one thing that bothered me about the game and how it touched on social issues (especially racism) was how it sort of would say "wow this society is racist, what a bunch of dicks" and then turn around and throw Chen Lin at us, who was a pretty bad caricature of an Asian American. That was a huge WTF moment for me. Same with the drunk angry Irish people in Shanty Town who you are supposed to simultaneously feel bad for & kill off once they get pissed at you for stealing from them (which afaik you have to do? unless there was a way to sneak around them to get the vigor enhancer thing)
I totally agree about making Booker more tangible, though that's something I felt about all the Bioshock games. It could be because I started gaming with adventure PC games where you either had dialogue options or you typed in your own dialogue, but it always bothered me how when you -did- interact with characters your options were limited to "kill/spare" or just staring at them while they went off on a monologue in front of you. Even if expanding Booker just meant expanding his interactions with Elizabeth, that would've been enough (though I do think if we realized early on that Booker had killed a bunch of Native American women, he might've been harder to play...so maybe we do need to know less about the characters we play?) But I would love these games a thousand times more if there were more ways to legitimately interact either with NPCs or the environment. (it would've also been awesome to have had more songbird in the game considering what a huge deal they made out of that character. i wonder how much songbird got scrapped, because the game seems to have changed pretty dramatically throughout its creation)
But still, calling this game, or the ending a Citizen Kane moment falls way short for me. What did, and still, makes Kane so riveting is that it told a story in a way stories weren't being told in the cinema both through the writing and the cinematography. The narrative and technical achievements of the film were only magnified by the fact that it was Welle's directorial debut. So no matter how -good- BSI might be, it isn't really doing anything that new. If anything, the twist, the interactions with the world, the lack of cut scenes, that praise can all quite easily be given to the first Bioshock game, since in SO many ways BSI is a retelling of BS1 with the real changes being a talking companion, tears, and ziplines.
In BS1 the twist felt so real and so personal and shocking that it threw the pacing of the rest of the game off (in a good way I felt, since your whole world got tuned upside down going from blind and unknowing vengeance/favor to a real and personal vendetta) and i felt like in this game, the twist was sort of entering into M Night territory in terms of "well we've got to outdo the first game with the twist". I mean, there was foreshadowing that became less murky after you realize how fucked up the situation is, but a lot of it relied on finding all the recordings, something that wasn't necessary in the first game (which to me is important in a narrative since as it stands i don't know anyone who's found all the recordings yet which means we're all working with incomplete narratives)
If anything, in my opinion, BSI is simply honing all the awesome things that BS1 had already redefined. If we were to award a game with a crown as heavy as being Kane-like, I'd be more apt to give it to BS1, Braid, Portal or Psychonauts because those games were all telling completely different stories and using completely different mechanics to do so (and in the case of Braid and Portal, they were actually those designer's debuts)
I totally agree about making Booker more tangible, though that's something I felt about all the Bioshock games. It could be because I started gaming with adventure PC games where you either had dialogue options or you typed in your own dialogue, but it always bothered me how when you -did- interact with characters your options were limited to "kill/spare" or just staring at them while they went off on a monologue in front of you. Even if expanding Booker just meant expanding his interactions with Elizabeth, that would've been enough (though I do think if we realized early on that Booker had killed a bunch of Native American women, he might've been harder to play...so maybe we do need to know less about the characters we play?) But I would love these games a thousand times more if there were more ways to legitimately interact either with NPCs or the environment. (it would've also been awesome to have had more songbird in the game considering what a huge deal they made out of that character. i wonder how much songbird got scrapped, because the game seems to have changed pretty dramatically throughout its creation)
But still, calling this game, or the ending a Citizen Kane moment falls way short for me. What did, and still, makes Kane so riveting is that it told a story in a way stories weren't being told in the cinema both through the writing and the cinematography. The narrative and technical achievements of the film were only magnified by the fact that it was Welle's directorial debut. So no matter how -good- BSI might be, it isn't really doing anything that new. If anything, the twist, the interactions with the world, the lack of cut scenes, that praise can all quite easily be given to the first Bioshock game, since in SO many ways BSI is a retelling of BS1 with the real changes being a talking companion, tears, and ziplines.
In BS1 the twist felt so real and so personal and shocking that it threw the pacing of the rest of the game off (in a good way I felt, since your whole world got tuned upside down going from blind and unknowing vengeance/favor to a real and personal vendetta) and i felt like in this game, the twist was sort of entering into M Night territory in terms of "well we've got to outdo the first game with the twist". I mean, there was foreshadowing that became less murky after you realize how fucked up the situation is, but a lot of it relied on finding all the recordings, something that wasn't necessary in the first game (which to me is important in a narrative since as it stands i don't know anyone who's found all the recordings yet which means we're all working with incomplete narratives)
If anything, in my opinion, BSI is simply honing all the awesome things that BS1 had already redefined. If we were to award a game with a crown as heavy as being Kane-like, I'd be more apt to give it to BS1, Braid, Portal or Psychonauts because those games were all telling completely different stories and using completely different mechanics to do so (and in the case of Braid and Portal, they were actually those designer's debuts)
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