People Placating Plasmid Penchants
So I got BioShock 2 for my birthday (thanks Kelly!) and beat it in one sitting. That's right, I played a video game for 12 straight fucking hours in order to beat it. I knew I would.
So here's what I thought of it.
The basic feeling on it? Disappointed.
BioShock was an incredible game. A twisted and brilliant story set in the moldering, leaking, groaning ruins of a city built beneath the surface of the ocean, haunted by the whale-like moans of the titanic Big Daddies escorting their glowing-eyed Little Sisters on grim errands to reap genetic material from corpses, filled with twisted, psychotic mutants, and the wreckage of an unreasonable philosophic dream. An anarcho-capitalist safe haven founded to shelter the greatest minds available but built on the Ayn Randian philosophy of Objectivism - the philosophy of pure enlightened self-interest - the submarine metropolis of Rapture is a majestic art deco ruin, torn apart by its own philosophy. The first BioShock tells a story about selfishness, broken dreams, and the nature of free will. And one of its most iconic figure is the masked giant we call "Big Daddy."
Once human, the Big Daddy is a golem, a "Protector unit," a man who has been repurposed by the gene-warping bio-technology of Rapture into a hulking monster who lives only to protect the Little Sisters, little girls who have themselves been turned into something inhuman. They wander the leaking, groaning passages of a dying city, collecting the DNA-altering fluid known as ADAM in order to refine it inside their bodies, harvesting this precious substance with giant pressurized syringes thrust into corpses. The city is full of people who changed their bodies too much with this ADAM, the splicers, deranged mutants, many of whom still wear the the masquerade costumes from the disastrous New Year's Eve that had brought Rapture to her knees. The splicers will do anything for just a little more ADAM to ease the agony of their tumorous, warped bodies - and they know that Little Sister carries it. But to get to Little Sister, anyone seeking ADAM must confront a lumbering, mobile massacre called Big Daddy: dressed in a old fashioned diving suit, armed with a hundred-pound steel drill on one arm or an over-sized rivet gun, able to shrug off gunfire or blows with wrenches or pipes, the Big Daddy is a ground-shaking force of nature.
The first video game character to actually intimidate me in years, Big Daddy shares a strange, symbiotic relationship with Little Sister; the mute titan and his macabre ward, a twisted vision of the innocent relationship between father and child, or elder sibling and younger. The monster is strangely gentle with Little Sister, but endanger her and he becomes a bellowing, armored T-Rex with an auger for a right arm.
BioShock 2 was announced some time ago, and when they did, they told eager players something incredible: in the sequel, they would be stepping into the armor of Big Daddy. In the first game, part of the impact of Rapture was that it was alien; Jack believed himself an outsider, and through his eyes the player was, too. But the players coming back for the sequel knew Rapture, the tragic tale of her downfall and the end of Andrew Ryan's tyrannical reign. They knew it intimately. So why not make the character a resident, a native of the fallen city? And why not make them one of the most dangerous creatures in Rapture?
I couldn't wait to try it.
Then they revealed that they had come up with an enemy that would actually scare Big Daddy: a limber, towering feminine figure, dressed in a tight-fitted version of the protector's armor, the so-called Big Sister. Armed with plasmid powers that dwarfed even that of the ferocious prototype Big Daddy the player assumes the (non)identity of, she was to be a constant menace, a terrifying foe that even a monster had to be afraid to be confronted by. Big Sister was watching, waiting, and she did not like what you were doing to her city.
So I strapped on the boots of a giant and got ready to kick some serious ass. The opening grabs your attention: you start before the ultimate failure of the city, escorting your Little Sister around the city. She darts into a party, her inhuman senses alerted to the presence of ADAM nearby. Not caring about the ordinary humans in the way, you storm into the party after her, celebrants recoiling from the sight of Frakenstein's abyssal monster. Then the Big Daddy hears Little Sister scream, and breaks into a pounding run, bursting out on to a balcony. Below, in an alley, a trio of splicers menace his charge. With a roar, he vaults the railing - displaying that he has two hands - and lands with such force atop one of the attackers that he pulverizes them into the pavement. Then he dons the deadly arm-drill weapon, smashing his enemies aside to get to Little Sister. He is furious, single-minded, and unstoppable. Then a splicer hits him in the helmet with something familiar to players of the first game: the weird little spherical bio-bomb produced by the "Hypnotize Big Daddy" plasmid (plasmids being a sort of bio-weapon created by ADAM). A strange woman confronts Big Daddy, informing him that "Eleanor is [her] daughter, not [his]!" Then she orders the giant to kneel, remove his helmet, accept a pistol and shoot himself in the head. He does, and falls to the ground.
