Great masterpieces... that suck!

[Snarky Username]

bioshock, I know it has great atmosphere, but how does that excuse absolutely horrid and broken gameplay? I played through that game twice to make sure I just wasn't missing something, but just never saw it. I'm not a fan of TF2 due to all the hard countering, at least until the new weapons came out, which I'm still bitter about since I'm not allowed to use them without getting incredibly lucky or buying them which is a bigger rip off the MW2 map packs.

Out of curiosity, how was the gameplay broken for you? I also thought Bioshock had a few issues, but gameplay was never one of them for me.

1. Plasmids were all useless, except of course where they were abitralily made essential. They do virtually no damage, do not distract enemies (you'd think being on fire would cause someone to stop shooting at their enemies but no), yet require huge sums of eve to use.

2. Hit detection is awful. How many crossbow bolts can phase through an enemy's head failing to do any damage? answer, a lot.

3. Enemies have more health than an M1 tank, and that's not the big daddies I'm talking about, which mixes very poorly with my next issue.

4. I rarely had any ammo, and when I did it didn't last due to the reason above. I find more ammo in silent hill games. This wouldn't be so bad though if I could just get the plasmid that allows you to pull limitless amounts of ammo from your ass that magically disintigrates upon the users death that all the enemies get. You ever have to beat an elite bouncer to death? I did.

5. hacking is both difficult and often impossible and useless. Wow, ammo's now two dollars cheaper. That was worth the three health packs I went through due to being electricuted from getting unwinable boards. I wish my electric plasmid could do that much damage. Why didn't I hack this thing to give me stuff for free anyway?

6. And the level design, while attractive, wasn't exactly clear, causing me to get turned around often. And this is coming from a guy who had little trouble with the water temple in OoT.

Really? I found myself blasting through a lot of the enemies without problem. Half of them could be taken down with one shotgun blast, even at the end of the game. And I found ammo lying all over the place, if I ever ran out of ammo for one weapon, another weapon was almost always full... Also when they didn't throw impossible puzzles at you (One of the giant issues of the game for me) hacking was incredibly easy...

But the level design could get pretty bad, I agree with that. Sometimes I felt like I was in a 50s cartoon and the background was blending into itself, also I really wish the plasmids were more useful, especially when the suck up half of your eve in one shot.

Well I suspect you're not being entirely truthful with the ammo, since I would always scrounged through the entire level to make sure I didn't miss anything, and difficult was the wrong word for hacking. It was easy when it possible, but it often wasn't.

Did you use your camera at all possible times? Also, what difficulty did you play at?

Oh so in order to stand a chance you need to break the flow of gameplay to take pictures in an action game for no reason but to make the game arbitrarily more tedious, taking the time to try to line up the perfect shot to get the best score so you're not fucked later in the game? Yeah that wasn't aa terrible decision. It didn't work for Dead Rising and it didn't work for Bioshock.

I'll take that as a no, then?

 

[archvile93]

bioshock, I know it has great atmosphere, but how does that excuse absolutely horrid and broken gameplay? I played through that game twice to make sure I just wasn't missing something, but just never saw it. I'm not a fan of TF2 due to all the hard countering, at least until the new weapons came out, which I'm still bitter about since I'm not allowed to use them without getting incredibly lucky or buying them which is a bigger rip off the MW2 map packs.

Out of curiosity, how was the gameplay broken for you? I also thought Bioshock had a few issues, but gameplay was never one of them for me.

1. Plasmids were all useless, except of course where they were abitralily made essential. They do virtually no damage, do not distract enemies (you'd think being on fire would cause someone to stop shooting at their enemies but no), yet require huge sums of eve to use.

2. Hit detection is awful. How many crossbow bolts can phase through an enemy's head failing to do any damage? answer, a lot.

3. Enemies have more health than an M1 tank, and that's not the big daddies I'm talking about, which mixes very poorly with my next issue.

4. I rarely had any ammo, and when I did it didn't last due to the reason above. I find more ammo in silent hill games. This wouldn't be so bad though if I could just get the plasmid that allows you to pull limitless amounts of ammo from your ass that magically disintigrates upon the users death that all the enemies get. You ever have to beat an elite bouncer to death? I did.

5. hacking is both difficult and often impossible and useless. Wow, ammo's now two dollars cheaper. That was worth the three health packs I went through due to being electricuted from getting unwinable boards. I wish my electric plasmid could do that much damage. Why didn't I hack this thing to give me stuff for free anyway?

