Kieron’s currently out at the Develop conference for us, so expect exciting missives soon. Or, more likely, incoherent booze-addled rambling about Kenickie. So, while he struggles manfully to work out what a wireless internet is, we can instead harken to reports from elsewhere in gamingdom. Specifically Videogaming247’s coverage of Ken Levine’s bravely-named “BioShock and Awe: Immersing the Gamer in an Alternate World Without Drowning Out the Gameplay” lecture and some quotable interview gobbets they tickled out of him afterwards. Tempestuous Mount Bioshock never quite goes dormant, it seems.
He’s not giving away much about whatever his next game is, beyond calling it “pretty crazy ambitious” – though it seems increasingly unlikely it’s the rumoured X-COM revamp.
“I’ll say this about it. It’s important to us that whatever we do has the same impact on the gamer that BioShock did. And so, I think that the company’s position on us and what we do is that we’re going to be breaking down barriers and breaking down doors.”
He does so like his breaking, that man.
So there’s that, but there’s also confirmation that he’s pretty much done with Bioshock now. The PS3 version and its extra content is nowt to do with him, and he reiterated that he’s got little to do with Bioshock 2. Which is good or bad news, depending on your take on the rumours that he’s difficult to work with. Which he also addressed:
“Maybe I’m the nicest guy in the world, maybe I’m the biggest asshole. I couldn’t tell you. I think people choose to work with me because I can work with them and make a game called BioShock. Do you like to see people say you’re inconsiderate? No. When it comes to hiring, does it really matter? No.”
Finally, there’s a lengthy transcript of his preceding speech, packed with Making O’Bioshock nuggets, thoughts on the upcoming movie adaptation and his claims that it’s a game that can change people’s lives. Cripes.
Oh – apparently Mrs Ken does get upset about the name-calling, though. Aw.
Related Stories:
“The final resort for someone with no justification for their blather — references to ‘joy’!”
So referencing joy when discussing video games is off-limits. No wonder I can’t relate to your dismal critique of modern gaming.
If you don’t enjoy Bioshock, and upon playing it feel the need to go on some ridiculous tirade about the end of gaming and the amazing superiority of games in the 1990s; you need to return to the primordial pre-Internet cave that spawned you.
If you don’t enjoy bioshock you live in a cave..? Yeah, good one.
Heh, I’m there at Develop atm, I particularly liked Ste Currans session at the end yesterday. (I’d score it a 7/10, though only journo’s and attendees will probably get that joke)
I still find it dissapointing the way people have to judge a game by comparisons rather than on its own merits, I loved System Shock 2 as well and still do, but I think its important to remember that Bioshock wasn’t trying to do the same things as SS2, its focus was elsewhere.
‘Joy’ in this context inevitably means “I have absolutely nothing to back up my idiot assertions about people who dare to dislike my pet game, so I’ll just make another — they’re jerks for not having heads full of nitrous oxide”. ‘Joy’ only ever seems to come up once a given piece of entertainment needs significant suspension of one’s critical faculties to pass muster — I see it all the time with, for example, Doctor Who fans, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen proponents of Deus Ex or STALKER or Half-Life or Thief or Hitman or Psychonauts or The Witcher or TF2 or [insert good game here] yapping on about their chosen game requiring ‘joy’ to work (nor moonbeams, rainbows or starlight); a game is supposed to elicit enjoyment, it shouldn’t have to coast on a player’s preexisting sense of directionless whimsy. You’re certainly not doing much to change my mind on that one — I mean, look at this load of crap:
‘End of gaming’? ’superiority of games in the 1990s’? I’m sorry “yutt”, but I can’t take responsibility for posts you make up in your head.
Well, the reason people a lot of people get so irked about it is that in the beginning it was pushed as exactly wanting to do the same things as SS2, ’spiritual successor’, ‘unofficial sequel’ etc, Levine showed up and TTLG and said all that stuff himself, IIRC. So everyone who had been (and still is) pining for something of that nature and quality raised their hopes to ridiculous heights by imaging the all the spine-tingly-ness of SS2 set to the gorgeous screenshots they were seeing, and when it came out and well, it wasn’t like that at all, everyone’s hopes came down with the appropriate force. So while Bioshock may well have been a great game if I had come at it without any preconceptions and been pleasantly suprised, I’ll never get to see that because the overwhelming sense I got was one of dissapointment.
Hypothetically if RPS could work both piracy and Bioshock into the same article, would it be the largest and most vitriolic comments thread ever?
