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BioShock 2 Released
BioShock 2 launched today for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Windows, ending the wait for a sequel to the original 2007 blockbuster. The events in BioShock 2 take place 10 years after the story from the original game. This time around, players control a prototype Big Daddy in an attempt to overthrow the new leader of Rapture. Early reviews for the game are quite strong, though the developers were prepared for fan backlash over some of the changes they made. The Guardian's Nicky Woolf praises the new storyline, and adds that "there is a fundamentally excellent shooter here too, with some of the best combat dynamics in the business." Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Alec Meer also had good things to say about the combat: "I can't stress this enough – as a game about shooting people, it's very responsive and very rewarding." However, Meer expressed disappointment that some of the impressive new concept art didn't get used and that the story and environment couldn't match the novelty of the original game. "Part of Rapture's great wonder was that it was just believable enough, if you squinted your brain a bit (or a lot), but this lathers on so much wild sci-fi that it's much harder to connect to it. The Sisters are elevated from horrifying genetic/psychological experiment into all-powerful messiah figures capable of pulling any old deus ex machina out of the hat. Making them into so much reduces the power and the sadness of what they are. As a result, the concept feels too exhausted to ever be used again."
Wow, a huge three years between games.
You guys never played Zelda, Metroid, Diablo or StarCraft, have you?
What kind of DRM does the PC version have?
I never bought the first game, due to the draconian DRM. By the time it was eased, there were so many other great games on my list to purchase and play that I never got back around to Bioshock. The end result: They lost my business.
I really enjoyed the first game. It had a lot of new elements thrown into it. Far from being a straight-up shooter, there was quite a bit of exploration required. Some areas reminded me of Thief for the PC. I liked the options to "level up" your character, and the moral choice to harvest / not to harvest the Little Sisters. (Although I didn't realize that it was all-or-nothing with that, so while I only harvested 1 Little Sister [the first one] I got the "bad" ending.)
Graphically, the first game felt a little dated, even at launch. But it was a great example of what a great story and plot arc can do to overcome graphics.
That said, I'm not looking forward to the sequel at all. I'm going to skip this one. Meer reflects the same thoughts I had when I first learned of a Bioshock 2: "Part of Rapture's great wonder was that it was just believable enough, if you squinted your brain a bit (or a lot), but this lathers on so much wild sci-fi that it's much harder to connect to it."
I don't think the follow-up will hold up. Part of that is that too many gamers (like me) would keep comparing a sequel to an original game that was (in many ways) groundbreaking. And it's awfully hard to live up to that.
Part of Rapture's great wonder was that it was just believable enough, if you squinted your brain a bit (or a lot), but this lathers on so much wild sci-fi that it's much harder to connect to it.
I'm a little bit afraid of the person who thought Bioshock was "believable".
That is all.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
If it's anything like "rogue" or "nethack" crossed with "tetris" and "super mario" ... I'm ready to play!
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
What's the story with DRM on this game?
I thought it was a prequel?
'Those are my principles. If you don't like them, well. .
twitter.com/scld
George Bush was in office at the time and if I believed half the stories about him that I heard wouldn't he still be there? Let alone Cheney.
Never under estimate what someone can or does believe. You cannot out weird reality
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
who thought the original was boring?
Hands down, System Shock 2 was better in every way than Bioshock (well, OK, graphically Bioshock is far better but then you'd expect that given the progression of engine abilities).
Most specifically, I like the background of Bioshock BUT the twist in the middle of the story really pissed me off, at least the way they handled it from user interaction. They were going somewhere subtle and then all of the sudden you have no choices (despite supposedly the game being about choice) and a Mu-Ha-Ha villain lacking only a twirly mustache.
That's not to say at some point I will not play Bioshock 2, I just have trouble really putting my heart into it after Bioshock was such a weak game compared to the story and gameplay of System Shock...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I really couldn't get into BioShock. I had just played Dead Space and they both felt like essentially the same game and same story line. You arrive, transport is destroyed, find yourself thrown into environment overrun with monsters, get your prompts from a "friendly" on the radio, etc. I made it through the first chapter, then quit. Oh, and the sound was annoyingly "off" somehow, maybe not properly mapped to the sprite's distance in the background.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
They were going somewhere subtle and then all of the sudden you have no choices (despite supposedly the game being about choice) ...
To me it seemed obvious the game was about the illusion of free will, serving as a rather well-executed illustration of determinism. Given that video games do have the power to completely control our actions within them, its message was uniquely suited to its medium.