6. And the level design, while attractive, wasn't exactly clear, causing me to get turned around often. And this is coming from a guy who had little trouble with the water temple in OoT.

Really? I found myself blasting through a lot of the enemies without problem. Half of them could be taken down with one shotgun blast, even at the end of the game. And I found ammo lying all over the place, if I ever ran out of ammo for one weapon, another weapon was almost always full... Also when they didn't throw impossible puzzles at you (One of the giant issues of the game for me) hacking was incredibly easy...

But the level design could get pretty bad, I agree with that. Sometimes I felt like I was in a 50s cartoon and the background was blending into itself, also I really wish the plasmids were more useful, especially when the suck up half of your eve in one shot.

Well I suspect you're not being entirely truthful with the ammo, since I would always scrounged through the entire level to make sure I didn't miss anything, and difficult was the wrong word for hacking. It was easy when it possible, but it often wasn't.

Did you use your camera at all possible times? Also, what difficulty did you play at?

Oh so in order to stand a chance you need to break the flow of gameplay to take pictures in an action game for no reason but to make the game arbitrarily more tedious, taking the time to try to line up the perfect shot to get the best score so you're not fucked later in the game? Yeah that wasn't aa terrible decision. It didn't work for Dead Rising and it didn't work for Bioshock.

I'll take that as a no, then?

That would be correct, not that it makes it any less idiotic. In fact make that issue number seven. I used it at first, but seeing as using it on living enemies alerts everyone in the level to your exact posistion and using it on the dead isn't worth shit, I gave up on it.

 

[Instinct Blues]

One recent one that I read for school was Macbeth. Honestly, I think that if it were a movie today, it would just be categorized as another meaningless action flick.

Did you even bother to read it? Macbeth does not translate in any way, shape, or form into a meaningless action flick.

 

[Inodio]

Frankly, I hated the Beatles. Besides the weird drug ones (Yellow submarine or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (LSD )) Besides that, I liked 'Hey Jude', until the two minutes of "na na na nana na naaaaaa nanana na hey jude" repeated a billion times. I have no idea why, and I don't care.
As far as books go, hated 'The Great Gatsby'. That boring boring boring BORING piece of
"He throws parties but doesn't attend, and ooh: he's having an affair"
"Well la-dee-daa. . Let's have lunch with him."
"Oh. He's dead."
THE END
-ARTISTIC BECAUSE IT DIDN'T MEAN JACK SHIT-
When I officially gave up on English classes until Senior year, when the teacher knew nobody gave a shit except for hopeful English Majors (Who would do nothing but write essays on how Zombieland was criticizing modern-capitalism anyway), and we watched Lion King.

 

[Lem0nade Inlay]

Eh, I found Fahrenheit 451 to be boring, and nowhere near as good as Brave New World or 1984.

I don't like Pink Floyd that much.

i felt like all the LOTR films were stretched out...

You did? Don't read the books then, you won't get through half of the first one.*

*[sub]For the record, I love LOTR, but if you find the movies boring, you're going to have a hell of a time going through the books[/sub]

 

[Hairetos]

I hate A LOT of old things. Dunno why, and I can't say I'm biased since I don't even know they're old before I hate them. It's just one big coincidence.

I hate classic rock all the way through the obnoxious hair metal people like to play in Intro to Guitar classes. I also don't like classic metal (Megadeth, Motorhead, old Metallica, etc.). I like a lot of newer metal genres.

I hate old movies for their lack of...interesting things to do. I dunno, they're just boring.

If you've ever taken an AP English class, you'll learn that almost all of the classic books of "literary merit" run a dull gamut of the same themes. They're pretty much centered around the different types of conflict: person vs. person, person vs. self, person vs. society, which then divulge into relationship, political, ideological, etc. The fact that one AP prompt can be addressed by somewhere around 50 of these books is a testament to this. Plot's not important CUZ U SEID SUMTHNG PROFUND!

I do like Baroque classical music though. Much better than Romantic era stuff.

 

[Snarky Username]

bioshock, I know it has great atmosphere, but how does that excuse absolutely horrid and broken gameplay? I played through that game twice to make sure I just wasn't missing something, but just never saw it. I'm not a fan of TF2 due to all the hard countering, at least until the new weapons came out, which I'm still bitter about since I'm not allowed to use them without getting incredibly lucky or buying them which is a bigger rip off the MW2 map packs.

