Buried Alive

And so, the BioShock journey comes to an end. Back when Burial at Sea was first announced, we all thought it would extend the story of BioShock Infinite, and perhaps provide a bridge to whatever game would be the next main entry in the franchise. Since then, of course, we've learned the shocking news that Irrational Games is shutting down (despite having released one of the most critically-admired games of last year, which appears to have also sold quite well), and this, the second part of the DLC, will be our last-ever journey through BioShock.

Fortunately, it's a very fine end. Like its predecessor, it combines some of the most memorable aspects of the worlds of Rapture and Columbia. It continues the impressive job of merging together their unique gameplay mechanics (sky-hooks in Rapture! Drinkable plasmids!), and actually manages to innovate somewhat in its play style, addressing what I've long considered one of the weak points of the franchise. As I've previously complained, I've often felt like the games have a half-baked implementation of a stealth system, with just enough enemy alertness and patrols to make me want to attempt a more pacifist approach, but not designed well enough to actually make it a viable strategy. Well, they've explicitly made a non-lethal playthrough possible this time, and even associated it with a new difficulty level: 1998 Mode. Somewhat similar to 1999 Mode, a "hardcore" mode with limited ammo and resources, 1998 Mode restricts you to only using stealth-based approaches: you can sneak around enemies, knock them out silently from behind, Possess them to join your side, put them to sleep from a distance with tranquilizer darts, or distract them with loud noises. The intro provides a good overview of the stealth mechanics, which, in addition to the typical field-of-vision sight avoidance now also incorporates an aural component. Moving faster makes your footsteps louder and more likely to draw enemies; stepping on broken glass or water will alert them to your presence, while wood or stone surfaces are quieter, and carpet is so quiet that you can safely run across it. Enemies have different alertness levels, which you can monitor from a discreet distance when deciding a course of action.

I'm not totally sure of the etymology behind 1998 Mode, but I strongly suspect that it's an homage to Thief: The Dark Project. This seminal game was released in 1998 by Looking Glass Studios, which was a forerunner to Irrational Games (Looking Glass also created System Shock, of which BioShock was the spiritual heir). Thief was a revolutionary game for its time, and arguably is still the only great stealth-based first-person franchise ever created. Thief had even more great mechanics, like great use of three-dimensional space (crossing a rope line suspended high above guards), manipulation of light (shooting out torches with water arrows!), and moving around unconscious bodies so they wouldn't be discovered by other patrolling guards. Thief is in the news again lately due to a lackluster reboot of the franchise. The timing is probably coincidental, but will probably make Burial at Sea look better in comparison.

The difficulty for 1998 was nicely challenging. There's one particular area, which I visited at two different points in the story, that was extremely difficult and took well over a dozen tries to complete; other than that, though, most of the game could be completed with a combination of patience, observation, and management of resources. (One random tip: at one point, it looked like I had lost the ability to pick up additional tranquilizer ammo. It turned out that my ammo was full, but since the crossbow holds two ammo types, I was seeing the other ammo type on display. On PC, you can press and hold "E" to bring up the weapon wheel, which lets you switch ammo types for the crossbow.)

One tangent/brag: you unlock a Steam achievement for beating the game in 1998 mode. I've become increasingly interested in achievements since their very clever use in Hate Plus, and after beating the game I looked at the statistics for Bioshock Infinite. I was a bit proud to see that I was one of the 0.1% of gamers who had unlocked this particular one. In comparison, a total of 2.2% had beaten this DLC at any difficulty. I was a little surprised that 1998 mode was so low, but even more surprised that overall victory was so high. This was on... Saturday afternoon, I think, which means that only four days had passed since the DLC was released. It's a bit astonishing to think that 1 out of every 50 gamers who had ever even started playing BioShock Infinite had downloaded this 6GB-or-so-large DLC, started it, and played to completion within a few days of its availability. Then again, I'm notorious for starting a game more than a decade after it is first released, so this quick adoption is probably more common than I realize.

But that also got me thinking about how valuable Steam could be for research and statistics into the patterns of game-playing. Sales data for digital distribution of games is notoriously difficult to get; neither publishers nor digital platforms like Steam tend to release sales figures, so the question of how well a particular PC title does is very opaque. (In contrast, since most console games are still sold through retailers on physical discs, sites like VGChartz usually have fairly-accurate numbers for sales on XBox, PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.) While overall numbers are mysterious, though, there's a lot you could learn from a game with a fair number of achievements. How many people play a game at all, enough to get an achievement from beating the very first level? How many play to completion? How popular is the DLC? Does latter DLC always decline in popularity, or is it primarily driven by reviews? In some games you might be able to figure out whether players gravitated towards "good" or "evil" playstyles, or favored a particular class type, or opted for non-lethal solutions. It would be really interesting to track this stuff across the industry as a whole, and also among individual franchises, to see whether certain types of players are drawn more to certain types of games.

Tangent over. Moving on:

Burial at Sea Part 2 is gorgeous. In particular, the opening scene might be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in any video game; this is taking the crown from the previous record-holder, the original BioShock Infinite. Scene design is incredible, the animations are gloriously sweet, the hue is super-saturated, and it's all tied together with the loveliest sound design this side of a 1990s Disney musical. The BioShock games, like System Shock before them, have long been renowned for their fantastic sound design, which just might be the best in the industry. Typically, their immense skill is directed towards making the creepiest, most unsettling moods imaginable, so it's wonderful to see that, when they really want to, they can be just as talented at invoking moods of euphoria and bliss.

MINI SPOILERS

In small doses, that is. Like every other entry in BioShock Infinite, this game starts with a beautiful worlds to explore, then rapidly shifts into an extended fight for your very survival. For me, the shift was easier to stomach this time, in large part due to the non-lethal tools at my disposal. The big difference, though, might have been the shift in character. In the expansion, you play as Elizabeth, the young girl who was Booker's sidekick in the previous two entries.

This is a fun shift. It reminded me in a few ways of some of my favorite parts in The Last of Us when you play as Ellie, who is Elizabeth to Joel's Booker. It's not quite as drastic a shift in playstyle - Ellie had fundamentally different characteristics and abilities, while Elizabeth still relies on many of the same weapons and plasmids as Booker - but there are still some neat additions, notably being able to crawl into ventilation shafts, just like Elizabeth was able to do in the earlier entries. Playing as a girl is interesting; the biggest impact I noticed was that I tended to cringe a lot more when coming under fire, and I was quicker to reload a checkpoint once it became clear that things would end poorly, unlike my earlier Booker games when I would usually play through to the end regardless. I still feel a weird sense of responsibility for Elizabeth, just like I did when she was a companion, even though now I'm the one looking after her well-being, instead of Booker.

Like Burial at Sea Part 1, this game takes place in Rapture. In this entry, though, we learn much more about the link between Rapture and Columbia. This helps resolve some of the long-unexplained mysteries of both franchises, and also acts as a really nice kind of retcon to explain why gameplay was so similar between the two entries. For example, we learn that Dr. Suchong and Jeremiah Fink were able to establish a connection through a Lutece Device, and so were able to collaborate on the development of vigors and plasmids. The Adam from Rapture was delivered to Columbia to create Vigors. There's even some neat minor stuff you can come across in notes and audio logs about the difference between injectables and drinkables: Fink is more consumer-oriented, and knows that it will be easier to sell a drinkable than a needle, even though it will take 50 times as much Adam to deliver the same results. Fontaine, though, is much more supply-driven, and aware of the benefits in hoarding Adam, and demands manufacturing injectables alone, stating that he'll take care of selling them to the public.

Okay... a lot went down at the end of Part 1, and more big revelations come in Part 2. Here we go!

MEGA SPOILERS

The big shock at the end of Part 1 was Elizabeth killing Booker. At the time, I'd thought that this was an alternate-universe Elizabeth, acting in vengeance for the death of her sister / alternate-self. In Part 2, though, I'm more inclined to think that it was the "original" Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite. The missing-pinky thing seems to be a somewhat-unique identifier for her, and she has memories of Songbird and other elements that probably aren't all that widely distributed amongst all alternate Elizabeths.

In her internal monologue, it was fascinating to note that she refers to killing "Comstock" and not killing "Booker." To me, these are still two separate entities: sure, if you go far back enough in time they came from the same person, but having "lived" as Booker and "killed" Comstock, I mentally categorize them as distinct persons. It was eye-opening to realize that Elizabeth doesn't see such a distinction: Comstock is Comstock, whether or not he was baptized at Wounded Knee. It does raise a lot of questions about guilty and culpability. Again, having played as Booker previously, I'm automatically sympathetic for him: he made a terrible mistake, but was haunted by it, and wanted to do what he could to make it right by saving others like his daughter. But, from Elizabeth's perspective, he's a monster who murdered a little child (from both directions!) and should be punished for it.

Or should he? Much of Part 2 is cloaked in deliberate confusion. Elizabeth has lost much of her memories; she had previously "seen through all the doors" and knew what lay in store in all alternate universes, but now she has collapsed into a single quantum; she knows that in the past she saw all outcomes, and started along this path, but now that she is set on it she does not know where it will lead. An early, unsettling moment has you confronting your own corpse, and the accompanying dizziness reveals that you have crossed over into a universe not your own.

