Samurai Goomba said:
Dude, I'd stand by those claims, too. He's not saying he hates the game. He's saying it isn't as deep as it thinks it is, that the little sister mechanic is crap (I agree for the same reason he thinks this, because it doesn't matter from a gameplay perspective the choice you make, so it IS NOT A CHOICE.) It's like asking if you want a car, or a boat. You're not making a moral choice, just deciding what gameplay benefit you want, and you're locked into your decision. If you kill one little sister, you're stuck with the bad ending. So you're either going to be all good, or all evil (because middle ground is pointless), and THIS IS NOT TRUE TO REAL LIFE. Nobody is all good or all evil all the time.
I did already address this issue. Your complaints only possibly make sense working backwards from a cheat sheet.
Actually playing through the game you have to make the personal choice to murder a little girl for a guaranteed gain, or rescue a girl for meagre gain and the uncertain promise of reward. Yes you get occasional rewards but it's not clear till a 2nd play-through or consulting cheat sheets that you see how similar both paths are.
Even then the lesson is clear: the righteous path has delayed rewards.
You are boiling this down to the end result, when it is how you got there that counts.
"If you kill one little sister, you're stuck with the bad ending. So you're either going to be all good, or all evil (because middle ground is pointless)"
Excuse me, you MURDERED A CHILD FOR GREED! Yeah, but it was "just one" sorry but in "real life" that makes you quite an evil bastard even if you rescue every other little girl. You still murdered one! No accident, you did it intentionally in cold blood. You earned the bad ending.
There is actually a slight distinction between "kinda bad" and "very bad" ending. But generally if you think it is justified to murder just one little girl to feed your lust for power, that says A LOT about your in game character.
And you know what, most of the gameplay IS shooting guys in the face! Play System Shock 2 and compare the games! Aside from ONE tonic that takes forever to get (like half the game), there is no stealth in Bioshock. At. All. There is no bargaining, or making deals. Your "exploration" claim is kinda nonsense, because everything in the game is "*insert activity*... While being shot at by respawning splicers." Oh sure, you can "get the drop" on splicers if the game decides to let you, but actual stealth? Avoiding enemies? Only the Big Daddies give you that option, and that's because they're passive enemies, not because the game has any actual alternatives to fighting (because really, that's only one enemy and a fairly rare one.)
So what if there isn't any stealth? What is your point? You must fight to survive, THAT is Rapture. My point is Rapture is rather depopulated since the Civil War, the place is quite barren most of the time and splicers don't come as a constant unending stream. There is no guarantee that the next room nor even the one after that will have anyone inside.
My point was not that it was a stealthy game but that there is at least time to pause and take in the story, events, environment and narrative. It's not like it is Modern Warfare 2 that would not stop for even 30 seconds for you to get your bearings.
If you think games are anywhere near books in depth, sorry, you're wrong. Not trying to be an elitist, and I love stories in games, but just no. Read the "Ware" books, or Broken Angels, or Alexandre Dumas... It isn't fair to compare games with books, I know. They are different, and books have had forever and a day to mature. They aren't in the same league. YET. BS is good by game standards, but poor by the standards of what books and in some cases even film can do. Basic thrillers like David Fincher's The Game or Seven kick Bioshock all around the schoolyard for subtlety.
It's easy to say literature is superior to computer games when you compare only the strength of novels against the weaknesses of games.
Books must describe events and maybe feelings to affect the reader by empathy with characters.
Games INDUCE feelings in the gamer, by role playing. It can be so much more personal, it is much more akin to stories told in the 2nd person perspective that is very difficult to be effective in prose but for interactive media you such capability.
Don't mean to come across as white knighting, I'm just reading this thread and finding myself seriously disagreeing with you here. Antisocialfatman does a YouTube review of Bioshock that's pretty informative, and I recommend checking it out to see just how lazy Ken Levine can be (despite his obvious writing skills).
Well antisocialfatman's himself describes Bioshock's story as "magnificent".
His main gripes seem to be that it is very dumbed down since System Shock 2 which went against his expectation, and that it is derivative. Really, a concept as original as Rapture... derivative. Even if it was, some of the greatest films at least are hugely derivative, Star Wars and Indiana Jones being most obvious.
He has endless praise for the game, he can only knock it for how it is an imperfect re-imagining/remake of System Shock 2. He won't just let the game stand on its own merits.
Seem he is disagreeing with you.
Part 2 of his review, I've just started and he is making alarmingly broad generalisations to criticise Plasmids, saying that they are too similar... really.
He does this by an extraordinary act of contrivance grouping all plasmids into "offensive" and "crowd control" saying all the plasmids in each "essentially do the same thing".
No. Bollocks.
Swarm is completely different from Enrage in how it is used.
Swarm is great for rooting out enemies who you can't spy, it reveals them and distracts them. So if chased and surrounded, blast swarm to buy you some time. It works as well for singular as multiple enemies. Enrage needs you to aim for and hit a particular target and then this is ONLY worth it for groups, the trade off is it has a pervasive
Big daddy hypno may do the same thing but the point is the trade off, one plasmid is not so powerful that it can turn both splicer and daddy in the same way.
He is right that System Shock 2 has more psionic abilities than Bioshock's plasmids, but he goes overboard in tying to paint Bioshock as having far less plasmids than it does. I understand his anger but he is overreacting.