Out of curiosity, how was the gameplay broken for you? I also thought Bioshock had a few issues, but gameplay was never one of them for me.

1. Plasmids were all useless, except of course where they were abitralily made essential. They do virtually no damage, do not distract enemies (you'd think being on fire would cause someone to stop shooting at their enemies but no), yet require huge sums of eve to use.

2. Hit detection is awful. How many crossbow bolts can phase through an enemy's head failing to do any damage? answer, a lot.

3. Enemies have more health than an M1 tank, and that's not the big daddies I'm talking about, which mixes very poorly with my next issue.

4. I rarely had any ammo, and when I did it didn't last due to the reason above. I find more ammo in silent hill games. This wouldn't be so bad though if I could just get the plasmid that allows you to pull limitless amounts of ammo from your ass that magically disintigrates upon the users death that all the enemies get. You ever have to beat an elite bouncer to death? I did.

5. hacking is both difficult and often impossible and useless. Wow, ammo's now two dollars cheaper. That was worth the three health packs I went through due to being electricuted from getting unwinable boards. I wish my electric plasmid could do that much damage. Why didn't I hack this thing to give me stuff for free anyway?

6. And the level design, while attractive, wasn't exactly clear, causing me to get turned around often. And this is coming from a guy who had little trouble with the water temple in OoT.

Really? I found myself blasting through a lot of the enemies without problem. Half of them could be taken down with one shotgun blast, even at the end of the game. And I found ammo lying all over the place, if I ever ran out of ammo for one weapon, another weapon was almost always full... Also when they didn't throw impossible puzzles at you (One of the giant issues of the game for me) hacking was incredibly easy...

But the level design could get pretty bad, I agree with that. Sometimes I felt like I was in a 50s cartoon and the background was blending into itself, also I really wish the plasmids were more useful, especially when the suck up half of your eve in one shot.

Well I suspect you're not being entirely truthful with the ammo, since I would always scrounged through the entire level to make sure I didn't miss anything, and difficult was the wrong word for hacking. It was easy when it possible, but it often wasn't.

Did you use your camera at all possible times? Also, what difficulty did you play at?

Oh so in order to stand a chance you need to break the flow of gameplay to take pictures in an action game for no reason but to make the game arbitrarily more tedious, taking the time to try to line up the perfect shot to get the best score so you're not fucked later in the game? Yeah that wasn't aa terrible decision. It didn't work for Dead Rising and it didn't work for Bioshock.

I'll take that as a no, then?

That would be correct, not that it makes it any less idiotic. In fact make that issue number seven.

Well there's your problem! But I do agree with you on that point. But if you had used the camera, that would have probably knocked out issues 2-4 easily. I think that the reason the gameplay was so broken was that you weren't playing it the way that the designers intended for you. When I used the camera, many splicers went down in one shot when I was using antipersonnel rounds, 2 shots when I wasn't. The rest were valid points that I also had too, though, but I found that the game more than made up for those points. This is just a personal opinion, but I have a feeling that you may enjoy the game a lot more if you used the (agreeably arbitrary) camera system.

 

[SquirrelPants]

Romeo and Juliet(I don't care if it's Shakespeare, this play is terrible)

Easily Shakespeare's worst work, which has always led me to wonder why it's also the most well-known.

 

[J-dog42]

I find that a lot of older books such as The Man in the Moon, All Quiet on the Western Front, Brave New World, don't really appeal. I think for me, they may have been good in their time, but now they just come across as boring and odd.

 

[archvile93]

bioshock, I know it has great atmosphere, but how does that excuse absolutely horrid and broken gameplay? I played through that game twice to make sure I just wasn't missing something, but just never saw it. I'm not a fan of TF2 due to all the hard countering, at least until the new weapons came out, which I'm still bitter about since I'm not allowed to use them without getting incredibly lucky or buying them which is a bigger rip off the MW2 map packs.

Out of curiosity, how was the gameplay broken for you? I also thought Bioshock had a few issues, but gameplay was never one of them for me.

1. Plasmids were all useless, except of course where they were abitralily made essential. They do virtually no damage, do not distract enemies (you'd think being on fire would cause someone to stop shooting at their enemies but no), yet require huge sums of eve to use.

