Gaming Bioshock

[DeathKnight]

[color=crimson]I utilized the search function and, surprisingly, there is no thread for this game.

Bioshock was released to great critical acclaim. It is the spiritual successor to the System Shock series that was released on the PC a good few years back. The style of System Shock is evident at many moments through the game - attention to atmospheric sounds, a driving story with a strong villain, and a fine meshing of first person shooter and roleplaying elements.

I had acquired Bioshock a month or more ago, and recently due to the freedom and free time of Winter Break. I beat it within the last couple of days. I thought it was a fantastic ride with a fulfilling story and game mechanics. There were scary moments throughout the game that left me a bit unnerved. It immersed you in a dying dream. A man's dream.

The story of Bioshock is actually extremely well written. The main plot twist of the game is hinted at intermittently through the scattered audio diaries of various notables of the city of Rapture, but this foreshadowing could be easy to misinterpret or miss completely. The fall of Rapture and its effects upon all the citizens of Rapture are presented eloquently through the misshapen, mentally disturbed individuals you lay to rest the entire course of the game. The maddening effects of rampant genetic manipulation turn citizens into your enemies, and as you use plasmids you observe the unnatural alteration of your flesh into forms not meant to be.

The graphics are also very well done. The detail in the city is immense with fading political posters ripped and stained with time dotting the city. Walls of photographs of missing people with an occasional flower rest in an empty, ruined square. The splicers are all ugly, worn, and emaciated. The Big Daddies, protectors of the Little Sisters who are running around harvesting the gene-altering ADAM, tromp around in their hulking diving suits. The Little Sisters run around in ragged dresses holding a medical needle as big as their head and gleefully stab it into dead bodies while singing to themselves.

That is another good quality about the game. You are not tromping around a country, or the world, but the dying cries of Rapture are presented very well. You may explore off the beaten path from your objectives and are usually rewarded with some items and diaries regarding the situations a year or two prior.

The shooting mechanics worked for me. I cannot describe them eloquently. If you have played a shooter, you know what to do. Crouch behind objects, pop out, shoot, dodge, all those maneuvers are needed at various times in Bioshock. Ammunition gets a bit tight depending on much you are willing to spend, the difficulty, and how you fight.

Rather than simply running and gunning, you can choose to use some light tactics. Look, a splicer! There is an oil barrel nearby. Switch to your telekinesis plasmid, pick that barrel up, and toss it right into him. The explosion that follows is very satisfying. You can hack security cameras that will set off alarms that summon comical, steampunk-style helicopter security bots. You can hack turrets who will open fire on hostiles. You can set traps with your crossbow, deploy proximity mines, snipe people in the head with your crossbow and there are still other options available. There is still something satisfying with firing a shotgun into someone a foot away, but the various methods of dispatching with foes keeps it interesting.

On the bad side, there were some graphical glitches. The extremities on some dead bodies had a way of twitching, so it would appear sometimes that their hands were waving to you or perhaps they were fidgeting with their foot, lol. The difficulty of the game scales very far back on medium. By the end game, I had enough tonics to hack everything breezily. I was dispatching Big Daddies merely by deploying a row of trap bolts and letting them calmly jog to their death.

The amount of hacking you do in this game is immense. I love the PipeDreams minigame, but by the end of Bioshock I was really tired of roaming around a tiled board trying to get water from one end of it to the other. The hacking is optional, but the benefits of saving money at hacked vending machines or hacking security systems makes it very attractive.

One more sour event in my play through was a Little Sister disappearance. It was in the Hephaestus level. A little sister hopped up onto the back of a Big Daddy as I opened fire on it. After dispatching the Big Daddy, it seemed the Little Sister fell into a nearby wall and disappeared. I can only figure hidden behind the wall was some kind of infinite chasm. Later, after clearing the level, I came back and struggled for 20 minutes to get her to respawn to no avail. This was the one Little Sister I missed, and I did not get the achievement for it, lol. Oh well.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game. My girlfriend is playing it as well, and is having a good time. She thinks the Big Daddies are cute but, whatever. I guess that does not say much about my physical appearance.

Now, would you kindly reply to this thread?[/color]

[John]

I could've sworn I had posted in a Bioshock thread on here, but maybe it was on GS.

My experience with Bioshock was kinda tragic. I rented it to play on my friend's (who lives just above me) 360, and, not expecting to buy it, put it on Easy so I could enjoy as much of the storyline and as many cool plasmids as possible before taking it back. Stupid, stupid idea.

