True, and true. Story was a B-/C+, combat was unimpressive, rag doll physics were rather hilarious and they totally removed anything resembling ammo management (one type of ammo for every single weapon in the game) as well as any possibility for character specialization.
MOO II was awesome sauce, this is true. (Although it was limited by the fact that once you got stellar converters combat went out the window, and the plasma cannon was better than every weapon further up on the tech tree). MOO III was an abortion of a video game and its makers will burn in hell for their sins. It was the last game that I bought because I trusted the brand, and I will never, ever, ever do so again. And yeah, one time playing was all it took until I actually threw the CD-ROM into the garbage. I didn’t even wait to finish the fucker, I was so disgusted that I destroyed it rather quickly.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, Bioshock was fantastic and I took the similarity more as an homage to SS II, and playing Bioshock provided me with incentive to reinstall
System Shock II and download the Rebirth mod to go along with it. It didn’t age prettily, but it’s still an awesome game all these years later.
Get both and clear your schedule for the foreseeable future. Start with Bioshock- Fallout 3 will annex all your spare time and suck you into its world completely.
You’re definitely not the only one. The first couple levels were ok, then i realized you’re fighting the same 3 to 4 enemies over and over again. The story loses a lot of steam after the midpoint and the last couple of levels were a real chore. The end boss was stupid and very anticlimactic. It’s a real shame because i loved System shock 2 and i was expecting a lot out of Bioshock.
I wouldn’t say that. It’s a great game for the $20 you can pick it up for these days. Compared to Bioshock which is still at least $50 and which you will likely only ever play through once or twice.
But overall Bioshock is still a more technically acomplished game.
System Shock 2 is truly one of the all time greats, in my opinion.
I like both Bioshock and Fallout 3. Bioshock is a much tighter game experience and tells a much better story. Fallout 3 is a sprawling, open ended adventure, but with a pretty disappointing main story. Bioshock is more twitchy, but still not really satisfying as a straight up FPS. Fallout 3 is much more forgiving of poor twitch skills, but even less satisfying as a straight up FPS. Bioshock can be completed in a day, but then that’s it. Fallout 3 can be completed in a few hours, or played for 60 hours still without finding everything.
Both Bioshock and Dead Space are good games, and actually quite similar (I heard DS was originally developed as System Shock 3), but I was more impressed by Dead Space. The sounds are spectacular, the shooting mechanics (going for the limbs instead of the usual headshots) are more interesting, the gameplay is more varied (zero gravity, vacuum sections), there are a wider variety of enemy types/bosses, and seems more replayable to me (with the achievements, bonuses, and new difficulty unlocked after finishing a first run). Although I’d say bioshock has a more original story, dead space has more “tension.” For those of you that have never played or seen Dead Space, just watch the trailer at gametrailers, and tell me if it doesn’t give you chills just seeing that.
There’s some truth here and some highly subjective opinion.
Yes, most of the enemies are the ‘same’ general enemies with slight changes in the skins. There are male and female melee weapon users, male and female gunners, sentry guns, flying copter guns, splicers who have weird glowy meat hooks in their hands and can leap like frogs, and Big Daddies. If someone absolutely requires massive variation in the enemies they face, Bioshock isn’t the game for them.
However, I felt that, if anything, the game picked up its pace after the mid-point, especially
when you start ‘bleeding out’ and have to race to find a cure to the subliminal command that’s slowly killing you
I also thought that the final boss was perfect and one of the better boss battles I’ve ever encountered in a game, bar none. And, to be honest, it was a lot cooler than the penultimate and final bosses in System Shock 2 who were, respectively:
a nerve cluster thingy with three floating targets that were all you had to destroy, and they were ridiculously easy to pop with anti-personnel ammo loaded. And well, a face. Where all you had to do was save three auto-hacking tools, disarm the forcefield and unload on her quickly with pretty much any weapon.
I thought that the final boss in Bioshock was both impressive in context, hard to beat thus inspiring some true white-knuckle gameplay, and fit in perfectly with the story so that it really, well, made sense.
Dead Rising. Seriously? With the retarded AI of those allies you’re trying to rescue. Descriptive text almost impossible to read on a non-HD tv. Useful weapons breaking almost immediatly. The worst save system i’ve seen in years. Not worth even $2, leave it on the shelves.
I disagree. Dead Rising managed a pretty remarkable feat for the time, pushing swarms of individual AIs running through large-ish environments. Bioshock used an off-the-shelf engine with very little in the way of new mechanics. As far as technical accomplishments go, I would say that is one of the few things Bioshock DIDN’T do. Which I think is a Good Thing. It let the developers focus on story and mood instead of wrestling with new technology.
