Together Retro: Bioshock

[Xeogred]

That is a spot on comparison haha. The melee attack sucks! Bring back actual controllable melee weapons.

It's also like how the new Deus Ex games have an activated melee takedown (I think Thief 4 did as well). Frankly, I think that stuff is extremely boring and pulling control away from me takes me out of the experience. I had more fun manually blackjacking people in Thief 1-2 or how Dishonored does it. On that note, if we're talking controls, gameplay mechanics, maneuverability and all that, I might go to say that Dishonored is the best in this genre. Not to mention you can play them like Thief or go guns blazing like Bioschok. Dishonored has aged extremely gracefully to me and feels timeless, unlike Bioshock and Human Revolution that both have some rough edges and chunkiness to them. Though sometimes you just want to shoot stuff and those will provide that.

Again I love Bioshock 1! But another negative popped up... hacking minigames. Please, just stop. Bioshock 2's fixed that and Prey did it just fine, it should take no longer than like 5 seconds. But if you just give me a straight up loading bar like Deus Ex 1, I'm completely fine with that. Hacking minigames get old 300 terminals later.

[Exhuminator]

I think you guys saying it's not fair to BioShock to compare it to System Shock, have a good point. Games do change as they progress in development, for whatever reasons.

Personally speaking though... keep in mind when BioShock was first announced, it was bandied about as practically System Shock 3 by the gaming press. This was presented to the world as a spiritual successor by initial media. I hopped on that hypetrain because of those rumors. When I realized said train was not actually going to System Shock land, but rather somewhere different, I was disappointed. But that doesn't mean I think BioShock is a bad game. It's just not the game I was promised by over exuberant misinformed journalists. (This was before I learned to not trust gaming "journalists" but I digress.)

I'm looking forward to reading about your new experiences with BioShock. Or perhaps your revisited experiences to see if it lives up to nostalgia.

[noiseredux]

so my history with the series is totally different than some of you guys. I knew nothing about System Shock at the time. I played Infinite when it came out because it looked so pretty. I ended up loving Infinite and went back to play Bioshock (1) and got bored with it after a few hours. That was like 2013 or so. I attempted it again last year, and again got bored after a few hours.

But my thinking - like Exhum's - is that maybe I should try to stick with it longer and at least see what the fuss is about. I wasn't really planning to but I've been in Xbox mode lately and saw a 360 copy for $3 a couple of weeks ago so I saw it as a sign that I should at least try to join in this month.

[isiolia]

One thing with Bioshock (and Infinite for that matter) is that the "theme" of them is only one level of the narrative. There's also a meta commentary or narrative regarding video games, though it's probably spoiler-ey to get too much into.
Either way, it's been a while since I played Bioshock, but I wouldn't disagree that the general physics/mechanics aren't as smooth and fun to play as other shooters. Could partly be a matter of system requirements or something too.

Still, if it's the unsettling/creepy thing you want, there's SOMA, though it doesn't really fall into the shooter or RPG categories.

[Xeogred]

Well fellas, not surprised at all... but I DO NOT recommend the Steam version of the Remasters.
http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/409710/
http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/409720/

See the scores and reviews for yourselves. Just made about an hour worth of progress in Medical Pavilion and went for another save, crashed. Not worth the headache. I've replayed the original several times through and know the whole game well, so oh well. Was having fun and probably would have went through the whole thing again. I remember having issues with the original PC version as well, or that it needed some config tinkering. The Remaster isn't that great at all with the options, the FOV wouldn't even change until I was actually in the game (as in, the optional slider bar wasn't moving from the main menu before starting). Offers zero controller customizations and there is literally no graphical presets or much to mess with. I can see how some people dislike the flavor of the Remasters too, something about it definitely looked... off. But I can't pinpoint what, everything looked cleaner and sharper, but the lighting and glow was different.

So yeah, stick with the console collection for the Remasters.

[dsheinem]

There's a big Bioshock sale going on for stuff on the Xbox 360/Xbox One: https://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Sear ... y=Bioshock

Welcome to the Circus of Values!

[Nemoide]

I might not actually play Bioshock this month, but I'm inspired to finally order myself a copy of the Ultimate Rapture Edition with the first two games for Xbox 360. I've been curious to play them since I first got a 360 seven years ago!

[ExedExes]

I've been waiting for this month to come. I got the Steam remasters and I just stopped playing the first game after Fort Frolic. I'll pick up and then go to the second game next, hopefully.

For all the complaints and issues I've read so far about stability issues with the Steam versions, I had a far worse time with an original boxed copy that I bought! Installation issues, startup issues, then I gave up when it finally kept crashing in one particular spot preventing me from going any farther. I read this game was very tough to run even when it came out 10 years ago.