@Subjective Effect
Thief 3 was the best game of the Thief series… and Warren Specter had little to do with it.
I’m still holding out for a Ken Levine X-com game, and will until he specifically says “It’s not Xcom”, and then I will hate him forever for saying so after the internet got my hopes up so much.
Final thought on this because this has gotten stupid and is entering the holy internet realms of name-calling…
Basically, my whole point is, i’m not a chest-beating, knuckle-dragging gorilla for liking Bioshock. There. I thought it was a good romp. I personally don’t give two flying farts if you like the game yourself or not, but I think shitting on those who do as being somehow stupid is just… kinda wrong. Sorry? And hey, if you don’t like the state of games then why not make your own game? There’s plenty of means to do so.
Gillen’s tinkering with the wireless interweb has clearly caused some kind of DNS short-circuit , cos I typed the RPS URL and it seems ended up on the Eurogamer comments thread…
Looking at that Bioshock defence article, my main issue was one that Kieron mentioned: that the designers didn’t succeed in making you do fun things. There was an article on Gamasutra about this, how to manipulate the player’s psychology to remind them that they can do fun stuff (and even force them to do it), rather than giving them a wrench and letting them use that instead of doing interesting things. Bioshock had a lot of interesting things in it, but it needed to nudge you towards them a bit more often.
Just to clarify, are we arguing about the quality of Bioshock here or arguing about people saying “I like/dislike (delete as applicable) therefore you are stupid!”?
I’ve sort of lost track.
I need to get back to Bioshock, I started playing it at the end of last year and then went on holiday and didn’t get back to playing it when I got back because it hadn’t really grabbed me. For me it didn’t help that the Little Sisters just became a power-up with a Yes/No option followed by a fancy effect rather than them making you look at the consequence of your decision as originally planned.
I’ll not talk too much on it until I’ve at least played further into it, but people seem to be getting awfully het up about things on here recently.
I gotta tell you, I’m replaying STALKER right now, and man, is it ever sweet. So much stuff I hadn’t seen before, what a great game.
Sorry if this has nothing to do with the above newspost, but then again neither do most of the comments that precede it…
(Still have to play Bioshock. I hear it’s a good game, but not the saviour of mankind.)
Me and my mate Dave had fun. We liked the story and the sound and the pretty environments, and zapping people with electricity.
Does for me.
rocketman71: Are you saying you should have been allowed to get away with killing “just” one little girl? I’m a little worried about you now.
Gap Gen: Did System Shock 2 really encourage you to do fun things? I loved it but it really was hard work at times, spending twenty minutes looking for a particular chemical just seem like effort for efforts sake.
I adored System Shock 2, and that’s not going to change. I also think BioShock is one of the best titles of the last few years. Sure it’s not System Shock 2, nothing ever will be.
It’s interesting to see how many complains about BioShock are about what it was “supposed” to be when they were first talking about it. At which point did we start accepting anything said in previews? O, that way madness lies.
I’m going to be a complete contrarian (dons Hitchens garb) and say that I started off loving the Bioshock demo and buying getting the game, getting annoyed with after a while, and coming back to it 6 months later and completely loving it. So at one point I would have been one of the naysayers, but gradually I fell in love with it all over again.
As for System Shock 2 – you know, I want to love it too. But after yet another unsuccessful attempt to fend off 10 zombies with nothing but a wrench, I gave up. Am I missing something?
P.
I was never into the hype of bioshock and I never finnished SS2. I did however enjoy SS2.
I think there is serious criticism to be leveled against Bioshock that has nothing to do with fanboyism or some state of gaming nostalgia. In fact I think a huge flaw with Bioshock was that I was playing a very outdate game model in a somewhat pretty package. Besides, the story was very average, with occasional peaks of good writing and never shied away from that game design crime of trying to be Hollywood. A little play of Pathologic might help illustrate what a game can do with narrative.
Bioshock on the other hand seems like a simple critique of an irrelevant hack novelist and a seriously failed critique at game plot devices. From the cheap moral choice presented to you, to the fact that after killing Ryan you are free, yet the only mechanism available to progress remains killing, to the main way the story is developed. It is delivered through tape recorders which effectively reduces any interaction you might have with someone to that only option of murder. Yet, I am told it is actually advancing narrative in gaming.