You raise good points FinnAgain, and yes it is my subjective opinion. I’m genuinely glad people liked it (no snark intended, honestly) and i see why they would, it’s a well made game. It just did not turn me on. I played the game on hard and found the last boss incredibly easy, i just used everything i had on him and a minute later it was dead.
I don’t get why Fontaine wanted to take over Rapture after it had become a rapidly flooding hellhole. Nor did i get what his con was, seems to me he gave the citizens exactly what they wanted.
Well, as for taking over Rapture even when it was hell on Earth:
as the ending “evil movie” shows, using the hell that Rapture had become you could take control of nuclear weapons and rule the world, or something.
As for the con:
most sucessful cons rely on giving someone exactly what they want, but then they discover that what they thought they wanted sounded much better on paper. Cons, at the best, take advantage of people looking to get a free lunch. That’s why there’s the saying “You can’t con an honest man”. Part of Fontaine’s con was that people could improve themselves with plasmids. They could, but then they’d be hooked on them and dependent on Fontaine for more Adam. His other con was that Atlas was offering a real option to Ryan and was forming a resistance to resist his tyrany, when really it was a case of “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!”
On a side note, holy mother of mercy, you beat Fontaine in a minute?I bow down and offer incense and burnt animals as tribute to your gaming prowess. That fucker murdered me half a dozen times on ‘normal’ and I had to resort to a hint guide to figure out what I was doing wrong.
On a total side note, I absolutely loved how varied Bioshock could be, especially how it allowed for alternate solutions to similar problems. The first time I realized that I could ignite oil-slicked pools of water and watch splicers burn, I fell in love with the game.
just to clear this up. I dunno where you heard this, but it is most certainly not true. I was at EARS (EA Redwood Shores) when the game started development and even came back and played it a year or so after I’d left. It was developed by a completely different team than SSII, and it was developed to be a space horror game in the vein of Aliens and Event Horizon. The vision of the devs was pretty clear from the get-go, and unlike most EA games they were actually given time and money enough to make it happen. Basically EA threw some money at them gave them a corner to work in and said “have at it, give us a progress report when you’re ready” which is something damn near unheard of at EA
True, but there are a couple of technical flaws that stand out in Dead Rising:
The transponder - While listening to Otis, you were basically helpless. If you defended yourself, contact was lost, Otis scolded you and the communication restarted from the beginning.
The transitions between the zonescould have been smoother.
The one save system is pretty unforgiving.
Bioshock had it’s flaws too though. All in all, both are good games. Bioshock was a good rental and Dead Rising was a good bargain bin game.
I’ll echo the praises that everyone has given for Fallout 3 and Bioshock.
Also, if you haven’t played Resident Evil 4 then be sure to do so at some point. It doesn’t really require too much puzzling and the action and story are fun, fun, fun!
By the way, all this talk of Bioshock prompted me to load it up again to try for the ‘good’ ending. As a result, I’d like to admit that I made a mistake and the enemies aren’t as limited as I suggested earlier. A full list would be:
-melee splicers
-pistol splicers
-machine gun splicers
-grenade throwing ‘ninja smoke’ disapearing splicers
-fireball throwing teleporting splicers
-ceiling crawling, sickle throwing acrobatic cut-you-up-at-close-range splicers
-machine gun turrets
-flamethrower turrets
-rocket launcher turrets
-security cameras which unleash:
-machine gun copters
-Big Daddies which shoot at you and toss prox mines
-Big Daddies which pound on you or use a giant drill to eviscerate you
I’d forgotten a bit of the variation, and on my new play-through, I’d honestly argue that there’s a fair amount of variation.
I’m probably in the minority here who thinks that Dead Space far outshines Bioshock. Sure, both games are brilliant, and I enjoyed playing them both, but no other game (except System Shock 2) has even made me as scared Dead Space. Sure, the initial shock value diminishes a bit after the first few hours, but still this game made me jump my seat more than once.
Bioshock on the other hand, while being beautiful and very immersive, was just too easy. Couldn’t kill that Big Daddy? No worry, just shoot away, get killed, get resurrected, shoot away again, get killed some more, etc, until the baddy is dead. It didn’t even regain some of it’s healt, while you get revitalized and get some free ammo if you were out.
Also, Dead Space’s AI is far superior.
There was a patch released that allowed you to turn off the Vita Chambers.
FTR, I played BioShock on normal before the patch was released and refused to use them. (I reloaded if I died.) The Big Daddy’s were actually fairly easy to kill once you got the chemical thrower. I’d unload 4 electric buck into them and follow that up with electrogel.
Some day I’m going to play it on hard with the patch and turn the vita chambers off.
