Bioshock -- the "sequel in spirit" to System Shock 2

http://screenshots.teamxbox.com/gallery/1457/BioShock/p1

concept art.

the game is now rated M in the US. (surprisingly)

and look out for goatse:

http://www.2kgames.com/cultofrapture/coverartcontestwinners.html

(check for the wedding ring)

Mmmm. The game looks so tasty.

Bump since the demo is out. Anyone play it? If you pre-order this from Gamestop you get a soundtrack CD, a DVD and a figurine for $10 extra.

No, because I'm waiting for the game and don't need anything sullying the experience. But did anyone see that fucking incredible video they debuted on Spike TV? With the Bobby Darin song?

yeah, I'm skipping the demo too - but definitely planning on picking up the game. Is it out next week, or the week after?

8/21

And Toys R Us is apparently selling it now. Which means it'll be up on the torrent sites possibly today.

The demo is the greatest game of 2007. I haven't played the full game yet, but the demo alone, by itself, greatest game of 2007.

Aaaaaand it leaked.

Took 'em long enough.

They deliberately crippled the game so you can't play the PC version before Aug 21st. Online software activation that actually d/ls the exe to your system. Apparently, Toys R Us broke the street date.

I know a guy who's getting the 360 version right now.

does he just never put his xbox on live, or do they have new chips that allow you to grab games AND play online now?

or do you mean he's getting it as in buying it at a TRU?

Hmm, I generally hate first-person shooters but this thing looks so cool.

available for preloading on steam.

The former, Will. It's actually a firmware flash. Works great. Or so he says.

http://www.metacritic.com/games/xbox360/scores/

haha yeah I was just going to mention how this is scoring.

I'ma be pissed if i have to sit thru a lot of somebody repping for libertarians and/or Objectivism in this, e.g. the gamedevs feeling the need to stick in a Heinlein-like author's avatar to lecture the audience.

While this is sometimes cool(see Kynes, Pardot), usually it suuuuuucks.

I just looked at it a little so far (at least my friend did) but it looks like it's the kind of game you only have to listen to what you want. You can just walk away, not read documents, etc.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/813/813214p1.html

The target in BioShock, Andrew Ryan, is anything but a prototypical villain. He's a man of bottomless ambition who built a city under the sea, obsessed with the idea of what makes a man, what differentiates a man from a slave. He's the Randian hero, a man who holds his own creative vision above all else, and he's Rodion Raskolnikov's exceptional person, someone who can be excused for committing crimes to achieve a noble goal, or at least with noble intentions--and he knows it. His vision, Rapture, is clearly a colossal failure. The driving force behind the game is your quest to discover why this man's alluring vision of an artistic utopia failed so completely and why you've stumbled upon it. Even though Ryan spits out what seems to resemble totalitarian propaganda, you can't help but sympathize with him. He has alluring ideas, speaks them with conviction, and comes off as a sympathetic visionary despite his severe eccentricities.

Ah fucking great, we mix the most socially inadequate of internet nerds, games journos, with product of the most socially inadequate of political philosophies.

"seems to resemble"?

Also, i'm a sucker for well-done-enough narrative that i try get as much from the game as i can(provided it's not page after page of plaintext)

here's what M@tt's mag sez:
http://www.gameinformer.com/NR/exeres/41497688-5BCB-4C0A-B952-A1B1440E2139.htm

The massively good reviews this thing is getting means that the backlash should come withing 9 days of the PC version being released.

Fun game that also "arty" in getting inflated metacritic score SHOCKA

So cna I buy an Xbox 360 now without worrying that it will break? Or is that ring thing still a serious issue?

Still. I'm buying one anyway, though. I pre-ordered this shit.

I played this last night and it was pretty damned cool..

Hell, I can wait. I started playing Xwing: Alliance again and finally got into Fable. I got enough to occupy me for the next 96 hours.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002605.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

you want to play this game. you want to read atlus shrugged. oneofusoneofus.

No, the best thing about this is guys on gaming boards who I always thought were pricks suddenly talking about how much they love Ayn Rand and me feeling vindicated.

Gee, between this coming out and Madden 08 hitting this week, you have the two major segments of 360 owners being sated for a while.

awaiting lolz: http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/gentopic.php?board=931329

The real reason for no "black" people. *spoilers*
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Melee Master89
Posted 8/16/2007 12:30:15 PM
message detail multimaniacal | Posted 8/16/2007 12:05:42 PM | message detail
theres a diary where the crazy surgeon talks about how you could change anything, your race, your sex, etc.
---
Proud Gallade/Marrowak/Starmie fan.
FuriousTiger-I like it when people argue because I can add more vocabulary to my slippery grasp of English.

dukebd699
Posted 8/16/2007 12:34:42 PM
message detail So what you're saying is black people would rather be white?

Selphbommr
Posted 8/16/2007 12:36:36 PM
message detail black people cant swim thats why. white ppl float, black ppl sink.

j/k dont shoot me
---
GT: SelphBommr
dont bother

VampSlayer246
Posted 8/16/2007 12:39:26 PM
message detail They used the white man plasmid.

BompBompYeah
Posted 8/16/2007 12:40:49 PM
message detail I'm sure Chocolate Rain is involved somehow.
---
Rad To The Max.
GT - ClapYerHandz

SR338metroid
Posted 8/16/2007 12:42:01 PM
message detail choklit rane rox i love that video
---
Yippie-Kye-Yay gamefaqer!!

VampSlayer246
Posted 8/16/2007 12:42:56 PM
message detail hahahahahaha
**steps away from computer to breathe**
hahahahahaha

ColoradoKindBud
Posted 8/16/2007 12:43:20 PM
message detail There was absolutely no reason to create this thread.

And yet it goes on for five pages.

marmotwolof, I'm pretty sure the game doesn't actually endorse Objectivism and Atlas Shruggery. The proponent of it in the game is the villain, isn't he?

Yeah, I know! There are already dudes going on about Rand oblivious to that.

Dudes, I am here to tell you that this game is freaking incredible. Except I was playing it with my gf last night and she got so freaked out by it I had to turn it off.

Something to do with the horrible doomed mutant souls walking around talking about how lonely they are, and god how they just want to meet someone and end their terrible loneliness, and then they attack you and how have to brain them with a wrench. Or the mothers looking desperately for their babies, who have become little flesh-collecting demons.

I'm off to buy an Elite before my copy gets here this week.

^...and I did. I'll be playing Gears and shit until BioShock gets here.

you forget to add "-ting" in there

I'll try to take care of that before I play.

how do people have this before release date?

Toys R Us broke street date.

i called them today and they said that was not the case

Yeah, they stopped selling it a little while after everyone found out.

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4491

PC demo hits tomorrow

check that. PC demo has already leaked.

steam is taunting me. "Pre-load complete; unreleased." anyone else had a total bitch of a time getting ss2 to run well on xp? i used to be able to do it but the internet says something about dual core processors pissing it off.

aaaaaand i got it running, but my display is all screwy. I guess have i have to d/l the latest hooja-doojas from ATI.

yay, am preloading now. But boo, am away this weekend. Arse!

oh boy, my vid card won't run this. excellent.

this will probably be fixed by the time most of you see it, but check what happens when you visit the gamedev's website:

http://www.irrationalgames.com/

509 Error

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.irrationalgames.com Port 80

I think I'm about halfway through now. This game gets hella difficult around the midway point. The stealth stuff drives me bananas. And there's a little too many retrieval-style missions. But this game is fascinating and super fun and crazy imaginative and is the best-looking and best-sounding game I've ever seen.

First time through I'm going without killing the Little Sisters. The way they cry over the Big Daddies after you take one out was just too much. Anyone doing it the other way? Does that make it way way easier? How does it affect the story?

SPOILERS bruv

http://www.sonydefenseforce.com/?p=83#comments

what happens when nakedly sony worshipping fanboys decide to review a 360 game.

Those aren't spoilers!

Omg Bioshock in 'cropping fullscreen to widescreen instead of vice-versa' SHOCKAH

this game is nutz

haven't run into any big daddy's yet. anyone know where the gene bank is in the first level? i need flame back

i was preloading but i had to shut down, so i paused it befoer closing steam and turning off. Now the "preload" button doesn't bring up the preload window any more and I... I don't know what to do...

this is sitting on my hdd right now. persona 3 is in my ps2. i have tomorrow and thursday off. it has been a crappy summer for gaming but this week is shaping up pretty well.

My 360 started chewing on discs yesterday, just as Bioshock is released. Off it goes to Microsoft for repairs. Bad timing :/

system shock 2 (underwater art deco libertarian-shooting remix)

The hacking mini-game is annoying (and I'm crap at it, so far). And there's too much fucking stuff to pick up and look for - but you have to keep looking 'cause it seems like you often can only pick up one bullet at a time. Other than that I'm liking the game fine so far (about two hours in, I guess), but I've yet to have my socks knocked off...

yeah, it's good but underwhelming so far... I guess that's understandable with all the superlatives knocking about

all it really takes to blow the gaming world hivemind is to make a first person shooter not set in ww2 or in the future pitted against an alien race in a struggle for survival etc etc. the game is getting better as i go on--the attack in the dentist's office was pretty nice.

need to play this. need new computer. need job. argh

i am up to neptune's bounty yay

Must stop reading thread. I know "THERE'S A DENTIST'S OFFICE?!?!" is hardly a spoiler but y'know, things gotta be fresh.

This game is so fun. How can we have a thread about a game and not have even little spoilers? Some compromise must be reached, come on.

(SPOILER ALERT)

Ice level? Awesome!

Why is this not on PS2 ;_;

are you kidding?

we're in the next generation pal. pick a side and run with it.

SPOILERS AHEAD

OK this is seriously great now...

need to sit with it a little while and let it get deep...

but standouts for me at the moment:

i. meeting your first little sister
ii. when you pick up the shotgun and all the lights go out and lots of splics come running after you
iii. another bit when you're looking for the telekinesis/doctor in the dentist and you walk round this corner and music starts... and you walk round the corner so slowly even though there's NOTHING THERE!

the music is so awesome throughout, as well... it as if THE CARETAKER made a videogame!!!

in other news I just downloaded the DS game where you touch up witches...

pick a side and run with it.

HA! I chose Sonicrosoftendo. Just need to find that Wii...

http://i17.tinypic.com/663d4bc.jpg

hahaha

well that was quick

My copy just came. Busted Big Daddy figure, but I'll get a free printed copy of the pdf art book if I return it. It's all good, time to check this shit out.

I got a loaner 360 from a friend while mine is in the shop, so, playing.

Bioshock is the first game that lets me combine the power of fire & bees into flaming bees.
This is totally worth the price of admission on its own, especially when the application of said flaming bees makes the enemies scream "Fire AND Bees? That's just not FAIR!"

How do you do that? Set the bees on fire when they're in midair?

So who's killing the Little Sisters and who's not?

I havn't tried that yet - the splicer just happened to be covered in bees, and I added fire, for hilarity. The bees do have the unfortunate habit of attacking anything and everything nearby, so be careful around Big Daddies.

I have been saving the little sisters myself. The ADAM reward is substantially less in the short term but there have been some interesting unique rewards to make up for it.

I'm rescuing them myself. Figure I'll harvest them when I replay on hard mode, the extra Adam will come in handy then.