I’ts around that mechanism that I found the flaws really acumulated in terms of immersive gameplay. Time and time again you find yourself under siege by Play-Doh faced caricatures of the mentally ill. Quickly it becomes aparent all you will be doing is killing or running away, so, they give you a large toolset. Only they give you almost all of it off the bat. This does give you the possibility to pull of some very satisfying tactics. Add in the camera, hacking and “inventing” and you get to a point where you have to saturate the game with enemies to justify all the options. Oh, gotta hack this turret, but first I have to take a picture, use telekinesis on a propane canister and set a wind trap before finnishing this other guy with a shotgun. Had encounters been more sparse you would have less chance of exploiting these possibilities, but they would have had a lot more impact as they would mesh into the narrative and you might really remember your experience more. At that point I was just tired of doing it for X hours straight. I find much of the immersion, enjoyable dynamics and (at first) interest in Rapture were sapped by the absurd amount of copy-paste momments and hostile inhabitants roaming around (not to mention a questionable script and voice acting, Suchong anyone?). This is my main problem with the game although I could go on.
All that said, I am still very satisfied with the scene where you meet Ryan. Too bad it falls apart in the context of the last act of the game.
But maybe I should replay it, it has been a while.
I still have yet to play Bioshock, but I have picked it up for £16 from Steam, so I guess I’ll make up my own mind.
Never that bothered by Kenickie, but Lauren Lavern singing on Don’t Falter by Mint Royal is one of my favourite song, plus, she does have a good line in nice frocks on the culture show.
and from Warren Ellis the other day:
Lauren Laverne and Tim from Ash agree that Kieron Gillen’s a psychopath, on national radio, hahaha – @phonogramcomic #
?!?
All of you, behave.
I picked up Bioshock a month or two ago when it was super cheap (£12!) and I’ve still to finish the thing. The problem being the downright terrible gunplay means I can’t actually be bothered to kill stuff anymore!
Just noticed the tick this box thing to recieve email, I hope nobody in this comments section ticked it!
“Just noticed the tick this box thing to recieve email, I hope nobody in this comments section ticked it!”
It’s because of threads such as this and the Oblivion one and others that have gone into the 100+ reply zone that I’ll never tick the box. :D
Smart notification systems limit the number of mails they spam you with. I have no idea how smart this one is, and I’m not taking the risk in order to find out.
To be fair, on your first playthrough, you don’t know that Bioshock’s ‘moral dilemma’ is going to be so unbelievably obvious, not to mention inconsequential (”They really are just kids? Okay, let’s see, child murder vs the enhancement and scarcely-perceptible rearrangement of my powerup timetable…”). And Gap Gen didn’t even mention SS2, so why bring it up?
As for ‘what it was supposed to be’, well, it’s perfectly legitimate to be put off by a company claiming ‘clever new things’ and then outputting what might charitably be described as ‘retro’ (if we forgive Peter Molyneux for it at all, it’s only because we’re used to it, and Irrational don’t have that paltry excuse; judging by Bioshock, they don’t even have his excuse of overreaching ambition!) but even after overlooking that, the corridor shooter we got instead is, well… what Riotpoll said.
It’s hard to find the article now that Next Gen rebooted it’s site, but I recall them writing an article about how the rumors Ken Levine is hard to work with is bunk.
Pithy sarcasm and name calling aside (and I apologise for helping put these comments on this track), I am curious as to which games have met with the approval of those who are vitriolically opposed to Bioshock. If you haven’t enjoyed either Bioshock or System Shock 2, perhaps it suggests as much about the way that you approach playing games as to the quality of the games themselves. If you treat every game element like a measurable, tactical commodity and play games with an overcritical eye I would imagine that it’s hard to enjoy something like Bioshock. A game’s atmosphere and writing can only suck you in as much as you let it.
It’s not that I’m opposed to criticism of Bioshock. It has holes that you can drive a bus through and most of the criticisms are quite valid. But I am pertrubed when games of its ilk are dismissed as shit or mediocre.
It’s probably an irrational misundertanding of the industry, but I worry that too much critiscm of people like Levine or Spector, or games like Bioshock, will simply lead to less investment in games with any ambition. Levine said that Take-Two took a leap of faith with Bioshock, and it’s not even that Bioshock is so revolutionary. If that’s the attitude, then I worry that those with the cash to splash will ask “Why bother making any attempt at creativity or interesting writing at all when it results in such wild criticism? Let’s just make another Timeshift or Fracture”.
Gap Gen: Did System Shock 2 really encourage you to do fun things? I loved it but it really was hard work at times, spending twenty minutes looking for a particular chemical just seem like effort for efforts sake.
