We won't cover BioShock's grades intensely because it looks to be another lovefest a la Oblivion or Black & White, but for our reader's orientation, here's a grab from the barrel, from Games Radar:<blockquote>The choice that really is emotionally affecting comes before this. Do you kill the Big Daddy? You’re usually desperate for Adam, but these gentle giants are the only things in the game that mean you no harm. Once you’ve watched them hammer a few Splicers, you develop a real fondness for the big guys, and their death is far more disturbing than the mysterious vanishing act a harvested Little Sister pulls. Their tiny charge patters barefoot over to the enormous dead hulk, wailing and sobbing. “Mr Bubbles!” she cries, “Please get up! Please!”
BioShock’s main plot isn’t about the Little Sisters, but it does have a sequence that gave us a Schindler’s List pang of guilt for killing them all (we needed the Adam). And Schindler’s List isn’t a cultural touchstone that comes up a lot when talking about games. There’s a richness to BioShock’s fiction, a conflicted complexity to its characters, and a humanity in its themes that we’re wholly unaccustomed to in gaming.
But it is uniquely a game: its most powerful moments play directly on the conceits of gaming itself. Where others try to contort film scripts around interactive shooters, BioShock uses violence as a bloody foundation for its real stories. While the relentless onslaught of the murderously insane continually rams home the horrific nature of what Rapture has become, two other threads tell the story of its past and future.
(...)
This is the really bewildering thing about it: it succeeds so stunningly on three different fronts. Not esoteric ones, either, these are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades: narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as BioShock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful.</blockquote>Link: PC Gamer review (10/10) (also available here, where the score is 9.5/10).
Link: GameInformer review (10/10).
Link: Eurogamer review (10/10).
Link: Official XBox Magazine (10/10).
Thanks Vaultkeeper and RPGWatch.
BioShock’s main plot isn’t about the Little Sisters, but it does have a sequence that gave us a Schindler’s List pang of guilt for killing them all (we needed the Adam). And Schindler’s List isn’t a cultural touchstone that comes up a lot when talking about games. There’s a richness to BioShock’s fiction, a conflicted complexity to its characters, and a humanity in its themes that we’re wholly unaccustomed to in gaming.
But it is uniquely a game: its most powerful moments play directly on the conceits of gaming itself. Where others try to contort film scripts around interactive shooters, BioShock uses violence as a bloody foundation for its real stories. While the relentless onslaught of the murderously insane continually rams home the horrific nature of what Rapture has become, two other threads tell the story of its past and future.
(...)
This is the really bewildering thing about it: it succeeds so stunningly on three different fronts. Not esoteric ones, either, these are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades: narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as BioShock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful.</blockquote>Link: PC Gamer review (10/10) (also available here, where the score is 9.5/10).
Link: GameInformer review (10/10).
Link: Eurogamer review (10/10).
Link: Official XBox Magazine (10/10).
Thanks Vaultkeeper and RPGWatch.
24 th of august ...
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