To be explicit: Burial at Sea Part 2 is the missing link that shows how and why the BioShock games are connected. In addition to minor things like the development of vigors/plasmids, this game shows how Atlas returned in triumph to Rapture and started the war that would destroy it. It doesn't just show it: you, yourself, do it. That felt super-weird, knowing that every action I took was creating the nightmare that I played through several years ago.

There's an optional side-quest in the game that lets you discover fairly early on that Frank Fontaine and Atlas are the same person. Like a lot of plot elements in Part 2, this leads to a hyper-awareness that can feel disorienting. You know that you're going to be betrayed, but need to proceed regardless.  These thoughts are often worked out in a strange external monlogue between yourself and "Booker" - which, as he helpfully points out, isn't really Booker at all, but merely a hallucination you've created to have someone to talk with. "Booker" reassures you, but as he points out, he can't tell you anything that you don't already know. (In one example of narrative inconsistency, it's established early on that you're talking to nothing on your radio, and Atlas jumps on the line, somewhat irritated, asking why you're speaking to yourself. Later, though, you openly discuss Atlas's identity and plans with "Booker," when presumably Atlas can hear every word you say.)

The ultimate resolution is... touching, and very bittersweet, but also confused me a bit. As far as I can tell, omniscient-Elizabeth had looked through all universes, and found a single version of Booker that could be saved. I think she implies that this is Jack, the protagonist of the original BioShock game, but I haven't been able to work out how that makes sense. Jack was Andrew Ryan's son, and the original BioShock took place in 1960. I don't see any way that this could be the same man who fought in the Battle of Wounded Knee... I suppose that some inter-dimensional trickery might be able to explain it, but a major plot point of the first game was how Jack was Ryan's illegitimate child, so without the genetic match the mechanics of the first game don't make much sense. Anyways... it's very possible that there was some explanation in the DLC that I was too dense to see, or that I misunderstood what Elizabeth was trying to do. Which, the more I think of it, just seems deeply strange. She seems happy to be deliberately orchestrating the events that will give Fontaine the activation phrase "Would You Kindly", and dooming the entire city of Rapture to destruction, and for what? To bring Jack down below the sea, so he can have a chance to die? Hm, unless... I suppose it makes more sense if her ultimate goal was to rescue the Little Sisters. If that's the case, then the destruction of Rapture wouldn't have intrinsically been a bad thing; at the very worst, it would ensure that no future little sisters were created, and at best, the existing ones could be rescued as well. Though, with her pre-existing ability to open tears, it seems like there must have been a much better way to accomplish that goal without an extremely roundabout mission. Then again, the whole thing is absolutely a retcon, so I'm probably making a mistake to question it at all.

Anyways!

While I don't claim to understand exactly how Booker fits into all this, it didn't make the ending any less touching. Scenes of sacrifice are always powerful, and fairly rare in video games, and literally every single game in BioShock Infinite has ended with the protagonist getting killed. Each death serves a purpose, though, and while Elizabeth's death is the saddest and least shocking, it's also the most uplifting. Elizabeth kills Booker in the earlier games, but here she has deliberately designed and played out her own downfall, in the service of a greater good. That's pretty heavy stuff, and an appropriately melancholic note on which to end a franchise built on the themes of corruption and decay.

END SPOILERS

So! I'd mentioned earlier that you might want to wait until both parts are out to try Burial at Sea; now that they're here, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. Assuming you already enjoyed Infinite, you'll find more to enjoy - terrific environments, fantastic voice-acting, and improved combat. People who have played through from the very first BioShock will get the most out of this, as it is a fitting tribute and capstone to the entire series. (For the curious, I went ahead and made another album for this one, though I haven't captioned anything yet. That may come in the future.)

Like a lot of people mourning the passing of Irrational, I'm very curious to see what the future brings. Ken Levine, the main creative force behind Irrational, announced its closure and also that he wants to transition to telling smaller-scale, more narratively driven games. That does sound pretty awesome, since I'm all about narrative in games. It is a bit sad, though, to think that we might have seen the end of one of the best visual design teams ever assembled. Don't get me wrong, the storytelling in the BioShock games is very good and much more memorable than most games out there. However, I think the one particular area in which they most excelled was creating distinct, creative, imaginative, wholly original settings. There's nothing like Rapture or Columbia, and if Irrational hadn't created them, I don't think anyone else would have. It's all the rage now to talk about how AAA titles are too derivative and cautious, churning out cookie-cutter sequels that improve graphics while sticking with stale modes of gameplay; the same line of arguing goes that the independent creators are doing all the innovating these days. There's some truth to that argument, but I think that the BioShock games have been some of the best examples to date of what AAA games are capable of doing that indie games are not. A small free or $5 game can have a really compelling story, as good or better than a $60 AAA title; but the $60 AAA title has the resources to construct a lush, vibrant, fully-realized, visually compelling realistic world. Too many franchises these days blow that budget on making the next hyper-realistic simulation of a war-torn WWII battlefield, or a sleek dystopic future, or a modern American city. BioShock broke the mold, inspiring players with its wholly original visions of worlds we hadn't even imagined before. I'm optimistic that Ken Levine will continue to create great games, but I'm pessimistic that the game industry will find a replacement for their breathtaking visual originality. If a franchise this popular and this well-liked couldn't survive, then who can?

Yet Another Roundup

Just realized I didn't write nearly enough about video games in my last post! So, here they are!

I recently received the Season Pass for BioShock Infinite, which will eventually include all the DLC released for the game. The first DLC entry, Clash in the Clouds, is apparently a combat-oriented expansion without original story, so I haven't been very interested in pursuing it. The next one, though, is the first entry of Burial at Sea, which has intrigued me quite a bit.

MINI SPOILERS (for Burial at Sea and all other BioShock games)

I'd been curious from the beginning about exactly how they would expand the game, since Infinite seemed to end so definitively. They'd opened up a multiple-universes plot, which can provide an infinite number of possible additions, but then neatly closed it as well. I think we still haven't figured out exactly how the events of Burial at Sea can be reconciled to the ending of Infinite, but I'm currently operating on the assumption that it occurs "before" the ending of Infinite (while recognizing that temporal words like "before" are very difficult to adapt to stories that include time travel and interdimensional travel).

The game takes place in a parallel universe to Infinite, and I think it's the first time we've received direct confirmation that BioShock 1/2 and BioShock Infinite occur in the same multiverse. You play as an alternate-universe version of Booker DeWitt, the protagonist of Infinite, but the game is set in Rapture, the location of the first two games.

I quite enjoyed the setting of the expansion. From a pure design perspective, Rapture isn't as delightful as Columbia, but it was great to see the Rapture vision elevated to the level of technical superiority that Infinite accomplished: the graphics look terrific, with Rapture's familiarity married to Infinite's polish.

I was also pretty impressed that they managed to revert to so much of the feel of the first two games while using Infinite's engine. Granted, it isn't that difficult to do so: Plasmids are basically the same as Vigors, etc. Still, there were a lot of things that felt like fundamental engine mechanics that turned out to be quite flexible. For example, in Infinite you could only physically carry two guns at a time, and would need to discard one if you wanted another. Burial at Sea returns to the previous system, where you can carry all weapons at once. This also involves some rebalancing: with a larger arsenal at your disposal, they can get away with providing far less ammo for each weapon type, forcing you to switch between weapons regularly, unlike in Infinite, where you could generally focus on mastering two weapons.

Irrational Games seems to have listened to some of the complaints that folks like me keep making about their (generally excellent) games, and I feel like they tried to address them, with varying degrees of success. First of all, there's a really nice long-ish stretch near the start of the game where you're free to wander around and enjoy the atmosphere in Rapture. It was great to participate in Rapture before the fall, when it was at the peak of its powers. There's a lot of conversations to eavesdrop on and culture to observe. Maybe it's because I'm so fresh from Infinite, but I kept comparing the two societies, and while both are kind of awful, I found Rapture's much more palatable. Granted, it's an objectivist fantasy realm where money rules absolutely: but on the plus side, it doesn't seem to have much room for racism or bigotry. If a black woman or a gay man seizes a fortune, all of Rapture will defend them against the parasite who would seek to steal from them.

On the more negative side, I feel like they tried to emphasize stealth elements more in the expansion, and really failed. Or maybe just I failed, but still. There's a huge shortage of ammo, and limited EVE, so several fights will come down to sky-strikes or melee attacks. You can one-shot melee an enemy if you sneak up on them from behind. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the incredible stealth system in The Last of Us, but I found BaS's stealth mechanics very frustrating. There are too few hiding places, you move too slowly while in stealth, enemies can see you from far away, everyone is alerted at once when you're spotted, and enemies don't seem to drop off of alert status once they start looking for you. I could occasionally knock out a couple of splicers, but most often someone would turn around at the wrong time, and since there's no cover around I'd be immediately spotted, and lose a ton of health while trying to quickly take them down.

