BioShock

The Good
Do you like the term - intellectual shooter? I don't, since it’s used mostly to identify oneself as an intellectual gamer instead of celebrating the game itself. However, I think it’s impossible to find any other two words describing BioShock so fully and extensively. I mean it in the most neutral sense of the phrase, because it is a well-known fact that you can’t take good without the bad. And it can’t be more so as in case of BioShock.

Irrational Games’ lastborn child, a successor to the critically acclaimed, yet ultimately unknown System Shock series, BioShock has brought the company just two things they were short of – wealth and fame. Now if there was just a single developer company that didn’t get enough of that, I would have bet on Irrational anytime of day. During its eight years course it hasn’t released a single average game. Let me remind you of the the unique concept of Freedom Force, flawless game mechanics and stunning level design of SWAT4, brilliant storytelling and engaging multiplayer of Tribes: Vengeance. All of those games (including, of course, System Shock 2 – the masterpiece of sci-fi horror) clearly showed that Irrational Games is an extraordinary team worthy of any amount of hype, overreaction and 10/10 reviews making the unsuspecting X360 owners rush into the street in order to buy a title from one of the most prominent developer of the recent decade.

However that should not cloud one’s judgment in light of the most obvious of BioShock faults, which we’re going to look over shortly.

Now to the premise. BioShock casts you in the role of a simple man living a simple life, who accidentally discovers a huge underwater city which the brightest minds of the post-war (WWII) world have made their home. Rapture. The world of unlimited possibilities for anyone who is willing to work and create. It opens its gates for anyone except for a single man - a parasite, a man who’s unable to do anything with his life, carrying his pathetic existence through the false notions of compassion, mercy and morality. Those who live in Rapture reject these people and all the governments supporting them, which is pretty much the whole "civilized" world. “It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the ocean, it was impossible to build it anywhere else”, says Andrew Ryan, the architect and the mastermind behind the city.

But you arrive too late to ripe the fruits of one man’s vision. As with all the ideas and utopias there is always one thing people forget to account for – it’s the faulty nature of the man himself. In case of Rapture, greed and lust for power turned out to be the harbingers of city’s downfall. You can’t build a society based on rationale and objectivism, because (watch out! Another Star Trek quote is coming!) human-beings are extremely irrational creatures and logic is just the beginning of wisdom. Despite seeming overwhelmingly complex the main idea of the game’s story is actually very simple and profound. It’s about how faulty the man is. No matter how much we strive into the sky towards perfection we should not forget about the chains on our legs, chains of human nature. The only thing that can beat the story of this game is the presentation of it..

The postfactum nature of BioShock’s storytelling provides the most impressive strength of the game. You’re not experiencing the story through the series of cut scenes or dialogs. Actually there’s no even a story to experience. Of course there is a series of events taking place inside the gameworld with varying objections and motivations but it is secondary to the history of the place. It’s not that important who you are and what you’re doing, what is important are the characters of Rapture and the details of their sad demise. The game achieves that sort of unusual narrative through the series of audio logs scattered throughout the gameworld combined with the detailed vision of what a certain environment has become. Irrational doesn’t connect the dots for you as it is done in many games via cutscenes or long dialogs. It offers you point A and point B and let your imagination do the rest, with results being much more striking and impressive.

That level of immersion is possible only in a video game, which in its own turn creates a much needed excuse for ideas of BioShock to take form of a video game. It creates an illusion of time overlapping – you hear the choices people made, the feelings they’ve experienced and at the same time you see the consequences of those choices and feelings right before your eyes. An amazing example of the interactive storytelling!

Ron Gilbert, the creator of Monkey Island series has once said that a game is a shitty place to tell a story. Yes, Mr. Gilbert it is, but instead of trying to tell it with the common devices used in movies and books, (yes, Square, you too) BioShock chooses another method unimaginable in the limits of those two media.

Certainly, a knowing man would notice that all of that (retrospective narrative, audio logs, post-factum presentation) was already presented by both System Shocks, Doom 3 and lots of other games which thought this to be a neat way to cut expenses on cutscenes, motion-cap and character modeling. But very few of them offered such an amazing treatment of this technique as BioShock did and neither has put it to so much use. The counterarguments to the tenets of objectivism, coined by Ayn Rand, are perfect fit for the BioShock’s way of narrating, with the characters speaking not of the current events or explaining a lot unnecessary info but expressing their thoughts and views in words instead. This in its own turn creates one of the most fleshed out set of videogame characters of recent years.