I'm doing the same. I'm on the last level now, (SPOILER ALERT) which is cool (END SPOILER) and I think I must be missing something in this game. How are you supposed to get the "all weapons upgraded" achievement when there are only like five upgrade stations in the game and after you use them once they're fuxored? Did I just breeze right past a bunch of upgrade stations or something?

yeah -- i think there's like 12 total

anyone following this whole ordeal surrounding the copy protection on the pc version?

http://xs218.xs.to/xs218/07345/sig_bioshock.jpg

2k seems to be backtracking pretty quickly though (5 activations now available), so i doubt it will be much of a problem in the long term. the soundtrack is now available for download, as well (as opposed to the pathetic 3 track cd of moby remixes that comes with the special edition):

http://downloads.2kgames.com/bioshock/BioShock_Score.zip

Cor, this game is good. Last night, whilst playing it I thought, "fuck, this game is boring. I feel like I've been playing it for hours". Turned it off and went to bed only to find it was 5:30am. I'd been playing it all night!

Of course, when I woke up I whacked the xbox back on and played another couple of hours. Now I'm late for work!

Oooh, I can hit the baddies now before they hit me! This isn't so hard after all :)

It'll hurt to lose all my upgrades and stuff when I finish this. Fortunately I'm pretty sure I'm miles off that, as I've spent way too much time walking about breaking things.

Funny how it turns out telekinesis is the best plasmid in the game. I didn't figure out how to use it offensively until about three-quarters through the game. Games where you can throw flaming dead cats at people = fun.

In conclusion - I do feel like this game was over-rated, but I do feel like it's a very solid game. I know when I'm playing a GREAT game I feel like playing it again as soon as I finish. I did not feel like that as I was beating Bioshock. Once was enough. It's a bit of a drag that the game has no replayablility / no multiplayer. It would have been great fun, say, if after beating the game solo, you could play a powered-up co-op campaign in the same world, just for laughs, or whatever. Anyhow - something more would have been nice. I also felt like, for me, there were just too much picking stuff up, too many hacking mini-games (when I got the achievement for beating fifty of those I felt sick), and too many hunt and fetch type parts to the game - one of those would have been enough - but three or four collecting missions - a bit blah. The story is also a bit sparse. But overall, it was failry addictive, and certainly a visually appealing world to stomp around in for five days.

Surely there's at least one replay in Bioshock-- isn't it a totally different game whether you harvest or free the Little Sisters? I'm sure the last level at least is completely different.

I can see myself replaying this game to death. It's my new Dead Rising!

Yeah, come on, how can setting people on fire and then shocking the water they're trying to put out the fire with ever get old?

p.s. I don't think I've ever had the feeling of wanting to restart a game as soon as I finished it except with Resident Evil 4. I'm loaning out my xbox to a buddy and I'm going to take it back when the rhythm games come out in October, and I feel like that kind of break will be a good amount of time before playing Bioshock again, however much I liked it.

Just finished. GOTY so far for me, easily.

rhythm games come out in October

Wow! Elaborate plz! Is The Idolm@ster getting a US release? If so, I assume there won't be any problem importing it to the UK (I hear lots of titles don't have any region protection)?

What others are there? Aside from Guitar Hero/Rock band etc, because I'm pretty much already buying them. Corrr, I'm a little bit excited now!

yeah, sorry, just meant GH and Rock Band. I don't think Idolmaster is coming out in UK/US at all.

This is sort of a minor quibble, but I hate the smooth camera moves that are typical of first-person shooters. In a game like Gears of War you get the sense of the up-and-down movement of walking (and the difference of terrain) that you don't get in Bioshock and Halo and other games, and that always takes me out of the game a little bit.

yeah, sorry, just meant GH and Rock Band. I don't think Idolmaster is coming out in UK/US at all.

Aw buggerit. I'm still excited nonetheless!

Idolmaster has gamer pix on live marketplace, which is the only good sign I've seen. I blew some leftover points on them of course, in the vain hope that my sole purchase would help the game get a release over here. I don't think it works that way though.

Back to Bioshock - there's little more satisfying than blasting a splicer in the face, with a downed Big Daddy, via telekinesis!

Whoa, I need to try that! Replaying on hard now.

Hahaha, you're right, I got a one hit kill doing that. I also tried throwing a splicer at a Big Daddy, though I think it just made him angry.

Weirdly I think throwing a body is the most powerful attack in the game by far. Even the super-strong splicers, if you hit them in the head with a body they go down. Plus you get a nice shield while you're lining up your shot!

frame rate was fine in demo, full game I get past the demo bit and now my VC is crying.

I like Lowtax's review of the game.

Just over halfway through (I think), and I'm starting to feel a bit bored. Not getting new plasmids now, I'm just getting upgrades to the old ones. Think I've seen all the standard weapons too (I got the crossbow about an hour ago). And I don't expect to see many more new baddies either. Hope there are some fun new environments coming up, or I might not make it to the end (to be fair, I'm in Fort whatever it's called at the moment, and I've been doing quite a bit of back-and-forthing. So perhaps I'll get inspired again once I'm out of here, which should be soon).

I'll just say that you're very close to getting somewhere story wise...

Finished this last night. Will be starting again tomorrow :D

the demo doesn't work properly for me so can't realistically put the money down for the full version until they bring a patch out :( :( :(

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2007/20070829.jpg

Not bad game at all. Bit easy.

Do you mean to tell me that Bioshock is a pretty good game?!?!?!?!?!?!?

It is a bit easy.

True enough.

Isn't there a hard mode or something.

thats what she said

:(

Haha.

My friends who don't even own game systems are all "dude, Bioshock looks awesome", apparently it is a Thing?

my buddy who hasn't owned a game system since... oh, i was gonna say sega genesis but he had a ps2... anyway, doesn't play many games, was all "you got a 360? do you have bioshock?"

i am renting it tomorrow and we gonna play through it like it ain't no thang.

I think I'm about 20 minutes from the end now, and I haven't been wowed by anything in the last 6 hours. The big storyline event in the middle was great, and it felt like it was going to change the nature of the whole game. So when it didn't, and things just carried on as before, it was a huge disappointment. And the level design (which is probably the best thing this game had going for it overall) gets less and less inspired the further in you go.

No game of the year, this.

I guess it's hard to get the proper immersion level if you're playing for one hour a week or whatever.

Huh? Apart from the fact that that's bollocks, I've not been playing an hour a week anyway. I had a chunk of time off halfway through because I was out of town, but when I play I tend towards fairly long sessions.

"You can only appreciate this game if you clock it in four days, like I did" is the weakest defence of a title I've heard in a long time.

Hey, it's cool. BioShock sucks. There are a finite amount of weapons and plasmids. The entire nature of the game didn't change halfway through. What a piece of shit.

did you make the game or something??

I'm just fucking around. There have already been a couple of games out since I said "GOTY so far for me, easily," that I like better than this. There really wasn't all that much good this year before that. To anyone who think the last part of BioShock was weak (and the final boss admittedly is), wait until you play the last couple missions of Halo 3.

What is the thing tht happens halfway through the game?

mild spoiler

the golf club action and reveal?

end spoiler

that's right near the end of the game!

Oh sorry, there was supposed to be more space there. It wasn't much of a spoiler, but mods, could you either make it less obvious or take it out?

OK, so I have almost made it halfway through the game on medium and I was wondering whether I should start over and play on hard or beat the game with ease by playing medium? It's a really fun game.

Hard is too hard and medium is too easy, unfortunately. I say press on and then replay on Hard doing whatever with the Little Sisters that you're not doing this time.

good idea

I was disappointed by this game. Really nice set pieces interspersed with a whole lot of linearity. Genuinely didn't see the twist coming. Zero Punctuation review == spot on.

I'm yet to see a Zero Punctuation review that isn't. Except perhaps Peggle, but I sort of think he's OTM with that too. Maybe he just has that way with words and is actually talking a lot of bollocks I don't pick up on.

all his reviews (for the games i've played at least) have left me nodding in a, "this is exactly what i thought about this game" way. which is a bit annoying in the way i can only ever say "ME TOO!!!11 LOL" on seeing them.

Finally playing this now that I've ditched my crusty old laptop and built a respectable modern PC, and I'm right past...that part. Golfing and whatnot. Sadly, I went into the game knowing there was a "twist," and there were more than enough clues to more or less figure it out well in advance, but the other twist, the co-twist if you will...yow. Turns out the bit I was expecting was merely the "adding insult to injury" part of a larger "oh BALLS" moment. I hate having to be so oblique about this, but spoiling it would be absolutely criminal.

The gunplay isn't too satisfying, but the plasmids are great fun (especially the old OH GOD I AM ON FIRE/OH GOD I AM STANDING KNEE-DEEP IN ELECTRIFIED WATER trick, never gets old), and I really dig the Power To The People stations. I loved "fine-tuning" guns in Deus Ex, and this is more or less the same mechanic, except with crazy ridiculous steampunk contraptions like the gigantic cylinder/belt-feeding mechanism for the pistol capacity upgrade or the baroque monstrosity that is the fully-upgraded shotgun.

I guess this might have some spoilers. I'll cross 'em out for youze.

I can't believe it took me this long to play this but I finally beat it. I really didn't like the game that much until the middle of the game. I figured I'd end up having to kill Atlas, and I was reasonably sure that he was Fontaine, and i figured my "previous life" was somehow related to Rapture, but I didn't see all of that crazy retro-psychology shit coming. Really, really cool. I also dig it when games like this sort of cast light on their own limitations like the linearity. It feels like this game was confronting that linearity in its narrative, unlike Assassin's Creed which just tried to come up with excuses for its gameyness. This is self-referential art done RIGHT. I'm also glad that I didn't "know" about the "twist" because while I heard there was a twist, I thought it was related to the little sisters.

Anyway, I thought I would be lukewarm on this game but I ended up really loving it.

lol boss fight

I loved the game, but it was too short and replayability really isn't there.

Can't really see replaying it to harvest the Little Sisters, and get the alternate ending. But might replay it to get all the recordings - missed a few - and try for different plasmids & Tonics. And just to admire the scenery.

DG otm. Also, everything I said earlier still stands, this was an upsetting game not just because it was disappointing, but because it was so nearly amazing, before that disappointment kicked in.

loved this game. only thing i didn't care for was the lame-ass boss fight.

it just seem a shame that as technology gets better the games get more stupider

i mean system shock was the most complicated and that would run on a 386

it just seem a shame that as technology gets better the games get more stupider

i mean system shock was the most complicated and that would run on a 38

^^^whoa wtf again

Maybe I have low standards, but this game is blowing me away. I've never played a game with a world that's both this unique and this immersive. And the twist even impressed my wife, who couldn't care less about non-Rock Band video games.

Okay, jeez, that ending is embarrassing. How could they have spent so much effort on the story only to finish off with that?

Still, amazing game. Best FPS I've ever played. Which means it's the best out of, like, three games.

I started playing Gears of War, got the shits with it immediately and started playing this and I've stuck with it. It's pretty sweet. I shouldn't have started it on easy tho.

Finally upgraded my graphics card on a drunken whim and quick search thru craigslist. I can now play this at home, along with Witcher.

Whee.

system shock 2 (underwater art deco libertarian-shooting remix)
-- adam, Wednesday, 22 August 2007 15:36 (9 months ago) Link

was system shock 2 as good as i remember it being? cause bioshock kinda sucks. of course i think FEAR is the best fps in recent memory so maybe i just have bad taste.

http://www.destructoid.com/hey-ashly-whatcha-playing-episode-three-89989.phtml

SS2 is as good. Be sure to get the updated fanmade texture packs, helps a lot.