While I'm complaining, the game was also shockingly glitchy for an expansion that spent this long in development. At one point I lost twenty minutes of progress due to an eternally spinning airlock; some research revealed that this is an issue which has been around since the game first came out, is present on all platforms, and still hasn't been fixed. That was frustrating. Several friendly NPC character models have weird bugs as well. The funniest and most disturbing was Elizabeth: sometimes, her skirt gets hiked way up to her hip, so you can see her entire leg, including the part that's just missing from the knee on up.

I still haven't totally grokked what Elizabeth is doing here. She seems to be one of the Columbia versions who has traveled through a tear into the Rapture dimension. She isn't familiar with anything about Rapture, but I also don't think that she's the same Elizabeth as from Infinite. She has a much more mature, femme fatale aspect to her. On a mechanical level, she seemed to be much stingier with health and ammo than in Infinite, and much more likely to get in my way. She's very cryptic, and your relationship with her in BaS seems to be about the opposite as it was in Infinite, when she was the naive innocent child and you were the worldly-wise man who knew what was going on.

A few other random thoughts:

It was fun to see Sander Cohen again. He's one of the weirdest, most messed-up characters in that universe, and his sequence in the original BioShock is probably the part I remember most vividly, apart from the very end. This seemed like an even less sympathetic version that we saw here, but that's because it was even more creepy and interesting.

I'm a bit curious whether this is the same Rapture as in the original BioShock games. I initially thought not: besides Booker's presence, there's also some news floating around about Fontaine and Brigid Tenanbaum that made me think we might be seeing an alternate version, where Rapture didn't fall but something else would happen. Late in the game, though, you start to see some Atlas posters, which makes me think it's more likely that we are in the original universe.

MEGA SPOILERS for Burial at Sea

Elizabeth mentions a few times that she's in "debt collection", and is seeking your help in order to pay back an old debt. I'd assumed that this meant that, after she killed off all the Booker/Comstock characters at the end of Infinite, she felt pity for what she had done, and decided to find alternate versions of them that she could help: perhaps ones from universes so different that they had never fought at Wounded Knee. By making their lives better, she may have hoped that she could atone for what she had to do.

But, given the very end, that doesn't seem to be the case at all. Her quest is one of vengeance, and she's clearly out to "get" Booker. It seems like there are actually multiple pairs of universes where a Booker sells a child to the Comstock in another universe. In this one as in the Infinite one, Booker changed his mind and tried to reclaim the baby; unlike the Infinite one, he pulled Anna just a little further through the portal, and ended up killing her instead of cutting her finger. Elizabeth is here to punish him for that act. (The Luteces come by as well, which was fantastic; I love that couple.)

It's all very clearly cliffhanger-y, and I'm awfully curious what will happen in Part 2. Will Booker be recreated as a Big Daddy? Will we play as Elizabeth as she hunts down and murders all remaining Bookers in the multiverse? Can Rapture be saved? 

END SPOILERS

If you're a fan of any of the BioShock games, it's worth picking up Burial at Sea, though you might want to wait until Part 2 comes out so you can play straight through. The game mechanics are pretty similar to what you'll find in the original games and Infinite, but there's some nice expansion to the lore that fans should appreciate.

Now, for a couple of fantasy game updates:

I finished my Arendel Phaedra game in FfH2. I'd been angling for a religious victory, but I could never convince Arturus Thorne to grant Open Borders, so despite spreading the Fellowship everywhere else I just couldn't quite get over the 80% level. For a while I'd thought that I'd be able to use Inquisitors to bring down other religions and thus raise Fellowship's percentage; but while I could do this in other countries with Fellowship as their state religion, I apparently couldn't do it in non-Fellowship states. Which I guess makes sense.

Oh! This was kind of fun. I'd been running some hunters/rangers since the start of my game, and gradually built up a proper military over several centuries: starting when killing Orthus and his barbarians, adding a couple of heroes, then expanding to full strength when I started my war against Jonas, at which point I added the Baron and started breeding werewolves. I then split the army in two, with the recon units and my national heroes preparing for a long fight against Acheron the Red Dragon, while my werewolf horde swung north and across the ocean to join in the fight against Alexis. Once again, I encountered something that's potential in every game in FfH2, but I've never seen until now: an epic war between vampires and werewolves.

Not every game has the Calabim. Sometimes nobody will build Baron duin Halfmoon, or he will die before establishing lycanthropy. Even if both are present, it's possible that they'll be on the same side, or never meet. Still, at least once, the randomness of procedurally generated content aligned with popular perceptions of mass culture, and we were treated to an epic struggle between the implacable foes of vampires and werewolves. (Thanks to my Command promotions on Priests of Leaves, I was even able to persuade a few vampires to turn from their evil ways, and join the slightly-less-evil ways of my werewolf horde.)


After my two wars with Jonas and Alexis, I never needed to go to war again. For a little while I was worried that Varn would declare war on me, since he'd contact me every ten years to demand that I switch to Empyrean. Now, I totally get why he would be passionate about this - in the lore, Varn is practically synonymous with that faith - but it seems pretty unfair that they would keep piling on diplomatic penalties, plus it seems weird that I never even saw the option to demand he convert to Fellowship (despite it being present in his cities and my own state religion). Still, he was delighted to have me as a fellow Overcouncil member, and we never came to blows. (He did declare war on Cassiel of the Grigori, which led to an interesting war to spectate. I was rather relieved that neither side demanded I join with them or cut off ties with the other.

Aaaaaanyways... since straight-up religion wasn't an option. I decided to go for an Altar victory, which I've previously pursued but never achieved. There are some similarities between the Altar and the Tower victories, since both require you to build multiple prerequisite wonders and then a capstone project. However, the early Altar pieces all must be built by Great Prophets, so it was a great project to do with a Great Person factory like me.

I'd thought that the Altar would be like the Tower and that all the world world declare war on me once I started construction. I pulled my army back to my core cities, and nervously hoped that at least my vassals would stand by me. Fortunately, construction commenced without any incident. I'm guessing that this is a scripting difference: sure, most of the world loved me, but even if public opinion was a factor, I'd have expected Arturus at least to declare war if it was a pretext.

I'd been prepared from my Tower of Mastery victory, and had started stockpiling vaults of gold once I decided to shoot for the Altar. So, it wasn't terribly long before I could afford to rush production, then exalt in the approval of all of Erebus as we joined the Gods.

Yay! This was the highest normalized score I've received, at least on this partition. (I had a long run of several years of FfH2 on my Linux partition under WINE.) I think it might be time to bump up from Prince to King. And Andrew keeps trying to convince me to play a Marathon game (apparently not realizing that, if I did that, I'd never get around to Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition.) There's still a lot left to experience. An infinite amount, really.

From the complex to the simple: I also beat Heroes of Dragon Age. Of course, "beat" is a tricky concept for games like these, since they're designed to keep you playing and spending money forever. I'd set myself a fairly straightforward objective: beat all of the single-player maps. I was happy to have done it without ever springing for a premium pack or gems.

My end team was the Black-aligned lineup I mentioned before: Merrill and a Level IV Desire Demon in the back, Grey Wardens Duncan and Carver (II) in the front, with an Inferno Golem towering over us all. I started to have the makings of decent Red and White teams near the end, with Fenris, Yavana, and Anders all making strong entries. Still, it would have taken forever to level them up. I sometimes rotated them in while grinding challenge nodes, but it was my Black team that eventually carried us to victory. It's a bit of a shame; there's actually some interesting strategies to consider in the game, and I would have enjoyed playing a version that focused more on squad composition than on level. As it stands, though, a high-leveled squad will virtually always outperform a well-designed squad. (Though there are still a few niche cases where that isn't strictly true. For example, a Ferelden Knight is fantastic in the Challenge maps against a single high-level opponent, regardless of how low his level.)

All in all, it was a decently fun way to waste some time. The biggest downside is that, given the deliberately open-ended design of the game, there isn't much of a sense of closure or catharsis at the end. It would have been really nice to get a closing video as nice as the opener, or even some text. I don't think that would have been easy to do, though... the game is really all about disconnected "what if?" scenarios, so there isn't any through-line to follow or big plot to resolve.

On a more positive note, I'm partway through playing Republique, a new mobile stealth game. I'd picked it up before the holidays, planning to play it on the airplane. It's been really good so far. The subject matter feels very au currant; the project started before Snowden's revelation of NSA abuses, and I feel like they probably updated the content to emphasize the surveillance state aspect a bit more.

There's a lot I like about it so far. It's a mobile game, but looks fantastic on my tablet. It has terrific voice acting, including Jennifer Hale doing a wonderful Eastern European accent. They managed to make the controls simple without making the game feel dumbed-down. It's much more about strategy than about reflexes, although events do play out in real-time and you definitely get some pressure when trying to avoid bad guys. The puzzles are generally well-designed, except for one frustrating one that I got stuck on for a long time.

The overall game design is good, too. I feel like I'm on kind of a roll now, after BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us and now Republique, in protecting young females from dangerous situations. Instead of controlling an on-screen avatar as guardian, though, this time you are... well, you, kind of. You're someone looking at a screen and tapping controls in order to guide the woman to safety. The moments of direct address can sometimes feel a little uncanny: am I me? Or am I a character?

