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The story explained that Ryan set all the vita chambers to be coded only to his genetic signature. A signature that you, as his direct offspring, share.”

It just became one for me…

What was the point in killing Ryan, if the Vita-Chambers were just going to revive him?

This may or may not have been covered in the 2 audio-logs I can’t seem to find…

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“There’s also the fight over who gets to control Rapture… only there’s nothing left to control. Why the hell is there a huge war between these two people?”
Better to rule in hell.

“And hell, who is even reading the propaganda put up everywhere? The citizens are veritable zombies, yet so much of the game is focussed around Rapture as some kind of, at least partially, functioning society.”
It’s automated. Just like the vending machines laugh the same propaganda reel has been repeating since the new years riot. Whilst the posters have become torn and overgrown.

“I found that, on the whole, my biggest problem was that I could never accept what was going on. It was mostly a ‘wait, how did they get from A to B if they…’ mindset. The backstory and the current story don’t seem to link up.”
You’re going to need an example to back that up.

“There’s also problems like: if I’ve been here 10 minutes, and I can take 4-5 of these people who’s entire lives have been dedicated to making themselves stronger through their Adam use… what exactly am I doing that they aren’t? Deus Ex made you out to be a pseudo God-soldier. In this game, if anything, they’re the God-soldiers, although they sure as hell don’t act like it.”
You’re built from the ground up to take advantage of your surroundings. Who knows what Fontaine, Suchong and Tenebaum added to you in your accelerated adolescence. You’re certainly faster, stronger and possibly smarter than anything else. Also think in terms of a new disease added to an ecosystem which has balanced itself out.

I’m not saying its perfect, the Fontaine/Atlas twist seems pointless and the normal difficulty setting is a tad too easy, but with fifty or so varied weapons, chunky combat and a story rich with foreshadowing and side plots it richly deserves the rewards it got.

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The story explained that Ryan set all the vita chambers to be coded only to his genetic signature. A signature that you, as his direct offspring, share. The lack of ability to use the vita chambers was referenced in the logs and story.

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I read above and did indeed find his comment, but again he says it’s a late 90′s style game. Other people may have said System Shock 2.5 (there are obviously more comments here than I’d like to go over, heh,) but in my experience the most common outcries would become much louder, and more of a screech if one compared Bioshock to System Shock.

System Shocks main problem is that, unlike Deus Ex, it’s problems aren’t balanced by a particularly well done aspect of the game. Every part of it is, at best, ‘good,’ and I have absolutely no drive to play it again.

Consider things that completely remove you from any immersion possible – you disable two turrets and a camera, run up, and in the nick of time… play a puzzle. Then, just as you beat it, you get to the second turret just in time to… play a puzzle. There’s also problems like: if I’ve been here 10 minutes, and I can take 4-5 of these people who’s entire lives have been dedicated to making themselves stronger through their Adam use… what exactly am I doing that they aren’t? Deus Ex made you out to be a pseudo God-soldier. In this game, if anything, they’re the God-soldiers, although they sure as hell don’t act like it.

There’s also the fight over who gets to control Rapture… only there’s nothing left to control. Why the hell is there a huge war between these two people? And hell, who is even reading the propaganda put up everywhere? The citizens are veritable zombies, yet so much of the game is focussed around Rapture as some kind of, at least partially, functioning society.

I found that, on the whole, my biggest problem was that I could never accept what was going on. It was mostly a ‘wait, how did they get from A to B if they…’ mindset. The backstory and the current story don’t seem to link up.

I do agree on your point that people are being over-critical, but a lot of that is because, on the opposite side of things, people are being too lenient. This game was literally hailed as a FPS rejuvenation, something that would forever change the way FPS’s would be made. In the end, it was basically a bunch of interesting ideas tossed together, without being finished.

While I did enjoy much of it on the play-through, I have no intention on beating the game twice, as I feel I’ve seen all that I need to.