2. Hit detection is awful. How many crossbow bolts can phase through an enemy's head failing to do any damage? answer, a lot.

3. Enemies have more health than an M1 tank, and that's not the big daddies I'm talking about, which mixes very poorly with my next issue.

4. I rarely had any ammo, and when I did it didn't last due to the reason above. I find more ammo in silent hill games. This wouldn't be so bad though if I could just get the plasmid that allows you to pull limitless amounts of ammo from your ass that magically disintigrates upon the users death that all the enemies get. You ever have to beat an elite bouncer to death? I did.

5. hacking is both difficult and often impossible and useless. Wow, ammo's now two dollars cheaper. That was worth the three health packs I went through due to being electricuted from getting unwinable boards. I wish my electric plasmid could do that much damage. Why didn't I hack this thing to give me stuff for free anyway?

6. And the level design, while attractive, wasn't exactly clear, causing me to get turned around often. And this is coming from a guy who had little trouble with the water temple in OoT.

Really? I found myself blasting through a lot of the enemies without problem. Half of them could be taken down with one shotgun blast, even at the end of the game. And I found ammo lying all over the place, if I ever ran out of ammo for one weapon, another weapon was almost always full... Also when they didn't throw impossible puzzles at you (One of the giant issues of the game for me) hacking was incredibly easy...

But the level design could get pretty bad, I agree with that. Sometimes I felt like I was in a 50s cartoon and the background was blending into itself, also I really wish the plasmids were more useful, especially when the suck up half of your eve in one shot.

Well I suspect you're not being entirely truthful with the ammo, since I would always scrounged through the entire level to make sure I didn't miss anything, and difficult was the wrong word for hacking. It was easy when it possible, but it often wasn't.

Did you use your camera at all possible times? Also, what difficulty did you play at?

Oh so in order to stand a chance you need to break the flow of gameplay to take pictures in an action game for no reason but to make the game arbitrarily more tedious, taking the time to try to line up the perfect shot to get the best score so you're not fucked later in the game? Yeah that wasn't aa terrible decision. It didn't work for Dead Rising and it didn't work for Bioshock.

I'll take that as a no, then?

That would be correct, not that it makes it any less idiotic. In fact make that issue number seven.

Well there's your problem! But I do agree with you on that point. But if you had used the camera, that would have probably knocked out issues 2-4 easily. I think that the reason the gameplay was so broken was that you weren't playing it the way that the designers intended for you. When I used the camera, many splicers went down in one shot when I was using antipersonnel rounds, 2 shots when I wasn't. The rest were valid points that I also had too, though, but I found that the game more than made up for those points. This is just a personal opinion, but I have a feeling that you may enjoy the game a lot more if you used the (agreeably arbitrary) camera system.

I thought the game was about solving problems your own way and not how the developers intended. Guess they lied about that. Besides I used the camera at first, but realized quickly that using it on living enemies was the same as commiting suicide since it alerted every enemy in the level to your exact posistion, and using it on the dead wasn't worth jack shit. And yes I know you get bonus points by using enrage to get them to kill eachother, but that doesn't work since any hit from anything causes the enemy to turn in the shot's direction and guess who they're going to see first and therefore attack. And what did the camera add that couldn't have been done better by reducing the enemys' health and skipping the whole idiotic camera idea anyway?

 

[HT_Black]

1984 was paced like a snail in an igloo, was filled with unlikable characters (and excriuciatingly bad softcore), and spent over 200 pages explaining on vague terms what could be made succint and pungent with a Post-it note and half an hour on a Saturday morning.

So you could say that I don't really like it.

Also, Twilight Princess was clearly about pedophilia, which automatically puts it on my "reprehensible" list.

 

[Therumancer]

There are plenty of works that are considered to be "masterpieces" or "classics", be they: Book, Film, Painting, Album, Game... whatever.

So what are some of these so called "masterpieces" that you personally don't care much for.
And when I ask this, I'm not looking for a recent, popular thing like Avatar or Harry Potter, I'm looking for older things, like Citizen Kane or Catcher in the Rye

Which brings me to my point, I hated Catcher in they Rye. I found Holden to be too whiny and annoying.
I also loathed Henry David Thoreau's Walden, largely for the same reasons. It's basically Thoreau's journal that he kept while being a hermit, and all he ever does is whine too.
Incidently, I had to read both of these in High School, so perhaps the bitterness I felt while analyzing them has influenced my opinions, but I also had to read The Grapes of Wrath and I heartily enjoyed that.

