Bioshock
 

I played this for 360 a while ago and had a huge boner for it. Last week I finally got a computer brawny enough to handle it and I finally beat it.

And...I don't get it?

How come the levels take such a serious dive in quality after Fort Frolic? How come the final boss fight is so anti-climactic? How come only the ending scene is so good-looking? How come the game unceremoniously dumps you back at the title screen afterwards? How come the learning curve morphs into an acute angle somewhere around the Big Daddy factory? What the fuck is up with the picture-taking system, why do I keep losing my bonuses, how the fuck far along am I with that one particular enemy, WHY IS THE GAME GIVING ME OBJECTIVES FROM THREE HOURS AGO.

And I have a serious question here:

I gathered he was born and sent to the real world two years before the game? Right? And he was genetically altered to age rapidly, right? So he basically ages on a 10:1 ratio, and according to the good ending, he gets all those little sisters as a makeshift family? Only, on his deathbed, they're all graduating college, making them 22 at the very least...which (assuming they're 8 years old at the time of the game, why not) means at least 14 years have gone by, making him at least 160 years old on his deathbed. I guess those very same genetic modifications could also make him live very, very long but that's outrageous and I will repeal it.

I'm sorry, I was just really excited for playing through this game and I'm utterly shocked it got so, uh, bad.

I got up to the part where Ryan gasses that chick and it wanted me to tool all around the planet looking for some part or something and my boredom finally overcame my desire to say that I've beaten the game.

My main problem with Bioshock was how after about an hour I could predict every single level to go like this:

ALL ROIGHT, BOYO, YA FOUND THA ELEVATOR, TOYME TA KILL ROYAN

LARGE EXPLOSION

GODDAMN SPLOICERS! WOULD YA KOINDLY FOIND A WAY AROUND


System Shock 2 pulled this shit all the time, too - it took me 4 hours to complete virtually the first objective I'd been given - but at least it was a little creative with it. Like, say, a parasitic network of fungi had implanted themselves within the elevator shaft, and I'd have to run all over the hydraulics deck trying to find neurotoxins to kill it with.

Now that I think about it, I hate System Shock 2 almost as much as Bioshock, except Bioshock has the taint of not being original with anything; same basic plot structure, same retarded fetch quests, same audio logs and ghost sequences, etc. It even falls completely apart in the last hour or so and has an idiotic, nonsensical ending.

Bioshock's just way, way stupider since there are pretty much no RPG elements and everything is retardedly simplistic. Also, In System Shock 2, if you ran out of Hypos in the middle of a fight and died because of it, there was pretty much no way in hell you could keep playing after restarting in the Vita Chambers, since you'd keep dying against whatever killed you and you'd run out of money sooner or later. I usually just reverted to an earlier save if I died, it was way less of a hassle.

In Bioshock, I killed an Elite Bouncer with a wrench and fire. It cost nothing, except about 5 minutes of my time.

Really I kept playing because I went into laughing fits every time he said boyo; I have no idea why I found it funny.
Heh. 'boyo'.

I'm pretty sure they only aged him into his twenties.

Oh, SS2 is also better because you can stage 4 man co-ops through the game that are batshit hilarious :<

I highly reccomend it if you ever get the opportunity

I completely forgot about one of the last Suchong tapes you get. In short, he says that when you were one year old, you weighed 58 pounds and had the gross musculature of a 19 year old.

So theoretically he ages TWENTY years for every one, making him at least a sprightly 320 fucking years old.

What the hell.

Bloody sploicers, indeed.

fuck, I liked bioshock. if you disagree, I propose that your time may be better spent eating a bag of dicks.

Like I said, they aged him 20 years, and then sent him to the surface.

I don't see what's so hard to understand about that concept either. It's not the first time it's shown up in sci-fi and it certainly won't be the last. The fact that you're sitting there, doing MATH on it, schimid, is what's amazing to me. Do you people just not enjoy games anymore? It seems like you take all the fucking fun out of everything.

Clearly the game shows that the protagonist ages the same way all humans do, seeing as he lived long enough to watch all the girls grow up and become parents themselves.

This is also assuming that he permanently ages exponentially. He could have been engineered to grow crazy fast the first year or so, then slow down to a normal metabolism and whatnot.
Also, the downloaded plasmids are worthless. >:(

That's what I'm saying. They took an embryo that had been fertilized by Ryan, designed Jack to mature quickly, and sent him to the surface. It's not like you have to look hard to see this information, the game practically shoves it down your throat.

I get that, it's just part of the reason I don't really like science fiction. Sure, I can roll with that whole "UH, THAT'S JUST HOW IT IS," but for a game being as hyped as this one is, game of the year, being touted as high literature that borrows heavily from Ayn Rand's objectivist writings, it'd be kind of a disservice not to ask a few questions.

It's not like I didn't like the game, it's that I got tremendously bored on my way out of Fort Frolic and that it never really picked up afterward. Sure, the story was still moving along, but I thought the level design was incredible until that point and never again after. I think of this game in the same way I think of Silent Hill, where the combat and gameplay are really secondary to the story and environment. It just felt a lot more tedious when I didn't actually want to explore that environment.

I think the point here is that System Shock 2 is a better game, anyway.

I found Bioshock to still be a great fame. It just could have been way better. Like halo-killer better, almost.

After playing SS2 first and Bioshock right after it, I can say this: They´re basically the same game in terms of design. System Shock offers more control over the character-building, true, but in the end, it´s pretty much the same with the plasmids. SS2 had the additional reparing and maintenance-thing, yeah, but I never felt like it had a big impact on my way of playing System Shock 2. Research is in both, Weaponmodding is also there, 80% of the PSI-Skills are useless in SS2 and so are 80% of the Plasmids in Bioshock...

I like both of them, but if I had to choose, I´d choose System Shock, because I prefer Sci-Fi over 50´s.

Also I don´t think System Shock is a lot more complex than Bioshock, the different features are just handled a little differently.

How many times ya'll gonna bitch about Bioshockkkkkkkkkk

Except System Shock came first, which makes Bioshock a BIG STEALER

or, since most of the same people developed it, it makes them really, really lazy

I liked the parts when you'd turn around and all of a sudden there was someone RIGHT THERE behind you. I swear I turned around and three Houdini Splicers wer circled around me, just staring. Then I blew us all up with the grenade launcher.

We should rather be thankful that the concept survived since EA sits on Systemshock like...well something big and ignorant sitting on a piece of gold. Beschissen, I say.

Anyway, it´s good that Bioshock came out because it made EA think "hey, maybe we could use this old license here...bit dusty but good".
The only problem will be - EA. Simple, dumb games. Mostly at least. I guess System Shock 3 or "Rebirth, Return of Shodan" or whatever will be even simpler than Bioshock in terms of RPG-Elements. And that, by the way, is what I expect Dead Space to be. A simple shooter with horror-elements. Yawn.

EA games used to be freaking awesome, until they became greedy bastards. THat Game Infarcer article about them putting a logo on the moon explains everything.

Isn't EA mostly a publisher?

I would think the developers they choose to work with are the awesome ones.

Not really. For them, it's less about getting the best developers ever, and more about buying out as many developers as they can, so that there's less competition and they're pumping out more games. However, the old EA used to actually work with the developers to help make it a good game; these days, they tend to actually shape the game based on how the sales on other games went. Basically, if some platforming game got great sales and reviews because it had lava-spewing dinosaur tanks, the next platforming game will probably have something similar to lava-spewing dinosaur tanks. Most other publishers and developers actually tend to find new things to do.