I am getting a little tired of the game. It’s just becoming a total grind. Kill Big D, rescue little sis, gather and fight off the swarm twice, kill the screamer, lather, rinse, repeat. And the story is almost non-existent. Bleh. I am at Dionysus Park, somebody tell me it gets better. I’m on the verge of switching from Hard to Easy and just blasting thru to the end.
I’m a wuss, I play on easy anyway, I’m just here for the scenery.
Here is how I explained Bioshock in another thread. It’s basically John Galt from Atlas Shrugged built this magnificant underwater city and went as crazy as Howard Hughes. The entire population turned into screeching lunatics trying to kill each other. For some reason, there are vending machines everywhere that dispense weapons, ammo and addictive genetically enhanced superpowers. You also have creepy little girls wandering around with mindless armored gigantos. And you are trapped inside all of this.
Bioshock 2 is the same thing, except now you are one of the giantos and the John Galt/Howard Hughes antagonist has been replaced by his political and idealogical arch-rival, a manipulative psychologist with socialist leanings.
Hold down the bumper buttons (XBox360). It brings up the weapon/plasmid select wheel and pauses the game so you don’t have to cycle through “camera”, “hack tool”, “out of fuel drill”, “other inneffective weapon” to get to the one you want.
I have to say one of my favorites is the spear gun. Nothing beats shooting some crazed splicer through the face and sending him across the room into the wall.
Some advice with collecting ADAM. Set up a mini-turret and use the Hypnotize 2 plasmid to bring more guns on your side.
I’m on a PC so I don’t have a ‘bumper’ button.
Your description reminds me though. I’d be amused if I wasn’t so annoyed: There I am battling a hoard of brute splicers and alpha-model daddies (all fully researched) when suddenly I run out of whatever I’m firing. So I take a photo of them.
I TAKE A BLOODY PHOTO! What flippin good will that do!?
Then I try to ‘remote hack’ the brute splicer.
Excelent game, but I think the weapon selection dynamics could have had more thought applied to them.
You do know that the 1-8 keys are your weapons (instant select) and the F1-F8 keys are your plasmids (instant select), no? No bumper button needed; just remember to visit a gene bank after you get a plasmid upgrade, or it moves it to the end of the list.
But compare the size of a keyboard to the size of a gamepad. The 1-9 f1-f12 keys are all the way over there. Not ideal if you don’t want to take your eyes off the screen.
And each weapon has different ammo, which makes it worse. I’ve often wasted armour piercing ammo on splicers, anit-personel ammo on big daddies, trap rivets fired directly at enemies (when they are much more useful as traps).
It’s nice that there is a range of weapons, each weapon having a range of ammo. But I’m afraid that makes playing the game in tight spots rather difficult and frustrating (often having to find cover or stand there like a lemon while you click, click, click, to the right weapon then click, click click to the right ammo, and possibly also click, click click to the right plasmid because you needed a different plasmid prior to the current tight spot)
Using the 1-9 and f keys is good for games when you are able to settle on a preferred weapon. You can memorize the key number. But this game demands you switch weapons all the time for the different needs of the game. So you either learn about 15 placements (plasmids and weapons) or you have to cycle them.
At the very least the camera and hack tool should not have been in the ‘weapons’ group. they should have had their own keys.
I’ve never actually read Atlas Shrugged, but I’ve used the Howard Hughes comparison before.
I have to say that I was still surprised that the vending machines were stocked with ammunition and supplies after 10 years, too…
Beat it tonight on hard with re-vitalize chambers turned off. Died twice, once I was being careless, the other I missed the obvious thing I had to do to move on and just ran out of plasmids, then health kits.
I gotta say I liked it a lot. If it wasn’t for the very cool twist to the first one I would have declared this one my favorite. Even though the first one had that feeling of entering a new and different universe, this trip to rapture didn’t really feel like “been there done that”. It kept up my interest and revealed an even darker side to the world if that’s possible.
I wonder how different the endings are. Mine was:
I spared the singer lady, killed the two others, rescued all the little sister. I think I died at the end after making it onto the platform, but I saw Eleanor spare her mother. She then took out some of my Adam so that she would carry me with her.