Well, with rare exception almost everything that is considered a "classic" nowadays is so dated that I think it loses relevence. The stories being classics because they usually addressed issues before the topics became commonplace, even when later material covered all the same stuff much better, and/or in a more currently relevent fashion.

The thing about "Catcher In The Rye" is that your supposed to be able to empathize with Holden and his observations about society, and how everyone and everything is phony. Then at the end of the story you find out that Holden is actually insane. This is supposed to raise the question about sanity, especially if you believe he saw the world clearly up until that revelation. There have been plenty of psycho-thrillers and such with the same basic twist, this is just the first time it really hit a mainstream audience that way which is why it became a classic. The book doesn't work as well nowadays because it's based on a world that is decades gone.

The book also has some infamy due to it's connection with murders, occultism, and similar things. A lot has been said about how the book has a tendency to be found in, or around a lot of the most... extreme, events that take place. This has caused it to have supernatural signifigance in some peoples minds. There are also conspiricy theories that it's connected to goverment meme/thought control experiments, right up there with the Polybius video game.

 

[Therumancer]

One recent one that I read for school was Macbeth. Honestly, I think that if it were a movie today, it would just be categorized as another meaningless action flick.

Did you even bother to read it? Macbeth does not translate in any way, shape, or form into a meaningless action flick.

Well, actually it sort of does.

The basic premise is that you have a guy who is promised the world and told he's pretty much invincible since he can only be killed under a set of circumstances that seem like they should be impossible. The guy pretty much runs around as a villain taking control of everything until a guy called Mcduff that fits those unlikely circumstances shows up and takes him down.

If you focus on the actual events of the story, and the stuff going on between the dramatic scenes (with them being present, but covered only to move the plot along), yeah this could be turned into a somewhat mindless action flick about a villain.

Simply my thoughts.

 

[Josdeb]

Lord. Of. The. Rings.

Yuck. I read the Hobbit, and it was painful. I tried to read LoTR and I made it 3 pages before offically stopping.
Actually, I don't like the LoTR films either. They bore me to tears.

 

[Capt. Crankypants]

I don't care at all for 'To kill a Mockingbird' or 'The great Gatsby'

A 'classic' book I DID enjoy though, was 'The picture of Dorian Gray'. I found I really liked Lord Henry, he made the book so much more enjoyable, AND relatable.

 

[Snarky Username]

One recent one that I read for school was Macbeth. Honestly, I think that if it were a movie today, it would just be categorized as another meaningless action flick.

Did you even bother to read it? Macbeth does not translate in any way, shape, or form into a meaningless action flick.

The problem was that there were far too many things that simply made no sense. It felt that Shakespeare would just use the witches as his own personal Deus Ex Machina, just as catalysts for the plot to move it along or explain why something happened. Not to mention that many of the scenes would just be blown through, swiftly going from scene to scene and event to event. I found that most of the soliloquies were just random thoughts from the characters (given there were a few that I really liked, the Porter's and Macbeth's last one on life in particular) but on the whole, they just took up space.

Not saying it was bad, but I am saying that it wasn't good enough to be regarded as the giant classic that it is today.

 

[Snarky Username]

bioshock, I know it has great atmosphere, but how does that excuse absolutely horrid and broken gameplay? I played through that game twice to make sure I just wasn't missing something, but just never saw it. I'm not a fan of TF2 due to all the hard countering, at least until the new weapons came out, which I'm still bitter about since I'm not allowed to use them without getting incredibly lucky or buying them which is a bigger rip off the MW2 map packs.

Out of curiosity, how was the gameplay broken for you? I also thought Bioshock had a few issues, but gameplay was never one of them for me.

1. Plasmids were all useless, except of course where they were abitralily made essential. They do virtually no damage, do not distract enemies (you'd think being on fire would cause someone to stop shooting at their enemies but no), yet require huge sums of eve to use.

2. Hit detection is awful. How many crossbow bolts can phase through an enemy's head failing to do any damage? answer, a lot.

3. Enemies have more health than an M1 tank, and that's not the big daddies I'm talking about, which mixes very poorly with my next issue.