Who cares?
Are the physics once again inexplicably capped at 30fps?
Something that was never explained by the devs about Bioshock 1, was the 30 frames per second physics cap.
There was / is literally no way around it, and for those who haven't played it on PC, having a game run at 50-60 fps and the physics much lower, it's an annoying and immersion breaking error.
Screw the critics. I love BioShock. The storyline, the drama, the graphics, the subtle all-pervading insanity.
How are deformed mask wearing cannibals subtle? Seems pretty obvious the level of insainty.
"Ooh, the concept appears unbalanced." ... "Waah, it's not as believable as the original." ... You know what? Put down the MacBook and the horn-rimmed glasses, back away from the Frappuccino, slowly, and STFU with all the art-school metaphysical crap.
I fail to see what a Mac Book, coffee products, or the rest of that bigotry has to do with the game.
The original kicked ass, pure and simple. How many other games offer that combination of determination and sadness, beautiful scenery and horrifying monsters, fast action and beautiful cutscenes?
99% of most games. I can't think of a Final Fantasy game for instance that didn't provide everything you just mentioned.
The environments, the puzzles, the music and sound effects - BioShock created an amazing world to rival Alice and Firefly, and engaged the player immediately and completely. Enough plot twists to make M. Night Shyamalan green with envy, culminating with finding out the truth about the voice on the radio, and the awesome "Man Vs Slave" cutscene.
The story is basic and most saw the double cross in the first 5 minutes. Atlas was far too much in the know to be as benign has he claimed to be.
The scenery is standard 30,40,50 thematics used in Fallout and a variety of other post-apocalyptic settings shooting for a Film Noir feel (see Dark City as a good example of the reuse of that era for effect.) I kept waiting for a Pip Boy ad.
The graphical elements were further more a re-use of Jules Vern crap and the Little Sister could be either The Stepford Wives or Village of the Damn. Take your pick. Both rather one dimensional.
The time line is inconsistent with more anacronisms within it's own lore is was barely tolerable.
The degeneration of the Plasmid users was nothing more then a set piece of zombie fantasy. The quickest and CHEAPEST way in a story to detach from conventional society is to use "The Zombie" be it fast running cannibals (28 Days) to the slow lumbering doomwalkers (Night of the Living Dead) they are cheap tools used to remove conventional society (almost as cheap as a nuclear apocalypse) from the world. Add in some uncanny valley-like responses from the audience by keeping them semi-human (rather then 80% rotting we want to unnerve the audience by keeping them 'fresh') for cheap effects.
The character development was non-existent save for a single woman pining over the leader described through audio tapes. Hell Borderlands had twice the character development with just the Tannis character alone.
Don't know about the critics, but I personally have enough faith in the sequel to have pre-ordered it. Especially considering all the bonus stuff that's included. :D
Sadly video games have come a long way in the ability to tell a story... but they have a long way to go. Enjoy it for what it is, a game. It is far from literature that people will be reading\playing in a 100 years...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Bioshock is/was an amazing game, one of the few gays to truly elicit an emotional response from me while playing. It remains the only game I've unlocked every achievement for on the 360, as I wanted to find everything in the world. The play-through where I doggedly hunted down every audio diary in the game really made me a fan, as once you hear all the stories being told (with excellent voice actors) by the end of the game, you can actually start to feel very sorry for the splicers you have to kill. Bioshock is more of a tale of tragedy, less so of vengeance and war, which is what most of the FPS genre is about.
A special mention also has to be made for Sander Cohen, who is one of the most memorable game characters ever. Playing through Fort Frolic still creeps me out, and the audio diary with him reading his poem "The Wild Bunny" is one of the most chilling pieces of game audio ever.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Why exactly is a generic sequel being featured on slashdot?
Wow, obviously I meant "games" not "gays". I wish Slashdot had an edit feature. :)
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
that wasn't THAT obvious :)
Actually M. Night Shyamalan wrote Bioshock 2's script but it was canned after they found out he was one of the masterminds behind 9/11
I fully agree that we should put all these Randroids adrift in the middle of the ocean so they won't be forced to use the roads, military, fire departments and schools they don't want to pay for.
