Rock, Paper, Shotgun

That’s the studio formerly known as 2K Boston formerly known as Irrational to you. As in Ken Levine’s original-name-reclaiming bunch: the developers who made System Shock 2, SWAT 4, Tribes Vengeance, Freedom Force – and, of course, Bioshock the first.

And there’s that Pandora’s box opened. The important news, though, is that Irrational are finally taking the lid of whatever their new project is next week. Several years in the making, massively mysterious: whatever it is, whatever it’s like, it’s bound to be a big old chat-magnet.
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Jordan Thomas first came to our attention with Thief: Deadly Shadows where he co-designed the Cradle with Randy Smith. Next he was on Bioshock, with his fingerprints over all Fort Frolic. Then, he stepped up to Creative Director at 2k Marin with Bioshock 2. He’s highly verbal, scarily optimistic and wants to talk to you about the Immersive Sim as an Anti-genre, the death of seriousness and the growth of snark, Thomas Moore Utopian fiction and what Ion Storm Austin were considering doing with Deus Ex 3…
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The Steam summer sale thingamy is continuing to offer some ludicrously good prices, as it happens. I’ve just spotted some for which there’s only six hours left, which should fill in some vital gaps on your virtual shelf. There’s Thief: Deadly Shadows for £2.09, BioShock for £3.49, and Titan Quest Gold for £2.49. There’s also Dragon Age, about 80 hours of game, for £11.99.

I can’t get over Thief 3 for barely more than £2. This is one of those games that come 2014 we’ll be writing ten year retrospectives about. If you never did, you absolutely must right now. Just for the heck of it, I’ve pasted my review of the game from 2004 for PC Format.

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Irrational’s blog takes great joys in pulling out various bits and bobs from the cupboards and doing a show-and-tell. Latest is the original early-00s Bioshock Pitch. They’re serializing it across several entries but you can follow the first eight pages here. And it’s nifty stuff, in noting what remained (a lot, conceptually) and what changed (almost everything, in terms of specific execution). This stuff is always fascinating. And while we’re on the topic, you’ve read Planescape’s Vision Statement, yes? More developers should totally release this stuff. It’s absolute treasure.

We usually steer clear of the arts and crafts region of bloggery, but I’ll make an exception for the link Dartt just forwarded to me: How to make a Big Daddy costume in a whole bunch of fairly complicated steps. Amazing, ridiculous stuff. Compare and contrast with 2007′s costumes…

This news is spreading rapidly over the net. It seems that the PS3 is good for something other than playing your Blu-Ray discs. News For Gamers have completed the PS3 version of Bioshock, to discover a fifteen second teaser for the second game. It’s apparently called Bioshock 2: The Sea Of Dreams and you’ll find images from it beneath the cut. EDIT: Also, thanks to the comment-threaders, video. Go watch!
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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.

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Gosh, all that hoo-hah about Bioshock’s limited number of installations and activation process seems like a long time ago, but I suspect it’s still an open wound for some folk. A vocal portion of Bioshock’s players were angry – “Ken Levine personally kicked my girlfriend to death” angry. Will they be any less angry now 2K’s lightened its infamously ruthless DRM (as promised many moons ago)?

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University of Connecticut Associate Professor of classical studies Roger Travis has started a blog comparing videogames to the classic tales of the ancient world. His latest post, “The profundity of Halo and Bioshock (and the Iliad)”, puts our favourite first person shooters up there with the greats of Ancient Greece.

Am I saying, a critic of video games might ask, that Halo and Bioshock are capable of the depth of artistic-philosophical expression reached by the Iliad in the Choice of Achilles? After all, when the Homeric bard has Achilles say that maybe the undying glory isn’t really worth it if you lose your life, he’s doing an artistic thing that we’re not used to thinking video games can do.

Here’s the answer: Yes, I am saying that.

Duke Nukem is more like Odysseus, you see. (Or is that Serious Sam?)

Who cares whether BioShock 2 will be any good without Levine at the helm, BioShock 3 has been announced! Gamespot spoke to Take-Two’s chairman, Strauss Zelnick, who suggested that the third game in the series would be released to coincide with Gore Verbinki’s film of the original story.

This came about when asked if the next game and movie would align. He said,

“It’s unlikely that the picture would be released to coincide with BioShock 2. It would be more likely that it would be released coincidentally with BioShock 3. That also remains to be seen.”

BioShock 2 is roughly scheduled for the third quarter of 2009, with the film tentatively set for 2010.

Oh yes – Rapture for real will be quite the sight to behold.

Oh no – It’s to be directed and produced by Gore ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ Verbinski. Well, the first film was loads of fun, but even discounting those sequels, high seas hi-jinks seems an unusual pedigree for undersea rumination upon the nature of man. But hey, both have water and zombies.
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