I'm having a hellish time trying to get deus ex running on my macbook; would like to run system shock 2 as well, but don't see that happening - I'm open to advice and hand-holding

in which case, I'm going to play through bioshock again... anyone replayed it since their original play-through?

I had a great time playing through the first time but I'm not sure how good it will seem second time through

Yeah just started. do u have to rescue all the girls to get the different ending? or just not kill any of them>?>?

I just read through this thread again and was struck by some of the negative reactions to this game and remembered how much I loved it when I played it; loved it

I'm going to harvest the little sisters this time through!!!

I think I harvested one little sister just to see what would happen and I got the "bad ending". Kinda lame. Anyway, the game's well put together and everything but damn... I just really didn't find it very much fun. I had a similar reaction to System Shock 2. It's like everything's there to make it great or at least really good, but I'm not enjoying myself playing through it.

i had a blast.

the only part that disappointed me was the boss fight/ending.

Wow, this is incredible. First immersive FPS in ages that really got me by the medulla oblongata.

I had that awesome rare gaming moment last night where you look up and six hours have passed in real rapturous focus. It's been a while.

My girl genuinely cannot stay in the room when i play for longer than fifteen minutes; she says it's too stressful.

Bioshock main character guy, what's on your iPod?

Maurice Chevalier, "Thank Heaven For Little Girls"

O'Jays 'For the Love of Money' / Cats and the Fiddle 'Jumpin with a G.I. Gal' (DJ Steempunk ReMash)

Clash, "Complete Control"

bioshock OST

just up to the first boss... wow, what an atmosphere.

mildly spoilerish question that i request only a mildly spoilerish response to if possible:

i rented this ish. i am only going to have time to play it thru once.

will i have more fun, in general if i kill or save 'em?

Surprisingly it's really six of one, half dozen of another; doesn't really affect the gameplay too much. You get immediate power up if you kill them, long-term benefits if you save them.

I saved them, but if you're gonna save them, save them all. Don't succumb to the temptation; the game has a long memory.

yeah, i killed just one of them and saved the rest and got the bad ending. :(

i recommend saving them.

the math sez: kill 'em bro

save em

http://www.whokilledbambi.co.uk/public/2007/07/kill-em-all.jpg

jesus

what the hell am i supposed to do

i've never played the game, if that helps

me neither, but something tells me - kill them.

yeah i'm just going on g.p. here

lol

I consider it more difficult to beat if you don't kill them. play with that in mind.

is it like one big payoff thing at the end or something that will enhance a great part of the game?

(not killing)

You get rewarded for not killing them too. Like every third one you save you get a chunk of ADAM. Also it's nice to not get a bummer ending.

There really isn't a significant difference in how much you ADAM you get in the long run.

oh

so you get adam from not killing them, as well as killing them?

might as well save them i guess?

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2007/08/little-sisters-save-or-harvest-we-break-down-the-best-approach-for-adam.ars

this is an ages-old quandry

to kill the dudes, or not to kill the dudes

hahaha

KILL THEM

ps that chart is o-p dude doesnt even take time-value into account

kill them, and if you want to win easily just stick with electricity powers

didn't realize ILG was so merciless.

just keep in mind if you harvest even one of them you get the "bad" ending so might as well go all or nothing.

can you drown them? might be an option

I saved them. So if you kill them, can you let us know what happens at the end? I only saw the good ending.

Here's all three endings on youtube:
(Guess what, SPOILERS!)

all 3 endings pretty much suck btw

didn't realize the sequel is going to be multiplayer based until recently. Ugh :(

no its weirder than that, from what ive read there are two totally independent teams working on it, one on the single-player and one on the multiplayer with like zero crossover (i mean im guessing the engine will be the same, but thats about it). unless thats bad info, which is possible.

see you in 2010 ;_;

shite

oh well.

just started playing this! pretty great! i could probably hack less, basically every camera and gun bot thing i come across i hack, cos like 1 in 5 you come back across with enemies near it. and i love the camera! what a great idea

i understand there is some kind of meta switcheroo at some point... i (player) don't have any idea who i (character) am, so, does the character not know either? nice tattoos anyway dude.

excited for you! - this game is so dope

i hacked the shit out of stuff too, because the hacking minigame is actually kind of fun. what a concept!

yah there's definitely a moment where it clicks and yr like I AM MASTER OF PIPE

surprised at how upfront the libertarianism is, constant PA addresses about 'parasites' etc, i figured it would be a more like a half-assed subtext. there are some genuinely scary moments, too, usually accompanied by loud big-band jazz

Jazz! That's why I hated this game!

the smuggler dudes were moving in BIBLES!

this is the only shooter where the levels really feel like actual spaces, not a sequence of challenge rooms imo. like the buildings actually make sense, and the layout wasn't just designed to give mr video game avatar a sequence of goals. play half life 2 through for the first time right now, and its def a great game, but it just reminds me of how flawlessly bioshock was put together to pull up the feeling of a real space that has been invaded by a game world if that makes sense?

this was great! but like everything it had problems. the meta-game switch was clever but everything after it felt rushed and uninteresting. i got sick of hacking. i got sick of fighting, honestly! surely something has gone wrong when your best strategy is "shock > beatdown w/ wrench" 95% of the time. near the end a lot of the splicers were all electro-y which felt cheap rather than challenging. never got into throwing out bees or even freezing dudes or w/e except on the level where your plasmids are randomized. didn't use half the weapons (or ammo types) the whole game. crossbow? what?

http://volpinprops.blogspot.com/2009/11/aquarium-photoshoot.html
also for sale!
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180436488073

thought about picking this up for the Mac but the demo didn't grab me at all. gonna bootcamp and install CoD instead I think

Bloody hell, that photo shoot!

So I finally got around to this, and played it non-stop for the last two days. Pretty awesome as everyone says!

Wrote about two pages for this post then realized - there's pretty little left to say about it, even in this thread! But in short, I will say that this game does certain things amazingly well - especially the story, characterizations and atmosphere, and a few things fall flat (design-wise), but overall it's a great game.

cautiously excited about the sequel.

That Big Daddy replica sold for only two grand! Crazy cheap!

this makes me slightly more hopeful

http://www.gossipgamers.com/10-new-bioshock-2-screenshots/

This new, 30 minute podcast from Irrational Games on Bioshock & the game they were working on before Bioshock is good fun...
http://irrationalgames.com/insider/irrational-podcast/introducing-irrational-behavior/

Boo, why do people not transcribe these things?

wtf is going on w/the build up to this game? why are ppl being such negative nancys

http://kotaku.com/5451885/bioshock-2s-chief-creator-against-a-tide-of-skeptics

I have to admit, when I realized there was a big multiplayer focus, and that you could pre-order from Gamestop to get EXCLUSIVE ONLINE CHARACTERS to play as, I did start to worry. Why does Bioshock need multiplayer at all? The shooty bits are just what I went through to get to the story, to play in that universe.

I just read that article on kotaku. My biggest problem with Bioshock 1 was that it wasn't any longer (also the last level and ending movies were pretty disappointing). I wondr what level "fort frolic" was... I might play through !ioshock 1 again before I start #2.

Is Bioshock 2 taking place during the 70s or something? Is the music/design aesthetic gonna no longer be 40s/50s stuff?

Irrational isn't doing the dev and I think that's why people are tripping

Fort Frolic was the Sander Cohen level with the plaster people sculptures and hunting down those guys and taking photos of them for the collage at the center of the shopping mall. That and the first level are probably my favorites.

I got the impression that it takes place in the aftermath of the first game, so I doubt there's a society down there to drawn upon the art and music of 1970, unless they come up with a newly populated working city and all...

The visual especially towards the beginning of that level - when you're about to take the bathysphere out but then Cohen shuts it down, instructing you over the loudspeaker while an enormous purple curtain envelops the area and the plaster corpses rise from the floor on pedestals - almost seemed like something out of Mulholland Drive.

wow ok so the new commercial for this that focuses on the multiplayer features in game video that looks like the shittiest last gen stuff ever. wtf are they thinking?

AGREED, that ad took me from "day one purchase even though I have too many games to play" all the way to "let's give it six months and see if it comes down in price"

yeah my gf (who is not a gamer at all) turned to me after it and said "wait wasn't bioshock that game you liked? i dont remember it looking so shitty" o_O

if you're talking about that terrible gamestop ad, i'm totally with you

yeah the one with the creepy scarred lady and the sailor?

yep, that's the one

yeah why anyone gave the green light to in game footage where yer character looks more float-above-the-groundy than the shitty 3rd person view in fallout 3 is beyond me

jesus christ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvsGgCMHkrg it looks like a cheat code or shitty mod of the first

good lord

actual game looks a lot better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MObDsX7I8dY

MP and SP handled by two separate dev studios btw w/equal resources. SP helmed and written by jordan thomas, the designer behind the first game's best level

it's nearly here!

more like multigayer

^the succinct summary of my feelings about this game that i have been groping for

can't help but worry that the developers of the sequel have the same grasp of the appeal of the first game as george lucas had of the appeal of the og star wars movies going into the prequels.
see also - dead space 2 "less horror, more guns!"

can't help but worry that the developers of the sequel have the same grasp of the appeal of the first game as george lucas had of the appeal of the og star wars movies going into the prequels.

and that sir, Is why until a game of the year award is given, I will be staying away from this. My memory of the first one is too good to be sullied with an inferior sequel.

otherwise it'll be Ghostbusters II all over again....... :(

so yeah, this

anybody played yet?

i'm an hour in. a little samey, claustrophobic. loking forward to some fun plasmids.

how are the horror bits so far?

Nice game to fall back into. Im about an hour or so in as well and am taking my time with it. I like to poke around and look through all the windows and whatnot. Gameplay is samey. Ive already regretted my first weapon upgrade.

should i start with this if i didn't play the first one? that way i won't it being samey.

first one is a great game and can be had for pennies right now, I'd say go for that one and wait for the price to drop on this

say that having never played this one obv

yeah, i don't think you can go wrong with playing bioshock 1

It might not matter if you play 1 for story purposes. It feels like the new ringleader of rapture was kinda grafted into this. Like oh hey btw heres this new pivotal character that you heard absolutely nothing about in any of the 1000 audio tapes you found in the last game!

those audiotapes were the worst. really lame story device.

valve woulda done better

I disagree about audio tapes being lame. They just shouldn't take up important drama that you could watch or be a part of

Already stated, but don't skip the first game!

I loved the audio tapes - if you hated them you didn't have to listen to them, but if you did they way the story unfolded, with the different viewpoints and completely out of chronological or logical order was fantastic. There were plenty of in-game cutscenes/radio messages that pushed the primary plot.

thought i had opened on this thread and was confused: Cassettes

they need to stop treating the PC version like kind of hated stepchild
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/98214-BioShock-2-Blows-Widescreen-Support

yeah i would rather have the option of skipping the audio tapes than have to sit through hours of poorly done cutscenes

btw this game is uglier than the first one, right?

Yeah the textures dont seem as slick.. Could just be my memories tho.