...but despite glowing reviews, I couldn't quite get into it. The atmosphere is very polished. The little girls are quite spooky and they're the highlight of the game by far. What I did not like so much was the actual combat. The worst thing about it is that what you're really fighting is the scarcity of resources (I was playing on hard). The challenge thus is not killing the creatures, but saving money. There are several things you have to keep track of, and you're constantly out of all of them. The water effects are best in class, but that's about it. The engine brings nothing new. Crysis, a 3 year old game, is more revolutionary even today than BioShock 2. I wanted to like it but in the end I just gave up.
It has no support on PC for a gamepad. This is after Bioshock 1 ONLY supported the 360 controller on PC, which required purchase of a usb dongle to work (wirelessly). I'm returning my copy as I'm not nerd enough where I enjoy sitting at my desk, playing video games with keyboard and mouse, when I could be sitting in my living room playing w/a controller on my HDTV (and no, i don't own a console and won't buy one)
...why are you comparing the two? Even though they had many of the same people working on them and shared thematic similarities, they were two very different games.
Although the mechanisms by which you leveled up differed, they seemed really similar to me - Plasmids/Psionic powers, hacking skills you could improve, hacking into turrets, scripted events... some of that is common now, but the main point I am making is there's nothing Bioshock did that was really revolutionary because the elements that made Bioshock fun, System Shock 2 had them and often had richer variants of them.
To me they felt very, very similar only SS2 was scarier, offered a richer upgrade tree, more interesting protagonists, and a world that made more sense as you were wandering through it.
I understand they flattened some things out to work better on a console version, so I don't even mind some of it being simplified - I just think they could have made choices that were not as much of a compromise and made the story better too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To me it seemed obvious the game was about the illusion of free will, serving as a rather well-executed illustration of determinism
SPOILER SPOILER STOP READING IF THIS GETS MODDED UP UNLESS YOU HAVE FINISHED BIOSHOCK .. ..
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Of course it was. And that's what made me most angry, the fact that they fumbled that totally with the Ryan killing scene.
If they truly wanted to illustrate you had no choice other than to kill Ryan because of your programming, they should have given you LESS CHOICE in what you could do at that exact moment. I wandered around trying to kill myself, trying to break out, trying to do anything other than kill Ryan. In the end, I COULD have just sit there forever. I spent a few hours trying. You could be a pacifist if you want to, and that felt wrong.
I would have preferred almost anything else to that - even just a cutscene that showed me killing him. Far better would be to see my own on-screen hand slowly coming up, bringing my selected plasmids and other weapons to bear beyond my control... every movement you made only allowed to be towards him, only able to turn slightly away until the inevitable stroke of bees or gun or what have you that that did him in. Even shooting anywhere and then having the bullet ricochet for the kill would have been amusing and driven home that main thematic point so much better that all along you were not really under your own control.
But the story beyond that point failed for me as well. Then I had the suggestion switch turned off (I think, I seem to remember they operated on me). So then really why did I go off to kill the dude? The Sisters kind of wanted me to, but I had no really compelling reason to do so other than to progress in the game. Then I was just playing any other shooter, or that is what it felt like... where in System shock I had a personal compelling reason (from the character's standpoint) to be playing that sucker until the very end and defeating who I had to at every point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone have a torrent for the first game with *ALL* the DRM stripped out?
I actually picked it up on sale for $5 but I never installed it because you *still* have to let it talk to their servers even though they'll graciously let you install it as many times as you want. (I was planning to plug the serial number into steam like I did for Half Life 1, but apparently that only works for 1st party games on Steam)
At least I cost them money by making them pay somebody to talk to me on their support number. Maybe I'll call again and waste more of their time.
What a twist!
I fail to see what a Mac Book, coffee products, or the rest of that bigotry has to do with the game.
I'm guessing he hit the nail on the head.
I came up with a tiny, tiny subset of that list but yours is really comprehensive and really lays out the great number of similarities.
One thing, although there is not exactly a skill tree the way you acquire new plasmids is along the same lines of how you would gain points to acquire new skills, it just means you can sort of adapt your "equipped skill tree" along the way, though only to a certain extent as you cannot afford the whole tree. I am not sure if I like that less or more yet, though the SS2 approach felt more "real" (or as real as a videogame can feel, anyway).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We just saw a reboot of Star Trek, and Spiderman is already about to reboot too...
Why don't truly classic video games like System Shock get reboots like movies and TV? I mean, take the same story and tweak it a bit. I think companies figure people have played through it already so they would not buy it - but aren't there about two whole gaming generations around that have never even heard of System Shock? And if you sprinkle a few surprises in there I'll be just as happy to play though a great story again - not to mention I remember very few specifics, but you could even give the most memorable parts new twists also...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The developers did not include widescreen ratios...again.. No widescreen, no thanks.