Turned out I liked it enough to go ahead and buy it, but I was far enough into the game at that point that it would've been a hassle to start it all over on a higher difficulty, and I didn't want to change the difficulty in the middle of the game (which seems like a silly feature to me anyway) because I wanted to see how the difficulty of one section compares to that of another. So I went ahead and finished it on Easy, which took a lot out of the game on a few levels. For one, I very rarely worried about ammo, and there were even many plasmids and a few weapons that I really didn't use once or twice--in fact, on Easy I probably could've made it through using only weapons, save for a boss every once in a while. And just as importantly, a lot of the tension was lost. I mean, not nearly all of it--regardless of difficulty level, this game has tons of [I]brilliantly[/I] scary moments--but I guess I didn't feel like a shipwrecked survivor trapped in an underwater dystopia fighting off savage genetic mutants as much as I should've, lol.

Still, it's a really good game, and I hope I get around to playing through it again sometime.

[Nomurah!]

[COLOR="Pink"][SIZE="1"]Heck yes, The Big Daddies are cute. In fact, how can "Mr. Bubbles" not be the obvious role to beat the crap out of you if you try and get near a little demon child?

BioShock is way scarier than the "scarefest" FEAR, and I'm glad I got this game over the holidays. I didn't look into as much as I could've, not knowing that it would be horrifying at times (I jump easily), but I'm glad. A scary game. A Break from FEAR and Resident Evil. :] Even scarier may be the splicers walking around singing "Jesus, Loves me" because, Christianity may be the base of many horror movies and games, lol. Plastic surgery itself has always been a scarier subject, and BioShock pretty much takes all these medical subject like plastic surgery and turned them into monsters...

Right now, I'm not too far into it, considering most of my time revolves around Oblivion, but I just deployed the Vector serum into the forest. I'll start playing again soon, and try to beat it. I havn't had any struggles with it yet, or died yet (I've noticed that it's not one of those games that you die every two seconds, obviously).

I get confused at parts, considering it doesn't explain everything about what the crap is going on, but the story is very well written, and works well with no cutscenes between the beginning and end.

...I suppose I'm going to get a bad ending.. My friend beat the game and told me there was two different endings to it. I harvest all the little sisters I encounter (and kill even more Big Daddies, considering theres almost a limitless ammount to how many will reappear in the levels, as long as your near where they spawn)..and I'm guessing that will end with... oh.. probably something worth dying for?

Hehe, I made a funny.

So... what's your favorite parts and EVE plasmids in the game?[/SIZE][/COLOR]

[Guest DrunkenPirate]

I got the game for Christmas, and played it for, I'd say about four days nonstop. The feeling of Rapture is one of, well I got the feeling that I was going to be raped, and without lube.

The first time you enter Rapture you are get the thought that "Hmmm, maybe this won't be so bad?" Wrong. The first scene with a splicer in it had me crying, it was too bad that I had been talking with a friend over X-box live Then playing through, I got the first Plasmid.

My first thoughts? "So... I get to be a Sith? ... Kickass!" All around, I enjoyed the game. I thought the Splicers themselves, while not very strong, added a lot to the atmosphere of the game. The songs they sang, the things they said it all left me a bit freaked out. Only in a good way.

[are i]

[SIZE="2"]Yeah, it definitely freaks me out lol. Even on easy (which I need because I suck at video games), I can't get passed the tension from knowing that a houdini could appear out of nowhere and slaughter me... though, even the slaughtering is enjoyable for some reason lol. It's the atmosphere, I guess.
I love all the ridiculously industrial upgrades for the weapons, and the dated music... it all works so well with that plot. It is easy to miss out on what's going on, but I think it's cool that they give you the choice of listening to the recorded journals or simply indulging in a graphically impressive shooter. Either way, it's easy to get to pulled into the story. I love it :animesmil[/SIZE]

[Panache]

This game is probably the most innovative fps I have ever played. The mechanics were incredibly fun and the veriety of weapons were great. The storyline was intriguing and the enemies werecomically crazy.

Great ****ing game.

[Kre]

[color=blue]Haha. Bioshock. Yeah, I played the demo at my friend's house once and we got pretty hooked. So when the game came out he rented it. So I went over to his house one time and I started a file on it. I got about half-way through the game before he had to return it, but it was a good expierence. Although it was kinda repatative.

One of my favorite moments of playing was at the beginning of the game, I think it was like right after you get the wrench. And I walk into the room and it leads to the left, then you do a U-Turn and go out. So I walk into the room, and I'm kinda prepared for something to jump out. I walk over to the window in the room and my my friend says "Hey! Watch out for the guy behind you!" So I turned around, and the corridor that you leave the room in is dark. But there's no guy there, so I kinda sighed in relief. But then a second later I saw a shadow skid across the floor leaving sparks flying on the floor and we were both like 'o.o'. It was pretty funny.[/color]