I think its kinda lol that you spend the game cruising around rapture on a metro train just like in dead space.

ugh the combat is so clunky compared to MW2

yeah this game is mainly abt the ~story~ and ~atmos~

that's what put me off the first one, felt really clunky xp

yeah but if i have to ~kill~ these fucking splicers to get the story i'd rather not. someone make a movie.

jeff plz sell my copy on amazon thanks

if i could at least map it to MW2 controls i'd be a little more willing to continue :/

ok I got the sports boost a little less clunkers

ok i'm into this now. i think it is pretty important to play the first game or you don't understand the significance of being a big daddy and having a little sister on your shoulder.

just got it. still has a lot of charm in the setting and story and music. graphics look exactly like original i.e. a step behind the newer big releases. i am going slow as possible and playing on 'hard'.

this game is unforgiving with the ammo.

yeah especially with the respawns. be nice if you regen'd even 10% of your health/eve

maybe u 2 noobs wd be interested in this ~hidden gem~
http://www.arizonafoothillsmagazine.com/afm-style-files/wp-content/uploads/style-savvy.jpg

lol

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/askville/5030904_5475327_mywrite/fat_monkey.jpg
"iunno combats kinda clunky in bioshocks"

try the first big daddy on hard. you will die like a bitch and rage-quit. oh wait, you can't b/c you are still playing some mario bullshit on your ds.

lolz coz please report back to us

:D luv u 2 first rounds on me when I am next in us of canada

btw, my girl has long since broken style savvy's back and is playing Might and Magic: Clash and says she prefers Might and magic

REALLY enjoying this now.

so was my 6 year old niece as she watched me play in wonderment yesterday

"look at this grown-up wasting all his damn time playing games"

i explained to her wii is for kids, ps3 for grownups

360 for men

poor men

360 for potty mouth teenagers

360 for young urban recording artists

64s, playstations, few herbs and a bit of benson

lol cozen gets high to watch benson

this has grown on me. those harvesting sessions really get intense as the game goes on.

YES! and the big sisters!?

i've been rescuing the little ones and I didn't kill that woman. it's worked out pretty well to be a good guy i think?

i didn't kill her either but I killed stanley later. i totally missed that you could harvest twice with each girl and missed out on lots of adam :(

the multiplayer seems really dumb for all the hype they gave it. at least in cod you have to spot the enemy, here they have HUGE RED NAMES above them.

Do you get a shitload of adam if you use the little sister to grab adam from the corpses then tear her apart rather than saving her?

Big daddy fights got less challenging for me once I learned to put prox mines on a corpse and hurl said corpse at big daddy for a one hit kill.

prox mines? you mean traps?

i've found it effective to freeze the big daddies and then drill charge them over and over. if you do it right they don't get any attacks on you at all.

cutty good news I am def getting a PS3 next wk

hi5

whaaaaaaaaaaaat! so psyched.

<3 $$$freelance lawyering$$$

i also had great luck using hypnotize on a big daddy to help kill a big sister

Proximity mines from the launcher. You can shoot them onto any large object and then hurl it at a big daddy for massive damage. All it takes is 3 mines on medium.

I hypnotized a big daddy who basically killed all my enemies in persephone during the boss fight which took the pressure off considerably.

rok out coz

oh hey just bought this. btw for DORKS the limited edition version is on some sort of secret clearance at best buy for $10 more than the standard.

(hushed confession - that is why i bought this, and the shit you get is super cool, book is awesome, and uh vinyl bioshock soundtrack OK!. also you get the new game soundtrack on cd and some rolled up posters that i even i am too full of self-respect to display in my house.)

game so far seems pretty sweet, much to my surprise. still sweating the multiplayer letdown tho

on the downside/upside multiplayer is much better than expected until it CRASHES when i am in first place. bahhh

my blu ray disc of bioshock 3 cracked before i finish it. does gamestop have any warranty for broken discs?

i am totally baffled as to how they got the multiplayer to look so shitty in that gamestop commercial

probably didn't have access to the game and built the animation from scratch.

2k games is replacing my disc! yay

ok so 2 multiplayer crashes in 2 days is starting to make me really fucking angry at this game.

3 now. wtf? anyone else having this problem?

Absolutely loving the single player on this btw, still early on, but lots of really nice touches (the amusement park level is incredibly well done, nice clever touches going on throughout). its harder than the first one, and big sister fights are INTENSE and thx to the excellent sound design actually pretty frightening in surround sound.

multiplayer is just...weird. very very few people playing it, and yes, like all online multiplayer experiences, you will end up running into the roving gangs of assholes that are into statbuilding each other and get mad when you interrupt their attempts by like i dont know showing up to play an actual game.

cool to hear more good things about the single player. i was unsure about this for a while but i have decided to pick it up soon.

i should clarify that there is nothing game-changing re:gameplay or environments vs the first one. whats nice is that the new development team seems to have really gotten the feel of the first game and expanded on it.

also looking out the windows at the sea is pretty awesome.

game is awesome

Crashes like a motherfucker on 360 tho ;_; I am on my third single player crash at this point

And they're full on system crashes too, which is annoying. Save often.

Ok yeah just lost two hours of work, pretty fucking furious.

Been saving progress regularly, am just starting the Siren Alley segment. Is it crashing at random points, i.e. early in the game, or later in the game as the action increases?

Agree with all the reviews so far - not a real departure from the first (yet), but very, very pretty. If it wasn't for the splicers, I'd be moving a bit slower and admiring the design more.

Just got to siren alley also (after a night of retreading) so it was earlier stuff than that. If you want to share my pain it crashed right after grace's apartment and kicked me back to the start of the level.

OUCH. 98% complete.

Forewarned, and fortunate so far.

Slowly working my way through this, and still enjoying the sense of immersion with the design and the audio diaries.

Seems like the Dionysus Park level is a good jump forward in difficulty, or maybe that's just me spazzing & not refreshing the health packs fast enough.

The bug I'm finding annoying is dying while firing the machine gun, respawning, and watching as the gun empties itself on the inside of the container.

Had the game freeze once, in the latter third of Siren Alley, but didn't lose enough gameplay to be sad.

A few other freezes, but now finished and enjoyed. Curious where Bioshock 3 will go.

Being an ammo hoarder, a hacking/looting completist, and using the Arms Race tonic, the last few levels were painful in leaving too many goodies behind.

Off to YouTube later to check out the other two endings. I went the rescue/spare (2 of the 3) route. Doubt I'll replay it to harvest the little sisters, but will keep the game and maybe dive in again to better utilize the research camera and try a few different plasmids, or maybe go the drill-only route. Avoided Decoy entirely, and passed on using some gene tonics.

One improvement would have been post-game or -level stats of plasmid/gene/weapon use.

I just started Dionysus park so I guessing I'm a bit past halfway?

My only complaint might seem like a stupid one (and I'm not even completely on board with this complaint): dying and regenerating at a nearby tube makes Bioshock 1 and 2 super easy. You could kill a big sister without using any ammo or plasmids if you don't mind hitting her with your drill over and over, dying, regenerating and repeat. Anyways I'm choosing not to harvest any little sisters. Hopefully the 3 different ending clips aren't as sucky as the ones in the first game. (I'm gonna watch the other two endings on youtube again)

But in general I have to say that I like Bioshock games because the setting and atmosphere is amazing. The horror is fun and thankfully it hasn't been any "shit my pants" type stuff (I've yet to play a game that scary and I don't know if it would be cool or just annoying). The story is still intriguing so far - mainly the intrigue of the same old theme of science overload turning people into mutants in a cool underwater city. Since someone upthread said they are interested in what Bioshock 3 could bring to the table, I'm hoping that this game starts getting more interesting storywise - not that I'm complaining (I'll always like the underlying theme).

9/10 stars so far. I might change that score after I beat the game, think it was too short (and too easy probably) and feel like there is no replay value until several years down the road when I have forgotten plot stuff.

(I've yet to play a game that scary and I don't know if it would be cool or just annoying).

Have you played FEAR? That fucked me up.

FEAR has some good jump scares. Have FEAR 2 on the 'to play' pile. Can anyone recommend the Fear Files expansion pack? They're cheap, but worth the buy?

The Fatal Frame games get to me, both for atmosphere, the musical stabs, and the ghosts respawning.

Dead Space is pretty intense jump-scare wise, plus its got a good background of dread.

There was a game I got from an abandonware site that was pretty scary. The game was essentially a survival variation of D&D. The game only had pictures and sound.. no animations I believe. You begin at the first level of a dungeon and work your way down through random rooms picking up/searching stuff along the way while hoping to not meet an early death and having to start over again and again (and the gmae was addictive enough to keep starting over and try to win. The problem was that the game would crash at some point even if you are doing good and made it 3 levels down. YOU CAN'T WIN. And I don't think this was intentional but the result of the game never being finished (I think)... which I didn't know until later. Anyways the best scare was when you are looking through the folders and reading about the different characters in the initial selection screen, a demon face or something (gravestone) would pop up if you either spent too long selecting or cycled through the characters too many times. Great stuff. Also the pictures/sounds/music in this game were creepy if I remember correctly. I could try to find it for yall if any of yall are interested

got this together with Oblivion for seventeen quid.

this game is freakin strange.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/i/irrationalgames

First trailer is here!

And it actually looks pretty damn cool- looks like Levine sat out Bioshock 2 to work on what it actually should have been.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3180831

O_O v v excited here

Infinite BioShock! would be an infinitely better title.

Fuck me, this looks good. Never did get round to trying Bioshock 2. Perhaps I shouldn't bother now?

I have Bioshock and Bioshock 2 still sat in their wrappers. I'll try and get to them both before the new Irrational Games project comes out...

You got like 16 months.. you can do it.

skyoshock

ok, so i had never played the first bioshock, and i borrowed it from a friend on friday and got obsessed. i'm past the big reveal moment, somewhere in the apartments. is it weird that my main weapon at this point in the game is still the wrench? for the first couple of hours i had plenty of ammo for everything, but ever since ammo has seemed really scarce. i also don't think i'm very good at this, so i'm all about the forgiving save and resurrection systems. and i get the impression that i'm alone in kind of loving the hacking mini-game, at least when i get a decent start on it.

proudest moment was hypnotizing one big daddy to fight another big daddy, and swooping in at the last second with a single grenade to finish things off.

Hacking was fun for me, as my timing coordination seemed suited for it, and I'm all about completist goodie collecting.games, not so much.

Bioshock Infinite's initial teaser was both brilliant and vertigo-inducing. Looking forward to that one.

I mean, it's Pipe Dream, how much can you hate it? The only problem is that it just got a little tiresome towards the end, but I still enjoyed it.

yes, pipe dream! i knew i had played a game very similar to it as a kid, couldn't think of the name.

btw i think i'm nearing the end, just got the big daddy suit. i haven't harvested any of the little sisters, but is there any benefit to going back and saving the ones i may have missed (besides completism)?

Popcap also did a nice clone of PD called Rocket Mania a few years ago, though it got totally overshadowed by Bejeweled and the like

I think there's a slight ending change if you saved all of them vs. some of them. However, if you harvested even one, you automatically get the "bad" ending, IIRC.

I like you guys but I don't share-my-credit-card-info like you guys.

Wrongggg thread.

would make the minigames more challenging if you had to enter a pin number

done, i backtracked to the wharfs for the last two little sisters and then got the "good" ending (pretty anticlimactic, honestly).

bioshock 2 is rad

PS3 version of Bioshock 1 is deffo less smooth than the 360 version. Annoying that you have to choose between quality textures and smooth framerate.

