Bioshock

I loved the start, liked the middle part and hated the end.

[spoiler:33e450746a]Besides the thing with the missing inventory, the end just sucks. I loved the Big Daddy part, but I hated, that there was no real consequence. They said, "if you become a Bid Daddy, there will be NO WAY BACK, DON'T DO THIS, NO." and then you do it and nothing bad happened. Everything is like before you just have a "new" Hud. There could have been so much more or they could have give you the choice. Do this or do this not and then change the end based on what you wanted to do. This would have become great, in my opinion.[/spoiler:33e450746a]

/Edit: Also the endboss sucked.
 
Sorry. :oops: I didn't thought about it, because the game is released now since some time and so on.

But I have to say... you don't miss that much now.
 
Aw, come on.

The art direction in that game is sheer awesome. Dudes did their homework on the marbly copper 30's and art deco.
 
i liked the game well enough.

sure the story didn't allow for any freedom, but at least the explanation about that was good enough.

the gameplay was ok, the art was goddamn awesome, character design was sweet and it wasn't a total resource hog.

sure, it's a game that will age, unlike Fallout, but pretty much all singleplayer FPS games are doomed to that. and game balance wasn't really good as well, i'll grant you that.

but it was still a pretty damn good game. if for nothing else, it was worth walking through it for the awesome art (and the winks to Fallout).
 
The only singe player FPS games that survive after a decade or so are those that have excellent level design. There are still people playing Blood and Doom out there, two games known for having entertaining and simple but exciting level design.

There's plenty of incentive to play Doom over Doom 2 or vice versa since the level design for both is different, but what's the point of Call of Duty? Would you play the original after having played the third? There's practically no interesting level design and most of it is cinematic stuff that's just annoying the second time around.

I think Bioshock trips over itself, there's plenty of ways to beat baddies up and it's fun to use different plasmids, but since there's no penalty for dying and the game has a very rigid cinematic structure with pretty boring level design (although the art design is spectacular, don't take me for saying that one is the other) it's something I could only play twice for the two different endings.

After that I actually get a bit nauseous when I think about playing it again.
 
horst said:
ah well, i found out how a game developer feels if his game goes DOWN in flames


gamesradar interviews "lynch&kane" director

very revealing. might do you good, since not every pr/developer seems to be a, and i quote here, "lying sack of shit" as many articles suggest.
Click to expand...

I didn't realize Kane and Lynch was so poorly reviewed. For what it's worth, I really liked the game. The gameplay mechanics aren't very tight, but the story, characters, and voice-over work are all top notch. I had a blast playing through the game with a buddy (especially the bank-robbery scene). I think there's a film adaptation in development with Bruce Willis attached, so I hope that's rad. Definitely some potential there.
 
Malky said:
I didn't realize Kane and Lynch was so poorly reviewed. For what it's worth, I really liked the game. The gameplay mechanics aren't very tight, but the story, characters, and voice-over work are all top notch. I had a blast playing through the game with a buddy (especially the bank-robbery scene). I think there's a film adaptation in development with Bruce Willis attached, so I hope that's rad. Definitely some potential there.
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I've heard billy bob is going to be in it as well. Sounds like a violent remake of Bandits.
 
Quick review for a quick ended game.

First time through looking at all the stuff: 8/10

Replay value after first time: None.



4/10




From an artistic POV overlooking the shallow and far-sighted gameplay, It's surely worth a play through just to explore the world of Rapture through a crappy re-hash of the System Shock 2 player augmentation system.
 
I actually bought the special edition of this game, but when I go through this topic I get the impression I should have simply waited for the regular version's price to come down.

Another disappointing purchase :(
 
Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude said:
Malky said:
I didn't realize Kane and Lynch was so poorly reviewed. For what it's worth, I really liked the game. The gameplay mechanics aren't very tight, but the story, characters, and voice-over work are all top notch. I had a blast playing through the game with a buddy (especially the bank-robbery scene). I think there's a film adaptation in development with Bruce Willis attached, so I hope that's rad. Definitely some potential there.
Click to expand...

I've heard billy bob is going to be in it as well. Sounds like a violent remake of Bandits.
Click to expand...

He could probably make a good Lynch, actually. Thornton deserves more respect.
 
i kinda liked it, too. but some reviewers didnt. and, the link was more about how those bad reviews were perceived by the developers - they actually made some impact. and its good to know this, since some developers seem to be immune to critics (on the outside)
 
I enjoyed it a lot . The atmosphere and the art direction (Just like Wooz said) were great . the story was kinda interesting too .
 
It didn't have much replay value, but I liked it on my initial play through. Despite the linear story and lack of consequences, I think that it captures the atmosphere of Fallout better than what I've seen of Fallout 3 so far.
 
It's fun the second time through, you just need to give it a few months.

Story and setting wise, it is probably the best game ever made. When it came to the "gamey" stuff, it failed a bit for me. Not that it was bad, but it interfered with what the game did well - the stunning setting. I got tired of hacking things, tired of switching weapons and ammo, and tired of plasmids.

The action should have been used more sparingly. I'm not sure the plasmids were needed at all. I just wanted to explore the story of Rapture.
 
Bioshock: Gameplay vs. Story

The story is a mix of Atlas Shrugged and a sci-fi dystopian society tale (new technology without moral guidance + totalitarian government = social chaos and destruction). In itself this creates a fun dig at Objectivism.

However, the story is just dressing on an FPS. And, in FPSs, the gameplay mechanic seems to have a lot in common with Objectivism. The mechanic is that everything and everyone in the gameworld is a resource to be exploited by the player. There is a passage from Rand in which Rourke looks out over a granite deposit and thinks, "All this is here for me." In a game like Bioshock, that is literally true. Everything in the gameworld was indeed put there for the player. This undercuts the game's stance on Objectivism a little bit.

There is more to Objectivism, of course, than exploiting resources. But, Objectivism's boogeyman is Collectivism, whether in the guise of socialism or charity. And in an FPS (at least in Bioshock), there simply is no collective. The player is, by design of the game mechanic, alone and totally responsible for himself. You can bring up the touted moral choice regarding the Little Sisters, but it's a false choice and does not constitute the player embracing charity or society's good over his own. The reason being that you are rewarded (in slightly different ways) for either choice, and you are rewarded materially in both instances. Thus the moral choice ends up being just another how-to-best-exploit-this-resource choice, much like choosing which plasmids to equip. Clearly the game wants you to feel your choice is good or bad, but it also knows that morality is not it's own reward in an FPS. The game rewards you with a good ending or punishes you with a bad ending simply in order to justify it's own insistence on the morality of this choice.

Trumping all of this is the game's visual and aural style. Bioshock could have been an interesting RPG tackling choices relating to society and the individual, morality and personal accomplishment, socialism and capitalism. Bioshock could have been a better FPS, with more attention given to resource-management, for instance. Instead, Bioshock is a visual and aural feast. The content matters much less than how it is presented. Who cares to unravel the intricacies of Ryan's failure as long as the voice talent can act!

So, Bioshock's story is trumped by it's own gameplay, which, in turn, is trumped by it's own style. And style does win out. The water is really really cool.
 
I liked the game and the story, compared to a lot other junks that are released nowadays, wasn't that bad! i actually enjoyed it!
 
Loved it at first, as I played on I realised how rediculous the story started getting. I beat it nevertheless and still enjoyed it, but it was lacking somehow in something...I think the whole idea of atlas being a "made up character" is a little bit silly. Maybe Atlas could have been killed by Fontaine or something else. Anyone could come up with a better ending.
 
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