Ten years pass.
A voice speaks out of the darkness, the familiar voice of Dr. Tenenbaum, the Russo-German scientist (whose name is likely a reference to Ayn Rand, who was born Rosenbaum) who created the Little Sisters. The radio crackles and hisses. The Big Daddy struggles to his feet, glances at his gauntlet-clad, massive hands. He regards himself a moment in the reflection of nearby glass, then looks around for Little Sister. Without hesitating, he immediately lumbers forward, equipping his iconic drill arm and surging into action, swatting aside rumble or clambering around it. He must find Little Sister - he must find Eleanor.
For a little while during this first few moments, the player is aware of the power of a Big Daddy. In the guise of this golem, you are quite strong, and the eerie, yet familiar ruins of Rapture await you. You very quickly discover the purpose of the strange ports and nozzles on your gloves: this Big Daddy can wield plasmids. You are different from your hulking brethren: lighter on your feet, less bulky in your armor, and able to upgrade yourself using ADAM. And you're not only intelligent but sapient; unlike your fellow Daddies, you have free will. The monster has a mind, and a mission, and that should make for some good storytelling.
However.
From the get-go, the feeling of hulking power fades. You don't make much noise when you walk - in fact, I think Jack, the protagonist of the first game, makes more noise when he moves - and you only appear slightly bigger than a human. Your shadow, when you throw it, is of a diving-suited giant, and it's a good thing: you'd quickly forget that you're not human otherwise. Your diving suit offers little protection from the meat hooks, pipes, wrenches and firearms wielded by the Splicers; where other Big Daddies are able to shrug off human attacks with a roar and a swat of a drill-arm, you are surprisingly delicate in combat, not even more than human. Hell, Jack felt like more of a bad ass than "Delta," as you discover your Big Daddy is named. No one in Rapture is scared of you: they don't flee at your stalking approach, but in fact are just as eager to attack a Big Daddy unaccompanied by a Little Sister as they were to attack the stranger Jack. Although your drill is a satisfyingly destructive weapon in close quarters, it runs out of fuel extremely quickly, and without more, it functions as a bludgeoning weapon (you can administer a melee swat with any weapon, which is handy sometimes) just like Jack's infamously destructive wrench. And as it turns out the "shock 'em with Electro-Bolt, crack 'em over the head with something" tactic is just as overpowered in BioShock 2 as it was in BioShock 1 - except only 50% of the time. Half the time you'll drop an opponent with one hit, and the other half you'll just daze 'em slightly. Don't know why that is, exactly, but it is.
The other Big Daddies are physically stronger than Delta, though Delta's more intelligent and has access to his Plasmids, which generally makes combat with them surprisingly more a matter of patience than actually being in danger. Really, the most dangerous common enemy in the game is the incredibly annoying Brute Splicer, a hulking muscle-bound babbling asshole who can knock Delta flying with a single punch, and who rips chunks of rubble out of the ground or picks up other chunks of debris to hurl at his head. He also runs around a lot... wait a minute. A hulking, annoying opponent who knocks the player flying, rips chunks out of the ground to attack...
Goddamnit, 2K Marin, that's the fucking Tank from Left 4 Dead, you assholes! Great, so the most challenging common opponent in the game is a rip off of the musclebound super-zombie from another game. Well done. Oh, and he's more a nuisance than a tough opponent (the Brute Splicer, not the Tank. The Tank is actually a valid threat) so that's super too. Nothing makes you feel like a nigh-unstoppable augmented killing machine like losing a quarter of your health bar because some big gorilla threw a wooden crate at your armored head.
But what made BioShock truly memorable for me are its fantastic villains. Jack is (literally) just a pawn caught between two god-like figures: the city founder, business magnate Andrew Ryan, and his arch-nemesis, the rebellious Atlas. Both are just voices on the radio for most of the game, but they are very potent voices; the common-man Atlas with his heavy Irish brogue and his desperate attempt to save his family from Rapture, and the deep, angry voice of the all-powerful Ryan, still master of his crumbling domain. Vain yet despairing, contemptuous and defiant, Andrew Ryan is your nemesis and your target for most of the game. When you discover the truth of your relationship to him, when you kill him against your own free will - free will you never had to begin with - and find the truth about the vengeful Atlas, it is shocking, it is compelling storytelling.
So in BioShock 2 you have the alien, unknowable and incredibly powerful Big Sister trying to rebuild Rapture, right?
Wrong-o, pal!
The Big Sister is relegated to the role of a difficult, but not too difficult, boss character. There are actually multiple Big Sisters, and while your first confrontation with her is frightening - ending in a draw that dumps you outside a flooded area of the city at the bottom of the sea (which you can survive thanks to your augmented diving suit) - the menace dies down a bit when you realize you can kill Big Sister, and that defeating her is, again, a question of pitting your Electro-Bolt and your patience against her wild, leaping, telekinetic, pyrokinetic abilities. She throws fireballs and wreckage at your head, and leaps around the screen, bounding off walls and the ceiling to kick you in the face - but she's not really all that dangerous in the end, succumbing to a barrage of rivets or bullets fairly easily.
So who is the big bad in Rapture now?
That would be the incredibly uninspiring Dr. Sofia Lamb. Lamb is not a very good villainess; what she is, more than anything, is an annoying voice on the intercoms or on your radio that you wish would shut the fuck up and get out of your way already.
Lamb is the apparently charismatic leader of a cult in Rapture; they worship her daughter - Eleanor, if you haven't guessed - as some kind of second coming (a subsect of the cult also worships Jack as basically Jesus, which was actually pretty entertaining) that will guide them to a perfect world. Lamb is a fruitcake, in all actuality; she is a sort of Super Communist, a Marxist-Utopian hellbound to create the ultimate human being, a self-less, mindless servant of the people devoted to using its incredible intelligence and vast plasmid powers to save us all from ourselves. Lamb wants to create a biopunk Jesus to carry us all away, a god-child born in Rapture who will serve as the living embodiment of her philosophy. She does what she does out of a misguided duty to humanity - she feels that love for a single person is evil, that we must spread our love evenly across all people, loving and serving each other equally.
I expected a frighteningly powerful enemy to pit myself against. What I got instead is the Anti-Ryan. Where Ryan promotes Randian selfishness, Lamb promotes an excessive version of Marxist selflessness. She isn't scary, she's boring, a cheap second-hand nemesis who had already been defeated once by the all-powerful Ryan, locked away in prison and forgotten in the titanic struggle between Ryan and Atlas. She talks a big game about how her cult (who wear butterflies as a symbol, in fact, the butterfly emblem is fucking EVERYWHERE in BioShock 2) will change everything, but no one remembered they existed in 1960 when Jack came to Rapture. She controls "the Family," a communist/Utopian cult, but there's no particular reason why they follow her that I've noticed. Your other opponents, like the completely insane Gilbert Alexander (the final confrontation with whom is a suitably BioShock twist) or the sad, misguided Grace Holloway, are more memorable: Gil, or as he calls himself "Alex the Great" is a complete and utter lunatic who heckles Subject Delta as he makes his way through Gil's domain, constantly screams that he is firing Delta, and who has littered his building with "fired" (read: to death) former employees; Grace rages at Project Delta over the intercoms, believing that the Big Daddy stole Eleanor, who had been left in her care, away from her.
The moral choices are back, and in fact are more numerous: I chose to spare the Little Sisters as I had in the guise of Jack, and I did not take the lives of the petty manipulator Stanley Poole, nor did I kill Grace when I finally confronted her face to face. I especially liked the results of sparing Grace: she comments that "no monster born would spare a life - it takes a man, a thinkin' man - to do that." The conflict of Project Delta - the golem with a soul - is highlighted in these decisions. I didn't take the lives of most of my enemies because I didn't feel the character would. He had one concern: save Eleanor, and with her, himself. Vengeance was nearly irrelevant to his mission.
A little is revealed about the true identity of the man beneath the helmet, whose face is never seen: how he came to Rapture, how he became a Big Daddy, how he met and successfully bonded to Eleanor. Fourth of the Big Daddy prototypes, unable to live without his Little Sister, but able to choose to spare his enemies, to think rationally and solve problems. He is very much cast in the mold of "Adam," Frankestein's iconic monster, though you feel nothing but human when looking at Rapture through his helmet.
The entire first 8 or 10 hours of BioShock 2 felt empty: I didn't have the wonder of a first-time visitor to this crumbling mad house, nor did I have the feeling of being a powerful monster on a mission. Delta's footsteps do not boom with heavy armored authority; he walks like a human, particularly after getting a tonic to accelerate his movements. Only when he jumps is there a sense of ponderous mass. He is no more physically powerful than Jack was; enemies often stagger away barely harmed after being cracked over the head with the barrel of his gigantic rivet gun or swatted in the face with the drill. A simple chain and padlock is completely immune to blows struck by the mighty Big Daddy's awesome drill, but a scrawny, tumorous Splicer slices it away with a single swing of his mere steel plumbing fixture weapon. Delta is stealthy and quick, like Jack - in fact, the game plays nearly EXACTLY like BioShock 1. Even in BioShock 1, when Jack briefly assumes the identity of a Big Daddy, he feels more like one of the unstoppable brutes than Delta does - his footsteps even produced a menacing thud and clank as he walked. Why the fuck am I being stealthy when I am in the role of a walking engine of destruction? Well, because bullets and pipes and meathooks hurt me just as bad - if not worse - as they hurt Jack the mere mortal.
The one thing over the course of the game that puts you firmly in the role of Subject Delta is that you can take Little Sisters away from their protectors, acting as their new guardian. The Little Sisters are extremely affectionate towards you, and you set them up on your shoulder where they taunt enemies ("Nobody messes with MY Daddy! Unzip 'em, Mister B!") and guide you to corpses they can harvest. There, you deploy your Little Sister once you have littered the battlefield with an array of booby traps, ranging from special rivets that fire a bolt into an enemy who trips their detection field, to electrified triplines and proximity mines. Then begins a ferocious battle, the Big Daddy standing over his oblivious ward as she harvests the ADAM. You often experienced this battle from the perspective of Jack trying to steal (and in my case, save) a Little Sister for the ADAM you needed, but now you are the hulking defender. It's very cool, I admit.
It is in the closing act of BioShock 2 that the game suddenly develops life: the plot thickens, the world becomes a desperate battle for survival. You come face to face with Eleanor, and because she experienced your entire journey via a symbiotic link with you, your actions have shaped her personality. Lamb rants and raves that her daughter is become a monster because of your selfish decisions - like sparing lives or granting a merciful death to a madman twisted by ADAM, I said she was a fucking fruitcake, did I not? - and there's even a scene where you finally, finally feel actual hatred for this contemptible, psychotic woman who will do ANYTHING for her deranged view of Utopian philosophy.
And then things happen that are amazing: you witness the world through the eyes of a Little Sister, and see how they view the world, how they maintain their strange, poignant innocence in the face of horror; you complete the transformation of an innocent girl warped by her mother into an armored champion who will risk everything to be with the being she considers her father. At long last, you feel the part of Big Daddy: a relentless protector who will do anything to save Eleanor. The last few battles are epic: you can summon your super powered Big Sister "daughter" and you take on hordes of enemies, including your Alpha-series Big Daddy brethren. You run and fight, the ground shaking to explosions and blasts of pressurized water, and Big Daddies (both yourself when injured and your opponents) roar as the drill shrieks and lightning bolts and blasts of fire fill the air. It is truly epic.
And the payoff: an amazing ending. I got the good ending, and I like it that way; something you don't see coming, and a world which will now be confronted not by the secretive incorporation of saved Little Sisters back into society as the adopted daughters of Jack, but by the coming of a genius with vast super powers, who would have been a soulless automaton but who is now a sincerely caring person. And the ultimate fate of Subject Delta was also a moving moment. I don't think the same person wrote the opening and ending cinematic as wrote the rest of the game, which is not nearly as engaging.
So in the end, do I recommend this game? To a fan of BioShock, yes. It continues the story of Rapture and the lives that were lost or changed forever by its confines. The ending is a well-done science fiction moment, and the opening is a rare glimpse at the Rapture-that-was. It fails on numerous levels, but truly shines in others: the scenery is gorgeous, even if it is decaying; the music is haunting and the voice acting top notch; and the story, at its conclusion, is excellent. Lamb is just as unimportant in the end as she was the entire game, and the grim echoes of Atlas and Ryan still call to you years after they both fell, unfortunately reminding you of far more interesting villains than your psychologist nemesis. But in the end the story was never about Lamb or her stupid cult: it was about a Big Daddy and the Little Sister who considered him to be her father. In many ways, like the first BioShock, it is a story about free will, and what free will can cost you.
No word yet from Clarion, but it could be a while; March has just started after all.
Thanks for the birthday wishes, all.
Also, check out Symphony of Science:
Way to make Science fucking beautiful, guys.
Deuces.
Forget You Ever Saw Me,
we are all connected: to each other, biologically; to the Earth, chemically; to the rest of the universe, atomically.
So here's what I thought of it.
The basic feeling on it? Disappointed.
BioShock was an incredible game. A twisted and brilliant story set in the moldering, leaking, groaning ruins of a city built beneath the surface of the ocean, haunted by the whale-like moans of the titanic Big Daddies escorting their glowing-eyed Little Sisters on grim errands to reap genetic material from corpses, filled with twisted, psychotic mutants, and the wreckage of an unreasonable philosophic dream. An anarcho-capitalist safe haven founded to shelter the greatest minds available but built on the Ayn Randian philosophy of Objectivism - the philosophy of pure enlightened self-interest - the submarine metropolis of Rapture is a majestic art deco ruin, torn apart by its own philosophy. The first BioShock tells a story about selfishness, broken dreams, and the nature of free will. And one of its most iconic figure is the masked giant we call "Big Daddy."
Once human, the Big Daddy is a golem, a "Protector unit," a man who has been repurposed by the gene-warping bio-technology of Rapture into a hulking monster who lives only to protect the Little Sisters, little girls who have themselves been turned into something inhuman. They wander the leaking, groaning passages of a dying city, collecting the DNA-altering fluid known as ADAM in order to refine it inside their bodies, harvesting this precious substance with giant pressurized syringes thrust into corpses. The city is full of people who changed their bodies too much with this ADAM, the splicers, deranged mutants, many of whom still wear the the masquerade costumes from the disastrous New Year's Eve that had brought Rapture to her knees. The splicers will do anything for just a little more ADAM to ease the agony of their tumorous, warped bodies - and they know that Little Sister carries it. But to get to Little Sister, anyone seeking ADAM must confront a lumbering, mobile massacre called Big Daddy: dressed in a old fashioned diving suit, armed with a hundred-pound steel drill on one arm or an over-sized rivet gun, able to shrug off gunfire or blows with wrenches or pipes, the Big Daddy is a ground-shaking force of nature.
The first video game character to actually intimidate me in years, Big Daddy shares a strange, symbiotic relationship with Little Sister; the mute titan and his macabre ward, a twisted vision of the innocent relationship between father and child, or elder sibling and younger. The monster is strangely gentle with Little Sister, but endanger her and he becomes a bellowing, armored T-Rex with an auger for a right arm.
BioShock 2 was announced some time ago, and when they did, they told eager players something incredible: in the sequel, they would be stepping into the armor of Big Daddy. In the first game, part of the impact of Rapture was that it was alien; Jack believed himself an outsider, and through his eyes the player was, too. But the players coming back for the sequel knew Rapture, the tragic tale of her downfall and the end of Andrew Ryan's tyrannical reign. They knew it intimately. So why not make the character a resident, a native of the fallen city? And why not make them one of the most dangerous creatures in Rapture?
I couldn't wait to try it.
Then they revealed that they had come up with an enemy that would actually scare Big Daddy: a limber, towering feminine figure, dressed in a tight-fitted version of the protector's armor, the so-called Big Sister. Armed with plasmid powers that dwarfed even that of the ferocious prototype Big Daddy the player assumes the (non)identity of, she was to be a constant menace, a terrifying foe that even a monster had to be afraid to be confronted by. Big Sister was watching, waiting, and she did not like what you were doing to her city.
So I strapped on the boots of a giant and got ready to kick some serious ass. The opening grabs your attention: you start before the ultimate failure of the city, escorting your Little Sister around the city. She darts into a party, her inhuman senses alerted to the presence of ADAM nearby. Not caring about the ordinary humans in the way, you storm into the party after her, celebrants recoiling from the sight of Frakenstein's abyssal monster. Then the Big Daddy hears Little Sister scream, and breaks into a pounding run, bursting out on to a balcony. Below, in an alley, a trio of splicers menace his charge. With a roar, he vaults the railing - displaying that he has two hands - and lands with such force atop one of the attackers that he pulverizes them into the pavement. Then he dons the deadly arm-drill weapon, smashing his enemies aside to get to Little Sister. He is furious, single-minded, and unstoppable. Then a splicer hits him in the helmet with something familiar to players of the first game: the weird little spherical bio-bomb produced by the "Hypnotize Big Daddy" plasmid (plasmids being a sort of bio-weapon created by ADAM). A strange woman confronts Big Daddy, informing him that "Eleanor is [her] daughter, not [his]!" Then she orders the giant to kneel, remove his helmet, accept a pistol and shoot himself in the head. He does, and falls to the ground.