360 textures look plenty good enough. I finally finished Bioshock 2 a few days ago. I found myself wishing I could play longer with my final set up

I got Bioshock 2 for cheap recently - missed out on the first one because my PC then was nowhere close to being up to it. I have reached the flooded park level, and so far this has been amazing, the best game I have ever played I think. The whole scenario is so sad & laden with pathos - the beautiful art deco sity all in ruins, with the sea coming in everywhere, views out of the windows showing broken monorails, some of the tower blocks with lights still on, some dark, stuff like that - obviously not long before the whole place is going to get reclaimed by the sea. The splicers' overheard conversations are sad & pathetic, even the noises the little helicopter bots make when they're damaged ramp up the ;_; The idea of the place, neon-lit Manhattan under the sea, w/the blocks connected by monorails and bathyspheres is so charming that I really wish it actually existed (BUT THE PARASITE SAYS NOOOooo) and I totally believe in it when I'm playing it and forget about the actual practicalities of it like where do they get the fresh air from, why are there no non-splicer residents apart from the plot characters etc.

I described the scenario to a friend of mine and he said it remiinded him of JG Ballard, which I guess it does, like "High Rise" or "Running Wild" - the first big room you encounter in Bioshock 2 contains a drained swimming pool, I wonder if that's some kind of tribute.

Will def. pick up the first game.

Best bit so far has been when one of the levels gets flooded and when you go back through the water-filled streets, and there's this huge shark swimming above you, taht was def WOAH.

Started playing this again.

I can't start playing it again! I got the multiplayer mode working (which is not very good - very clunky in its execution) and now the single player mode is fucked. Or maybe Windows live is fucked, either way, I can't tell but it leads to the game locking up. I tried reinstalling it, no good. Luckily I'd (just) finished it.

Pro: the maps - plenty of interesting things to explore, all of the locations make "sense" by which I guess I mean they appear to be there for a reason & are not just random rooms. I completed the objectives in the Pauper's Drop section, went scouting round for pickups and found that I had only explored half of the map. The whole concept of the place is quite charming.

The music is very good and is deployed well throughout the game.

The splicer's spiel was v effective, especially when they were all sad, like complaining that their house was in ruins and their furniture had been made into firewood, or they were lonely or whatever.

There were some very striking/memorable bits incl the shark swimming through the streets as above, the big sister smashing in the windows of the banqueting hall, seeing Rapture through the eyes of the little sister.

The little sisters thing is very well done, quite twisted and creepy which adds majorly to the atmosphere of the game. I noticed quite late on that the spiel they come out with is related to what you're doing. If you stand around and do nothing for a while they complain of being bored, when you electrocute ppl in the water they say things like "look daddy, they're dancing!" Uh.

Con: combat was very clunky I thought. The idea of having the plasmid attack on the LMB and the gun on the RMB is good, but IDK, it didn't seem to work too well for me, the aim, especially on the guns seems really crap, both in single player and multiplayer. I never really found it anything other than frustrating, especially as there seems to be nothing conceptually wrong with the weapons etc. I compare this w/UT2K4, which is smooth and fast, and rewards practice.

For all that I really liked the maps, the location, the idea of this place, after a while it was like the gaps began to show a bit, and it became evident that there wasn't quite as much there as there seemed at first. I started wondering, who looks after the infrastructure of this place, when everyone there is a deranged, gun-toting mutant? Surely there must be other normal ppl there, apart from the key characters? Where does the food come from, who tops up the vending machines, where does the air come from? etc etc. There seemed to be a small number of different types of splicer, and seeing the same ones over and over again throughout the game chipped away at the suspension of disbelief.

The voice acting as not very good, for some reason the female characters seemed especially bad, and this got worse during the last level when holy shit the game got super-verbose with Elanor and Doctor Lamb blabbing away non-stop. SHUT UP ALREADY.

I hate games that have online activation! I still have all my Quake discs from 15 years ago. I still play them from time to time. Maybe I'll want to play through this again (if I can get it working) How do I know that it'll activate in 10 years or w/e? Why can't I install it on a not-online computer? I paid for the fucking disk! It's annoying.

Oh, I liked the little helicopter robots too, they were cute. I felt sorry for them when they got all busted up, and you could hear the motor cutting in and out. I had a tonic where you could fix them up, but I lost it ;_;

I would totally go and visit Rapture if it existed, and was not full of deranged maniacs. I could do w/o the Randist bollocks too I guess.

I hate games that have online activation! I still have all my Quake discs from 15 years ago. I still play them from time to time. Maybe I'll want to play through this again (if I can get it working) How do I know that it'll activate in 10 years or w/e? Why can't I install it on a not-online computer? I paid for the fucking disk! It's annoying.

I have a solution.

These games seem pretty buggy? Bio 2 is still fucked and will not run. When it was running is did crash quite often. I bought Bioshock the other day, installed it, it plays the cutscene on the plane and the shadowed "Bioshock" title OK, then the sound cuts out up till the point when the bathyscape arrives in Rapture, then it sticks and won't go any further. I have no clue how to resolve either of these issues. Not very impressive, I'm glad I bought the budget reissue of the game, & didn't pay full price for it!

Your PC sounds borked.

i started playing Bioshock a couple months ago. i liked the way it started, but grew tired of it after a few hours. i decided i'd quit and go back to it after playing SS and SS2, both of which I'd never played. so I'm playing the first System Shock right now - it's solid but very awkward to control. i can see why Doom 2 was more popular at the time. SHODAN's a great villain though.

Your PC sounds borked.

― Most women do not like atheism.(8)(9)(10)

My PC is fine. I found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOvDXxKDQFk

...which fixed it! It's a bug.

I liked the opening cutscene on the plane with all the passengers smoking and the cabin lights shining thru the fug of ciggy smoke. I remember using public transport in the 1980s before smoking was banned and it was often just like that.

The first Bioshock is an incredible game, and that opening sequence really sets the scene. The whole moment when the plane explodes around you, and then you find the tower, walk in, the lights go on and a giant Andrew Ryan is glowering at you. Just perfect in every way.

Bioshock 2 is nowhere near as good, but it's still enjoyable and the narrative elements are well done. I got right to the very last level and the sodding disc died (there's a whole saga I recounted in the 360 thread). Going to have the disc fixed today.

so I'm playing the first System Shock right now - it's solid but very awkward to control.

i think this was by the guys (Looking Glass) who did the ultima underworld games, which were similarly adventurous and revolutionary and way ahead of their time while being kind of a drag to play. (the UU games, at least the first one, control pretty similarly to system shock.)

system shock 2 is one of the most incredible games ever made for about 4/5ths of its playtime. or 3/4ths, depending on how forgiving you are. also hope you are not afraid of spiders.

http://i.imgur.com/ii1ac.jpg

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2011/07/08/bioshock-infinite-e3-demo-video-watch-all-20-minutes-now/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPMiqDqkWn8

did that new one ever come out and was it good?

october

oh, i guess feb 2013

video games never come out

Yeah, they pushed it back. I hope this is a good thing. Please don't suck.

Hurridly getting out of the way of the imminent GTA V.

Wait, I thought GTA V wasn't hitting for another year at least. It's Rockstar, it's going to get pushed back.

i think they pushed it a long while back - iirc they needed time to fine tune, to which i say take all the time you need

http://www.facebook.com/bioshock

B:I trailer is coming and their FB page has the countdown

and here 'tis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLHW78X1XeE

I like the "made with exclusively in-game footage" tag at the end

looks lovely

seems like there's a lot of staff leaving the developer. doesn't bode well - maybe they're far enough along that it won't impact on the quality of the game too much?

more likely they stayed on till their principal work on this was finished.

I think the move to 2013 was more to give it some clear space in the schedules, rather than it not being nearly ready.

sure there will be polishing till release, but I'd say the main stuff is all done and people are now free to leave.

there have been quite a lot of talk of a troubled development though, Gears of War producer was brought in a few months ago to pull it together etc
eg http://kotaku.com/5933119/bioshock-infinite-update-multiplayer-modes-cut-gears-maestro-joining-should-fans-worry

http://media.whosay.com/254969/1/254969_la.jpg

well, i'm *finally* playing bioshock 1, on a retina macbook pro, and it is glorious and smooth and beautiful. i love the maps.

anybody else really, REALLY surprised they didn't put the big-eyed/large-busted lass somewhere on the cover?

maybe next time

this might be one of the few new games on my immediate wishlist for the next six months

People who care way too much about this kind of thing are apparently pissed about that cover- grizzled white man with gun steadfastly refusing to look at off-screen explosion, etc- but it could have been a lot worse. I have to voice my appreciation for bright colors and zeppelins tbh.

all video game box covers are terrible. except for http://benandalice.com/images/megaman.jpg

http://amigairc.amigarevolution.com/badcat1.jpg

god dammit

http://amigairc.amigarevolution.com/badcat1.jpg

Irrational hired a Russian cosplayer to be her official face:

http://irrationalgames.com/insider/we-love-our-bioshock-cosplayers-so-much-we-hired-one/

http://ormeli.deviantart.com/art/Elizabeth-252947899

http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/227/f/3/elizabeth_by_ormeli-d46ljuj.jpg

always think of this game whenever i drive by one of these trains
http://i.imgur.com/TECDos.gif

http://irrationalgames.com/files/2012/12/Happy-Holidays.jpg

FILL YOUR CRAVINGS

AT THE CIRCUS OF VALUES

*ding ding ding doot doot doo doo*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMIAqZSfz6A

FILL YOUR CRAVINGS

AT THE CIRCUS OF VALUES

― the late great, Friday, January 11, 2013 12:20 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hysterics

This comes out next week, right?

Anyway, here's a GB sit-down with a tired Ken Levine:

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/elizabeth-is-a-shark-ken-levine-on-bioshock-infini/2300-7164/

definitely didn't pre-order this. Im worried its going to be a turd. bioshock 2 wasnt exactly amazing. then again infinite looks more than just a rapture rehash..

Im worried its going to be a turd. bioshock 2 wasnt exactly amazing

Totally different developers though - I'm not saying this won't be crap, but the people who made Bioshock Infinite had nothing to do with Bioshock 2 (and everything to do with the first game + System Shock 2 and SWAT 4).

I'm pretty sure this is going to be a masterpiece but what do I know.

all the trailers have been so chaotic, explosions everywhere, big guns. hopefully that's just the shit that looks exciting in a trailer and not what the majority of the game is like.

reviews falling all over themselves to slobber ken levine's dick here. as long as it's an attractive shooter with enough "trenchant social commentary" to counterbalance all the right wing islamophobe modern warfare stuff i'll be happy.

this looks comically awful in every way

glad i didn't have to say it

this looks str8 wikked imextremelyhumbleo

Turns out I preordered this in August or something then forgot all about it until I got the message today saying it'd been dispatched. But I'm away from home for the next 2 weeks bah.

http://i.imgur.com/hVC8e1b.jpg

lol

Lowest score on Metacritic so far is an 80.

the first one was entertaining and involving enough but was not exactly fashion forward as a shooter. if this one is about the same that's worth it to me.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jchIi-vR_js

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jchIi-vR_js

I will probably rather enjoy this. I love the art design, and my first job was as a dude in a historical American village set between 1865-1914.

