Bioshock -- the "sequel in spirit" to System Shock 2

#JustSaying

I'm still kind of disappointed in the combat. The weapons are mostly indistinguishable crap (the Hailfire is an exception, though), and the two most interesting bits have some serious problems in their implementation. The skyrail/Handyman combination makes for a genuinely tense fight on hard, but doesn't appear nearly frequently enough (and what happened to enemies using the skyrails like in the trailers?), and use of the tears during combat more often than not boiled down to "hunker behind cover, summon turret/Patriot/Mosquito, repeat." And while I'm bitching, the boss fight in the bank vault is insanely difficult on Hard, with almost no opportunities to seek cover, replenish ammo/change weapons, and no tears of any kind.

What do people think of the anachronistic music? There's a surprisingly good "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" in there, and I definitely got a little of the "wait, what" feeling they were aiming for when I ran into the girl singing "Fortunate Son."

quite a few things to like in here but i'm not very impressed. it should have been an rpg.

i enjoyed the (annoyingly rare) skyline-based combat arenas. the corridor shooting was easy enough that i just blew through it. also i took a lot of stupid pleasure in charge -> jump backwards -> charge -> jump backwards -> etc.

The bad guys definitely used the rails in my game

After thinking about it, they must have been in my game as well, if only to explain how they were getting around behind my back (assuming they weren't just spawning out of nowhere). I never actually caught them at it, though. I can't help but wonder if that's tied in to the programming that won't let you look directly at Elizabeth without her scurrying off to the side- great in combat, annoying as shit when you're supposed to be listening to dialogue.

Bought this. Really loving the art design

eh this was a disappointment.

very pretty but much less convincing and involving than the setting in the first one. interesting enough story that inevitably gets up its own ass the further you get. and, biggest problem of all, a really dated fps driving it all.

so this game just seems pretty lame if the reactions in this thread are to be believed y/n?

I liked it. The setting's pretty cool, the combat is hectic and fun, and the story's interesting (if a bit silly and ham-fis
If you're fed up with the FPS genre you probably won't enjoy it, but it's a good game.

I'm about four hours in and feel mostly positive about it so far, but it suffers from the same problem as the OG Bioshock for me - once you find a single satisfying combination of vigor and weapon there's mostly very little gameplay incentive to change up, which makes combat a bit of a chore.

The other thing that's annoying me is that Columbia's supposed to be a living city as opposed to Rapture's post-collapse husk. It's a nice idea, but what it means in reality is that the game is populated with dead-eyed automatons who pay no attention to you standing inches from their face for minutes at a time, leaping up and down on the counters of their stores, or robbing them blind while standing in their line of sight.

ya that's a bit weird—one of the strengths of the original was the way it made the typical video game's weird empty zombie world work for it

Beat it last night, I guess it's entertaining? I dunno if you liked the other ones, play it I guess. I think I am just sick of shooters acting like they're ~important~ or whatever. Actually scratch that. I liked Spec Ops the Line a fair bit (perhaps more than it deserved, even). Something about this one just rubs me the wrong way. People trying to champion it like it's ART and THE FUTURE OF STORYTELLING and etc and maybe I'm missing something but on the surface it is kind of M Night Shyamalan caliber.

But yeah if you think you'd like it you probably won't be disappointed, just don't pay too much attention to the insane attempts to be GRANDIOSE

Took forever to Steam this on friday night, so I took a break and went to see "Paths of Glory" at the cheapie theater down the street. Same time period! Then proceeded to shotgun a lot of the game over the weekend. Am now within sight of the end, but I don't like the game/movie convention that EVERYthing has to ramp up as you go and no more wander about parts.

Am playing this on hard, which I like b/c ammo shortages forced me to grab/shoot/drop. Some of the battles are stupidly, pointlessly hard, tho.

I will say, I'm disappointed that one of my fave jedi power drinks(FORCE PUSH MOTHERFUCKER AW YEAH EAT DEATH BY PLUMMETING) was like the last one you get.

So all-in-all, a game completely worth getting.

Game pushes you straight through the story and if you kind of allow it to, it works well. Even the side quests are mostly "turn around and go back the exact way you came". Story itself needs a heavy dose of "show, don't tell."

The artwork and visuals are incredible and the skyline fights are very fun. Those two elements alone make it easily worth playing.

Feel like playing on hard is worth it. Slows you down and forces you to vary the gameplay more. Also makes dropping a handy man a real fight.

i feel like it would be more rewarding to play on hard but i'm already dying a couple times in the big fights, mostly when i'm trying to figure out who's even shooting at me.

i'm in the 'horror' section of the game (ghost mom, burnt-out abandoned city) and that atmosphere works a lot better than the dead-eyed automatons mentioned above.

i really enjoyed this game except for the stupid bits, but that's all games, just in this case the stupid bits are Really Important

i guess i'm the real negative nellie hear but yea, the ending totally lost me

and not as in "idgi" but like, oh of course you would turn out to be this dumb and self-involved, game

however:

What do people think of the anachronistic music? There's a surprisingly good "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" in there, and I definitely got a little of the "wait, what" feeling they were aiming for when I ran into the girl singing "Fortunate Son."