Republique was a Kickstarted project. I didn't participate in it, but am always really happy to see such projects succeed, particularly for video games, which tend to have much higher budgets, expectations, and risks than other Kickstarter projects. One of the rewards for this was apparently to become a character in the game, so there are a lot of times when you can identify a guard and see their name, country of origin, and some personal quirks (including a rap sheet) along with a Kickstarter badge. Cool! I'm a big fan of being immortalized, even if it's a few words buried deep within a game.

This is the first episode of the game; I haven't beaten it yet, but I feel like I'm close. I'll probably pick up the remainders as they're released, though I'm likely to continue to time my purchases to coincide with long plane trips or other periods where I'll have my tablet and no Internet connection. It's a fun game and a great way to pass time, but so far hasn't been compelling enough to preempt the many, many other games that I want to play.

Infinite Jest

Here’s the latest entry in my series of “Games I’ve played long after most other folks have finished, and long before they become retro”: BioShock Infinite! I have opinions! Often-contradictory ones!

First, a bit of background on my existing prejudices: System Shock 2 (created by another, now-defunct studio that employed many of the creators behind the BioShock franchise) is one of my favorite games of all time. I still think that its villain is the best video-game villain to date. While the game is somewhat dated technologically, it still feels state-of-the-art in many ways, most notably its incredible sound design.

I have a more complicated relationship with the BioShock games. They abandoned many of the RPG underpinnings of System Shock and correspondingly emphasized its action elements. They tell incredible stories, with a lot of creativity and insightfulness; the original BioShock famously featured an in-depth examination of Objectivism, ruthlessly examining the implications and consequences of its values. But, they are also the worst offenders in modern-day gaming “moral” systems, with stupid, redundant “choices” that tie unsatisfactorily into game consequences, with Manichean absolutes that remove any reason to think after the first presentation. (The original BioShock’s moral choice was, “Do you murder this little girl?”, asked dozens of times throughout the game. If your first answer was “No,” why would your twelfth be any different?)

So, I looked forward to BioShock Infinite with a mixture of excitement and caution. It looked gorgeous, and after the somewhat-repetitive BioShock 2 I’ve been anticipating the fresh territory they can mine with a total change in setting. I was hopeful, but not particularly optimistic, that they would also improve their in-game storytelling, allowing player actions to have the same importance and gravity that they allow their fixed fiction.

As I’ve been mulling over this blog post, most of the things I’ve wanted to write about have been critical of the game, so I’m a bit worried that it will leave the wrong impression. Therefore, I’ll state up front that BioShock Infinite is a great game. It’s possibly the most gorgeous game I’ve ever seen, with stunningly lush environments (a welcome change from the dourness of Rapture!), phenomenal character modeling, and wonderfully lifelike animations. Gameplay, while still primarily a FPS action game with some RPG elements, has some really fun and unique innovations, most notably a companion who you don’t need to babysit, and who instead aids you when you’re in trouble.

I’ll get at the story below in spoilerville, but up top I’ll say that I enjoyed it much more than the story of BioShock, but still felt a lot of frustration at certain aspects of it.

MINI SPOILERS

All of these games have drawn somewhat from the survival horror genre, but have moved gradually further from it with each iteration. System Shock 2 (I haven’t played the original) was the most brutal, with very limited ammunition and other resources and a seemingly endless supply of ravening, horrifying creatures trying to murder you. BioShock got more generous with your resources, and made enemy designs less macabre and more grim. Both games made very effective use of creepy sound design, and were perhaps a little too reliant on a trope of “Let’s lure you into a creepy-looking room with flickering lights…. oh no, the lights went out! You hear a door slam shut! SOMETHING IS SKITTERING AROUND YOU!!! You can move around but can’t see anything. OH NO THE LIGHTS ARE BACK ON AND SOMETHING HORRIFYING IS HERE!!!” Thankfully, BioShock Infinite doesn’t return to that specific well, and instead finds other ways to inject creeping dread. Still, the baseline experience of Columbia is worlds apart from the confined spaces of System Shock 2 or Rapture: you’re often in the wide-open world, under a stunning blue sky with fluffy white clouds, not cowering in a slimy corridor trapped between flesh-devouring monsters. You walk through lush gardens, calming streams, a lazy beach, and all sorts of bright, cheerful, well-maintained civic institutions.

This is getting at what’s probably my single favorite aspect of BioShock Infinite: how original and creative it feels. That’s no small accomplishment! It sometimes feels like video game developers have an incredibly stunted vocabulary to draw from when deciding on their game concepts: “A gritty World War II battle… a sleek vision of the future with humans fighting aliens… a muddy medieval fantasy…” I can’t think of another game that has mined the territory BioShock Infinite has chosen for its inspiration: 1910s Americana, complete with bandstands, barber-shop quartets, long stripey bathing suits for men, cotton candy, revivalist tent meetings. This is married with another counter-temporal innovation akin to BioShock’s 1940’s undersea technology: lighter-than-air technology, which lifts the whole kit and kaboodle way up in the air, floating these grand edifices up in the clouds. They’re loosely joined together by a varied system of technologies, including sky-lines (essentially motorized bi-directional ziplines), zeppelins, floating yachts, and tethered barges. Again: lots of games let you fly, or lift you into the air, but I haven’t encountered another game that has come up with these fanciful means of transport, and that alone is a delightful reason for this game to exist.

The game also deals with some interesting, weighty weighty themes. The *Shock games may be a great deal more subversive than we generally think of, since they offer pointed critiques of bedrock values in modern American society. System Shock was less overtly thematic, but did offer a chilling counterpoint to our society’s love of helpful electronics. Few Americans describe themselves as Objectivists, but the Tea Party’s ascendency was in some ways predicted by BioShock’s indomitable Andrew Ryan, and the game broadly examines not only libertarianism, but the free-market economy and capitalism itself, finding plenty to criticize. BioShock Infinite takes on an entirely separate, and probably even more potent, set of American values: Religion, faith, and independence.

It also deals in a very direct and often uncomfortable way with America’s troubled history with race. The game is set long after the Civil War, but long before the March on Washington, and features white Anglo-Saxons proudly congratulating themselves at being so forward-thinking as to employ the “lesser races” as servants. You’re confronted with caricatures of African-Americans, Chinese, and Native Americans, with exaggerated features and stereotypical actions. You also get to meet the real people, who are often cowed and beaten down by their smug oppressors. As the game goes on, you’re gradually introduced to the finer grains of racism, including antipathy towards the Irish and Germans. All of this is very historically accurate, which just makes it more awkward.

So, let’s get down to choice, shall we? There’s not a lot of it, which was frustrating at the time but, in retrospect, may have been a good thing. At the least, I’d rather that the game tell a constrained story that I merely play through, rather than offer bland dichotomies like those in its prequels.

When you first enter Columbia, it looks absolutely incredible, like a vision of heaven. This early part actually may have been my favorite part of the entire game: you get to wander around amazing environments, listen to some beautiful singing, gaze in awe at your surroundings, eavesdrop on the sometimes-delightful period conversation. This made me wish that I was playing a different game than I actually was playing: I wanted to play an RPG, where Columbia could just be a city, a place I could spend time exploring and solving puzzles inside of.

But, of course, that’s not the sort of game I’m playing, which I guess I shouldn’t hold against them. This is a first-person shooter, and so, after that delightful introduction, you’re plunged into the world of running-and-gunning. You’re doing it against a beautiful backdrop, but mechanically, it’s very similar to BioShock: creep into a new area, shoot at a bunch of bad guys until they’re all dead, loot their corpses, go to a vending machine, buy upgrades to your weapon or Vigor/Adam, then find the next and repeat. The games feel quite different, but they play out very similarly. (With the notable exceptions of some improvements like Skylines and Elizabeth, as noted above.)

The stories also have some surface similarities. Instead of Andrew Ryan, the prophet of unfettered free-market libertarianism, we have John Comstock, a prophet who offers to cleanse away sins and build a better society on Earth. Both visionaries have created these incredible worlds, far more interesting than the mundane land-bound cities of America. In BioShock, you’re visiting his land after it’s all gone to heck. In Infinite, you’re seemingly entering Columbia in its period of greatest strength, even during its ascendency; your actions carry the threat of toppling it down.

Interestingly, both men also have industrialists who serve as foils. Frank Fontaine featured prominently in the first game, and Jeremiah Fink plays an important role in the latest. Ryan and Fontaine were united in activity but divided in outlook: both ran businesses to make money, but Ryan was an idealist who wanted to change the world while Fontaine was an opportunist who wanted the best for himself. Comstock and Fink are divided in activity but simpatico in outlook: Comstock tries to focus on the spiritual and emotional in his role as prophet, while Fink focuses on efficient production and canny marketing in his role as profit-maker. But, Columbia is inextricably the product of both men: Fink manufactures all the machines necessary to elevate it and keep it running, while Comstock manufactures the fierce passions that draw so many men and women there and unite them in a common purpose.

Comstock’s greatest opponent, though, is not Fink, but rather Daisy Fitzroy, an escaped former slave who has started leading a revolution of Columbia’s underclasses against their Anglo-Saxon “Founder” overlords. More on that below in mega-spoilerville.

