I’m a little bit behind in blogging lately. The past few weeks have been unusually hectic for me. For a while, I shifted over to some of my other dork hobbies to try and get some work done on several long term projects.
A Model, Idiot?
I was also pretty busy this week with some ups and downs in my personal life and now I’ve been hit with a pretty heavy sinus infection and soar throat. Currently, I’m using a very powerful drug: pretending-I’m-not-that-sick. Hopefully, my liberal dosages of imagination can help prevent me from paying any doctor bills. Either that, or it will give me pneumonia, but that’s cool too.
Before getting to my thoughts on BioShock, I feel like I need to tell a quick story.
About a week or so ago, I went into my neighborhood unfriendly Game store that also has Stop in its name. (No, not the one out by Target, the one in the mall. I like the one out by Target. At least I like it as much as one could actually like a member of this chain, mainly because one dude that works there is cool, knows his stuff, and one time made fun of the DS Imagine Series with me.) Anyway, back to the evil store in the Mall. The main girl that works there is this enormous, nosy lady that takes the promotion side of her job way too seriously. Apart from doing a really good Jabba the Hutt impersonation, she also is the role model for all annoying video game store employees.
So, the other day I was walking through the store, with a mild interest in buying Infinite Space for the DS. I was the only person in the store and she hefted herself across the room to ask: ‘So, what systems do you play on?’
To which I responded (in an attempt to end the conversation), ‘Oh, pretty much all of them.’
‘Ah, a fellow gamer,’ Jabba the Hutt growled, ‘What kind of games do you like?’
I thought for a moment, then hit back with something that I knew would send her back to her lair behind the counter, ‘I hate them all.’
Mission accomplished. She slithered away, mumbling under her breath. Triumphant, I took my time looking through almost every game in the store before leaving without buying anything – Infinite Space wasn’t in stock.
The mighty Jabba bids you welcome and will gladly pay you the sum of 20,000. He also wants to know if you would like to preorder the next Madden game
So, what’s the point? Later on, I was thinking back to that fairly bold statement and came to an uncomfortable realization: it’s kind of true. These days, I find fewer and fewer games that I actually like. I find flaws in everything and end up nitpicking otherwise good games to death. One would wonder if I even enjoy video games.
Now, with my perpetual pessimism (and utter hatred of First Person Shooters) in mind, understand how profound this next statement is:
I love BioShock, it’s freaking Awesome.
Not to say that there aren’t flaws. It’s just that the flaws are so inconsequential that even my ass-hole-ish self can overlook them and completely enjoy the game.
It should come as no surprise that BioShock is a great game. I’m not the first, or even the thousandth person to say so. But the fact that I, an ornery, anti-FPS, bitter old gamer actually likes it says a lot about the quality of the game.
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Okay, since you asked, here are the very minor issues I had:
1 – The sound was a bit off. A lot of times when receiving transmissions from Atlas, Ryan, Fontaine, etc, the transmission would be drowned out by the sounds from the game, making it hard to hear the information they were giving you. There is probably a way to adjust this in the options, but I didn’t take the time to look, as it didn’t bother me all that much.
2 – The Hack button is the same as the Eve Hypo button. Infrequently, I would rush a turret, stun it with electricity, then (being in a hurry), I would mash the hack button, only to instead use an Eve Hypo. In the meantime the turret would come back to life and start to inject an unhealthy amount of ammunition into me. Inconvenient yes, but it is more likely that this is a reflection of my own weak skill at FPSs rather than a game flaw.
3 – The different levels almost got formulaic. Go through that door to advance, but wait! The door is blocked and you need to do some sort of side/fetch quest through the entire lever to gain access. But even this was okay, as the various quests were for the most part unique and forced you to interact with some of Rapture’s more unusual denizens.
Really, that’s about it. The odd thing is that, much like Uncharted, I don’t really have the urge to replay the game, even with the carrot of seeing a different conclusion if I harvested rather than saved all the Little Sisters. Maybe I’ll go through it again down the road, but currently, it’s going back on the shelf.