― muus lääv? :D muus dut :( (Telephone thing), Tuesday, April 9, 2013 10:36 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this was super cool! where do you hear tears for fears tho? didn't pick that out.

feel like the audio clip tapes are still the best mechanism for delivering the narrative. you're discovering it vs you're being clobbered with it.

i hate hate hate listening to information delivered verbally (in-game and irl), why can't they just leave datapads lying around like a regular game

in all the hoopla about the story using irl american racism, doesn't the parallel world where the fanonist rabble wreck the beautiful flying city kind of prove the confederates right? i was really annoyed by the on-the-one hand plot turn there

http://kotaku.com/some-dont-like-bioshocks-forced-baptism-enough-to-as-473178476?utm_source=gawker.com&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=recirculation

yes i have no problem with virtually killing hundreds of people but the concept of virtual baptizing is deeply offensive, great

idea for new brad paisley song "accidental person who agrees with kotaku commenters"

Finally beat this tonight. There's one bit that completely doesn't make any sense, but I wanna play it again, only in 1999 mode.

as some people itt are disappointed w BI it's prob worth mentioning in here that system shock 2, which for the first time since the 90s will run on your system without requiring you to shut down portions of your cpu first + doesn't look so old if you mod it a lil + is a total atmospheric masterpiece where every glance out a hallway window onto the silent stars is worth a thousand zipline rides in disneyland, is now $9.99 on GOG

i've been replaying it but i'll probably have to stop at the spiders. this is the only game where i really can't deal with the spiders.

i downloaded the no-spider patch last time, years ago, but there's no point in replaying the whole thing if i'm gonna wuss out again.

plus the no-spider patch had a flaw wherein what it actually did was make the spiders invisible and immobile and incapable of doing damage, which meant that occasionally a door in the wall or something would open or you'd come to a place where there clearly ought to be enemies but were not and it would slowly dawn on you that standing somewhere very close to you were giant silent invisible spiders

!

modding up the gog version of ss2 took me like 10 minutes and it runs/looks great. had to remap the controls a whole lot, the defaults were and are fuckin bonkers

yup

also there's NO. KEYMAP. TO. CHANGE. PSI. POWERS. it's almost like you don't want us to use them. which i never ever had until this playthrough.

yeah this was super cool! where do you hear tears for fears tho? didn't pick that out.

IIRC, it's just near the start of the burned-out post-revolution city, where you're roaming the huge open area and following Ghost Mom's tracks. There's a floating building that's come unmoored and a red tear where you can hear this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAA_zE5a3JQ

I think you can first hear the original song when you see the Parisian rip in the tower.

Hated the first 2-3 hours of this but it's starting to win me over.

Definitely won over. Appears to be much much longer than I expected. One big concern - it's way too easy on normal/standard/whatever mode. Normally I wouldn't complain, but it's pretty much tension free so far, esp if you figure out how to use murder of crows effectively.

Yeah, I did my first playthru on Hard

Haha:

http://crypticsea.com/twined/bioshoot.html

The text adventure! Spoiler-heavy.

weirdly i also felt it was too easy, and yet for most of the game i kept dying at least once in big fights. it also felt like the game was giving me breaks, like i would be fighting a handyman, die, and when i came back it was nowhere to be found. maybe we killed each other simultaneously? it was unsatisfying though, i should have just restarted the checkpoint.

i hate the way bioshock lets you chip away at bosses like that. sure, they get some health regen when you die and respawn but then their alert state goes back to normal and you can get the drop on them. feels cheap? or like it's making an already easy game with flimsy gameplay even more ethereal?

found normal to be fairly easy but hard to be close to impossible.

close to the end now and it is back to being a slog. sorta feel like the story curve is too exaggerated or something - slow build, big rise to action in the middle with the fink section and then this sort of meandering end game i am in right now. also going from lockpicks being scarce and feeling like i had to choose carefully if/when to use them to the point where they are all over the goddamn place and i have like 30 of them is sorta stupid.

collector shit like the telescopes is super irritating as well, i know ive missed a few because they're just sorta plopped in pointless locations. and the production value on the kinetescopes is just fucking godawful, to the point where i have started to skip right when the opening credits roll because they are a) boring b) all but meaningless to the narrative.

also this fight the ghost in the graveyard shit is some goddamn weaksauce. not hard, just crazy annoying.

once i discovered jump -> charge -> jump back -> charge, repeat, repeat, all fights became meaningless.

but it's the pelvic thrust that really drive you insane

ha i feel the same way about crow trap

several times i have backtracked into what is supposed to be a pitched respawn battle and all the dudes are already dying because of crow traps i left there 45 minutes ago. also bucking bronco is the most useless thing in the world

i used undertow to throw people off of ledges a whole lot.