Even BITD, they were cramming more free & cheap PC games down your throat than you knew what to do with. Before the CD era, your local game shop usually had piles of floppies for a dollar or two each. Then PC gamer came with a CD every month full of demos and a few full games. Wal-mart's discount CD rack always had a variety of classics for $9.99 each (the full version of Doom II was on that rack by 1998 or so), and there was usually a disc with a fair number of obscure titles for $20 or so.
That's true, but for some reason I never felt this as badly as a kid with a PC as opposed to now. I wonder if my issue is partially a result of age.
I do think there is a mitigating factor, two in fact: one a lot of those shovelware CDs were effectively just demos, so I don't feel as pressured since its not like I just bought a hundred full games (though apparently some of those CDs were basically warez, as the youtube channel Ancient DOS Games discovered). The second was that getting a new game still involved a trip to a physical store, which wasn't the same sort of everyday occurence that logging onto Steam or the EShop is.... plus back then my parents had to get a game for me and I recall my parents were NOT the kind to just get me anything I asked for.
The color scheme was because in the early 1990s, that was the default 256-color palette for VGA games. It was a little while before custom palettes were the norm.
And to answer
@Polyraptor 's thing about the interface, that was likely a resource management thing. Any N64 speedrunner knows that when there's less graphics on the screen, the game runs faster. Same is true on PC so a lot of games that would otherwise be demanding would put the game area in a small screen to make the game run smoother. At least SS1 gives you the choice to go full (I never took it because I felt having all the info on screen was important).
SS1 has flaws honestly, the biggest one probably just that the controls take getting used to and in my experience, the game crashes alot ("don't forget to salt the fries!") but when its running fine and once you've gotten used to its controls, there's a lot it does I wish had been carried over.
Like the door hacking being an actual puzzle. I hated how it worked in SS2 because it LOOKS like a puzzle, but in reality its just you randomly clicking and hoping a sequence that solves it is even doable.
In fact that's one of my biggest problems with SS2 in general--its attempt to be more like an RPG feels like it goes the Daggerfall route where player skill is abstracted out in favor of basically everything is about the stat sheet and hoping you get the roll you need.
I'll say it... I recently got to play Bioshock for the first time and in a lot of ways it seriously improved on SS2, and this is one of the ways. It manages to make hacking an actual player experience.
One of my biggest disappointments was the replacing of the stimpatches (or particularly, their effects) with the hypos. First, there's only three now--health, psi, and speed. In the first game, the speed stimpatch basically goes into bullet time--you move normally but the world itself has gone slow. It even had ancillory uses (like this one part where you're trapped in a room with a time bomb--using a speed patch literally gives you more time). SS2's Speed Hypo? Just ups your characters movement speed. Literally only good for speedrunners or escaping enemies. No cool outside the box uses or anything like that.
Pretty much the biggest moment that pissed me off in SS2 was this time I picked up a shotgun from an enemy corpse, repaired it to working order.... then found I could not fire it because you literally can't use weapons unless you have a point of skill in that weapon. That is the dumbest shit ever. I would've been fine with just being penalized somehow, but not being able to use it AT ALL is bullshit. There's another weapon whose usage is literally just "you hit enemies with it like you do with the wrench" but again, can't use it at all unless you have a skill point.
That's SS2 in a nutshell... pretty much all the "improvements" it tried to make wind up just making it a worse game. Lots of good ideas on paper but poor in practice. And I didn't even touch on everything I hated. Here's one last one: it was convenient in the first game how there was ONE battery that powered everything that just had its own indicator in the corner. SS2 replaces this with individualized batteries that not only run out way faster, but which you have to go into your inventory (which itself can't hold near as much) to check... its more of a hassle now.
also, if we're talking about graphics, SS1 actually made me feel like I was in a space station despite its limitations. SS2 just makes me feel like I'm playing a shitty N64 game.
Pretty much, SS2's only saving grace is the story. I will agree with people who thought that one scene (you know the one) was a pretty epic moment. so I would call it a case of a game where its better to watch someone else play it than to play it yourself.
That said, I'm thinking of trying again but with a Psi chararacter build. Plasmids in Bioshock are so much fun that I wonder if maybe going full Psi in System Shock 2 would just make the game better.
