I'm enjoying it, although I am having difficulty fighting off the splicers while my Little Sister gathers Adam... each time I die (why the hell do you have to manually use first aid kits???), sorry, each time I die, she stops gathering the Adam, and has to start all over from the start again. It's really annoying.
Like other games such as portal the "Magic" or "X factor" of the original will never be able to be duplicated. We have already been to rapture, we already understand Plasmids, the steampunkish weaponry, the novel 50's atmosphere, the initial awesomeness that is the big daddies, splicers, and the pale glowy eyed children.
Also A prototype "Big Daddy" Is ALOT and i mean ALOT less interesting then the Fall of Andrew Ryan and his dream. The unknown of a lost underwater utopia is pretty much well known.
What did you think walking underwater would be like? Were you expecting to just wander aimlessly in slow motion around the city? Maybe punch a shark in the face? Guess what Plasmids and bullets won't work underwater...so what were you expecting to do in your point A to Point B freedom?!?
Bio2 is exactly what i expected to be. Which is still a fun enjoyable FPS. Oh and supposedly it has multiplayer. Which i haven't played yet.
How does it have an effect on the game itself? Again, you could remove it from the game and a vast majority of the people wouldn't even notice.
It would change the whole philosophical depth of the game for a start there have already been a dozen rebuttals of Facism whereas Objectivism is much fresher ground. That's what elevates Bioshock in my eyes, it shows gaming can be a platform for philosophical arguements without merely rehashing concepts from other mediums or focusing solely on concepts found only within gaming itself.
And there has never been a rebuttal of Objectivism before? There is plenty of criticism out there on it. Tons, even.. Bioshock is nothing new or unique in this respect.
The whole point is it shows why Rand was a quack and why Objectivism sucks as a political ideology. Saying this has bearing on the game is narrow-minded.
It doesn't have a bearing on the game, because Objectivism has no bearing on the game. Again, we don't need a video game to show us that Rand was an idiot, it's been done before. Not breaking any new ground here.
Even though Objectivism has been refuted nonillion times before (it's retarded), you do have to admit that BioShock takes a more explicit political stance than any multimillion unit-shifter that preceded it -- so in that sense I think it's a landmark, even if I'm usually not gung-ho about games and (poor) narrative.
Also, it's pretty easy to read into its dystopic counterpoint to 1984 as a decrying of widespread privatization; so in that sense, I think its anti-neoconservative shtick is more direct than, say, FFVII's vague anti-corporate musings.
It's extremely similar to bioshock but that's not a bad thing at all in my book. I'm a bit mithed by walking and aiming as it feels so clunkly and can only walk and shoot and successfully kill something with the guns that shoot 10million rounds per second due to my aim being awful. Apart from that I'm loving it.
Actually the atmosphere is still there, it's just not scary, never has been.
I'm not sure what you look for when it comes to atmosphere, for me is setting a mood that makes you think....I still got that from bioshock 2....maybe you're just trying to hard...=/
The thing about BioShock's morality system is that it's completely arbitrary and doesn't require any real thought. The choices aren't real, it's just a matter of "Do I want to be good or bad?" The effect is that I don't care about the actual content of the decision or the process of making it, I only care about the tangible outcome -- as in how this will affect my alignment meter. And the game really only rewards you for being "all good" or "all bad," which just means that you feel obligated to play it a second time (or just YouTube the other ending and save yourself the trouble). Also, since EVERY decision is quite literally the EXACT same one, you really only make the decision once and then you just keep repeating it over and over again. Where's the fun in that?
I'll compare this to The Witcher which actually has some real difficult decisions in it. The decisions are mostly "shades of gray" that amount to picking between the lesser of two evils. It requires you to think about what it is you're doing because you have to have to try to rationalize and justify what is essentially a bad decision anyway. I'll explain in more detail. Chapter 1 isn't really a spoiler since it's the intro chapter, and this is the kind of decision upon which the entire game is founded. I'd encourage you to read it, even if you haven't played it, since it won't ruin anything, but just in case.
The big decision in chapter 1 is to side with either the town herbalist or with the citizens on the outskirts of town. The citizens tell you that the herbalist is a witch and that she's released an evil force on the outskirts (simply called The Beast) and caused all sorts of death and destruction.
As you do quests you find out that the town's important figures are all somehow involved in what's going on; the witch sold a poison which was used to kill a man; the witch also has a voodoo doll with pins in it bearing a strange likeness to a merchant; a young boy with special powers (he acts like a magical medium for the Voice of Death or something, I don't remember specifically) suggests that "The Beast" was summoned by the witch; the town guardsman whose sister was murdered, turned out to have raped and gangbanged her himself; a local merchant is selling weapons to an elven terrorist group which got a few citizens killed; the priest of the Holy Flame has been kidnapping and selling children to a gang of cultists; another merchant has a demonic plant growing in his yard which turns out to be the possessed body of where he buried his murdered brother.
So basically, everyone's hands are bloody, and you have to weight the evidence and decide what spawned the Beast -- the townspeople's rotten secrets spawning the very essence of evil itself, or the witch summoning it in a demonic ritual either because she's got evil intentions, or because she wants to punish the townsfolk. Furthermore, are the townspeople acting out under the influence of the beast, or were they already so corrupt?
Siding with the townsfolk will involve killing the witch, whose guilt is not fully proven, while siding with the witch will involve killing the entire village, not all of which are entirely guilty. Innocent until proven guilty? It's your job to condemn a potentially innocent person. Hope you make the right decision.
Later chapters have you making similar decisions, although they're not nearly as dire as this one. Do you side with the Knight Order that sort of oppresses its constituents for their own safety and is fairly against multiculturalism, or with the elven/dwarven rebellion which is basically a terrorist group fighting for a good cause with a bunch of casualties to innocent people. The decisions are usually based on actual morals and ethics with no clear "right or wrong" choice. And they all have long-lasting consequences that reappear and resurface throughout later chapters, so your choices do actually feel substantial.
The morality system in The Witcher works because it's grounded in very real decisions; things are almost never so binary as in BioShock (or KOTOR, for that matter) and I really like that TW challenges my gray matter to actually think about these things. No decision was easy and I was often uncomfortable with having to choose, because the situations actually moved me. My decisions in BS were just as arbitrary and indifferent as a coin toss, and that, quite simply, drains all of the serious philosophy and ethos from it.
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
