Well, my actual website is now fully operational. I assure you, it is quite deadly. A lot of the content from this blog has been copied over there already, not sure if I'll move the rest or not.
Right now we have a couple of articles, weekly columns, bi weekly webcomic. Soon we'll have some videos up there too. So go there... go there now. Add it to your favorites. Share with your friends.
Please... I beg of you. For the love of all that is good, visit my site. Now back to the old and out of date blog you've somehow found:
Yes, the original. With the internet buzzing about Bioshock 2 (and by buzzing I of course mean that it came out a month ago and has been thoroughly digested, haven’t you heard that Final Fantasy XIII is out? And God of War III is next week?) I was reminded that I had yet to play the original Bioshock. So I went to the store to pick up a copy.Note to all: Bioshock now costs less than 20$ so you really have no excuse to not pick it up and play it if you haven’t already done so.
First Impressions and Setting:
The first thing that struck me about the game was the setting, I’ve heard a lot of people describe the setting as steampunk… but I would say that this is a little over generalized (that’s right, the very specific setting of steampunk is too general for Bishock, la-di-da). It is somewhat steampunk… but steampunk set in the late 50s, early 60s, which gives it a flavour all of its own. I would actually go as far to say that the setting is actually cyberpunk… but with the 1950s view of the word “cyber”. Regardless of how you try to define it, the setting is instantly compelling and draws you in almost immediately. The game is literally full of “Huh, that’s neat…” moments and imagery based on its own setting.
The entire game takes place in the underwater city of Rapture, built by visionary/rich crazy person Andrew Ryan. The idea here was that there would be a city full of people who were sick and tired of morality and government and wanted to get away from it all to do their own thing, free to pursue their own endeavours no matter what the rest of society thinks about it. It’s like a crash course in objectivism gone wrong. Did any of that ring any bells? Andrew Ryan? Pretty close to Ayn Rand, yeah? Ever read the Fountainhead? And that’s just one of many things that make this game badass. Yes it’s a fun game even on the surface, but if you want to dig deeper, the depth is there. It’s a little like Evangelion that way, sure there are some badass robot fights, but there’s also a lot more going on.
Anyways, naturally this sort of environment leads to people getting carried away, free to act upon their own ideals instead of society’s norms (the first area of play has some nasty examples of what happens when morality stops being an issue for a plastic surgeon, that gives you an idea of what sort of issues the rest of the game will tackle). As the rich and creative run free through the city, there are eventual class struggles (it’s a whole city after all, someone needs to clean the toilets, so there’s a working class in Rapture that’s not too pleased with how things are going) and the whole thing melts down and sends the city into a small scale civil war. Also, everyone has super powers. There’s that. You, the “hero” of the game shows up sometime after the conflict, city in ruins, with some of the key figures representing various philosophical ideals still surviving to hinder or help you along the way.
Gameplay:
At its core, Bioshock is an FPS. You run around shooting things to progress the story, as it progresses you get bigger and better guns, and you get bigger and better super powers.
Ah yes, the super powers. Scattered throughout the city are little girls, called Little Sisters, and they are protected by big guys in suits with drill hands, they’re called Big Daddys. Their purpose isn’t immediately evident, but without revealing too much I can say that they’re a key reason why everyone has superpowers. Of course, you get superpowers early on. These superpowers are called Plasmids, and have a variety of effects. Some are straight forward (ie: Lightning Bolt) and others are a little more abstract/strategic (ie: Decoy Dummies). Some of these powers will also let you impact the environment (flame melts ice, lighting overloads some machinery, etc), but these environmental changes are pretty few and far between. A closed wooden door will not burn down, or be destroyed with an RPG, and sometimes glass will break and sometimes it won’t, which can be frustrating. The game makes up for this by having a full map available to you at all times (not a strange Symphony of the Night map that shows you some stuff but not others). If you’re not sure where you should go, check the map, you can go to every place in every level with no backtracking needed hours later (looking at you Metroid Prime).
The bread and butter of the game is still a shooter, and you can get through most encounters using only your guns, but the Plasmids provide a nice little change of pace to set the game apart from its competition.