The best one being nobody else but the creator of Rapture himself – Andrew Ryan. Much as his prototype – Ayn Rand – Andrew has emigrated from the Soviet Union when he had found himself unable to cope with all the changes happening to his country. Yet he didn’t find any rest in USA either. Everywhere he was despised for his talent, money and radical views. He didn’t want the parasites, people without ambition or talent, to impose their will upon him. Much in fashion of Dostoevsky’s characters Ryan saw himself as an extraordinary being far above the issues of morality and decency. But unlike Raskolnikov, Ryan doesn’t doubt his beliefs and is not tormented by them. He is the man of great faith and strong convictions. He firmly believes in everything he does and doesn't care what others think of it. So even in time of his death he remains as strong in his faith as he ever was.

To be frank, the scene of Andrew Ryan's death requires some more space of this review. This is undoubtedly the piece of drama that will stay in your mind forever. Without spoilering much I can only say, that during witnessing it, I haven't thought for a second about how great/talented/skilled the guys at Irrational are. All of my thoughts were with that man before me, who even in his death doesn't lose a single inch of his faith and views. Very strong and convincing scene, indeed. It would make every movie director jealous.

In the spotlight is also a well-known duo. Big Daddy and Little Sister are perfect metaphor to unconditional love that requires no objective or rational explanation. You will love those interplays, they bring warmth and create a very important contrast to the cold and menacing environments of the city. Of course it’s a cheap argument to put a cute little girl on one plate of the scales and Ayn Rand with her philosophy on the other. The contrast works well, however.Partly, because it is a contrast which you, the player, must inevitably break, not by your choice, but by the necessity.

Other characters do not disappoint either. Each of them is a representation of a specific part of the new, corrupted Rapture. Art, Science and Industry. Fueled by plasmids (which are essentially a plot device and a key gameplay feature) they strive for perfection in those areas. A mad plastic surgeon with his mind completely whacked, an artist finishing his last masterpiece of dead bodies and a smuggler with non-existent values. Each character has lots of background to him depending on how thorough you are in examining your environments, finding clues and actually thinking. Because, as I mentioned earlier, Irrational doesn't care if you're following a story or not. This is excellent, since it always keeps you on your toes and your mind is always working, trying to figure out the real motivations of the characters. No wonder there are so many plot-analysis written after the game's release.

Visually, Bioshock is nothing but stunning. The game's visuals are a beautiful example as to what exactly constitutes great graphics in a game. Obviously, not technical superiority or the hardware the game is capable of taking advantage of. The true brilliance of graphics lies on sole shoulders of an artist. Artistically, BioShock is a very ambitious project. It has been compared to Fallout on numerous occasions with similarities in its 30's ads stylistic approach. Some people attached "art-deco" label shortly after. But the truth is that BioShock is something you haven't ever seen before. It seamlessly combines incombinable. The screaming ads of smiling people reminiscent of mid-20th century America is merged with technological wonders which feels more at home in Wells and Verne novels, than in the works of Asimov and Clarke, and all that is spiced up with the extreme attention to details. Texturing, modeling, special effects - everything in here is working in a single unit to bring the atmosphere of the decayed city of wonders as to close to reality as possible. I've already known that level designers of Irrational are miracle workers with their amazing job on SWAT4 realistic levels, but this time, when they were not constrained by limitations of our real world, they outdid themselves. Sometimes, I even felt like crying staring looking over beautiful locations, so different and yet following the same stylistic guidelines.

That does sound like a perfect game, doesn't it? Well, I don't want to break it for you, but it isn't. The irony is that if BioShock didn't have all those extraordinary things I've mentioned up to this point I might have had no problem with it whatsoever. But the game's unique and unusual subject, superior artistic design and overall professional quality brings me to blaming BioShock for a thing I wouldn't consider to blame any other game for. Namely, it's genre choice.

The Bad
Why on Earth this game decided to be a First Person Shooter?

As I said I had no problems with any game's choice of genre up to this point. You see in games like No One Lives Forever, System Shock I & II, Outlaws, Dark Forces, Strife, Half-Life - all the additional features (non-shooting) are used to enhance them. Thus, it results in a perfect blend. We take a shooter canvas and put some nice touches on it that elevates it above it's contemporaries. It worked on numerous times, and should have worked with BioShock as well.

