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Feature: Credit where it's due
"Audio logs", said a game designer, eliciting a chorus of involuntary groans from absolutely everyone. They're clumsy, they're silly, and they're usually badly done, to the point where it's tempting to insist that they be consigned to history altogether. That would probably be overkill.
Feature: The final mystery of System Shock 2 remains unsolved
If you read System Shock 2’s patch notes on Steam you might notice something unusual, as I did. In the list of fixes, additions, and technical talk, there's a note thanking "Le Corbeau" for providing the patch. It's an official patch that the game’s publishers pushed onto Steam, but reading the note it looked to me like they didn’t know who was updating their game.…
BioShock is ten years old! The first-person shooter set in the underwater city of Rapture was released on August 21, 2007 in North America (and on the 24th elsewhere), and I've been digging through RPS's archives for the things we wrote about the game upon its release.
Given Alice is not interested in any ghost stories which aren't terrifying movies she can freak herself out with while alone in the house, it falls to me to tell you about Ken Levine and other senior Irrational folk's new studio, Ghost Story Games [official site]. I'm not sure whether to call it a new studio or a rebrand, actually, as the site seems to…
2005's tactical cop FPS SWAT 4 is one of the superest shooters and a strong contender for the best game those BioShockers at Irrational made, you might have heard. Probably from us. Several times. And each time, we cough and mutter "Er, but you'll need to wander eBay or something to get it." No more! SWAT 4 is now available easily and DRM-free from GOG.…
Bioshock: The Collection [official site] is out next week, and as such you'll be able to play the first two Bioshock games and all of the single-player DLC in renewed detail. Bioshock Infinite is thrown in there for good measure, but it already looks so pretty on PC they're leaving it as is. 2K Games also plan to give the updated versions free to people…
So I can't play the original BioShock because I can't deal with injections at all. I played Binfinite, though, and that was better, although I think some of the DLC is perhaps not my cup of tea in terms of icky moments. That's why I'm now watching the BioShock: The Collection Remastered [official site] trailer through my fingers, ready to cover my eyes at any…
Rapture is still one of my favourite video game places, and I'm quite keen to return to it all fancied-up. Following a string of leaks, publishers 2K today announced BioShock: The Collection [official site]. It's coming our way in September with all three BioShock games and their singleplayer DLC plus a video series with words from sweet Ken Levine. Most notably, the first two are…
BioShock: The Collection Is A Thing, But More Importantly, Sea-Life Facts!
BioShock: The Collection is the deeply uninspiring name for a bundle of all the previous BioShock games that for some reason 2K are still refusing to acknowledge. It's now been rated by bodies around the world, including the ESRB, and yet 2K still remain schtum. Which is weird. Anyway, it'll contain all three games, and in case you've forgotten, "Cutscenes also depict intense acts of…
Feature: The Jupiter Ascending of videogames
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. It's not all we hoped it would be, but I liked BioShock Infinite [official site]. Am I wrong?
Feature: Biff! Pow!
Superheroes are, my dear mole cave people recently thawed following a decades-long slumber, very much in vogue right now. Films about whiny teenagers with the least interesting powers of an arachnid are ten a penny, but video games of this kind have been oddly lacking. The superhero games we do have - for example, the Arkham series - are mainly about specific superheroes, not about…
Feature: The Irrational Need For Closure
The contemporary big-budget FPS has a few different strains: blood-n-guts military settings a la Call of Duty, open-world environments like Far Cry, and high-concept dystopias. Outside of open-world most of these styles were first codified in the 1990s, and FPS games then and now share an enormous amount: primarily a core mechanic of shooting many hundreds of enemies in the face over and over again,…
Though BioShock is seemingly continuing, essentially everyone who ever worked on the series has split up, split off, or travelled to the four corners of the world. BioShock's one of the finer modern FPS series, sure, but what might its makers do freed from the demands of sprawling development with huge budgets and mandatory face-shooting? We've already seen Gone Home and Eldritch from BioFolks gone…
In a post on the Irrational Games website titled "A Message From Ken Levine", the BioShock creator announced that he's "winding down" Irrational Games. What does that mean? All but a core team of fifteen developers are being laid off, so that the remaining few can focus on new ideas, "a long period of design", and the idea of "replayable narrative". This is a surprise.
The first part of Burial At Sea, BioShock Infinite's Rapture-bound DLC, met a mixed reception. Alec loved its pre-fall beauty and felt frustrated by its inevitable, violent turn and quick end. Which I suppose means there's plenty of reason to feel excited by the arrival of part two. Irrational want to whet your appetite for wetness with a three-minute video, but be warned: it assumes…
After reading Alec's impressions of BioShock's star-spangled salvo against American exceptionalism, I got quite excited. So of course, I proceeded to do what any rational, well-adjusted human being would: list off all the potential ways it could go horribly, horribly wrong. Nefarious hacker code theft, of course, was up there, as were natural disasters, a scenario in which total destruction of Infinite was the only…
Let's do this, okay: When a new game first announces a release date, let's just go ahead and ignore it. Wasn't it Einstein who said the very definition of insanity was filling a balloon with kittens and then severing off your own leg? So it is that BioShock: Infinite has declared it won't be with us this year at all. They're now looking at February…
I'd hate to have supernatural powers. What if there's a supernatural equivalent of a sneeze? You're driving along in your Crueltymobile, or whatever it is evil people do when they're not battling others, then: "Ahhh-Ahhh-AHHHH-CHOO" and all of a sudden every kitten in three blocks is now a giant, man-eating snarg. No, I'd rather remain mundane and in control of my surroundings, lest I suddenly…
The Boys of Silence sound like an incredible New Romantic band so I was slightly disappointed to find that they're actually blind men with two gramophones soldered onto their heads. If ever a game needed less mechaniman monstrosities and more synth pop, Bioshock: Infinite is that game. With these cantankerous "walking cameras" that emit the shriek of a thousand sirens and Mr Tickle's dangerous yet…
Levine describes this latest "heavy hitter" character as "sort of a tragic figure." The video goes some way to explaining why: a heavily-scarred gentleman trapped in a giant, ape-like robotic suit, at the centre of which is what appears to be a heart in a glass case. Threatening, indeed, but you really wouldn't want to share his fate. There's a bit of footage, and even…
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