My thought on things: Bioshock
The other night, I dreamed I had returned home and was visiting Actors Theatre. I was in the main lobby, looking at a lobby display when the unmistakable, hollow moan filled my ears. Creaking joints were followed by thunderous steps that shook the very ground I stood on.
Coming down the stairs was one of Bioshock's monstrous Big Daddies - a veritable war machine with over-exaggerated features and a giant drill for an arm. I stood perfectly still, as the creature approached me. He passed, as if unaware I stood so close and as I tried to sneak past I stepped just a little too close and he swatted me away aside like a fly.
As he continued on, the lights emanating from him a placid, dirty yellow, something in my mind snapped and I brought up my shot gun and blasted a buck shot to the back of his head. The lights snapped to a brilliant, bloody red and I narrowly avoid drill through my face.
This is how the game plays and this is what the game does to you. For a week, it filled my thoughts (and those of my wife who surprisingly got into a first person shooter), an addiction almost as bad as the game world’s addiction to Adam and the plasmids it makes possible.
A beautiful underwater city, ravaged my madness, Rapture is a perfect first person shooter setting, as the world is as varied and twisted as imaginable. Water is beautiful. I found myself wishing I was still living with Beth’s parents so I could play it on their massive HD television. Even on a standard television, this game was an incredible visual spectacle. Evil little girls, stabbing syringes into “angels”, their monstrous protectors and of course, the completely insane denizens who crawl out of the woodwork from all directions at any time to bash your skull in with a wrench.
Their AI is brilliant and annoying. At any time during a fight, even the most average enemy will dash to a med station for an instant heal. They will set up turrets and cameras. And if they are near death and can’t heal, they will hide in a room, wielding their wrenches by doorways and refuse to move until you either walk through the door or light their asses on fire.
Yes, Ryan Industries has granted you the ability to have fire at your finger tips. As well as electricity, telekinesis and many other brilliant and fun plasmids, all of which, depending on how you use them can stun a single enemy to prep him for a crunching death blow from your wrench or annihilate an entire room of twisted freaks with a flick of your wrist. Brief tutorials for each plasmid are presented in fun, 1960s era safety cartoon style. But the real fun is when you realize that you can ignite a pool of oil, which spreads catching several enemies on fire. As they rush to the water below, you shoot a bolt of electricity into it, finishing them off. With telekinesis you grab one of their corpses just in time to block an incoming volley of pistol shots from above you and with a quick flick, send the body hurling into your assailant for an instant death.
But why kill your enemies right away? Instead, maybe you like snapping pictures? A research camera “weapon” in the game adds a little RPG flair, as by taking pictures of your enemies you can valuable experience points, that once leveled up give you damage advantages against your enemies, expose their weaknesses and even give you special items like Static Charge 2 (an exciting power-up that emanates an electrical charge each time someone strikes you). For the puzzle fans, there is also hacking - sort of pipe-dreams on crack puzzles, where you try and get some fluid from point A to B by switching out pipes. Hacking allows you to take control of all the electronic bad guys (turrets, camera, flying bots), get cheap supplies from vending machines and even a quick heal from a healing station (this same hack turns the healing station against your enemies, spraying poisonous gas at anyone other than you that tries and uses it).
This is the world of Bioshock one of the most surprising and inventive games I have played to date. And it is my firm opinion that you should be playing it now (you have to do something before Halo 3 comes out right?)