Especially, if we take into consideration, that the "shooter canvas" of it is much more superior to any other FPS. You have lots of abilities to choose from, different plasmids in various combinations can easily provide a lot of unexpected results. It's fun to experiment with those techniques, trying to find an instant-kill solution. Which, of course, is impossible to find, prompting you to keep chaging your approach in every situation. I didn't miss any of the System Shock exclusive features, like inventory, research or character stats, and was completely satisfied with the way revival chamber were realized in BioShock. So, what's wrong? We have an excellent story/subject and great gameplay which easily result in a game like one has never seen before, don’t we?

The problem is that those do not go together at all. I think the reason of that lies in BioShock's subject which requires everything to work for it. It wasn't a problem in NOLF - where subject required you to be a spy, you did what spies usually do (at least in 60's movies), in Outlaws - subject required you to take revenge on your dead wife and daughter. And what does BioShock subject (counterarguments to objectivism) requires you to do? Nice question.

Kill hordes of zombie-like Splicers is the answer. Now tell me, how does that reinforce the game's point? What is the reason to all the time I spent in-between admiring locations and listening to the logs? There's none. BioShock with its serious subject would have looked much better in the canvas of adventure or an RPG (as showed by Bioware/Black Isle) or maybe tried to get there by some other means. The core of the BioShock's gameplay should have been "a choice" instead of "a shooting". The choice players face in the current game is laughable, because it doesn't provide any effect on the story, (it shows another cut-scene in the end, true, but how does it help to change the message of the game?) and benefits from saving the girls are obvious from the start.

Once again, I will say that have the subject of the game been simpler and less dominant; it wouldn't have made the action seem much more appropriate. But as it is, each part of the game must work towards a single goal -- conveying an idea. Obviously, "shooting zombies", which is somewhere around 70% of the game doesn't help that cause much.

I completely understand the reasons behind BioShock's choice of genre. First, people were expecting a successor to System Shock, secondly, one cannot expect BioShock the Adventure to break as many sells as BioShock the FPS did. Which is a shame, since in the end, it did outgrow both System Shocks, and perhaps became the best top-sold game of the last decade. It certainly deserved upon much better treatment.

The Bottom Line
This is my first review that features a newly created rating system. It came up as I wasn't satisfied with the criteria usually used for game ratings. I called it TAPEA, with each letter standing for a certain aspect of Developer Company as reflected by the game.

Talent: 5/5

One should not doubt the talent of Irrational. Once again they proved that they were touched by God himself. I can't imagine an untalented person coming up with those outstanding locations and brilliant ideas. Rapture, Big Daddies, Art-Deco, Plasmids, Little Sisters, Underwater setting – they're constantly feeding you high-class ideas, which could’ve only born in the minds of extremely talented individuals.

Ambition: 4/5

In BioShock the developer offered something rarely seen in a video game. A mature subject venturing beyond love/hatred/revenge clichés. Unfortunately they didn't dare to carry this ambition through. I mean creating a gameplay that would have been on par with the game's subject, hence a drop in one point.

Pteity (Pushing The Envelope - ity): 3/5

BioShock does go when nobody has gone before. It changes your mind on the subject of how games can communicate stories and ideas. Unfortunately, all of those elements have been already seen in other games, even if executed on a much lower scale and with much lesser effect. The story repeats itself in game play department as well - it does provide some unique ideas, but nothing warranting a legion of clones.

Effort: 5/5

The colossal attention to detail and the game's impressive length (around 12 hours) show many sleepless nights and cups of coffee drunk in the Irrational Games headquarters.

Adequacy: 5/5

The overall coherency of different departments is the evidence of how much the developer cared about how things are fitting together, the style and theme are always maintained regardless of the situation. I won't drop any point here since even the game's questionable FPS attitude towards gameplay is reasonably justified within the limits of the gameworld. Completely adequate and nothing feels out of place.

In the end we receive 4.4/5 which is an average score of those five equally important criteria.

As for the closing part I'll just repeat the one-liner "Who is John Galt?" It's a quote from "Atlas Shrugged", book by Ayn Rand, which BioShock names as its primary source of inspiration. It's a synonym to hopelessness and inability to change anything. The same feelings I am left with after completing BioShock. I understand that you can't have best of both worlds at the same time. You can't be commercially successful and yet break new grounds, at least not on a scale, shareholders' meeting would appreciate.

