Replaying Bioshock 1.

[bean@twoot.site]

Replaying Bioshock 1.

It definitely suffers from a second playthrough. The lack of surprise just means you get to see how shallow it all is.

It's too little of an immersive sim to allow different approaches, but too much of one to really offer cool setpieces.

You can't really go stealthy, you can't really specialize in different weapons. The AI is janky and sometimes has melee enemies wandering around aimlessly.

And the political commentary doesn't really hit because it's all so cartoonish. Like there's a surgeon who thinks that, with plastic surgery being readily available, it is now a moral duty to be beautiful.

And that is an interesting (tho wrong) idea, but it's explored by him going "CRAAAAZY" and killing people who came in for a routine procedure.

Also it has a weird tendency to drop audio logs right before someone radios you anyway, so they're constantly interrupted.

The big moral choice thing ("kill kids or save them") was always fairly transparently bullshit, not just in terms of what it asks of you but also that it doesn't cost anything to be nice (you get basically the same resources, only slightly delayed, and the game's piss-easy as it stands even without the infinite respawning chambers).

What is there, what stood the test of time, is some great fucking art direction, some good voice acting* and an acceptable, slightly more involved than average, shooter.

* I love that Andrew Ryan's voice actor is best known as Quark from DS9

[roughling@thebleakest.link]

@bean the morality system gets even worse in 2 lol

[bean@twoot.site]

@roughling I tried 2 for the first time a few months ago and bounced off after a bit.

The pacing of it is entirely off - much much more of the okay-ish combat, even less of the world building.

[outie@slime.global]

@bean also, foreshadowing Infinite, it is racist as fuck

How any of Suchong's voice lines got recorded without anyone going "hang on a moment" is a mystery to me

[outie@slime.global]

@bean Ken Levine kept pitching Bioshock as "the thinking man's shooter" and I guess it is that, in that it makes you think "maaan..."

[roughling@thebleakest.link]

@bean I ended up liking it a lot by the end, but that's partially because Eleonora really resonated with me in my last year pre coming out lol

[bean@twoot.site]

Tonally, this reminds me of... the Batman Arkham games?

Like Sander Cohen is basically Victor Zsasz? Someone who wants to kill for the art of it.

Except... Cohen is framed as someone who used to be a good artist, and the thing you make for him is just, uh, hot garbage.

And I find it hard to even see the message in that - "under Objectivism, we would make shit art"?

I think the problem here is that it concentrates on The Great Men going wrong, and kinda entirely forgets about the exploited that would be required for that system. Like... What happens to people who move there, promised riches and freedom, who then don't "make it" and end up as servants? Is there slavery in Rapture?

And that's the weakness of the world building, right there. It's not a coherent world, it's a series of vignettes about Great Person (Gone Wrong). It's not quite "but what do they eat" (there is fishing, they are under the sea), but more... who goes fishing? How do they live?

There's also the basic enemy of "the splicer", who is addicted to ADAM. Except when the player gets ADAM they get cool bee-shooting powers with zero downsides, so it's not clear to me what they are even addicted to given that most of them don't show any powers at all.

[bean@twoot.site]

Bioshock literally is the sort of game where you can click on a thing to get a tooltip that says "FIND a diary that explains this",

and the diary is literally on the table right next to it.