think I'd much care for that solution.

Hehe, in all fairness, the shotgun that they were just shooting at you with is always magically jammed when you go to pick it up.