There’s also a sickeningly repetitious mini “hacking” game. Or rather, “plumbing” game. Throughout the game you will be invited to “hack” just about everything, vending machines, security cameras, health stations, gun turrets, safes. You name it, you hack it. The game mechanic that supports this is a mini game where you shuffle tiles around a square board to make sure water can flow from an entry point to an exit point, with different traps to circumvent and various effects on the water flow speed to mix things up a little. This game is fun at first, but you will be expected to repeat the motions no less than 100 times throughout the game. In later levels this mini game not only gets hard, it sometimes gets impossible, but by this stage you should probably be employing your auto-hack devices anyways. I got to the point where I was just destroying as many hackable things as I could, just to save myself the frustration of playing the mini game again.
Critiques:
While a good many things are right with this game, there are a few things that could have been tweaked or improved upon (other than the aforementioned “hacking” game).
First, boss fights. The game builds up to some of them (stage bosses) and has some of them just sort of roaming around (Big Daddy fights). The first problem is that stage bosses aren’t nearly as challenging as Big Daddys, and the second is that Big Daddy fights aren’t that hard either (you can YouTube some videos of people taking them down in under 5 seconds). Stage bosses are just a little harder than random encounters, and honestly, two or three normal enemies attacking you at once is usually more of a challenge than any given “boss” (up to and including the final boss, the final boss who I was able to take down to about 25% health by just running at him with no thought to strategy and hitting him again and again with a wrench and not healing myself). The point here is that once you figure out that bosses are a pushover, they lose their intimidation factor, and it sort of hurts the game’s mood. Big Daddys’ are portrayed as these unstoppable killing machines and if you so much as look at one funny they’ll tear you limb from limb, by the midpoint of the game I was picking them off for fun, which is a problem.
This brings me to my second point, which sort of encompasses the first point: overall difficulty. A friend of mine suggested that being a “veteran” gamer, you should automatically play any game you buy on the hardest setting, to make sure the game is challenging. I played through this game on normal difficulty, and it made me agree with him, the only time I ever died is when I messed around and tried to do something creative or stupid (“Hmm… I will light all the enemies on fire, then supernaturally enrage them so they attack each other, and instead of hiding I will join the fray swinging a wrench wildly! … Aww shit, I died… stupid game…”). Even set on “Hard” I can’t see it being all that challenging, there are respawn chambers all over the place and when you respawn, whatever damage you’ve done to the enemies stays intact, so if you don’t mind running around a little bit you can just respawn continually, chipping away at the enemy and not really worrying. You can turn these chambers off in the settings and you’ll just respawn from your last save point, and be respawn I mean reload from save point. And by reload I mean “watch the screen go to your save menu, slowly load the level, and wait some more”. This is incredibly time consuming and basically punishes you for trying to make the game more challenging. This is something you shouldn’t have to do. Think about it, in order to make this game challenging you need to play on a harder setting and disable certain gameplay features. That’s messed up
My third gripe is the “collect stuff” element of the game. Stuff is literally everywhere: chips, chocolate bars, ammo, health packs, money, tape recordings, booze, etc., can be found in every safe, bookshelf, box, corpse, trashcan in the game. To search for something you have to press “X”, a little menu will open up to show you what’s in the location (up to three items) and if you want one of them, you’ll have to take all of them, in the order that they appear. This occasionally and hilariously leads to you getting drunk off two bottles of booze to get to 5$ in someone’s pocket. This is a great image of our hero. Searching for stuff also gets pretty time consuming since if you’re like me you play games with a compulsion to do everything and get everything. Add to that there’s no visible inventory for everything non-ammo related: “Oh… I can’t carry more distilled water? Good to know game…” and it gets a little frustrating.
Finally, there’s the “morality system” that is boasted about on the back of the box. “Become the saviour of the city or the douchebag of the city”… or something like that. This actually boils down to “Save little girls or kill little girls”… THE CHOICE IS YOURS!! Not exactly a deep morality system here… I’ll let you guess which one gets you the “good” ending and which one gets you the “bad” ending…
Overall:
Tons of fun, highly recommended, the shortcomings are forgivable and are more than made for by the high points.
Edit @ 4:26 pm 03/10/10: Removed arbitrary score out of 10... I disliked it and it bothered me while I ate lunch so I got rid of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment