Today in Bioshock 2: Tonic Boogaloo
Today in Gaming Completion
Finished Bioshock 2 over the weekend. Fun game, although like the first one it's a little brief. The visuals of the game are still striking, and a nice change from the vast fields of grey & brown that we find in a lot of games.
The game takes us back to Rapture, the libertarian paradise on the ocean's floor. We get to see a lot of fun stuff this time, including an amusement park dedicated to outlining the horrors of the world above, one of Rapture's slums, a brothel and a heavily surveilled section populated by the followers of the game's villain, before things went bottoms up.
I've always loved the pun in Rapture's name. Nitrogen Narcosis, aka the Bends, is also known as Rapture of the Deep. It's an appropriate name for a place founded on greed that gets consumed by it.
Rapture's always seemed to be a very roomy place for an underwater city, although you have to appreciate the desire to have grand open spaces instead of compact, highly efficient ones.
Anyway, in this game you get to play a Big Daddy, one of the diving suit cyborgs that were every PC's great nemesis in the first game. You're trying to free Eleanor, the daughter of the game's archvillain, Dr. Sophia Lamb.
The game disposes of a big boss battle in this game, instead giving the PCs a race to escape (although I'm sure that there's no chance of actually losing this race) as well as a bunch of "hold the line!" type missions.
You get to do the main Big Daddy job of guarding Little Sisters from attacks by splicers while they extract Adam, the mutagenic compound extracted from sea slugs that provides the PC with his super juju. This mission is made easier with a variety of sentry guns, trap rivets, decoys and proximity mines.
In fact, I really would like to try playing it through again, getting the decoy ability earlier and seeing how well it helps distract attacking splicers.
The game plays a lot with the PC's relationship with Eleanor, who is the villain's daughter and the original Little Sister. Much is made of the power of the little girls, and the psychic bond they all share. In one level you get to take a trip in the body of a little sister, accumulating a big sister suit for Eleanor. It's very amusing to imagine the little sister trying to carry all that inconspicuously.
I can't recall the article, but someone published a piece recently talking about the daddification of video games; how they were playing with instincts slightly less violent than bloodthirst. Bioshock 2 definitely falls in that category. Each level has Eleanor reaching out to you, and the PC carries little sisters around the city on his shoulders, looking for "angels" (Adam infused bodies) for them to harvest.
The game manipulates paternal instinct like a piano concerto handling white keys. I wonder how a woman would react to it, or someone who actually had kids instead of a painful longing?
Of course, yesterday I decided that, in advance of the Halo day at the beginning of June, I'd see how the multiplayer worked. In summary: it doesn't. Apparently, you can't run mulitplayer for more than one player on a single machine (in spite of the fact I've got an awesome tv built for it).
No. You, in fact, have to have a Gold Xbox Live membership and be connected to the internet to play multiplayer.
What makes this worse is that I accidentally bought the multiplayer expansion off Xbox Live on Sunday. Yes, accidentally.
You see, after watching a couple episodes of How I Met Your Mother, I was showing Cynra my hard won achievements, and scrolled down to look at the description of the Sinclair Solutions package. We saw that it was purely multiplayer, so I wasn't interested.
Then, the following sequence of events happened.
A) Ra, our middle cat, began scratching at a chair.
B) I began remonstrating the cat.
C) the controller began to shift, falling from my lap.
D) I grabbed the controller, pressing the stick up and pushing the A button.
Di) this initiated the purchasing sequence.
Dii) "there are no refunds for this product"
E) Fuck.
Thankfully, it was only a couple hundred XBL points, but still, it sticks in my craw.
Finished Bioshock 2 over the weekend. Fun game, although like the first one it's a little brief. The visuals of the game are still striking, and a nice change from the vast fields of grey & brown that we find in a lot of games.
The game takes us back to Rapture, the libertarian paradise on the ocean's floor. We get to see a lot of fun stuff this time, including an amusement park dedicated to outlining the horrors of the world above, one of Rapture's slums, a brothel and a heavily surveilled section populated by the followers of the game's villain, before things went bottoms up.
I've always loved the pun in Rapture's name. Nitrogen Narcosis, aka the Bends, is also known as Rapture of the Deep. It's an appropriate name for a place founded on greed that gets consumed by it.
Rapture's always seemed to be a very roomy place for an underwater city, although you have to appreciate the desire to have grand open spaces instead of compact, highly efficient ones.
Anyway, in this game you get to play a Big Daddy, one of the diving suit cyborgs that were every PC's great nemesis in the first game. You're trying to free Eleanor, the daughter of the game's archvillain, Dr. Sophia Lamb.
The game disposes of a big boss battle in this game, instead giving the PCs a race to escape (although I'm sure that there's no chance of actually losing this race) as well as a bunch of "hold the line!" type missions.
You get to do the main Big Daddy job of guarding Little Sisters from attacks by splicers while they extract Adam, the mutagenic compound extracted from sea slugs that provides the PC with his super juju. This mission is made easier with a variety of sentry guns, trap rivets, decoys and proximity mines.
In fact, I really would like to try playing it through again, getting the decoy ability earlier and seeing how well it helps distract attacking splicers.
The game plays a lot with the PC's relationship with Eleanor, who is the villain's daughter and the original Little Sister. Much is made of the power of the little girls, and the psychic bond they all share. In one level you get to take a trip in the body of a little sister, accumulating a big sister suit for Eleanor. It's very amusing to imagine the little sister trying to carry all that inconspicuously.
I can't recall the article, but someone published a piece recently talking about the daddification of video games; how they were playing with instincts slightly less violent than bloodthirst. Bioshock 2 definitely falls in that category. Each level has Eleanor reaching out to you, and the PC carries little sisters around the city on his shoulders, looking for "angels" (Adam infused bodies) for them to harvest.
The game manipulates paternal instinct like a piano concerto handling white keys. I wonder how a woman would react to it, or someone who actually had kids instead of a painful longing?
Of course, yesterday I decided that, in advance of the Halo day at the beginning of June, I'd see how the multiplayer worked. In summary: it doesn't. Apparently, you can't run mulitplayer for more than one player on a single machine (in spite of the fact I've got an awesome tv built for it).
No. You, in fact, have to have a Gold Xbox Live membership and be connected to the internet to play multiplayer.
What makes this worse is that I accidentally bought the multiplayer expansion off Xbox Live on Sunday. Yes, accidentally.
You see, after watching a couple episodes of How I Met Your Mother, I was showing Cynra my hard won achievements, and scrolled down to look at the description of the Sinclair Solutions package. We saw that it was purely multiplayer, so I wasn't interested.
Then, the following sequence of events happened.
A) Ra, our middle cat, began scratching at a chair.
B) I began remonstrating the cat.
C) the controller began to shift, falling from my lap.
D) I grabbed the controller, pressing the stick up and pushing the A button.
Di) this initiated the purchasing sequence.
Dii) "there are no refunds for this product"
E) Fuck.
Thankfully, it was only a couple hundred XBL points, but still, it sticks in my craw.