Never played it, unfortunately. Thing is, a lot of Bioshock was very subtle (for example, I totally missed the moving statues in the opera house). Didn’t help that I played it while I was ill, mind. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that improves if you replay it – I’ve played SMAC several times and missed several things that really define the game (like the social models) until the second or third play through.
Kieron puts it well in saying that given the choice between an easy method and an interesting method, most people will choose the easy method and get bored. Bioshock needed just a little bit more prompting to get gamers like me to explore alternatives to just wrenching everything not wearing a diving suit.
I stopped reading the comments a 3rd of the way down and I’ll end up repeating others comments from after that, but oh well.
Bioshock was a fantastic game for me. For some of you it seems it wasnt.
However I find the not SS2 argument lazy. SS2 has flaws that Bioshock doesnt. Part of that is the SS2 did this – great, Bioshock did that instead – bad. Well I glad Bioshock did that, I like many others prefer it.
BTW, being a PC fanboy, doesnt mean you’re better than any other fanboy. How is Bioshock dumbed down for consoles? How would being PC only improve any game beyond interface (and not for all games) and the graphic’s on high end machines for a small user base?
While I’m at it, whats marks this as mass market and dumbed down? Because it hasnt got something you wanted, that you think makes it complex. Well in my opinion, dumbed down describes virtually every RTS as the majority have a distinct build order for maximum productivity leading to some form of appropriate ‘tank’ rush / weapon deployment. Must mean PC owners are dumb, cause tarring with brushes seem to be the rule here.
But hey, I’m going critercise SS2 for needing to use computer logs and 3D to create an immersive atmosphere when Super Metroid achieves as much or more without them. Ah I’m fitting right in with you guys now.
Oh, bad ending for just killing one innocent girl – why would that be? Is that because killing one innnocent person is a bad thing to do? Damn, I’d better scratch that one per hit list of mine, I thought you were allowed to kill one innocent person and police only got involved 2nd time around. Sorry, but whoever thought they should still get the good ending is being a doofus.
“The only thing Bioshock can’t do is clean the filthy cesspool where your sense of joy used to be.”
Those are exactly the words I was looking for! Well said.
Anyone who says Bioshock is a bad game or even has criticism that they believe make it a bad game overall is a moron, imho – and completely missing the point. Just look at it for gods sake! Almost every aspect of that game shines and i think it’s an exceptional game despite it’s flaws. Most of the negative comments i hear seam to come from typical angry internet men. If you want another perfect example of this check out the Mass Effect forums – Bring down the sky update thread.
Because some of these prats haven’t gotten exactly what they were expecting, they’ve started saying shite like Mass Effect has zero re-playability!
LOL!
Oh god.
If only we could round them all up and pack them off to an island with no internet OR PCs. Keep them in solitary for a week, then release them and set them on themselves.
That would be awesome. And would be doing the ol’ gene pool a huge favour… and the WWW
Um… just to throw something in here, I killed about 2 little sisters in my solitary playthrough and got the good ending. I thought it worked on what you did for the majority?
Wurzel: 2’s the limit, I believe.
I reckon Tom was taking the mickey. Let’s start a pool!
This is begging the question a bit; now, maybe in the initial stages of Bioshock, Take Two really were taking a gamble (all I know of Bioshock’s early days is a few pages of concept art) but 2k were… extremely accommodating in bringing down their game’s common denominator to make up for their ‘unorthodox’ artistic choices — indeed, anything remotely ‘new’ or idiosyncratic to the game had been scythed clean away by release time. Even the abovementioned aesthetic couldn’t have had Take Two sweating too much — there’d been a decade of horror games beforehand, and Resident Evil had proven that spookiness was (to say the least) no impediment to success. The only thing ‘different’ about Bioshock was its milieu and the care with which it was rendered, and few-to-no people are complaining about that — if anything, the criticisms (which are about the actual game, ie, what you and your avatar do) discourage corporate conservatism in gaming, not encourage more of it (of course, I say ‘if anything’ for a reason — it’s sales that publishers listen to, and Bioshock sold just fine.)
If the criticism of Bioshock puts developers off from adopting its gameplay elements, then games will have lost nothing whatsoever — after all, Bioshock doesn’t actually have any gameplay elements of its own. Even its aesthetic accomplishments could prove a pretty harsh double-edged sword, influence-wise — Bioshock has spawned the most outspoken “slickness can replace gameplay” attitude I’ve ever seen among gamers, critics and punters alike, since I started playing in ‘86. And the disparagement that Bioshock is copping isn’t going to put off any artists or writers inspired to work harder by the visuals they saw — what sense would that make? (”Man, these guys were dead impressed by Bioshock’s look and story, but hated the combat — I think I’ll just write a space marine thing.” “Good idea, I’ll draw some shoulderpads.”)