Ten years pass.
A voice speaks out of the darkness, the familiar voice of Dr. Tenenbaum, the Russo-German scientist (whose name is likely a reference to Ayn Rand, who was born Rosenbaum) who created the Little Sisters. The radio crackles and hisses. The Big Daddy struggles to his feet, glances at his gauntlet-clad, massive hands. He regards himself a moment in the reflection of nearby glass, then looks around for Little Sister. Without hesitating, he immediately lumbers forward, equipping his iconic drill arm and surging into action, swatting aside rumble or clambering around it. He must find Little Sister - he must find Eleanor.
For a little while during this first few moments, the player is aware of the power of a Big Daddy. In the guise of this golem, you are quite strong, and the eerie, yet familiar ruins of Rapture await you. You very quickly discover the purpose of the strange ports and nozzles on your gloves: this Big Daddy can wield plasmids. You are different from your hulking brethren: lighter on your feet, less bulky in your armor, and able to upgrade yourself using ADAM. And you're not only intelligent but sapient; unlike your fellow Daddies, you have free will. The monster has a mind, and a mission, and that should make for some good storytelling.
However.
From the get-go, the feeling of hulking power fades. You don't make much noise when you walk - in fact, I think Jack, the protagonist of the first game, makes more noise when he moves - and you only appear slightly bigger than a human. Your shadow, when you throw it, is of a diving-suited giant, and it's a good thing: you'd quickly forget that you're not human otherwise. Your diving suit offers little protection from the meat hooks, pipes, wrenches and firearms wielded by the Splicers; where other Big Daddies are able to shrug off human attacks with a roar and a swat of a drill-arm, you are surprisingly delicate in combat, not even more than human. Hell, Jack felt like more of a bad ass than "Delta," as you discover your Big Daddy is named. No one in Rapture is scared of you: they don't flee at your stalking approach, but in fact are just as eager to attack a Big Daddy unaccompanied by a Little Sister as they were to attack the stranger Jack. Although your drill is a satisfyingly destructive weapon in close quarters, it runs out of fuel extremely quickly, and without more, it functions as a bludgeoning weapon (you can administer a melee swat with any weapon, which is handy sometimes) just like Jack's infamously destructive wrench. And as it turns out the "shock 'em with Electro-Bolt, crack 'em over the head with something" tactic is just as overpowered in BioShock 2 as it was in BioShock 1 - except only 50% of the time. Half the time you'll drop an opponent with one hit, and the other half you'll just daze 'em slightly. Don't know why that is, exactly, but it is.
The other Big Daddies are physically stronger than Delta, though Delta's more intelligent and has access to his Plasmids, which generally makes combat with them surprisingly more a matter of patience than actually being in danger. Really, the most dangerous common enemy in the game is the incredibly annoying Brute Splicer, a hulking muscle-bound babbling asshole who can knock Delta flying with a single punch, and who rips chunks of rubble out of the ground or picks up other chunks of debris to hurl at his head. He also runs around a lot... wait a minute. A hulking, annoying opponent who knocks the player flying, rips chunks out of the ground to attack...
Goddamnit, 2K Marin, that's the fucking Tank from Left 4 Dead, you assholes! Great, so the most challenging common opponent in the game is a rip off of the musclebound super-zombie from another game. Well done. Oh, and he's more a nuisance than a tough opponent (the Brute Splicer, not the Tank. The Tank is actually a valid threat) so that's super too. Nothing makes you feel like a nigh-unstoppable augmented killing machine like losing a quarter of your health bar because some big gorilla threw a wooden crate at your armored head.
But what made BioShock truly memorable for me are its fantastic villains. Jack is (literally) just a pawn caught between two god-like figures: the city founder, business magnate Andrew Ryan, and his arch-nemesis, the rebellious Atlas. Both are just voices on the radio for most of the game, but they are very potent voices; the common-man Atlas with his heavy Irish brogue and his desperate attempt to save his family from Rapture, and the deep, angry voice of the all-powerful Ryan, still master of his crumbling domain. Vain yet despairing, contemptuous and defiant, Andrew Ryan is your nemesis and your target for most of the game. When you discover the truth of your relationship to him, when you kill him against your own free will - free will you never had to begin with - and find the truth about the vengeful Atlas, it is shocking, it is compelling storytelling.
So in BioShock 2 you have the alien, unknowable and incredibly powerful Big Sister trying to rebuild Rapture, right?