Razor 1911 proudly presents:
BioShock 2
(C) 2K Games
Date: 2010-02-08
Game Type : KillEm All
Size: 1 DVD
Protection: SecuROM+XLive+PA
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5346628/BioShock_2-Razor1911
Professional reviews are paid for, film at 11 rated highly by sellout monthly.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
...if they had allowed you to play as a Little Sister, the target of every Splicer, crawling through the ducts for safe transit, popping out here or there to try and drain some Adam from a corpse, scampering around various Big Daddy's for protection (or deliberately drawing enemies to Big Daddys to get them killed), perhaps being able to set traps or sabotage things.
I suppose a scenario like that would've made the game more puzzle-like rather than a shooter, but I think it still would've been pretty interesting to play.
"Bioshock is/was an amazing game, one of the few gays to truly elicit an emotional response from me while playing."
Alright admit it. You have a thing for guys in diving suits. :)
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Translating:
"Fuck you. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Fuck your mother, your father, your dog and your cat. Fuck your house. Fuck your job. Fuck your car, fuck your computer, fuck your gaming habit. Fuck you for buying our games. We hate you and we feel superior to you in every way conceivable. Also, we don't trust you.
Because, you know, we felt that was better for you guys all around."
Stories in games are a tricky thing. On one hand, you want a cool story with unforseeable twists (else, well, a story is boring. For reference, see 99% of the cookie-cutter scripts used today where you know after 10 minutes how the rest of the movie will run). The story should leave the hero in situations where the audience keeps wondering how the heck he's gonna get out of that mess.
On the other hand, you want to shape this story and drive it. Now, if the twists are unforseeable and hard to predict, it's virtually impossible to do just that. Unless you pull one deus ex machina out of your ass after another that drives the story for the player. If you don't have any idea how to get out of the whole creek, it's frustrating because, well, you're stalled.
And we didn't even touch the topic of "multiple ways to solve something" and "outcome based on player decision".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I really honestly wonder what Freud would think of that one...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Perhaps you would be interested in my game reviews then? I try to approach them as somewhere between a game reviewer and a game player.
What? What does that even begin to mean? Game critics have a tendency to inflate game quality but the reasons why are subject to speculation, conjecture and conspiracy theories. I do know know what kind of extra perspective a game critic might add that a game player hasn't.
Film critics tend to look at movies very differently from the average moviegoer because they've seen a lot more movies. It's a lot harder to impress a person who's seen thousands of films than someone who has seen a few hundred without trying to discern for quality. Imagine a teen girl whose maybe two hundred movies, mostly of the teen-girl shit variety and the best thing she's seen is probably "The Breakfast Club." Now imagine someone who loves films, seeks out the best movies to watch, gets a job as a film critic and watches every new release from that moment on. Is it any surprise that one of them loves "13 Going on 30" and the other thinks it's shit?
What's bizarre is that the experience of being game critics for years doesn't make them harder to impress. Rather, we see nearly the opposite where critics kiss the ass of every triple-A release to come along. Actual gamers who spend their money on expensive new games and spend hours getting involved in them seem to be much better at analyzing the quality of these games but there's one more tangentially related phenomenon I think is interesting enough to throw in this rant that started with me asking what the hell you meant when you said something weird.
The older gamers with lots of experience tend to love a handful of older games and feel like nothing can compare to them. The people who love off-putting games like Deus Ex and X-Com are unlikely to see anything come out that pleases them the way their old favorite did. What are others to make of these opinions? Do these older gamers have experience enough so that we should expect to trust their opinions? I dunno. Maybe it just means Deus Ex is the best game of all time and everything since is simply worse.
STFU with all the art-school metaphysical crap.
He should have said film school crap. Your assessment is accurate, would you kindly pat yourself on the back for recognizing that 99.999% of everything produced is derivative.
Like the concept of "an original thought". Look at art and culture since the dawn of recorded history and almost everything is just one regurgitated idea after another.
I think what allows some people to enjoy these kind of games more than others is not that they couldn't pick them apart and point out every flaw, borrowed concept, etc, but they choose to immerse themselves in the world and allow their own imagination to run wild as if being there, "Holy shit I'm trapped underwater. I'm scared.. What can I do to survive?" Taking on the struggle of the character, integrating themselves in the story. The developer can't do that for you.