So where do you think they will take this?
It looks like people could be brought back to life as our character shows, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone like Ryan come back. Perhaps in some new place- mayhaps the utopia everyone was looking for to start with? Maybe we’ll get to play as a big sister (the character’s daughter).
Alright, I’m tired, falling asleep. Great game!
I actually read it after playing the original Bioshock as most of the reviews seemed to describe the game as having some pretty heavy Ayn Rand references. For example the antagonists name is Andrew Rand and his whole Rapture city is essentially a Objectivist paradise gone wrong. In the second game there is a recording of him debating with his rival and he quotes “A=A” which is taken directly from the John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged.
I would describe the setting of both Atlas Shrugged and Bioshock (and Fallout 3 for that matter) as a sort of “Welcome to the World of TOMORROW!!!” sort of futurist 1940s/50s. A bit more sleek and art-deco than “steampunk” but the same sort of anachronistic aethetic.
Mark Meltzer question:
Did you have to kill him or did you find him dead. On the PS3 I found him dead under some stairs. Also did you kill Gil or let him live?
Soooo, now that some of you guys have gone through single-player, can anyone give the multiplayer a whirl and let me know how it is?
Xbox 360, and I definitely killed him. He was the 3rd Big Daddy - a Rumbler IIRC - in Fontaine Futuristics. At least I killed a Rumbler that had a diary on him where Lamb gave him the choice of death or becoming a BD. I let Gil and Grace live, and killed Stanley, and still got the “best” ending, but didn’t get the “Savior” achievement.
I played it for a short time. It has potential but I wanted to play one-player so I didn’t go back to it.
I’ve been playing multi-player for a few days, but have only done “Survival of the fittest” so far. The matches seem kind of frantic but are fun, with options for still advancing your character even if you are out-skilled or out-gunned by your opponents who have superior weapons/plasmids.
I often have this little thought in the back of my head: “If I don’t buy the game the second it comes out, and don’t spend that first second playing multiplayer, am I ceding control to the other folks that are honeing their skills online?”
My online nickname needs to be “cannonfodder” or “ScorePadder”
I’ve spend about 30 minutes playing the online part of the game and there’s some neat stuff there to explore, but I spent it at near the bottom of the scoresheet.
This mindset kept me out of multiplayer games for years.
I decided to change that mindset for Modern Warfare 2. I can now consistently place in the top 3 in free for all games and win almost every cage match I play (against similarly ranked players).
The new mindset I adopted was this: If you are new you are bound to get beaten a lot. The only way to get to the other side of that is to go through it.
- Keep playing.
- Get beaten.
- Play more.
- Get beaten.
- Play more.
- Repeat steps 1-5 for as long as it takes.
And remember - you’re not alone. There will be other ‘noobs’ in the games to hone your own skills on.
ETA: Some games have a system that will try to put you into matches with similarly skilled players. I can see this happening in MW2, as I get better my opponents seem to be harder. I don’t know if BS2 has the same system but I reckon it does.
A funny glitch happened the other night, on multi-player. While waiting for enough people of single-digit rank for a game, the algorithm kept trying to mash us in with a bunch of people who were level 30+, probably all in a party. Once enough people are found for a game, there is a voiceover that says something to the effect of, “There’s no going back now. Prepare yourself!” So for about 10 minutes, the 30+ chunk would get added, “There’s no going back…”, chunk removed. Chunk added, “There’s no going back…”, chunk removed, chunk added, “There’s no going back…”…
Yes, I’m easily entertained.
My Ukranian copy of the game arrived yesterday. It looks like an official copy, but all the writing on the box is Russian, and when I tried to install it, I think it was asking for a CD key, which of course, the box did not contain.
So, I downloaded it off of Steam instead. The whole Windows Live thing just fucking sucks. I don’t want to play it online, I just want to play singleplayer, however it looks like you can’t save your games without creating a online profile, so I did.
I got to a scene in the second map (Atlantis Express?..the train station after your underwater tour) and I had to throw a switch to open some random gate somewhere, it got real dark…aaaaand then the game crashed.
Is Bioshock 2 known to be buggy? I hate crashes, especially once you get some time invested. It just makes me not want to play again until a later day.