Wrong-o, pal!
The Big Sister is relegated to the role of a difficult, but not too difficult, boss character. There are actually multiple Big Sisters, and while your first confrontation with her is frightening - ending in a draw that dumps you outside a flooded area of the city at the bottom of the sea (which you can survive thanks to your augmented diving suit) - the menace dies down a bit when you realize you can kill Big Sister, and that defeating her is, again, a question of pitting your Electro-Bolt and your patience against her wild, leaping, telekinetic, pyrokinetic abilities. She throws fireballs and wreckage at your head, and leaps around the screen, bounding off walls and the ceiling to kick you in the face - but she's not really all that dangerous in the end, succumbing to a barrage of rivets or bullets fairly easily.
So who is the big bad in Rapture now?
That would be the incredibly uninspiring Dr. Sofia Lamb. Lamb is not a very good villainess; what she is, more than anything, is an annoying voice on the intercoms or on your radio that you wish would shut the fuck up and get out of your way already.
Lamb is the apparently charismatic leader of a cult in Rapture; they worship her daughter - Eleanor, if you haven't guessed - as some kind of second coming (a subsect of the cult also worships Jack as basically Jesus, which was actually pretty entertaining) that will guide them to a perfect world. Lamb is a fruitcake, in all actuality; she is a sort of Super Communist, a Marxist-Utopian hellbound to create the ultimate human being, a self-less, mindless servant of the people devoted to using its incredible intelligence and vast plasmid powers to save us all from ourselves. Lamb wants to create a biopunk Jesus to carry us all away, a god-child born in Rapture who will serve as the living embodiment of her philosophy. She does what she does out of a misguided duty to humanity - she feels that love for a single person is evil, that we must spread our love evenly across all people, loving and serving each other equally.
I expected a frighteningly powerful enemy to pit myself against. What I got instead is the Anti-Ryan. Where Ryan promotes Randian selfishness, Lamb promotes an excessive version of Marxist selflessness. She isn't scary, she's boring, a cheap second-hand nemesis who had already been defeated once by the all-powerful Ryan, locked away in prison and forgotten in the titanic struggle between Ryan and Atlas. She talks a big game about how her cult (who wear butterflies as a symbol, in fact, the butterfly emblem is fucking EVERYWHERE in BioShock 2) will change everything, but no one remembered they existed in 1960 when Jack came to Rapture. She controls "the Family," a communist/Utopian cult, but there's no particular reason why they follow her that I've noticed. Your other opponents, like the completely insane Gilbert Alexander (the final confrontation with whom is a suitably BioShock twist) or the sad, misguided Grace Holloway, are more memorable: Gil, or as he calls himself "Alex the Great" is a complete and utter lunatic who heckles Subject Delta as he makes his way through Gil's domain, constantly screams that he is firing Delta, and who has littered his building with "fired" (read: to death) former employees; Grace rages at Project Delta over the intercoms, believing that the Big Daddy stole Eleanor, who had been left in her care, away from her.
The moral choices are back, and in fact are more numerous: I chose to spare the Little Sisters as I had in the guise of Jack, and I did not take the lives of the petty manipulator Stanley Poole, nor did I kill Grace when I finally confronted her face to face. I especially liked the results of sparing Grace: she comments that "no monster born would spare a life - it takes a man, a thinkin' man - to do that." The conflict of Project Delta - the golem with a soul - is highlighted in these decisions. I didn't take the lives of most of my enemies because I didn't feel the character would. He had one concern: save Eleanor, and with her, himself. Vengeance was nearly irrelevant to his mission.
A little is revealed about the true identity of the man beneath the helmet, whose face is never seen: how he came to Rapture, how he became a Big Daddy, how he met and successfully bonded to Eleanor. Fourth of the Big Daddy prototypes, unable to live without his Little Sister, but able to choose to spare his enemies, to think rationally and solve problems. He is very much cast in the mold of "Adam," Frankestein's iconic monster, though you feel nothing but human when looking at Rapture through his helmet.
