new level". Next Generation Magazine summarized the game as "a great blend of strategy and action backed up with all the extras". Various sources have ranked SHODAN as one of the most effective antagonists and female characters in the history of video gaming.IGN Staff (March 7, 2006). Top 10 Tuesday: Most Memorable Villains . IGN. Retrieved August 27, 2017. In the years following its release, System Shock has been inducted into many lists of the best video games of all time, including those by PC Gamer, GameSpy, and Computer Gaming World. In 1998, PC Gamer declared it the 6th-best computer game ever released, and the editors called it "one of the finest games ever due to its seductive game design that blended a fantastic storyline with meaningful, suspenseful action in a way that has rarely been equaled". Legacy In a Gamasutra feature, Patrick Redding of Ubisoft attested that "the fact that so many of System Shock features are now virtually de rigueur in modern sci-fi shooters is a testament to the influence exerted by this one game". GameSpy argued that the game "is the progenitor of today's story-based action games, a group with titles as diverse as Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, and even Half-Life". Eurogamer called the System Shock series "the benchmark for intelligent first-person gaming" and noted that it "kick-start[ed] the revolution which ... has influenced the design of countless other games". Steven Wright for Glixel said in a 2017 essay that System Shock still is important to gaming today, and that the only reasons it is not considered a "Mt. Olympus of gaming" is due to its lower sales compared to games like Half-Life that sold in the millions, and that at the time it was released, it was difficult for players to adjust to the complex systems in the game compared to straightforward first-person shooters. The game has been cited as a key popularizer of emergent gameplay, and alongside Thief and Deus Ex, is considered one of the defining games of the immersive sim genre. Certain game developers have acknowledged System Shock influence on their products. With Deus Ex, developer Warren Spector revealed a desire to "build on the foundation laid by the Looking Glass guys in games like ... System Shock". Developer Ken Levine has commented that the "spirit of System Shock is player-powered gameplay: the spirit of letting the player drive the game, not