Right – any comment containing a insult, no matter how mild, gets insta-killed from now on.
@Tom; I think you’re missing the point of why people are saying Bioshock didn’t deserve all the praise it actually got. The art and story (compared to other fps) are very good, it’s just that the game is an fps. And it misses the whole point of fps games, that killing stuff should be fun. Even the Halo games have better gunplay than Bioshock does! When the actual meat of the game (the gameplay) gets boring, tedious and becomes a neccesary evil to progress the story you know that something is wrong. Some people seem to like wanking over nice effects, but a lot of people actually like some decent gameplay in there too.
@Riotpoll
But I find most FPS’s boring. Games that mix it up a little rather than sticking to the tried and true mechanics are far more interesting/compelling games for me. Hence my love of SS2, the Thief series, etc. They had FPS shooter mechanics in them, along with some RPG stuff etc and a very different pacing/story telling style. And I personally don’t think there’s anything boring about the combat in Bioshock. It just rolls along at a different speed.
I would say, and i mean this in the least offensive way possible Riotpoll (because a large part of yours and my opinions a based on personal taste), that it’s you who missed the point. Yes, Bioshock is a FPS, but it came from a very different vision of what a FPS could be.
Personally I hate the idea of “genres” – thus giving people expectations and preconceptions. If only there was one genre called “An Amalgamation of Ideas”.
No one would know what to expect then and I think would remain considerable more open minded.
I think the first-person perspective was necessary for the purpose of immersion. Just think back to the “big reveal”/spoiler. You know, the big one. It would have had absolutely no effect on me, if I was just watching my avatar’s reaction on the screen. It would have felt completely different.
And for the record, I found the actual gameplay (shootan, runnan, fightan) perfectly acceptable. I have it on PC and 360; I completed the 360 version, mostly because it looked better, but also it seemed to handle better.
@Tom; If you enjoyed FPS you would know why I don’t like Bioshock because of it’s gunplay. My point is that Bioshock is primarily a traditional style FPS, it has the same pacing as a lot of other FPS, it just has some RPG-lite stuff bolted onto it. If the RPG bit was actually more than “Level up your guns/lightning powa and decide whether to kill children or not” it might have been more interesting.
My point was that you (now I see due to your tastes) didn’t understand why some people say Bioshock is not a great game. Calling them morons probably wasn’t a good idea either.
I’d just like to point out I’ve only ever finished one FPS (HL2+ep1), because I get bored. With Bioshock I got bored a lot sooner than most of the others ;-) ( I enjoy mp a lot more on an fps)
Can’t wait till next year when we’ll be having the exact same arguments over Fallout 3!
i thought fallout 3 comes out in the fall…out? out, fall. or something.
If the criticism of Bioshock puts developers off from adopting its gameplay elements, then games will have lost nothing whatsoever — after all, Bioshock doesn’t actually have any gameplay elements of its own.
this is really the heart of the matter, isn’t it?
anyway, bioshock was 3/4ths a good game with 1/4 not a good game at all slathered on, mostly near the end. it was certainly a fairly straightforward fps game with a smattering of genre hybridity mixed in there. (i call these games “fps ” because it looks cool when you type it out, and calling some of them rpg hybrids is overstating the case tremendously.)
the “moral choice” was about as morally engaged as choosing what to have for lunch, but such is the nature of our modern age / blame it on teh consolez. i generally blame it on the modern age of our consolez in the interest of striking a middle path.
it’s also hard not to love a game that features an evil walt disney telling you how he burned down his forest rather than letting those fucking cocksuckers in washington take it from him. when was the last time you played a game that said eminent domain is lame?
and if you did, it was some indie thing where the socialists who made it have you playing as a community lobbyist who wants to make sure the state steals property from its owners to build a park or perhaps a homeless shelter rather than some giant big box retailer. i’ll take evil walt disney any day of the week!
i hope the sequel features g. gordon liddy:
“”They’ve got a big target on there, ATF. Don’t shoot at that, because they’ve got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots…. Kill the sons of bitches.”
(this is, coincidentally, great advice in most fps games.)
@dhex That is one terrifying final quote. Haha.
But yeah, I’m more interested in the unknown project than Bioshock 2. Because a sequel/prequel will not be able to live up to the original.