Perhaps, you need people like Andrew Ryan or Dagny Taggart (a character from the book) to do it, people not constrained by the concerns of others or by the questions of appropriateness and decency. Men who uses only common sense and objective truth as their Bible. And, you know, I am sure that the phrase "BioShock could have been so much more" would have been written somewhere in that book.

Maybe Ayn Rand was actually right?

Nah. :)

The Good
I confess that I bought an X-box 360 for this game. After 2 years of hearing how wonderful it was, I broke down and tried it. I hooked up the unit to my HD TV and experienced something remarkable.

2k studios spent a great deal of effort designing this game. They designed an entire city, sculpted and shaped in the Art Nuevo of the preceding decades. Then they smashed it with blunt objects of war and destruction. The details are astounding, portraying a beautiful gleaming city in the process of an ugly death. Everywhere you look, you see what it was and what it is. Rubble and debris. Surprisingly creepy…

Using the Unreal 2.5 engine, The graphics are detailed, revealing textures and dimensions that add to the feeling of being in a real environment. The sound is equally well done, with subtle music cues. You won’t forget the first time you hear someone sing a gospel in a weary, lost voice. The random pieces of dialogue you hear from the NPCs wandering around only contribute to the sense of madness that has possessed Rapture.

Gameplay is an elaborate gun and run mix up, enhanced by weapon choice, weapon improvement and general collection of supplies. I really like how you can use different approaches to killing your enemies.

One of the biggest points of the game is the story. It’s told through old tapes, ghosts, NPC narrations, and settings in the environment. Its not your run of the mill tacked on adventure. Its critical to the game and how it is played. I was taken by surprise when I saw the rooms that the little sisters were kept in. It was reminiscent of the brutal experimentations that were done by behaviorist in the early 20th century. B.F. Skinner is even mentioned in passing.

Voice acting was pretty good, if not slightly over the top. The accents were heavy and seemed to be coming from a b-movie cast.

It was very cool, how you had a few methods for turning enemies in to allies against their will. It was even cooler, how you could rack up achievement points for Xbox live.

The Bad
For a game based on self-determination, this game is pretty linear. You can find a lot of cool stuff by wandering off the path, but to progress, you have to pretty much follow the directions put before you. The game even alludes to it about 2/3 of the way. You end up normally using 2-3 plasmids for most of the game and the same goes for the weapons.

And its short and a little on the easy side. Replay value is not its strongest point.

The Bottom Line
This game is proof that games can be art and have a meaning to them. And yes, it was worth buying the Xbox 360.

The Good
As the world crested over Y2K, nerds everywhere rejoiced in man’s greatest invention to date: the world wide web. This marked the turn of a new age, the Age of Information, where the basis of world currency turned from gold to ones and zeros. The nerd caste, once the universal butt-end of derision and wet towel snappings, found their way to the highest echelons of society and even have one of their own cast as the world’s richest man, Bill Gates. Role-playing, once a dark secret that could derail a presidential candidate, now has gone mainstream and online with a subscription rate that grows exponentially every year. That guy in high school who never spoke or left the computer room is now your boss. The nerd is triumphant.

The popular notion would be to consider the age we live in, what with its information superhighway and Ausperger’s syndrome, to be the most intelligent period of all time. People now have instant access to a wealth of information that would have taken weeks to compile. However, one instead should ask, “Does being truly smart mean you know a great deal of information?”

No. In this day and age people don’t need to know more information, instead they need to be able to process this information. Even though the mother-load of human history and knowledge is available to any and all, people choose to spend their time spouting South Park catch-phrases or quoting whatever the Insane Clown Posse has to say about their imagined enemies. The world wide web is cluttered with completely pointless web sites about ninjas and robots and ninja robots as well as the required slash fiction for said genre. Wikipedia, a brilliant idea in theory in which encyclopedia submissions are edited by its users, offers information that is on the whole unconfirmed and inaccurate. As SomethingAwful.com puts it, and puts it well, “The internet makes you stupid.”

In that case, what is so good about the internet? How can man’s greatest invention be worthy of such praise if all it can do is show you some fat kid pretending to swing a light saber around? Three things: e-mail, porn, and finding opinions that support whatever it is that you are thinking.

That’s right: the internet is not for learning. Or at any rate, nobody ever seems learns from it. If you are some dumb racist misogynist with a hate on, but can’t find anyone who sympathizes with you because they are all well-adjusted humans who don’t have an issue with their penis size, well, you’ll find all the small-penised friends you’ll ever need on the internet. If there is some opinion that proves you wrong, well, you don’t want to hear it.