Computer technology has advanced a ton in the six years since BioShock came out, and that’s probably most obvious in the character modeling and animations. The previous games in the series have almost completely eschewed other on-screen humans: most of the time you’re fighting monsters, who don’t need to look particularly realistic. When they do add a human element, it’s been done not through the typical game mechanism of interaction, but rather through voyeurism: audio logs, phonographs, voxophones, that let you eavesdrop on the thoughts and actions that others have taken prior to your arrival. That’s let them make very fleshed-out characters without needing any actual flesh, as it were.

Well, they’re now confident enough to have major characters on screen for a long time; in the case of Elizabeth, she’s practically always visible. They did a fantastic job developing her: her facial animations, gestures, movement, and speech are all incredibly well-done. At the same time, I think they made a very wise decision in making her slightly cartoony. It’s not a huge exaggeration, but big enough to move her out of the uncanny valley and into the world of video-game character. I think they get the best of both worlds: I can exclaim at how life-like her movements seem, without getting caught up on how much of her still fails to approximate life.

That said, her story does not make a lot of sense to me. We’re expected to believe that she grew up in a totally isolated tower, with absolutely no human contact until she turned nineteen; and yet, she has incredibly high verbal skills, is able to pick up on all kinds of nuances of speech, and otherwise… just does not make a lot of sense. As you learn more about her history and purpose, there’s sort of an explanation, but the explanation kind of boils down to “She’s magical! Because quantum theory!” Anyways… realism is not something I demand from my entertainment, so it shouldn’t bother me much, but given all the effort they put into developing her character I would have liked a SLIGHTLY more believable backstory.

Elizabeth is the star, but there are plenty of other folks filling the frame as well. This is something that the earlier games were completely missing: regular folks just standing around, not shooting you or directing you on a new quest. Their movements are more understated than Elizabeth’s or Daisy’s, but still remarkably well-done. My single favorite parts in this game weren’t moments of high action or dramatic plot twists: they were completely optional ambient scenes featuring some folks singing while you made your way past them. Players could certainly just rush past and get to the next action sequence, but anyone doing so would deny themselves the best parts of the game. Here’s my personal favorite, a couple of children in the slums under Columbia playing Shake Sugaree:

And of course there’s the more famous floating barbershop quartet singing God Only Knows:

And don’t forget this lovely short sequence featuring Elizabeth singing “May the Circle Be Unbroken” while Booker strums the guitar:

So, while the regular people are delightful, they’re awkwardly spliced into a game that can’t really accommodate them. To its credit, BioShock Infinite tries to enhance its inherited systems to incorporate a living world; to its detriment, it fails in its attempts.

• In an early sequence, an on-screen warning alerts you when you encounter civilians while in a fighting stage, warning that it might make things more difficult if you kill them. This had the effect of making me hesitate before shooting anyone I came across for the rest of the game, since I hate killing innocents in any game; but it didn’t matter, since 99.99% of all encounters end with the other person shooting at you. I don't think there was a single incident after that first one where you could accidentally shoot a civilian, and not a single time when you could avoid a fight with an enemy soldier.
• Since Columbia is still a functioning society, you can encounter stores and dwellings that are still occupied, whose inhabitants will frown on you looting their goods. The game helpfully will show the message "Steal" when you hover over one of these items, and display in red text instead of white, which warns you about what you're going to do. This in itself actually leads to a nice mini-choice: you can steal, which will give you more resources but also cause consequences (NPCs turning violent, or calling for help, or just running away and making you feel bad); or you can ignore it and continue pretending you're in an RPG. However, there are also some times when an item ISN'T marked as owned, and yet taking it will turn everyone on the map hostile against you. This is particularly annoying when you try to Possess a vending machine, which is something the entire rest of the game has hard-wired me to do reflexively. In multiple cases, I ended up reloading a level (sometimes losing some good progress) just because I hadn't meant to trigger this reaction. Anyways, it's annoying to have what feels like a half-baked ownership system grafted onto a game that's fundamentally about grabbing every single thing you can see.
• Speaking of grabbing: The BioShock games are some of the most Skinner-ian experiences I've ever had. The world is filled with containers, and the containers have good things inside (money, ammo, health, salts), so you spend much of the game just mindlessly pressing F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F. BUT, the game lets you consume food even when your health is at maximum, so you sometimes end up wasting a resource that you could have better saved until after an upcoming fight. Annoyingly, this is only true of health; the game keeps you from picking up salts or ammo if you're at the maximum. And rarely-but-not-too-rarely the game will drop in a rotten piece of food which actually decreases your health. This is marked, so you can just not press F a second time to avoid eating it; but, that slows down the process of spamming the F key whenever you open up a new room; more annoyingly, if that rotten food shares a container with something you want, like Silver Eagles, then (as far as I can tell) there's no way to take the money you want without also eating the rotten food you don't. 
• Late in the game, you can get allies to fight alongside you, which is awesome; however, it's very easy to shoot them. It would be nice if there was a stronger visual distinction between factions, instead of just a pop-up that says "Don't shoot your allies!" after you've already shot your allies. Fundamentally, though, the problem is that the first 80% of the game has trained us to shoot everything that moves, and it's very hard to break that habit this late in the game.
• There's a section of the game after you acquire the Shock Jockey vigor, which has a combat purpose but also lets you re-activate certain electrical generators, which lets you solve puzzles and acquire new items. So, I kept an eye open for those generators for the rest of the game. And, of course, they completely disappear soon after you see them. Once again, the game has trained me to do something, and then totally ignores it for the entire rest of the game, causing me to waste time for no good outcome.

MEGA SPOILERS

One of my biggest annoyances with the story was a sense of false equivalency. The Daisy Fitzroy situation initially bugged me since I assumed that it would be another thing like the Little Sister situation in BioShock: there would be a Big Choice to either support Fitzroy or Comstock, which would determine the outcome of the game. And that bothered me since I didn’t think it would be an interesting choice: Daisy had genuine grievances, and was fighting on behalf of an oppressed minority against an oppressive majority. Why on earth would I side with Comstock?

Well, it turned out I didn’t have to. The plot plays out in a predefined way, with circumstances compelling you to ally with Daisy. I was a little miffed that “I” (as Booker DeWitt) was so resistant to helping her out: Booker just wants to do a job, while I wanted to ally with Daisy's greater cause. I wanted more enthusiasm from Booker, but was generally okay with the way the plot was going.

Later in the game, though, the rebels start winning, and a bit after that they turn against you. I felt like the game was implying that there was no real difference between Vox Populi and the Founders. Now, I don't want to go overboard and idealize the Vox: they are certainly not perfect. But, I'm a bit stunned that the game would imply that rebelling slaves are as evil as the slavers. I wanted to see this as a tragic situation, of noble aims led astray, and been able to rein back in the Vox's worst impulses and refocus on universal values (freedom, safety) rather than vengeance.

That was probably the single thing I most disliked about the game. It ends up not being that significant in the context of the whole game, though. I'm still not totally sure how I feel about the multiple-worlds thing: it was surprising, and cool, and is something that fits very well within the framework of a video game: I like the idea that when you re-play this game, you're not re-doing your earlier experience, but rather defining the events that took place in a parallel universe. But, I don't think that the underlying game itself justifies that. The plot is just too linear, too fixed, with too little opportunity for variations: the only interesting differences in the plot are the two destinies for Booker that are embedded within the structure of the game itself. I can't replay this game and create a version where Daisy lives, or where Fink is persuaded to turn against Comstock, or where the Luteces separate. The dialogue in the game talks about how there are some fixed points (it always starts with a lighthouse, etc.) and variations, but the content of the game consists almost entirely of fixed points.

And, again, fixed points by themselves aren't necessarily bad. I would never claim that Portal is a bad game because it didn't feature alternate endings. But I think that the lofty and ambitious metaphysics presented by Bioshock Infinite can't begin to be justified by the gameplay they accompany.

So, the key plot itself: I may be missing some things, but from what I understand, here's the idea:

• There are alternate universes, generated by quantum events. Each time a choice could go multiple ways, an alternate universe is created. Some things must stay constant, but many can vary.
• Booker DeWitt, a veteran of the Indian Wars, feels bad about what he's done in war. He encounters a revivalist preacher who offers to baptize him. In one reality, he accepts the baptism and is reborn as John Comstock, The Prophet, and starts having spiritual visions. In another reality, he remains DeWitt, and joins the Pinkertons as a detective/thug/enforcer.
• Comstock meets Rosalind Lutece, a brilliant physics theorist who understands the nature of the universe. They form an unlikely partnership: her inventions allow a city to fly, and he can give her the resources to pursue her own project of uniting with her "brother" Robert, a male version of herself who exists in other dimensions.
• One of Comstock's prophecies states that his daughter will fulfill his visions and rule both Columbia and the world. However, Comstock is impotent (perhaps from contact with the quantum devices). Rosalind agrees to help Comstock, over the objections of her brother: in this reality Comstock has no child, but in other realities, Booker does.
• Robert contacts the younger version of Booker. Tears in the quantum fabric of the multiverse let you traverse both dimensions and time; I think that Comstock is probably around 45 in his reality while Booker is around 25 in his own. Booker agrees to surrender his own child Anna in exchange for... I'm not sure what! Forgiveness for sins? Payment of monetary debts?
• In carrying out the deal, Robert and Rosalind are reunited. Booker changes his mind, but is unable to bring Anna back through the tear. The tear closes, lopping off her pinky finger.
• In the Comstock reality, Comstock renames Anna to Elizabeth and begins grooming her for rule. This means locking her up in a tower and denying any human contact. But, she has an endless supply of books, phonographs, movies to watch, etc.
• Elizabeth has special powers. I'm not sure if this is the result of her moving through the tear, or her existing in a reality other than the one into which she was born. In either case, she is able to find and open tears all on her own, without requiring the massive machinery of the Luteces. Comstock and his flunky scientists (probably not including the Luteces) tap into this power, lessening Elizabeth's abilities (so she can open tears but not create them) and possibly using the power to help fuel Columbia.
• Robert isn't happy about what's happened to Elizabeth. He convinces Rosalind to help undo their actions, even though it will mean their separation. They may or may not know that, in the future, with Comstock's plan set in motion, Elizabeth will use the might of Columbia to rain fire down on Earth, eventually conquering all the inhabitants. And, with her own powers, she won't just conquer one Earth, but all of them: she'll be able to open tears and move her vast army into all universes at will.
• So, the Luteces convince Booker to capture Elizabeth and bring her back to New York. At some point here, he moves into the Comstock/Columbia universe. Elizabeth is now nineteen, and Comstock an old man. Booker still mourns Anna, but has repressed the memories of his complicity in her loss.
• The game starts here.
• Comstock was present when the Luteces took Elizabeth, so he knows what Booker looks like. He knows about the mark on Booker's hand, "AD" for "Anna DeWitt". Comstock has passed this description along to his peoples, warning them of the "False Shepherd" who has come to take "The Child" Elizabeth.
• Lots of shooting.
• Booker rescues Elizabeth from the tower. She wants to go to Paris. Booker lies and says that he'll take her there. They try to escape Columbia, but whenever they acquire an airship capable of leaving, they're attacked by Songbird, an enormous avian automaton designed to protect Elizabeth. They get separated multiple times and reunited. She eventually figures out that he was hired to kidnap her and is justifiably angry. But, he keeps protecting her, and she decides that leaving with him is better than getting locked back up in the tower.
• Daisy Fitzroy, leader of the Vox Populi, agrees to help them escape if they'll help her acquire weapons for her army. Booker and Elizabeth initially fail, but then start traveling between alternate universes until they find one where the Vox have gotten their weapons and are winning the war against the Founders.
• But, in this universe, Booker allied with the Vox (why can't I play in this reality?!) and died a martyr to the cause (oh.). Daisy is understandably nonplussed when Booker shows up again, figuring him for an imposter, or at the very least an inconvenience in this great narrative she has going on. She orders the Vox to destroy him.
• Daisy kills Fink, who has been manufacturing almost all of Comstock's supplies. In a frankly unbelievable turn for her character, she threatens to kill Fink's young son. Elizabeth stabs Daisy from behind, through the stomach, with a pair of scissors. It's pretty shocking. Elizabeth starts getting really upset about what she's done, while Booker tries to persuade her that both of their actions have been justified. Elizabeth asks Booker to kill her if it seems like she'll ever be returned to the tower.
• Songbird ambushes them as they're about to escape. Before Songbird can kill Booker, Elizabeth offers herself up freely to return. He takes her away. I think there's another shift between realities here. Rather than the tower, she's taken to a new institution where she's tortured and gradually gives in to her destiny. In this reality, she succeeds Comstock after his death, then militarizes Columbia and launches an aerial attack on New York City. Part of her knows that this is wrong, so she sends Booker back in time with enciphered warnings to her younger self explaining what she'll need to do.
• Back in the past, Booker rescues Elizabeth again, and destroys the tower. Since the tower had been siphoning off her power, Elizabeth is now, for the first time, in full control of her abilities. She can open tears anywhere, to any time or place. She also seems to suddenly understand the nature of the multiverse and everything that has happened; I'm not sure if this is also a result of the tower's destruction, or if it's from the code sent back by her future alternate self.
• Elizabeth walks Booker through his history, showing him the real history of everything that had happened. He finally understands that Elizabeth is his daughter, and that he is Comstock.
• Oh, yeah, Booker killed Comstock. I forgot to mention that. Elizabeth was going to, but Booker beat her to it. Comstock was going to reveal that Booker gave up Anna/Elizabeth; once she figures it out, she shows these events to Booker.
• Booker and Elizabeth both understand that they can't make things better by just killing Comstock: as long as some version of Comstock exists in some other universe, he'll just continue his plan and conquer all universes. The only way to win is to go back in time before Comstock was born and "smother him at birth".
• Booker figures that this means smothering him as a baby. Comstock wasn't born, though: Comstock was born-again, baptized in the river into his new faith.
• So, Elizabeth and her alternate-dimension Elizabeths hold Booker down under the water and drown him. He dies. The end.

On the one hand, it was an unexpected and cool ending. Almost no games end in this way, with the protagonist dying, and I actually really like it: it's melancholy with just a little bit of uplift, since your sacrifice (unwilling, in this case!) makes the world a better place.

On the other hand, it makes less and less sense the more I think about it. Elizabeth is drowning you, the future version of Booker, not the younger version. Killing someone when they're 38 years old won't kill the version of them when they're 18 years old, right? And I don't think that having two versions of the same person in the same reality will somehow erase the younger version, either: after all, we've just played an entire game where Booker and Comstock have coexisted in space and time.

The alternate Elizabeths all gradually disappear after you drown, which is sad and makes sense - if Booker died before Anna was both, there can be no Elizabeth.

Anyways! Like so much else in the game, this felt really ambitious and really interesting, which makes the flaws all the more frustrating.

Final thoughts:

• Favorite weapon: I relied on the Machine Gun and Carbine for most of the game. I didn't even try many of the later weapons, though.
• Favorite vigor: Shock Jockey.
• Favorite NPC besides Elizabeth: Daisy Fitzroy, with Rosalind Lutece a close second.
• Favorite combat tear: Summoning a mosquito.
• Favorite infusion: I maxed out Armor before I spent a single one on Health. Salts are useful, though I never ran out after getting about 5 upgrades.
• Favorite song: May the Circle Be Unbroken. (Close second: Fortunate Son by CCR.)
• Favorite animation: Elizabeth opening a new tear
• Favorite setting: Anywhere outdoors in Columbia is pretty great. I might give the edge to Battleship Bay.
• Creepiest setting: Oh, definitely the workshop with all the decapitated toy heads of Benjamin Franklin. Phenomenally unsettling atmosphere in there.
• Favorite combat move: Sky-hook executions looked cool, but I rarely did them. It's simple, but I loved chaining enemies with Shock Jockey, then stunning the crowd each time I burned another one down.
• Favorite hat: I ended the game with Rising Bloodlust (increase weapon damage with each kill), but prior to that had used Storm (chain effects when killing with certain vigors) or Sheltered Life (brief invulnerability after eating food).
• Favorite shirt: I ended with Scavenger's Vest (enemies give ammo 40% of the time). For most of the game I used Blood to Salt (enemies give salt 40% of the time).
• Favorite pants: Urgent Care (shield regenerates sooner and more quickly). I was very shield-reliant in my game.
• Favorite boots: Overkill (killing an enemy with excessive force will stun nearby enemies).
• Biggest complains about gear: Far too many items require skylines, which are only present in a few fights, or melee, which is usually an awful idea.
• Favorite statue: So many to choose from! The Child is pretty awe-inspiring. But the Founding Father statues are so startling that I might need to pick those.
• Weirdest enemy: Mecha-Lincoln has come to destroy you!!!
• Toughest enemy: For me, it's The Mechanic. Not so much for the skyline-electrocution thing (I rarely use those anyways, even during combat), as the way he'll rapidly close in on you and won't let up.
• Coolest boss fight: The ones with the ghost of Lady Comstock were really frenetic and fun. The long fight near the end where you had to defend the airship against zepelins was surprisingly fun too.
• Favorite voxophone: Alternate-world Booker describing his decision to join the Vox.
• Favorite kinetoscope: Battleship Falls. (Though the propaganda ones are pretty nifty, too.)
• Favorite filmstrip: The alternate-universe ones with older Elizabeth are chilling and neat.
• Most stunning alternate world: Elizabeth raining hellfire down on New York City is awe-inspiring.

END SPOILERS

So, would I recommend this game? Yeah, I guess. The gameplay is fine, the story is cool-if-frustrating. The graphics, modeling, and animation are the real stars of the show, arguably the best of any game created yet. The world looks amazing and cool, and you'll wish you could spend more time exploring it instead of just shooting people in it.

Oh: Very late in the game, I took a handful of screenshots. (I feel way less compelled to do so in games with minimal options for character customization or branching plot choices.) These are all from the finale of the game and super-spoilery.

There's an expansion thingy coming out in the next month or so, which I'll be keeping an eye open for. It sounds like there will be two parts to this, and I'm not sure whether I'll get the "season pass" now to buy both cheaper, or wait until both are out and check the reviews for their quality. From what I've heard they'll be improving and adding new game mechanics like stealth, which could go a long ways to helping this series reach its potential.