The RPS review had this great turn-of-phrase:

story-based games which revolve around targeting reticules

That review: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/25/bioshock-infinite-pc-review/

god why does adam sessler fucking talk like that

getting repeatedly stuffed in lockers does things to a man

Being forced to cope working with Olivia Munn

this looks comically awful in every way
― turds (Hungry4Ass), Monday, March 25, 2013 1:32 PM

disney + steampunk

I'm getting some Sky Captain: The Game vibes from the commercials for this thing

looks dope + free xcom from steam. mostly worried about annoying companion AI girl b/c that shit never works

girl from ico, pour one out

ken levine has a copy of devil in the white city, access to google, a thing for toddler-women with dewy eyes and huge tits who are based off his ex-girlfriend, and now he even has an AAA game about skyracists to show for it.

http://i.imgur.com/B4dmKRN.jpg

did ken levine beat you and bill magill up or something

okay lol

Who the hell was Levine's ex, then?

“I’ve had the experience of knowing a girl once, dating her once actually, who had been with somebody who had abused her before. All the clichés you hear about are true. She would say that this guy had pushed her down the stairs when she was pregnant, that he had made her kneel in glass… all these unspeakably horrible things. Then she would make excuses for him, all the time. I knew the entire time that we were dating that she would go back to him. I could just see it. It was this tragic thing happening in real-time. And she did go back to him.”

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/13/bioshock-infinites-elizabeth-shaped-by-ken-levines-experiences/

so gross

never gave a shit about his pretentious thoughts on the first gamed, not sure why i would care now.

but go on digging through the back catalog of pcgamer to make fun of us nerds. ;)

lol what are you talking about you psycho. im making fun of ken levine, not you. i cant think of any other ilx subboard where it's consistently seen as a personal insult to not like something... unless things are a lot more heated in the Mark McGrath Cruise thread than I remembered

he said ;) calm down

shhit.... my bad.

http://www.giantbomb.com/reviews/bioshock-infinite-review/1900-568/

every Gerstmann is giving it top marks

even, rather.

Dammit, I started this board, why do my mod powers not allow me to edit my own text

opening is pretty impressive. i'm not even going to try to slog through while half asleep though.

Lowest score on Metacritic so far is an 80.

― polyphonic, Monday, March 25, 2013 2:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as if this means anything smh

i gotta go to bed but the first 90 mins at least are pretty good. is def a fps but the killin dudes is more fun than bioshock 1.

thats encouraging. i quit bioshock after like 90 minutes because of how boring the combat was

Is it just me or do Levine & company really, REALLY like Against the Day?

http://m.voices.yahoo.com/ken-levine-pulls-plug-bioshock-film-12056035.html

Also, imdb lists him as the voice of the Circus of Value clown, which I did not know.

This is pretty great so far. Combat is super fun, especially with the skyhooks.

looks maybe less AtD than a sci-fi Ragtime?

yeah i hit the first big skyhook combat sequence last night, super fun.

Maybe not so much AtD but plenty of Tom Swift

downloaded the 60 minute trial last night on PS3 but haven't turned it on yet

if you can't aim for shit there's no point in getting this game, right

think of it as bettering yourself through grueling training

As someone else said, "Bioshock Infinite is a game about a guy with an eating disorder."

i always try to play on hard mode then remember i am slow and old

If you're playing on PC, the mouse sensitivity tweak here is extremely helpful:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/27/bioshock-infinite-tweaks/

It seems to makes it much less twitchy; I think it's adjusting it so you can move the mouse in smaller increments for smoother aiming.

more hacking: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/BioShock_Infinite

hmmmmm. did the 60 minute trial, not sure what i think. the combat feels wrong a little bit. also dan, i take back what i said, the aiming in this (on console at least) is kind of a nightmare. the baseball throwing scene is kind of shocking, but not i think in a good way. world is interesting but awfully busy, chatty cathy main character seems like a problem, and the kinetescopes are super lame when compared to similar things ive seen in older games (both fallouts fuck even singularity).

hoping the story background falls back some as you get further into the game.

here's a quicklook, not really spoilery:

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-bioshock-infinite/2300-7184/

So I started out trying to put down some more detailed thoughts on the game so far but really all you need to know is ROLLYCOASTERS WHEEEEEE.

man i really liked this game but i feel like i murdered a whole lot of dudes. seems like there's a better way to tell that story without the slaughter? or i'm just fucking old.

i guess that's the critical refrain of 2013 so far--"why can't we tell this story/make this game/etc without wholesale slaughter?" a la tomb raider, even far cry.

i like that in ni no kuni they make a point of telling you that you're only knocking the monsters out, and they get up later and don't attack humans anymore. which is nice unless humans are these monsters' only food source and now they all starve to death :(

i played the first hour of this last night, it's pretty but i'm still hoping the fun gameplay will kick in soon. it's hard after playing lots of Far Cry, i keep trying to aim with the left trigger and accidentally using powers.

i got to the first robot guy who shoots flames at you and used 'possession' on him. he kept shooting flames at me, so i shot at him and the game popped up a message saying "don't shoot your allies!". then he killed me.

so it's an allegory for life

ugh some polygon asshole is biting my complaint http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/2/4174344/opinion-why-my-wife-wont-play-bioshock-infinite

so it's an allegory for life

so smart

One could argue that one of the greatest legacies of American history is intense violence. It could be argued to be “on message” as much as anything else in the game. Americans are always given a censored version of history and violence, leading right up to the current wars in the present.

One could argue vs. It could be argued.

this guy sure can eat a lot.

scarfing all the hot dogs and cotton candy in sight for health. it reminds me of Streets of Rage.

haha yeah one of the only decent game mechanics in the fable series in retrospect was the "hey dude if you eat 25 apple pies a day, u gonna get fat"

wait did san andreas do that too? if so i guess they deserve the prize

they could take the far cry 2 malaria thing and apply it to games like this, where if you eat 40 bags of potato chips in a row to regain micro health, for the next three run and gun battles you stop every 20 seconds and your perspective shifts to a hunched over guy wheezing while you half black out.

Welcome to Cluckin Bell can I take your order

in the hall of heroes now and it's getting more fun combat-wise, but i still feel like they went to to create an interesting world just highlights how linear and game-y it is (so many invisible walls, locked doors, finding money in garbage cans and pineapples on dead bodies, etc).

it's weird that the mechanics of the game (ie shooting people) seem so separate from what the 'point' seems to be (exploration, telling a story?).

i completely agree. what if it had been an open-world, undirected myst-style thing where you just wander around and put clues together and then maybe break into the tower with some sierraesque inventory puzzle and maybe occasionally you shoot some dudes? right? "not being call of duty" isn't enough.

(meant to write "the trouble they went to...")

exactly, that would be amazing. and probably sell way less, i guess.

i would even accept an old-style fps with convoluted maps and keys and that sort of obviously gamey stuff. tack on the beautiful world and pretty good story and i'd be set.

all this said, i still really enjoyed the fuck out of this game, maybe my favorite gameplay experience since portal 2. which had its own linearity problems.

at least linearity in a game like Portal 2 makes narrative sense

what was the first game with a dude (or lady) on a comm device (or whatever) telling you what to do? at what point was it decided that that was a more immersive way to guide the player than keys or levels or hookshot points?

and then how long was it til omg the dude (or lady) on the comm device is actually the bad guy became a go-to twist?

is "i have no mouth and i must scream" the ur text of modern shooter design?? and did anyone else quit playing dead space 1 when dudes and ladies on the comm device kept being like welp the engine's busted go fix it, oh shit now you need some dilithium crystals, go get those, etc?

ha, it didn't bother me in Dead Space because it was so obvious that the real story was "walk down a dark hallway listening to weird noises and drones and wonder where/when the monster is going to pop out."

because there are so many civilians around in BI and it feels semi-random when they will ignore you vs interact vs instantly try to beat you to death, i keep thinking how could it would be if the whole game acted like the party level in Dishonored.

maybe i should give dishonored another chance. did you stay stealthy or go buck wild? i felt constrained by the game's prissy reminders to keep quiet.

stealth all the way, but i love that shit and try to do it even in non-stealth games.

(so many invisible walls, locked doors, finding money in garbage cans and pineapples on dead bodies, etc)

why are they still doing invisible walls in 2013 ffs

wouldnt be bioshock without invisible walls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPMiqDqkWn8

I obviously am not a big shooter person given my complete ineptitude at aiming but I really feel like the mechanics of the genre have changed very little since... Goldeneye maybe? was gonna say Doom but that's not entirely fair

lol @ that video

have first person shooters gotten better (or 'more fun') since doom

i guess i mean the single player first person shooter experience specifically

doom 2 was the height of the genre and they've just gotten much, much, much worse since then

http://24.media.tumblr.com/0f78253fee579834f99f0d78f54f4576/tumblr_mkr3o8vRdu1qz4zf7o1_1280.png

that fucken guy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

― 乒乓, Saturday, 30 March 2013 02:10 (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ebert died so bioshock infinite could live

i'm only a little bit into this, haven't even met the_girl yet, not that impressed. it's pretty but eh. feel like they needed to re-address the core purpose and possibilities of an fps as a storytelling device. the intro sequence gave me too many yeah-sure moments -- ok the lighthouse is a... rocket? and it automatically lands in... a church? with baptismal waters on all the floors? i get that they have to introduce the odd ideology somehow but come on.

already looking not as good as dishonored. weird-steampunk is a crowded field, huh. i got made as a bad guy right away; am i going to kill my way through the entire city now?

can't even take any 'games as art' discourse around this. because it talks about race openly? is that it?

it's because the story doesn't really make sense but does it while staring at you really intently

i do think it's an interesting conceit to have more than one mystery unfold -- the character's mystery of wtf this city is + the player's mystery of who the f the character is.

but i have only middling faith both will be resolved well.

not to sound like an aggrieved cornerite here but making the big evil city a secessionist racist religious cult built around the founders is way eye-rolly imo. why make it a flying city? just put an fps in south carolina in 1912 and call it a day.

Because a flying city is the polar opposite to an undersea base, and yet both are societies removed and cut off from society

wouldn't the polar opposite of an undersea base be another undersea base like directly across the earth from the first one

lol

yes but under ice

ice costs too much to drill

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u113/alfredofroylan/bioshockinfinite_zps2b73eade.jpg

oh boy. last guy is actually the least bad?

pathetic!

#JustSaying

I'm still kind of disappointed in the combat. The weapons are mostly indistinguishable crap (the Hailfire is an exception, though), and the two most interesting bits have some serious problems in their implementation. The skyrail/Handyman combination makes for a genuinely tense fight on hard, but doesn't appear nearly frequently enough (and what happened to enemies using the skyrails like in the trailers?), and use of the tears during combat more often than not boiled down to "hunker behind cover, summon turret/Patriot/Mosquito, repeat." And while I'm bitching, the boss fight in the bank vault is insanely difficult on Hard, with almost no opportunities to seek cover, replenish ammo/change weapons, and no tears of any kind.

What do people think of the anachronistic music? There's a surprisingly good "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" in there, and I definitely got a little of the "wait, what" feeling they were aiming for when I ran into the girl singing "Fortunate Son."

quite a few things to like in here but i'm not very impressed. it should have been an rpg.

i enjoyed the (annoyingly rare) skyline-based combat arenas. the corridor shooting was easy enough that i just blew through it. also i took a lot of stupid pleasure in charge -> jump backwards -> charge -> jump backwards -> etc.