The entire first 8 or 10 hours of BioShock 2 felt empty: I didn't have the wonder of a first-time visitor to this crumbling mad house, nor did I have the feeling of being a powerful monster on a mission. Delta's footsteps do not boom with heavy armored authority; he walks like a human, particularly after getting a tonic to accelerate his movements. Only when he jumps is there a sense of ponderous mass. He is no more physically powerful than Jack was; enemies often stagger away barely harmed after being cracked over the head with the barrel of his gigantic rivet gun or swatted in the face with the drill. A simple chain and padlock is completely immune to blows struck by the mighty Big Daddy's awesome drill, but a scrawny, tumorous Splicer slices it away with a single swing of his mere steel plumbing fixture weapon. Delta is stealthy and quick, like Jack - in fact, the game plays nearly EXACTLY like BioShock 1. Even in BioShock 1, when Jack briefly assumes the identity of a Big Daddy, he feels more like one of the unstoppable brutes than Delta does - his footsteps even produced a menacing thud and clank as he walked. Why the fuck am I being stealthy when I am in the role of a walking engine of destruction? Well, because bullets and pipes and meathooks hurt me just as bad - if not worse - as they hurt Jack the mere mortal.
The one thing over the course of the game that puts you firmly in the role of Subject Delta is that you can take Little Sisters away from their protectors, acting as their new guardian. The Little Sisters are extremely affectionate towards you, and you set them up on your shoulder where they taunt enemies ("Nobody messes with MY Daddy! Unzip 'em, Mister B!") and guide you to corpses they can harvest. There, you deploy your Little Sister once you have littered the battlefield with an array of booby traps, ranging from special rivets that fire a bolt into an enemy who trips their detection field, to electrified triplines and proximity mines. Then begins a ferocious battle, the Big Daddy standing over his oblivious ward as she harvests the ADAM. You often experienced this battle from the perspective of Jack trying to steal (and in my case, save) a Little Sister for the ADAM you needed, but now you are the hulking defender. It's very cool, I admit.
It is in the closing act of BioShock 2 that the game suddenly develops life: the plot thickens, the world becomes a desperate battle for survival. You come face to face with Eleanor, and because she experienced your entire journey via a symbiotic link with you, your actions have shaped her personality. Lamb rants and raves that her daughter is become a monster because of your selfish decisions - like sparing lives or granting a merciful death to a madman twisted by ADAM, I said she was a fucking fruitcake, did I not? - and there's even a scene where you finally, finally feel actual hatred for this contemptible, psychotic woman who will do ANYTHING for her deranged view of Utopian philosophy.
And then things happen that are amazing: you witness the world through the eyes of a Little Sister, and see how they view the world, how they maintain their strange, poignant innocence in the face of horror; you complete the transformation of an innocent girl warped by her mother into an armored champion who will risk everything to be with the being she considers her father. At long last, you feel the part of Big Daddy: a relentless protector who will do anything to save Eleanor. The last few battles are epic: you can summon your super powered Big Sister "daughter" and you take on hordes of enemies, including your Alpha-series Big Daddy brethren. You run and fight, the ground shaking to explosions and blasts of pressurized water, and Big Daddies (both yourself when injured and your opponents) roar as the drill shrieks and lightning bolts and blasts of fire fill the air. It is truly epic.
And the payoff: an amazing ending. I got the good ending, and I like it that way; something you don't see coming, and a world which will now be confronted not by the secretive incorporation of saved Little Sisters back into society as the adopted daughters of Jack, but by the coming of a genius with vast super powers, who would have been a soulless automaton but who is now a sincerely caring person. And the ultimate fate of Subject Delta was also a moving moment. I don't think the same person wrote the opening and ending cinematic as wrote the rest of the game, which is not nearly as engaging.
So in the end, do I recommend this game? To a fan of BioShock, yes. It continues the story of Rapture and the lives that were lost or changed forever by its confines. The ending is a well-done science fiction moment, and the opening is a rare glimpse at the Rapture-that-was. It fails on numerous levels, but truly shines in others: the scenery is gorgeous, even if it is decaying; the music is haunting and the voice acting top notch; and the story, at its conclusion, is excellent. Lamb is just as unimportant in the end as she was the entire game, and the grim echoes of Atlas and Ryan still call to you years after they both fell, unfortunately reminding you of far more interesting villains than your psychologist nemesis. But in the end the story was never about Lamb or her stupid cult: it was about a Big Daddy and the Little Sister who considered him to be her father. In many ways, like the first BioShock, it is a story about free will, and what free will can cost you.
No word yet from Clarion, but it could be a while; March has just started after all.
Thanks for the birthday wishes, all.
Also, check out Symphony of Science:
Click to viewWay to make Science fucking beautiful, guys.
Deuces.
Forget You Ever Saw Me,
we are all connected: to each other, biologically; to the Earth, chemically; to the rest of the universe, atomically.