Future Shocked

In my ever-continuing odyssey of finishing popular games years after release, I've recently wrapped up Bioshock 2. This is the sequel to one of my favorite FPS-ish games of recent years, which in turn was the spiritual successor to the most amazing survival horror game that I've ever played. Bioshock 2 upholds the legacy, without advancing it... it's a thoroughly satisfying game that maintains the best elements of the franchise, but can't provide the same sense of exponential growth and, well, shock that its predecessors did. Simply put, expectations are now high enough that just meeting them is an impressive accomplishment.

Graphically, the game looks similar to Bioshock, though I think the overall quality may be a tad higher. The design of Rapture still looks the same, which is excellent; it's this really cool, almost steampunk-ish / art deco look. One amazing new angle is that you periodically venture outside of Rapture, in a full diving suit, and the visuals there are just gorgeous. It's a burst of organic sealife, a nice contrast to the industrial elegance inside the structure.

The voice acting continues to be excellent. They've brought back most of the characters from the first game; thanks to the magic of audio recordings, we even get to hear from some people who didn't survive it. There are many new characters as well, and the majors have well-thought-out, complex personalities.

General gameplay still feels pretty similar: you will probably end up specializing in a couple of weapons (short-range and long-range), using those for most of your combat, and breaking out your plasmids for the big fights. There are some pretty significant improvements here, though. The first Bioshock game technically had traps, but I almost never bothered using them; they just didn't seem effective, you usually didn't have opportunities to set them up before encountering enemies, and they were much more of an obstacle to you than to your foes. They've refined traps in the sequel, and as a result, they're more effective and MUCH more fun. One small change: you don't set off traps yourself, so you can happily apply Trap Rivets or Proximity Mines all over the place without worrying about where you're going. There are also many more gameplay situations now where traps are useful: you'll clear an area out, know that you'll need to defend it against a bunch of incoming Splicers, set your traps accordingly, then wait for them to come in.

That actually speaks to one of the things that I like best about Bioshock. On the FPS/RPG continuum, it's much closer to the FPS side, but it does resemble the RPG in the way that it lets you choose between multiple solutions to any problem. In the combat scenario that I laid out before, I'll generally spend a minute setting up cunning traps, and snipe off the ones who make it through. If you're more into twitchy action, though, you can just break out your machine gun and your strafing shoes and go at it. And, if you're into hacking and there are turrets or security cameras nearby, you can enlist them in your action as well.

That's another big improvement in the sequel: in the first Bioshock, you technically could get a security bot follower, but it was really hard. You usually had to set off an alarm, wait for a bot to come, then get close enough to it (while it's pelting you with bullets) to start a hack, and hack it or buy it out. Every once in a long while you would run across a Splicer with a bot who you could kill and then hack. Because of that, I rarely had companions, and when I lost one, it would be a while until I'd get a replacement. Here, though, you can get a new Plasmid sequence called Security Command, and the second and third levels let you summon security bots on demand at any time. You're limited to two, but still, that's really awesome. For the latter part of the game I usually had both of them in tow, which gave me a lot more flexibility in how I approached most combat.

A lot of other stuff from the first game has changed slightly:

• You can now hack items at a distance using a dart gun. This is helpful for turrets, but I generally still hacked everything else up close like before. Also, the game no longer pauses while hacking, so you don't want to do it while in combat (and don't ever want to hack a turret at close range). There are a limited number of Auto-Hack Darts that let you instantly hack anything.
• Hacking is way less fun in this game. I still do it whenever I can, but the minigame is totally twitch-based. In Bioshock, I could at least pretend that my brain had an impact on the outcome.
• Most of the weapons stay the same, but the alternate ammo changes a bit. There's no more Electric Buck, but we do get one that has more stopping power.
• Some plasmids now have alternate effects if you charge them up by holding down your fire button. For example, Incinerate 2 tosses off a quick flame when you tap, but holding and then releasing creates a fireball that can engulf multiple foes.

Okay, plot time!


MINI SPOILERS

You remember that part near the end of Bioshock 1, where you transformed into a Big Daddy and escorted some Little Sisters? They kind of took that idea and built a whole game around it. You ARE a Big Daddy, which has a big impact on both gameplay and plot. For gameplay, you have a much closer and more involved relationship with the Little Sisters. It doesn't end when you defeat their protectors; instead, you'll escort them around Rapture, find Adam-filled corpses, and stand guard over the Sister while she collects Adam, as dozens of raving Splicers swarm over you. You still have the Rescue/Harvest choice as before, but collecting Adam takes much more time. I didn't mind, though; the corpse locations are very varied, and I liked how each one requires you to study the lay of the land and work out a strategy before starting to gather.

The plot seems to occur slightly after the events of the first Bioshock: Ryan is already dead, as is Fontaine, but Rapture is still chugging along and swarming with Splicers. The game's creators have retconned in a new villain, Doctor Sofia Lamb. She's a fascinating character, and pretty much the opposite of Ryan: where Ryan was a full-on Objectivist Libertarian, Lamb is totally devoted to collectivism and the common good. The most interesting parts of the game come through the audio diaries as we unearth the story of how this conflict between philosophies evolved, eventually turning into a physical conflict that touched off a civil war.

As best as I could piece it together, here's the basic story:
Andrew Ryan recruited Lamb, a psychiatrist (or was it psychologist?), to help Rapture residents cope with live under water. She hid her true objectives until after she was established in Rapture: she's fanatically devoted to strengthening the bonds between people and communities, and she sets about subtly subverting Ryan's individualist society. Publicly, she sees patients and prescribes treatments; privately, she looks for people who share her vision, and gradually forms them into a secret society she calls The Family. Ryan eventually finds out. There isn't really any government on Rapture, but there are businesses, and those businesses essentially act as the state. Ryan Enterprises puts the pro-Lamb areas of Rapture under lockdown; after a public trial, he sends Lamb off to confinement.

Lamb has a daughter, Eleanor, whom she has been grooming to be the vessel of humanity's redemption. Lamb's ultimate goal seems to be to harness the plasmid technology of Rapture and use it to make humanity evolve into a single consciousness, thus freeing it from strife and conflict. Eleanor has been chosen to be mankind's savior. When she's sent away, Lamb entrusts Eleanor to the care of Grace, a poor singer who is one of the most dedicated members of the Family. Grace raises Eleanor. Eleanor learns that the man appointed as caretaker of Lamb's domain, Stanley Poole, has been throwing wild parties and generally debauching in her absence; she confronts Stanley, he panics, has Eleanor abducted, and sent to the Little Sister orphanage, where she's transformed into one of those creepy little girls.

Around this same time, you arrive on the scene. Most of Rapture's residents were drawn to Andrew Ryan's vision and followed him below the waves; you, though, are a deep-sea diver who stumbles across Rapture and decides to stay. You become a Big Daddy, and become the guardian of Eleanor.

That's all well and good, until Dr. Lamb leaves confinement. (I'm not clear on whether she was released, broke out, or if her faction seized power.) One of the very first scenes in the game has Dr. Lamb ordering you to pick up a pistol, hold it to your head, and fire; you kill yourself, while creepy-eyed Eleanor looks on in horror.

Your Adam gets harvested. We learn in Bioshock 2 that, in addition to collecting Adam, the Little Sisters are also able to collect an individual's thoughts and personality. They usually ignore this, but Eleanor, who had grown very attached to you as a father figure, gets the other Little Sisters to secretly collect this information. They eventually find a new body, and you are reborn into it. Eleanor has a telepathic link with you, and very occasionally will send you encouragement or warnings.

In the game proper, you initially meet with Dr. Tennenbaum (sp?) from the previous game, but before long she collects her rescued Little Sisters and flees Rapture. She hands you off to Sinclair, who provides a role similar to that played by Atlas in the first game: he's your most frequent communicator on the intercom, guiding your movement throughout the game.

Bioshock 2 has the same binary morality as the first game. The most obvious choices to make are whether to rescue or harvest the Little Sisters. It's interesting that, in this go-round, you develop much closer relationships with the Sisters than before: after you adopt one, you'll typically lead her around for a while and defend her while she collects Adam. It would be unusually cold-hearted to harvest after that, and I always picked the rescue option. As before, this initially means less Adam, but over the long run you not only get bonus Adam but also unique gene tonics and other goodies as thank-you gifts.

Besides the Rescue/Harvest quandary, there are several points in the game where you need to decide whether to kill or spare a high-level opponent. These were at least a little more interesting; in one case the other guy had caused a great deal of anguish for many people, and in another, the other person has very explicitly asked you to kill him. Still, it's ultimately a black-or-white, on-or-off approach to morality, which isn't very interesting to me in this post-Dragon Age era.

On the whole, the rhythm of progress through the game feels very similar to the preceding entry. You explore one large area of Rapture at a time. In the first part of the game, each new area provides you with a new weapon and a new type of Splicer to worry about. Much of the game is spent exploring, killing Splicers (who respawn, which I hate - how can there possibly be this many people left after everything that has happened previously on Rapture?), collecting limited quantities of ammo, and eventually fulfilling the requirements to leave and go to the next area. There's no back-tracking between levels, so you need to fully explore if you want to make sure you have all of the important stuff like Power to the People stations taken care of.