The bad guys definitely used the rails in my game

After thinking about it, they must have been in my game as well, if only to explain how they were getting around behind my back (assuming they weren't just spawning out of nowhere). I never actually caught them at it, though. I can't help but wonder if that's tied in to the programming that won't let you look directly at Elizabeth without her scurrying off to the side- great in combat, annoying as shit when you're supposed to be listening to dialogue.

Bought this. Really loving the art design

eh this was a disappointment.

very pretty but much less convincing and involving than the setting in the first one. interesting enough story that inevitably gets up its own ass the further you get. and, biggest problem of all, a really dated fps driving it all.

so this game just seems pretty lame if the reactions in this thread are to be believed y/n?

I liked it. The setting's pretty cool, the combat is hectic and fun, and the story's interesting (if a bit silly and ham-fis
If you're fed up with the FPS genre you probably won't enjoy it, but it's a good game.

I'm about four hours in and feel mostly positive about it so far, but it suffers from the same problem as the OG Bioshock for me - once you find a single satisfying combination of vigor and weapon there's mostly very little gameplay incentive to change up, which makes combat a bit of a chore.

The other thing that's annoying me is that Columbia's supposed to be a living city as opposed to Rapture's post-collapse husk. It's a nice idea, but what it means in reality is that the game is populated with dead-eyed automatons who pay no attention to you standing inches from their face for minutes at a time, leaping up and down on the counters of their stores, or robbing them blind while standing in their line of sight.

ya that's a bit weird—one of the strengths of the original was the way it made the typical video game's weird empty zombie world work for it

Beat it last night, I guess it's entertaining? I dunno if you liked the other ones, play it I guess. I think I am just sick of shooters acting like they're ~important~ or whatever. Actually scratch that. I liked Spec Ops the Line a fair bit (perhaps more than it deserved, even). Something about this one just rubs me the wrong way. People trying to champion it like it's ART and THE FUTURE OF STORYTELLING and etc and maybe I'm missing something but on the surface it is kind of M Night Shyamalan caliber.

But yeah if you think you'd like it you probably won't be disappointed, just don't pay too much attention to the insane attempts to be GRANDIOSE

Took forever to Steam this on friday night, so I took a break and went to see "Paths of Glory" at the cheapie theater down the street. Same time period! Then proceeded to shotgun a lot of the game over the weekend. Am now within sight of the end, but I don't like the game/movie convention that EVERYthing has to ramp up as you go and no more wander about parts.

Am playing this on hard, which I like b/c ammo shortages forced me to grab/shoot/drop. Some of the battles are stupidly, pointlessly hard, tho.

I will say, I'm disappointed that one of my fave jedi power drinks(FORCE PUSH MOTHERFUCKER AW YEAH EAT DEATH BY PLUMMETING) was like the last one you get.

So all-in-all, a game completely worth getting.

Game pushes you straight through the story and if you kind of allow it to, it works well. Even the side quests are mostly "turn around and go back the exact way you came". Story itself needs a heavy dose of "show, don't tell."

The artwork and visuals are incredible and the skyline fights are very fun. Those two elements alone make it easily worth playing.

Feel like playing on hard is worth it. Slows you down and forces you to vary the gameplay more. Also makes dropping a handy man a real fight.

i feel like it would be more rewarding to play on hard but i'm already dying a couple times in the big fights, mostly when i'm trying to figure out who's even shooting at me.

i'm in the 'horror' section of the game (ghost mom, burnt-out abandoned city) and that atmosphere works a lot better than the dead-eyed automatons mentioned above.

i really enjoyed this game except for the stupid bits, but that's all games, just in this case the stupid bits are Really Important

i guess i'm the real negative nellie hear but yea, the ending totally lost me

and not as in "idgi" but like, oh of course you would turn out to be this dumb and self-involved, game

however:

What do people think of the anachronistic music? There's a surprisingly good "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" in there, and I definitely got a little of the "wait, what" feeling they were aiming for when I ran into the girl singing "Fortunate Son."

― muus lääv? :D muus dut :( (Telephone thing), Tuesday, April 9, 2013 10:36 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this was super cool! where do you hear tears for fears tho? didn't pick that out.

feel like the audio clip tapes are still the best mechanism for delivering the narrative. you're discovering it vs you're being clobbered with it.

i hate hate hate listening to information delivered verbally (in-game and irl), why can't they just leave datapads lying around like a regular game

in all the hoopla about the story using irl american racism, doesn't the parallel world where the fanonist rabble wreck the beautiful flying city kind of prove the confederates right? i was really annoyed by the on-the-one hand plot turn there

http://kotaku.com/some-dont-like-bioshocks-forced-baptism-enough-to-as-473178476?utm_source=gawker.com&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=recirculation

yes i have no problem with virtually killing hundreds of people but the concept of virtual baptizing is deeply offensive, great

idea for new brad paisley song "accidental person who agrees with kotaku commenters"

Finally beat this tonight. There's one bit that completely doesn't make any sense, but I wanna play it again, only in 1999 mode.

as some people itt are disappointed w BI it's prob worth mentioning in here that system shock 2, which for the first time since the 90s will run on your system without requiring you to shut down portions of your cpu first + doesn't look so old if you mod it a lil + is a total atmospheric masterpiece where every glance out a hallway window onto the silent stars is worth a thousand zipline rides in disneyland, is now $9.99 on GOG

i've been replaying it but i'll probably have to stop at the spiders. this is the only game where i really can't deal with the spiders.

i downloaded the no-spider patch last time, years ago, but there's no point in replaying the whole thing if i'm gonna wuss out again.

plus the no-spider patch had a flaw wherein what it actually did was make the spiders invisible and immobile and incapable of doing damage, which meant that occasionally a door in the wall or something would open or you'd come to a place where there clearly ought to be enemies but were not and it would slowly dawn on you that standing somewhere very close to you were giant silent invisible spiders

!

modding up the gog version of ss2 took me like 10 minutes and it runs/looks great. had to remap the controls a whole lot, the defaults were and are fuckin bonkers

yup

also there's NO. KEYMAP. TO. CHANGE. PSI. POWERS. it's almost like you don't want us to use them. which i never ever had until this playthrough.

yeah this was super cool! where do you hear tears for fears tho? didn't pick that out.

IIRC, it's just near the start of the burned-out post-revolution city, where you're roaming the huge open area and following Ghost Mom's tracks. There's a floating building that's come unmoored and a red tear where you can hear this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAA_zE5a3JQ

I think you can first hear the original song when you see the Parisian rip in the tower.

Hated the first 2-3 hours of this but it's starting to win me over.

Definitely won over. Appears to be much much longer than I expected. One big concern - it's way too easy on normal/standard/whatever mode. Normally I wouldn't complain, but it's pretty much tension free so far, esp if you figure out how to use murder of crows effectively.

Yeah, I did my first playthru on Hard

Haha:

http://crypticsea.com/twined/bioshoot.html

The text adventure! Spoiler-heavy.

weirdly i also felt it was too easy, and yet for most of the game i kept dying at least once in big fights. it also felt like the game was giving me breaks, like i would be fighting a handyman, die, and when i came back it was nowhere to be found. maybe we killed each other simultaneously? it was unsatisfying though, i should have just restarted the checkpoint.

i hate the way bioshock lets you chip away at bosses like that. sure, they get some health regen when you die and respawn but then their alert state goes back to normal and you can get the drop on them. feels cheap? or like it's making an already easy game with flimsy gameplay even more ethereal?

found normal to be fairly easy but hard to be close to impossible.

close to the end now and it is back to being a slog. sorta feel like the story curve is too exaggerated or something - slow build, big rise to action in the middle with the fink section and then this sort of meandering end game i am in right now. also going from lockpicks being scarce and feeling like i had to choose carefully if/when to use them to the point where they are all over the goddamn place and i have like 30 of them is sorta stupid.

collector shit like the telescopes is super irritating as well, i know ive missed a few because they're just sorta plopped in pointless locations. and the production value on the kinetescopes is just fucking godawful, to the point where i have started to skip right when the opening credits roll because they are a) boring b) all but meaningless to the narrative.

also this fight the ghost in the graveyard shit is some goddamn weaksauce. not hard, just crazy annoying.

once i discovered jump -> charge -> jump back -> charge, repeat, repeat, all fights became meaningless.

but it's the pelvic thrust that really drive you insane

ha i feel the same way about crow trap

several times i have backtracked into what is supposed to be a pitched respawn battle and all the dudes are already dying because of crow traps i left there 45 minutes ago. also bucking bronco is the most useless thing in the world

i used undertow to throw people off of ledges a whole lot.

oh yeah, i suppose. i hadn't thought of that, mainly using it to grab snipers etc

I'm also thinking that the last vigor (the shield bullet return thingy) has shown up just in time for it to be annoyingly crucial in some late point boss battle that will be super annoying.

not really

improvements in the weapons and vigors was far to expensive (and looting every last trash can and corpse far too fiddly), you really felt like you were locked in to whatever you chose. i never fucked around much beyond the first few i got of either tbh; did just fine with possession and a carbine

*too expensive

i went the whole game with my perennial favorites, the shotgun and the sniper rifle (both good for someone who is not good at aiming at things quickly).

i have yet to upgrade any weapon ever. a bunch of the weapons are pretty stupid (looking at you volley gun), but i always hate the grenade launcher/rpg shit in shooters. mainly rolled with hand cannon and burst gun.

slow build, big rise to action in the middle with the fink section and then this sort of meandering end game i am in right now.

i stopped playing this game p quick but i'm sure this is accurate because it's exactly how bioshock and ss2 were. i dunno why that has to be so.

also bucking bronco is the most useless thing in the world

For me it was indispensable for Crows (leaves them exposed and helpless for a looong time after the first upgrade) and any time you're in a tight space or near a lot of melee enemies, like the parts with the Boys of Silence. I was only ever able to sneak past one once because their search pattern is so fast and unpredictable and running alerts them immediately, and on Hard their gang of masked weirdos can easily beat the shit out of you if you let them get close. I haven't been able to get much use out of Undertow, though, and almost never use traps because enemies seem content to take cover instead of chasing me.

The volley gun is kind of bullshit, but the Vox version, the Hailfire, is amazing- it's more or less the same thing but you can use it to airburst grenades.

The Boys of Silence strike me as being a big part of the earlier version of the game. They even have action figures for them, which is weird for a tertiary villain. It's like the toymakers flipped thru a catalog of character art design in 2010 and picked one just that looked cool.