And that brings us to video gamers, who are already an opinionated set of people without even mentioning “fan boys”. One common way of broadcasting one’s opinion is to write reviews; however, all these reviews posted on the internet serve to do is buttress the experience they had with the game and the justification of the game’s cost. These ordinary reviews will tell how someone feels (for example, “This game rocks!” translates better into “This great game gives me the rocking feeling!” rather than “This is a good game,”) but not any original thought beyond “Too bad you couldn’t carjack anything.” Folks, that isn’t a review: that’s an affirmation of your experience (or the opposite of affirmation if it happens to be Big Rig Racing). Video game reviews on the internet have as little to do with discussion and original thought as Britney Spears’ horrific snatch has to do with underwear when entering or leaving a motor vehicle.

The internet is littered with these testimonials that are all virtually the same: you get a synopsis of the game’s story, a run down on the graphics and sound and gameplay with scores out of ten, a consensus of “rocks” or “sucks”, a comparison to GTA San Andreas, and then the words of either “must-buy”, “rent” or “your time would be better spent masturbating”. This would be fine and all if it was a cuisinart or Astroglide or any other product you purchase, but some gamers go further and insultingly call video games “art”. Games are many things: a hobby, entertainment, a great way to tell a story and waste 100 hours of your life. But not art.

That isn’t to say there haven’t been games that have been so good that they have been “artful” or even “masterpieces”. However, gamers appear to have a limited vocabulary in reviewing games; if something is good but inexplicable falls out of the “rock” range, gamers can not comprehend and thus this becomes a critically acclaimed hit that doesn’t somehow sell many copies.

So, I was over at JazzOleg’s place, the one that has the stuffed grizzly bear that he killed himself with his own bare hands ; he had just bought his brand new computer, one that is made out of gold-pressed platinum and is faster than “Old World” immigrants at an open buffet. (it’s amazing: on top there’s an opening to which you can offer your living sacrifices to appease the angry video card god within) Like a proud poppa, he first popped in “The Witcher” and then “Bioshock”. I was so impressed with “Bioshock” that I had to get my own copy, to which I then found out doesn’t work on my YEAR-old computer. Seeing that I’m not going to get an Xbox 360 anytime soon and the ‘Corn is smart enough not to let me in his home without him, it seems I’ll never finish this game.

So this is not a review. Somebody else will gladly spout off about Ann Rand-whatsherface and quote something from wikipedia, cool. However, playing it through a short while made me think of the discussion above when I made a realization about this game.

Games are not art and gamers don’t have the ability to appreciate art in games. This is apparent in “Bioshock”, because this game succeeds in spite of itself. To be an artist in this modern age is to hide that fact that you are an artist at all.

Absolutely, “Bioshock” is a game that “rocks”, but the reason why it “rocks” is crammed far deep inside the game to save it from being a commercial failure. Daddy Systemshock whatshisface knows full well of this: you give the people only what they want; that which they need you must hide it from them or else they cannot accept. Therefore, “Bioshock” “rocks” because it has cool graphics, cool ragdoll physics, cool game play. People like the Big Daddy (well, like killing him, anyways) but may not know why. People know it’s a good story, but they don’t have to sit through verbose and pedantic exposition (the “talky” parts) before they can start killing.

The opposite of this are games that are genius, but are too good for their own good. Planescape: Torment looked like a novel because it was a novel, and disguised so poorly it flopped like a twenty-pancake belly flop. ICO is a transcendently original platform-puzzler that made a believer out of everyone who played it, but gamers instead held fast to Italian plumbers and their goombas. I’m sure the same could be said of Psychonauts, but I haven’t played it and never will because I’m waiting for the sequel, which is going to be an MMO or FPS. Whichever, it’s not that there’s any difference between the two because they both sh*t green money.

“Bioshock”, besides being a cool-ass linear FPS with a cool-ass story that you’d never ever heard of before, is masterful because it is a perfect blend of art, design and commerce. I haven’t finished it, but that much is clear from playing it for awhile and (hopefully) merits this discussion. It knows its place and being such a genius work, tricks us why we like it.

The Bad
Can't carjack any cars. Can't punch a dog into outer space. Crowds do not chant my name when I score a hat trick.

The Bottom Line
The real beauty of art is that a true masterpiece will garner our respect, especially if we don’t like it. Great art challenges us.

Meanwhile, videogames have adjustable difficulty levels.