Also like in the previous game, most of the plot is revealing the past and not the present, which is overall a cool way of doing it; it gives the game world a nice sense of grounding.

MEGA SPOILERS (for this game, as well as the first Bioshock and System Shock 2)

In a way, I'm putting this in "mega spoilers" so I don't give away the fact that there really aren't any mega spoilers in this game. Unlike the mindtwisting, astonishing reveals of Bioshock and System Shock 2, stuff actually progresses more or less in the way you expect it. Except, of course, I had been conditioned to expect that there WOULD be a twist. Throughout the whole game I kept wondering: was Sinclair really the transferred mind of Ryan? Or maybe Eleanor was secretly an evil prodigy, manipulating events around her to bring about Armageddon? Nope: Sinclair really is a reform-minded business tycoon, and Eleanor really is a slightly scared young lady with enormous talents who wants to do good.

Lamb made a good villain. She's philosophically the exact opposite of Ryan: her communalism to his individualism, her religion to his business, her Tyrant to his Parasite, her Green to his Libertarian. I like how the series underlines that extremism in any form is the danger, not any particular philosophy. I also like how much credit it gives to its villains, letting them speak at length and lay out their thoughts.

A few relatively minor complaints: I totally didn't get the bit with Sinclair at the end. I could understand it if Lamb brainwashed him, or something, but it's just bizarre for him to be completely lucid and instructive and still trying to kill you. I was also bummed that there doesn't seem to be any option to save him. It felt like forced failure, especially after you were able to save the other folks in the levels before that one. Let's see, what else... mmm, I guess that might be it.

Things I loved:

• The final battle was really epic and exciting. I laid out everything I had and won, but it was quite challenging, which I enjoyed.
• The new gene tonics were great. I especially enjoyed Fountain of Youth (or was it Life?) that regenerates health and Eve when standing in water.
• Late in the game, my standard load-out was Insect Swarm 3 with two Security Bots in tow. I could take out almost any enemy without even directly engaging. A couple of times I completed an Adam harvest without any harm to me or the Little Sister. 
• Favorite weapons: generally the shotgun, but I probably used the Rivet Gun more. Both are awesome once fully upgraded. I also had a lot of fun with the Spear Gun, and would have enjoyed even more sniping opportunities.
• It was really fun to get the cameos from the first game. Ryan is still a larger-than-life presence, and it was cool and creepy to hear from Fontaine again.
• That said, the whole Lamb thing is pretty ham-handedly retconned. The end result is great, but it really doesn't flow at all from what we saw in the previous game.

 END SPOILERS

I just recently noticed that there's a new Bioshock game coming up, called Bioshock Infinite. I'm very curious to see what it has to offer. The first two games have been great, but it would be cool if they can move past the world of Rapture and do something more. For two games now they've been hinting at what happens when the advances made by Ryan Industries are unleashed upon the world, and I hope we'll get to see and participate in that.

Would You Kindly?

Yeah, yeah... as usual, I'm way behind in playing games.  Still, for anyone who's curious, Bioshock is an AWESOME game.

I don't really like the idea of Action/FPS/RPG hybrids all that much; I'd much rather play a full-on RPG that lets me think about strategy and tactics rather than twitchily respond.  In practice, though, some of the best games that I've played fall into this category... the recent Elder Scrolls games, which are more towards the RPG end of the spectrum, and Bioshock/System Shock, which feel much more like FPS games with heavy RPG elements.

Somehow it works, possibly because I'm better at FPS games than I think.  Even though I don't often play these games, I've noticed that when I get into one, after a while it really does become second nature.  I develop decent reflexes, can strafe around an opponent, become adept at zooming in through a scope and pulling off headshots, and otherwise doing FPS-y things.  Games like Bioshock are great in that they offer a multitude of ways to overcome any obstacle, so even if a particular enemy is hard to shoot, you can switch to a special power for an area-of-effect attack or other approach.

Bioshock's atmosphere was terrific.  It starts out feeling just slightly dystopian - slightly crazed, slightly disheveled - but after a few hours, you reach into the full-on System Shock level of horror.  It presents amazingly creepy tableaus, haunting images that shock you and stick with you.  It isn't all art direction, either.  They do some really simple but effective stuff, like suddenly cut the lights, and make you listen to several seconds of violent sounds before the lights come back on and monsters are staring at you.  They also do amazing things with shadows, particularly early on in the game; as terrifying as seeing an act is, it can seem even scarier if you're only seeing it second-hand, flickering across a wall in a macabre black-on-orange dance.


MINI SPOILERS

The key to Bioshock, though, is probably its story.  It belongs to that rare element in the world of video games: an original idea.  Bioshock takes place in Rapture, a fallen paradise, a stunning technological achievement built not only from steel and glass but also from Objectivist beliefs, an unswerving faith in business, in the moral imperative of selfishness.  From that starting point, they sketch out a sprawling, fascinating tale of Rapture's rise, decline, and eventual disintegration.  Unlike a traditional RPG, you don't learn the story of Rapture by reading books; you see it all around you, in the faded posters on the wall; and you hear it, through recorded announcements and audio diaries.  That world is filled with characters, some already dead, and they grow to be quite complex and interesting over the course of the game. 

Probably the most infamous aspect of Bioshock is its morality system.  I wasn't as impressed by this as I was by everything else.  As with Fallout, it's a very black-and-white setup: press one button to be good, press another button to be bad.  It's also less varied than in Fallout, not to mention Dragon Age or Oblivion; you are only presented with the same choice over and over again, so there's no reason not to make the same decision each time.  The consequences for gameplay are minor; being evil helps you more in the short term, while being good will eventually lead to some extra benefits.  Anyways... the moral system isn't bad, it's just been done way better before.


MEGA SPOILERS

Of course, I found myself constantly thinking of System Shock 2 while playing this.  When I first walked into Ryan's outer office and saw the dead body, I immediately thought of the scene where you see the captain in SS2.  I was glad to see that they weren't repeating themselves, though.  The final confrontation with Ryan was chilling.  Atlas's revelation was cool; again, though, it's hard not to think of SS2, and I'm guessing that it was much more effective for people who hadn't played the other game.

As I mentioned above, I do appreciate how the game supports different modes of play.  I focused on hacking abilities as much as I could; late in the game, the Winter's Breath 3 attack plus my full complement of tech splices let me convert every turret, camera, and bot I encountered with ease.  I actually rarely used my Eve for attacks, so I generally had a full bar and maximum hypos.  In combat, I relied very heavily on my fully-upgraded shotgun: 00 buck for most enemies, and electric buck for the big daddies.  I occasionally used the machine gun when in more open areas.  After the Sander Cohen level, I used the crossbow whenever I could in sniper situations.  I really enjoyed this mode of gameplay - lots of stealth (I had the splice that turns you invisible while still, and added the splices to quiet your footsteps even though I never used the wrench), coupled with rapid aims and quick squirts of death.  On the other hand, I rarely used the grenade launcher, and never used the chemical thrower, other than during the final fight with Fontaine.

I played through the game the good way.  I really liked the last couple of levels; I tend to hate escort-type missions, but with the tools at your disposal, it was actually a fun challenge to keep the Little Sister alive and unharmed.  The final boss fight was definitely challenging; I used up all my first aid kits, but managed to defeat him on my first try.  In retrospect, some more boss fights along the way would have been fun; there were just a couple, and other than having much more HP than normal, they weren't all that interesting.

Favorite character: Sander Cohen
Favorite enemy: Houdini Splicer
Favorite vending machine: Ammo machine ("Mi amigo!  El ammo!")
Favorite weapon: Toss-up between shotgun and crossbow
Favorite ammo: I love the idea of the Trap Bolt, though I probably got myself as often as I got any enemies.
Favorite primary splice: Winter's Breath, though I love the idea of Insect Swarm
Favorite secondary splice: Invisibility (whatever it's called - it really changes the way you play the game)
Favorite area: Sander Cohen's, with Arcadia (original form) a close second
Favorite music: Beyond the Sea
Favorite shocking moment (repeating): When you walk up to search a body's corpse, and they suddenly sit bolt upright and start laughing at you.  I got in the habit of always having my shotgun out when I searched bodies, just so I could quickly put them down while I was still jumping.
Favorite shocking moment (singular): Gosh, there are so many... maybe the ghost scene with Ryan's mistress, or the doctor's surgical chambers.
Favorite audio tape: Again, too many to choose from... Ryan's tended to be the best
Favorite radio conversation: "Would you kindly?"


END SPOILERS

I think it's funny that an action RPG has a much better money system than any real RPG that I've played lately.  Yeah, it stinks that they limit your wallet, but it's also realistic; it's absurd to think of adventurers carrying around the kind of change that they do.  And in terms of pacing your purchase, it works just right.  You need to buy stuff in order to progress, because you can't collect enough ammo just from your enemies; there are some good things worth saving up for (particularly if buying stuff with Adam); so, you get a nice, interesting tension between buying what you want now and what you need eventually.

Anyways.  I'm happy to see for myself that Bioshock was able to pick up System Shock's legacy.  Even though it isn't a sequel, it capture most of the feel of that great game, and I'm hoping that this franchise has a more successful end.