4. I rarely had any ammo, and when I did it didn't last due to the reason above. I find more ammo in silent hill games. This wouldn't be so bad though if I could just get the plasmid that allows you to pull limitless amounts of ammo from your ass that magically disintigrates upon the users death that all the enemies get. You ever have to beat an elite bouncer to death? I did.

5. hacking is both difficult and often impossible and useless. Wow, ammo's now two dollars cheaper. That was worth the three health packs I went through due to being electricuted from getting unwinable boards. I wish my electric plasmid could do that much damage. Why didn't I hack this thing to give me stuff for free anyway?

6. And the level design, while attractive, wasn't exactly clear, causing me to get turned around often. And this is coming from a guy who had little trouble with the water temple in OoT.

Really? I found myself blasting through a lot of the enemies without problem. Half of them could be taken down with one shotgun blast, even at the end of the game. And I found ammo lying all over the place, if I ever ran out of ammo for one weapon, another weapon was almost always full... Also when they didn't throw impossible puzzles at you (One of the giant issues of the game for me) hacking was incredibly easy...

But the level design could get pretty bad, I agree with that. Sometimes I felt like I was in a 50s cartoon and the background was blending into itself, also I really wish the plasmids were more useful, especially when the suck up half of your eve in one shot.

Well I suspect you're not being entirely truthful with the ammo, since I would always scrounged through the entire level to make sure I didn't miss anything, and difficult was the wrong word for hacking. It was easy when it possible, but it often wasn't.

Did you use your camera at all possible times? Also, what difficulty did you play at?

Oh so in order to stand a chance you need to break the flow of gameplay to take pictures in an action game for no reason but to make the game arbitrarily more tedious, taking the time to try to line up the perfect shot to get the best score so you're not fucked later in the game? Yeah that wasn't aa terrible decision. It didn't work for Dead Rising and it didn't work for Bioshock.

I'll take that as a no, then?

That would be correct, not that it makes it any less idiotic. In fact make that issue number seven.

Well there's your problem! But I do agree with you on that point. But if you had used the camera, that would have probably knocked out issues 2-4 easily. I think that the reason the gameplay was so broken was that you weren't playing it the way that the designers intended for you. When I used the camera, many splicers went down in one shot when I was using antipersonnel rounds, 2 shots when I wasn't. The rest were valid points that I also had too, though, but I found that the game more than made up for those points. This is just a personal opinion, but I have a feeling that you may enjoy the game a lot more if you used the (agreeably arbitrary) camera system.

I thought the game was about solving problems your own way and not how the developers intended. Guess they lied about that. Besides I used the camera at first, but realized quickly that using it on living enemies was the same as commiting suicide since it alerted every enemy in the level to your exact posistion, and using it on the dead wasn't worth jack shit. And yes I know you get bonus points by using enrage to get them to kill eachother, but that doesn't work since any hit from anything causes the enemy to turn in the shot's direction and guess who they're going to see first and therefore attack. And what did the camera add that couldn't have been done better by reducing the enemys' health and skipping the whole idiotic camera idea anyway?

Well the camera also gave you special tonics the more you used it. There's actually an entire guide on what abilities the camera gives you. Also, I'm pretty sure that the camera never alerted enemies that you weren't already fighting to your presence... But yeah, the camera was a bit of a bad idea, and I still agree with you there like I did in my lost post. But if you just accepted that and used it like the game asked you to, you would probably find the game to be better and more enjoyable overall. Every game has flaws, including Bioshock, but the many of the ones that you had were because you never used the camera.

 

[Panda Mania]

The Last of the Mohicans. A few pages in, and I was being strangled by the horrifically uninteresting and incredibly irrelevant and unnecessary paragraphs that interrupted the already dull action and story. I couldn't go on to finish it. 'Course, I dunno, there may be people that love it, everybody's mileage varies...

It made me feel better to learn that Mark Twain ruthlessly mocked James Fenimore Cooper's writing style, which was verbose even for its day.

 

[archvile93]

bioshock, I know it has great atmosphere, but how does that excuse absolutely horrid and broken gameplay? I played through that game twice to make sure I just wasn't missing something, but just never saw it. I'm not a fan of TF2 due to all the hard countering, at least until the new weapons came out, which I'm still bitter about since I'm not allowed to use them without getting incredibly lucky or buying them which is a bigger rip off the MW2 map packs.