Nice & pastoral:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiwiZ0T6umo

i decided to play bioshock 1 before trying infinite and i hated it!

would read details

between this and half-life 2 i think fps games aren't for me :/ but i also hated the look of it, clowns and steampipes and LOL 50s anachronisms or whatever the fuck it is they're going for

lol. i think infinite looks better but bioshock looks more coherent -- it really feels like being trapped a mile underwater in someone's leaking hubris whereas infinite feels like a ride. BUT THEN given the limitations of video games maybe it is way easier in general to simulate claustrophobia than spaciousness? i'm not crazy about the 20s/50s muddle aesthetic either but i do like bathyspheres and diving helmets a lot. <shutupdifficultlisteninghour>system shock 2 by the way feels more like being on a crippled spaceship 6.7 trillion miles from earth than actually being on one probably does.</shutupdifficultlisteninghour>

fps-wise since these big Storytelling Classics have been failing you maybe you should play something quake-like where the reasons you're shooting people are three sentences long and only in the manual. altho idk haha i really like half-life 2.

what i've seen of system shock 2, i'd probably enjoy it a ton if there was an updated version. u might be on to something tho as im ok with cod or cs prob cuz they're pure shooters w/ no story

between this and half-life 2 i think fps games aren't for me :/ but i also hated the look of it, clowns and steampipes and LOL 50s anachronisms or whatever the fuck it is they're going for

― am0n, Monday, April 29, 2013 7:34 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

it's not the greatest genre but these arent its best examples either. bioshock 1 is a challenge-free asset tour for dumbasses.

it really feels like being trapped a mile underwater

agreed, the water pouring in thru cracks and looking out windows was really well done. and the skyhook thing in infinite looks pretty crazy.

lol i never played quake but i had a roommate who would come home from work and play it for hours. apartment sounded like a damn warzone.

the telepath thing in bioshock reminded me of hl2's super gravity gun

There is an updated versions of SS2, sorta. the game is out at GOG.com and there's a buncha mods to d/l that you can update it by a decade

it's not the greatest genre but these arent its best examples either.

FYI this is crazy talk (about HL2)

Wellll, if the genre is just running and shooting things then I suppose this is the other end of the scale from Quake 3 Arena, but nearly anything else I can think of (storytelling, mechanics, design, atmosphere, setpieces) HL2 >>> anything else I've ever played

Half-Life is still better than its sequel. Dunno if that updated version was any cop though

There is an updated versions of SS2, sorta. the game is out at GOG.com and there's a buncha mods to d/l that you can update it by a decade

― Hockey Drunk (kingfish), Tuesday, April 30, 2013 3:46 AM

i saw those mods, they're pretty good. i might grab it off steam at some point

in the end, liked this quite a lot. some def problems (had 30 lockpicks for the last like 2 hours of the game and nearly nowhere to use them). i get the feeling that lots and lots of stuff just sorta didnt make the cut - really surprised to see the handyman barely get used. and yeah, once you get the pattern of open rift with rocket automaton/leave crow traps everywhere/find your gun and stick with it, the challenge is kind of not there anymore. the ending is overreachingish, and it could have been a lot better if it hadnt been 30-45 minutes of fps cutscene (wtf at that btw, i cant believe they didnt break that exposition up basically at all. maybe another "oh shit we have too much story to cram into the game" or something.)

but on the plus side, it's crazy long for a one player closed world game, and it does look pretty fucking amazing most of the time. and although its far from a difficult shooter, there is some decent requirement of thoughtfulness and strategy (more limited weapon/ammo drops would go a long way to encouraging this, which im sure hard/1999 mode put into effect). hooray for a non recharging health/mana bar as well. and yeah if it is kinda consequence free thx to the liberal revive system, eh, we all knew this was going to be heavy on story and easy rolling on gameplay anyway.

fuck a goddamn blimp battle though.

Sometimes I get the idea that their ultimate narrative desire could only be pulled off by an HBO series. There is so much stuff that feels cut or slotted in from previous iterations.

Also, Film Crit Hulk made a point I really like about how you can make the ruling faction actually out of American history, and do the false equivalence thing and put them up against something from French and Russian history and expect it to work:

...THE REFERENCE THEY’RE GOING FOR IS MOST DEFINITELY THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, WHEREIN THE VIOLENCE GOT SO OUT OF CONTROL AS TO LOSE A GREAT DEAL OF MEANING, BUT GROUNDING THAT ANALOGY IN AMERICA’S RACE ISSUE IS DEEPLY PROBLEMATIC FOR ALL THE REASONS YOU SAY (THERE’S A REASON WE LOOK AT DJANGO AS A FUCKING HERO). AND LORDY KNOWS THAT HULK IS SICK OF THE SAME KIND OF DISCUSSION OF “IT IS ALL RELATIVE!” THAT SEEMS TO CROP UP SO MUCH IN THE SOPHOMORIC UNDERSTANDING OF POLITICS THESE DAYS...

Emphasis mine

it's way worse than not voting (but a symptom of the same thing)

Oh wait, that bit is from here:

http://badassdigest.com/2013/04/03/hulk-vs-devin-vs-bioshock-infinite/

tim rogers wrote a lot of words about this game, it turns out

that's weird

OH MY GOD FUCK ZEPPELINS

I have successfully fucked all the zeppelins. Not sure if I like the ending or not; it does make (most of) the game make much more sense in retrospect, but even though it works logically, it still somehow feels kind of unearned. I'll have to think about it.

i liked all the whiz bang visual ending stuff and managed to not think about the content too hard, when i do i just get irritated.

Finished this over the weekend - it was certainly an impressively lavish experience but it's not actually much of a game, is it? In terms of what you actually get to do, it's a really basic shooter with very little variety in the enemies and weapons which never feel terribly powerful. By the end I was grimly slogging through the fights just to see where the story was going. I'm glad I played it and I guess I can admire the ambition behind it but ultimately I don't think the story actually says anything of any substance.

ok this is longer than the game: http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=3006

System Shock 2 now on Steam for like seven bucks

remember that it is my will that guided you here. it is my will that gave you your cybernetic implants: the only beauty in that meat you call a body. if you value that meat, you will do as i tell you.

thought that rogers piece was importantly otm every thousand words or so, which is about par.

i would have said it was in the five to six thousand word range. i just copy-pasted it into word to count, out of curiosity, and it is a long way from being in the five to six thousand word range.

thing is a short novella. could very well be an ebook.

like the dude who wrote 50K words about Spec Ops: The Line

Chapter Five: Let’s talk about ludonarrative interference.

:(

i like the idea that you got through the preceding ten thousand words without difficulty and then on reaching the words 'ludonarrative interference' something in your brain went oh hell no

well maybe i was more rapidly scrolling thru sort of reveling in the actionbutton dot netness of the whole thing and "ludonarrative interference" and all its attendant undergrad neologism ridiculousness flipped that oh hell no switch. like i can take the chatty blog vomit but once someone starts going all ian bogost it's oh hell no.

his total deployment of it is a complaint about the fact that he's using the term, though, and then a thing he's talked about ... at length ... elsewhere

i don't think i've ever read bogost. i wonder if i'd like him.

DangerFrost 11 minutes ago
I saw the trailer for the new bioshock DLC
I JIZZED IN MY PANTS]
i saw Elizabeth smoking
I JIZZED IN MY PANTS

PENDANTturnips 52 minutes ago
eww Elizabeth smokes? well thats gonna make her a 5/10 now

ProxyStarkillaYTA 4 minutes ago
Yeah, you're right, I'd never stick my dick in her now.

Matt Hatt 47 minutes ago
Agreed, smoking is such a turn off for me too. Kissing an ashtray is never fun.

Even gamers have standards

standards about not having sex with real people

i guess i shouldn't be surprised that that character is some kind of basement-dweller sex object since that's p much as designed, right

http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/hot-dang-real-bioshock-elizabeth-is-hoooootttttttttt.453058661/

http://oi43.tinypic.com/f0xk6v.jpg

the internet

Meanwhile, this looks interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpgvZay10jE

The Part 2 promo image is good, too

A fairly candid interview with Ken Levine where he talks about Logan's Run, how that led to Rapture, B:I, and DLC philosophy

http://www.nerdist.com/2013/07/nerdist-podcast-ken-levine/

been playing burial at sea on 1999 mode - pretty brutal but it sure slows the game down which i like.

there are small corridors and closets that elizabeth blocks you in, which even if she eventually moves can cause you to be killed/spotted.

rapture is still way cooler\weirder then blimp-town. narration still too explainy.

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DLP8l2nnnn4s&start1=71&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D1ng0yS_Jl5I&start2=70&authorName=

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DLP8l2nnnn4s&start1=30&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DM7FIvfx5J10&start2=0&authorName=HappyHappyHappyHappy

just finished b:i - my what a terrible game that is

yeah i rarely just straight quit on a game but this was total garbage and i couldn't justify wasting my time with it. and i went in with such optimism!

the first bioshock's a pos and it looks like a masterpiece next to B:I

i don't know what is worse about b:i, the narrative or the mechanics. it's gotta be the mechanics just bc that's the fundamental need of a game - to be fun to play - but the story is dumber than inception.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/01/21/whitaker_wright_s_underwater_ballroom_in_surrey_england.html

This game was great fun, and easily the most beautiful-looking game I have seen so far. Also I really liked the combat, and am kind of confused by everyone who says it sucked. Aside from just pointing the trigger and shooting, you usually had multiple hiding spots, tearable gun turrets, all the vigors, etc. so many different ways to approach most combat situations.

Then again I've been off fps for a while, what are the games with wonderful combat that you would recommend over B:I?

High point of the game for me was zipping around a looping skyline while trying to take down a single huge dirigible halfway through the game.

no fpses matter after unreal tournament 2004 iirc

paranautical activity is awesome - brand new roguelike fps

infinity was the worst

The false shepherd is either a mulatto dwarf or a Frenchman with a missing left eye, no more than four foot and nine inches

They say this over the intercom when the shit hits the fan and all the authorities are looking for you, and it always stuck out to me. Is it a literary reference or something?

The first encounter with the crow man feels playing through a 100% accurate re-creation of a nightmare. Probably my favorite part of the game.

It does kind of suck when they show you an alternate reality 1983 but you never get to go there.

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/news/ken-levine-closes-irrational-sets-create-brave-new-narrative-games/

whoa, was bioshock infinite a huge failure or something? i just assumed it had sold well.

The massive delays couldn't have helped.

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dz3RHenh8vJ8&start1=245&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3De8-sMJZTYf0&start2=0&authorName=snoopsagan

I made it about 3/4 of the way through on the second play before just giving up. I was playing on Hard and the fight against the Handyman was so impossible it just became extremely un-fun.

'Storyline' in this was fun to think about for about the first 2 hours of my second playthrough, but the more I thought about it, the less appealing it was, and the more icky it felt. Plus in all the interviews w Levine I could read, he never had a good answer for why the racist stuff other than "This is how the world was in 1912". Yet you never read about all the floating cities and robot presidents in history books. So this guy, who SOLD HIS OWN DAUGHTER, turns evil because he is later baptized? It wasn't the massacre in Wounded Knee and it wasn't SELLING HIS OWN DAUGHTER, it was being baptized. Right.

I guess this stuff is probably touched upon in the DLC but count me out.

i completely agree. what if it had been an open-world, undirected myst-style thing where you just wander around and put clues together and then maybe break into the tower with some sierraesque inventory puzzle and maybe occasionally you shoot some dudes? right? "not being call of duty" isn't enough.

i just started playing this because it is free on xbox gold and this so expresses my disappointment about an hour or so in. such a beautiful world, wish i could stop being shot at by dudes so i could enjoy it.

That's ironic because there is no story at all this game is telling. The plot is a kind of an aimless bait-and-switch of a bunch of topical high concepts smooshed together through clever but sloppy writing and used to disguise a dull shooter as something which could have been so much deeper. It's the dumbest "thinking person's game" ever.

The idea that without the shooting this could have been something amazing is utterly absurd but I am sure it sold a lot to people that think Call of Duty is for idiots.

well it's boring the piss out of me, and if there's no story there then i don't know if i can be bothered to play much further.