I’m way more contrarian than all of you. I don’t just wear Hitchens garb; I have his skin glued on like Hannibal Lecture when he escaped.
And just in the manner of the great Hitch, I loudly proclaim that you have all failed to tackle MY criticism of Bioshock. Prepare for smug in 3…2….1…../smug.
Bioshock was awesome. The issue that spawned the biggest and most ignored thread on the 2K forums is not. I freely admit that I am petty for basing my decision to buy any sequel on the pre-emptive factor of the physics engine being capped and then 2K ignoring the large outcry about it. You can’t criticise me for that because I’ve beaten you to it.
I guess some random comments…
I loved Bioshock, and I didnt listen to any of the hype. I just saw the teasrer trailer and fell in love. I played it, I loved it, then I moved on. I go back every now and then, and still enjoy it.
The constant respawning wasnt bad at all, I always looked at it as more loot to make better ammo with. Stay still, go invisible, wait, kill, loot.
SS2 will always be good, but it is like every game, a little flawed, but still…a wonderful game.
Nice to see at least a few other people like Thief 3 as well as I do.
I wonder how everyone would compare the immersive qualities of Bioshock and SS2 to something such as Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth? A very wonderful game, incredibly immersive.
Always a joy reading the comments section everyone, keep up the good work.
@dhex That is one terrifying final quote. Haha.
why?
i really wanted to get into cthulhu or however you spell giant spaghetti squid face’s name, but it’s frickin’ hard!
Smitty: the immersion of DCTOE was broken by a) buggy crashing gameplay b) console derived save points and c) tediously hard sequences that did not allow for a moment of hesitation, deviation or repetition (i.e. the escaping from the hotel where you had to be note perfect in your actions). But it’s still not a bad game although possibly appeals more to people who are into the Cthulhu mythos than those who don’t know anything about it.
Back on topic: I loved Bioshock, so much so that as soon as I’d finished, I had to restart it. I had no problems with the gunplay, had plenty of time to look around and appreciate the environment and find little things which just delighted me (Wild Bunny; Tchaikovsky; The Dancers to name but a mere fraction) The fact that I played it through to completion is one thing because that rarely happens. Not even with SS2 (although that’s at least on my “I’ll get around to it some time” list).
BioShock has certainly split the opinions of gamers hasn’t it? It has a lot going for it, to be sure, but even the worst fanbois have to admit it is flawed. System Shock 2 vs BioShock is a case of Alien/Aliens vs Alien Resurrection. Some people like the poorer one better, but if you really want to dissect the issue it comes down to having a taste for something deeper or liking the ohh shiny. Each to their own I suppose.
Oh, is that what it comes down to.
Bioshock would have been at least 3 times more awesome if they had replaced Andrew Ryan on the intercom with a girl robot. Also, instead of big daddies they could make you fight monkeys (monkeys are wacky and hilarious in any setting) and the same zombie five hundred million times.
i hope in system shock 3 weapons sometimes just explode or disintegrate into dust as soon as you pick them up, altho I’m not sure i can handle a game that DEEP, so you guys will have to tell me how great it is.
Just shows us all how you’ve missed the point completely.
Well, Bioshock’s certainly made your mind up, like all good art does.
(oh snap)
“That you don’t like it proves that it’s art!” is my new favourite argument.
Everyone is wrong.
“System Shock 2 vs BioShock is a case of Alien/Aliens vs Alien Resurrection. Some people like the poorer one better, but if you really want to dissect the issue it comes down to having a taste for something deeper or liking the ohh shiny.”
No-one can possibly prefer the nonsensical aborted-gimp-mask Alien Resurrection. It’s not even that much shinier – particularly that utter utter utter pile of shite hybrid thing at the end: I’ve seen 50s B-Movies made on a budget of $20 with better conceived and executed monsters.
I find it’s best to just not acknowledge the existence of it. It’s not even the red-headed stepchild of the family, it’s the stinking web-footed, one-eyed, mouth-breathing, sociopathic child of the incestuous union between violently-hated distant cousins, unwillingly-inherited after they won themselves a Darwin Award.
Oh, Bioshock? S’alright.
I still maintain that Alien Resurrection has a great script, ruined by the director. Which is a strange thing to say given he also directed Amelie, possibly my favourite film. You can still find the original untouched script online, before the director and producers lowered the budget, scrapped things and added others like the human-like hybrid. At the very least, Resurrection could have been a really fun, somewhat tense actioner. instead, turned out like turd.