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So I do feel there’s been a backlash. Part of it really does seem to be the usual internet contrarianism, but I think part of it may also be that more time meant more people getting past the really shiny early-to-mid-game and hitting the less successful later chapters. Which seem to have soured some people on the game entirely. (Again, I don’t really get that – I liked all of it except the final boss fight, which was trivial and rather silly, even if much of the late game wasn’t *as* brilliant.)

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On the one hand the initial, positive, critical reaction to Bioshock was much like that line in Life of Brian, “I say you’re the Messiah, Lord, and I should know, I’ve followed a few!” But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some very good things to say.

Essentially, what the Bioshock debate seems to me to say is that we, as gamers and critics, seem to want from gaming in general, a mechanics-free, totally immersive world in which we are told a deep and complex story well, that evolves around the player’s actions, where the setting is a believable world, and where we can’t see the maths behind the action or the design that’s making us feel so immersed. Also, some of us, would quite like to have fun. People got annoyed because Bioshock didn’t do a), and some people didn’t have b), and they were expecting rafts of both.

When someone commented that they would quite like RPG mechanics in Bioshock’s FPS world, I would hazard a guess that what’s behind that idea is the desire to feel, in any game, a sense of control over yourself in the game, as opposed to a desire to see mechanics transposed across.

It’s mainly about feel.

Personally, I think computer game genres are woeful things, because most of the best games break those boundaries. Or try to do away with convention. Deus Ex gets called an FPS/RPG, but really, it wasn’t either of them properly. It was a game which was trying to break the conventions of the time because it could, since games cost less then, and it was seen as less of a risk. Half-Life broke the FPS conventions by trying to have more of a story, more of a world. Mario 64 broke platforming conventions (and created a whole raft of new ones) by breaking the 2D wall.

What I find personally disappointing is that the genre-pushing of the great few of the late 90s/early 00s (HL, Deus Ex, etc.) seems to be less common. Or at least when it takes place, it happens like Stalker – not in a particularly broad way, good though it was.

Ironically, I think the perfect game of our time is Mario Galaxy. It emphatically does not revolutionise the platformer, but it does show how limited the boundaries are – in this case, the boundary of gravity. And the boundary of staying in three dimensions. Crysis points out the limitations of non-destructable trees, and non-flingable chickens. What’s going on now seems to be to be fervent evolution, not revolution. Half-Life, Deus Ex, SS2, were at the time revolutionary, which is why they get talked about in such awestruck tones. But as I said in the Deus Ex 3 post, I’m not interested in Deus Ex 3, because it will only be at best more Deus Ex. What I would rather see – and what Bioshock was hyped by some people to be – is the next revolution.

But – and here’s the rub – maybe it isn’t coming. Maybe there’s been too many games; graphics have evolved to a peak, but the way we physically play games hasn’t changed at all; that actually evolution, rather than revolution, is the way forward. It’s slower, but maybe in a crowded, expensive-to-produce market, more necessary.

We’re getting there. I hope. A piece at a time.

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I’ve actually just written a piece about the piece about the game. Partly because, one the one hand, I think you’re wrong to defend it so strongly. A game with a Metacritic score of – and it makes me disbelieving every time I see it – 96 seems like it should be able to stand up for itself.

And the problem is just that – the score is so overwhelmingly positive, that I worry what signals that sends out to other development companies. It says that we’re willing to accept very vaguely innovative ideas, as long as it’s graphically beautiful and has at least three talking points.

For me, Bioshock was a shooter that failed at as much as it succeeded in. And, I don’t know, maybe that does deserve credit. I do know this, though – gaming, as an industry, tears apart games that attempt just as much and succeed in more obvious areas.

Invisible War is, for me, to Deus Ex what Bioshock is to System Shock 2. A solid gameplay base, tacked onto what should have been a brilliant progression of a great concept, but what ended up being a slightly clumsy repainting of it, with fewer colours and a slightly dog-eared brush. We hated Invisible War, despite my protests. Now we love Bioshock, despite my protests.

Life goes on, though. The hyperbole for this was nothing compared to Super Mario Galaxy.

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