Out of curiosity, how was the gameplay broken for you? I also thought Bioshock had a few issues, but gameplay was never one of them for me.

1. Plasmids were all useless, except of course where they were abitralily made essential. They do virtually no damage, do not distract enemies (you'd think being on fire would cause someone to stop shooting at their enemies but no), yet require huge sums of eve to use.

2. Hit detection is awful. How many crossbow bolts can phase through an enemy's head failing to do any damage? answer, a lot.

3. Enemies have more health than an M1 tank, and that's not the big daddies I'm talking about, which mixes very poorly with my next issue.

4. I rarely had any ammo, and when I did it didn't last due to the reason above. I find more ammo in silent hill games. This wouldn't be so bad though if I could just get the plasmid that allows you to pull limitless amounts of ammo from your ass that magically disintigrates upon the users death that all the enemies get. You ever have to beat an elite bouncer to death? I did.

5. hacking is both difficult and often impossible and useless. Wow, ammo's now two dollars cheaper. That was worth the three health packs I went through due to being electricuted from getting unwinable boards. I wish my electric plasmid could do that much damage. Why didn't I hack this thing to give me stuff for free anyway?

6. And the level design, while attractive, wasn't exactly clear, causing me to get turned around often. And this is coming from a guy who had little trouble with the water temple in OoT.

Really? I found myself blasting through a lot of the enemies without problem. Half of them could be taken down with one shotgun blast, even at the end of the game. And I found ammo lying all over the place, if I ever ran out of ammo for one weapon, another weapon was almost always full... Also when they didn't throw impossible puzzles at you (One of the giant issues of the game for me) hacking was incredibly easy...

But the level design could get pretty bad, I agree with that. Sometimes I felt like I was in a 50s cartoon and the background was blending into itself, also I really wish the plasmids were more useful, especially when the suck up half of your eve in one shot.

Well I suspect you're not being entirely truthful with the ammo, since I would always scrounged through the entire level to make sure I didn't miss anything, and difficult was the wrong word for hacking. It was easy when it possible, but it often wasn't.

Did you use your camera at all possible times? Also, what difficulty did you play at?

Oh so in order to stand a chance you need to break the flow of gameplay to take pictures in an action game for no reason but to make the game arbitrarily more tedious, taking the time to try to line up the perfect shot to get the best score so you're not fucked later in the game? Yeah that wasn't aa terrible decision. It didn't work for Dead Rising and it didn't work for Bioshock.

I'll take that as a no, then?

That would be correct, not that it makes it any less idiotic. In fact make that issue number seven.

Well there's your problem! But I do agree with you on that point. But if you had used the camera, that would have probably knocked out issues 2-4 easily. I think that the reason the gameplay was so broken was that you weren't playing it the way that the designers intended for you. When I used the camera, many splicers went down in one shot when I was using antipersonnel rounds, 2 shots when I wasn't. The rest were valid points that I also had too, though, but I found that the game more than made up for those points. This is just a personal opinion, but I have a feeling that you may enjoy the game a lot more if you used the (agreeably arbitrary) camera system.

I thought the game was about solving problems your own way and not how the developers intended. Guess they lied about that. Besides I used the camera at first, but realized quickly that using it on living enemies was the same as commiting suicide since it alerted every enemy in the level to your exact posistion, and using it on the dead wasn't worth jack shit. And yes I know you get bonus points by using enrage to get them to kill eachother, but that doesn't work since any hit from anything causes the enemy to turn in the shot's direction and guess who they're going to see first and therefore attack. And what did the camera add that couldn't have been done better by reducing the enemys' health and skipping the whole idiotic camera idea anyway?

Well the camera also gave you special tonics the more you used it. There's actually an entire guide on what abilities the camera gives you. Also, I'm pretty sure that the camera never alerted enemies that you weren't already fighting to your presence... But yeah, the camera was a bit of a bad idea, and I still agree with you there like I did in my lost post. But if you just accepted that and used it like the game asked you to, you would probably find the game to be better and more enjoyable overall. Every game has flaws, including Bioshock, but the many of the ones that you had were because you never used the camera.

Yes, all games have flaws, but unlike some games, like half-Life 2 which had incredibly uninteresting and generic but at least functional gameplay, that can succeed in spite of them. Bioshock could not as it's flaws were simply too glaring and bad. I don't care if the camera caused a lot of my problems, that didn't make them less there.