It did however, fulfill my desire of a truly immersive FPS. Lots of nice touches from the original SS (melee hand weapon, searching desks and other places for items, audio recordings, etc.)

[Xeogred]

Well, good luck ExedExes... I didn't have a happy experience with it. Lost like an hour worth of progress. I guess it autosaves at points but I don't want to bother.

And yeah, Bioshock needed some tinkering, Bioshock 2 was awful on my old AMD card with issues, and these remasters don't seem good.

Infinite runs extremely well on PC thankfully.

I love this series enough that I'll just pickup the PS4 collection. Always up for an excuse to replay some favorites and I guess get some more trophies.

[Ack]

Bioshock...meh, I got the remastered releases for the first two for free on Steam since I owned the originals, so maybe I'll go back and play it, but it's not a comfortable experience. Even when maxed out, the gunplay never feels satisfying, and the game was obviously designed with consoles in mind. But it did provide the wrench, and for that I am grateful.

Yes, I play FPS, and yes, I use melee weapons in them. In fact, I will often favor melee or close-range weapons that require I get into people's faces. Death by knife is far more humiliating, and melee kills were the norm back when I was in my college computer gaming days. The impact hammer and shield gun of the Unreal Tournament series, the knife of Battlefield games, the ability to bludgeon people to death with smoke grenades or even binoculars in Call of Duty...this is what we strove for. Whenever a new potential member would enter and act like an ass and try to trash talk, we would hunt him down for sport with our blades out. Just so he'd know what it was like when we got our claws into him. I once spent an entire evening stalking only one player, and after he screamed, cursed, and cried, he never came back again. He should have been more polite.

As for Bioshock...it's a game I find that thinks it is more clever than it actually is. If it had ended at a different moment I might think differently, but for me, it will forever be the game that shot itself in the foot of its message. In which I now discuss the story:

The trouble is that the game is a railroad...and that's the meta point of it, to an extent. But then you pass that meta moment where the story reveals that you're simply following instructions with no real freedom, and you're supposed to suddenly have that freedom...and then you don't. A new voice takes over for the old one, and you're right back to wandering similar-looking corridors with the same weapons, doing the same things you were before. The sudden break and freedom you're supposed to feel isn't there; you're right back on the railroad. If the game had ended with the big reveal of the railroad, I'd have considered it a much better game. But no, it tries to go on...and for little more than to give you the potential of a happy ending that I don't think it deserves.

The game really only offers two choices: how do you want to use your gear, and do you want to hurt or save the Eves. The Eve question is the big "moral" decision of the game, but in truth, it's not much of a moral decision. The end result is slight, you'll receive more than enough Adam to make the resource side of the question ultimately unimportant, and so it comes down to whether you as the player are ok with hurting a virtual representation of a mutant little girl...and you can always restart and try the other option, so there is no consequence.

Really, your gear is the more interesting choice; but then, gear always is. How do you go about killing something that must be killed is a better question in an FPS. Because you're in an FPS. Stop kidding yourself, you're playing a genre that is nicknamed "murder sim." Your morality is already darker than the average bear. Part of the point is to kill, so accept it and get on with it.

Now, as for the Randian debate, I have one issue with it, and it's pretty much the same issue with all philosophies: utopian ideals only work with utopic people who are capable of living up to them, and none of us are. Communism, Anarchism,
Democracy, these forms of government (or lack thereof) only truly function perfectly when the people within them are perfect, and they break down when abused by the likes of psychopaths or misunderstood by the masses, which is exactly what has happened in Rapture. Rapture is an accurate reflection, not of the Randian utopia, but of that utopia twisted and manipulated by someone who lacks the empathy necessary to maintain such a utopia. What started as a free-form benevolent dictatorship quickly lost the benevolence. The citizens who populate its faulty streets are no better either, having brought with them the baggage they carried into the city and glutted themselves on genetic mutation to the point they're hardly human.

That is not to say that there is no place for the ideas of Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, John Locke, or William Godwin, just as society has a place for religious teachings such as those of Lao Tzu, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, and so forth. These ideas of utopia are what we are meant to strive for, but they're unattainable. They provide guidelines by which we should try to hold ourselves as best we can, even when that is practically impossible, because we are flawed. Yet it is in overcoming those flaws that we transcend ourselves, and Rapture is a place where that transcendence never occurred. Instead it is a place where the flaws grew and flew open, were twisted and reshaped to suit the needs of a madman, much as we see the twisting of various other philosophies and religions in our world.