I finished the game on Wednesday and started replaying it again last night on hard, just getting through the opening act. The attention to detail is quite impressive, and a couple of things I hadn’t noticed on my first playthrough stood out (since I’m going to take my time this go):
when you first get to the lighthouse, look at the wreckage. The large part of the plane, the tail section, will slowly sink until it’s completely gone
likewise, in the first section, there’s a spot where you board an elevator, right before the baby carriage scene. If you stay in the room before boarding the elevator, the ceiling cracks and water starts pouring in. There’s a limit, but it goes from a dry floor to reaching about knee level, enough to make a sandwich board start floating
I loved the spoilered bit (after recovering from almost having a heart attack). The game keeps throwing out little things ranging from big “Boo” moments, to losing vision for a moment (due to steam pipes bursting, lights flickering, water blur) and afterward you think “hey, was that corpse there a second ago” that keeps the tension amped.
And I’m enjoying hacking everything in my path. Especially the health stations. The cost decrease is nice, but one time I was re-tracing my path and ran into a new batch of splicers in an area with a hacked station. One got hurt enough that he ran over to the station, and some poison / acid sprayed into his face, dropping him. And since I’m poking my nose into every corner (instead of just following the goal arrow), I’ve picked up a couple engineering tonics that lower the hack level (which I think reduces the number of short-circuit pieces on the board) and slows the flow. Rapture will phear my leet skillz.
I’ve heard that there have been some traffic problems on 2k’s authentication server that’s been causing activations to fail. The only trick I’ve seen mentioned so far is that any “O” in the serial number is going to be the letter “O” not the number “0”. And the code’s case-sensitive, and don’t forget to type in the dashes (as opposed to just about every other CD-key software I’ve seen that handles that for you). Unless you hear different, my only idea is to keep trying.
Yep, it was the server’s problem, not mine. Luckily once I found a forum that was onto the problem, the last post was “it’s working, everyone try now!!”. And it worked.
A question;
[spoiler]I’ve killed Steinman, but I didn’t end up going into one area of the dentist’s office… it was key-locked, but I didn’t think it was by the key that I got from Steinman (I know that was to open the emergency access, but it might also work there). Anyone know if i’m able to get in there yet? Am I missing anything?
Oh, and who’s killing and who’s saving? Two saves so far… bloody hell those BD’s are fast. :eek: [/spoiler]
Spoilered, for those who’d rather figure it out themselves…
[spoiler] This is the dentist office with the broken window and the corpse hanging through it next to the locked door, right? Look through the window and you’ll see an access key hanging on a column. It’s too far to reach with your arms, but you recently obtained a psychic power that might come in “handy”…
Just make sure to hang onto it (keep the left button held down) and hit the “E” key (or whatever it says to “pick up”) instead of flinging it away into the room. I did that the first time and couldn’t get it back, so I had to revert back to an earlier save.[/spoiler]
First: The entire score. MP3s. Free. http://downloads.2kgames.com/bioshock/BioShock_Score.zip
Second: There’s a downloadable artbook, too.
Third: There’s no rootkit in Bioshock, that’s a lie.
Fourth: The copy protection has been increased to 5 uses, and there’s a physical uninstall tool.
Well I just finished and I’ve got to say it wasn’t bad. I wouldn’t rank it among the greatest games ever but I don’t feel I’ve wasted my time.
The good stuff:
Better level design than I’ve seen in a long time. These maps feel more like actual environments than paintball arenas. Too many FPS lately have levels that are chamber, then hall, and repeat until you get to the end of the game. Bioshock has sprawling environments that go everywhere. I can’t even think of a “How the hell did they get to work?” problem with any of the levels (where someone has to work in a location that involves them jumping over lethal obsticals, sealing themselves behind brick walls, and other absurdities).
The art design is exceptional. We are at a point where the design is more important than the number of polygons and effects that can be layered. There’s some great moments in the game that work specifically because so much effort has gone into getting the art right.
You’ve got a lot of options and few of them are obvious solutions. All of the weapons are effective, all of the plasmids are effective, and you have to choose what works for you. In a lot of games the optimal solution for the player is simple and that’s not the case here. Those multipliers stack up fast and you can hardly go wrong with just picking what you like.
The sound track is wonderful. There’s a great mix of well known tunes and more obscure ones. I’m sick to death of driving electric guitar scores, especially in games were it isn’t appropriate to the setting. The use of music was very effective.
The bad stuff:
Hacking is way too simple. Perhaps its a misspent youth playing Pipe Dream but the only time I was even challenged was when there was only one path through, you had to change the first tile to do it, and the dead ends were hidden back a ways. Just click on as many tiles as you can to expose them and then shift them around. It was still time consuming and in the end it felt more annoying than interesting.
On that subject why were they calling it “hacking” anyway? The term is an anachronism in the setting since it didn’t really come into use for this context for another decade.
The ghosts were completely pointless. In System Shock 2 the ghosts were everywhere and were well integrated into the setting and story telling. In Bioshock they’re just kind of there. They could have easily been ditched without losing anything.
The flip side of that is the game feels barren since we only get to know a small handful of people in the audio logs. If they’re going to use that tool then I wish they had gone all the way and given us a broader scope of contacts.
All in all, not bad. The gameplay was nothing new or special but I’ll given them credit for making such an engaging world.
Some weird things have happened to me in this game and I was wondering if they’ve happened to anyone else. Lately, my energy bars have disappeared, another time I can’t change weapons and now, my character is invincible. Hell, I killed a Big Daddy with a wrench! Also, there was a point in the game where an enemy was supposed to attack me in order to further along the plot, but…well…he’s not there. Has anybody else ran into these glitches?
I’m a total camera whore at this point. I’ll even let myself take some damage in order to set up the best shots I can.
I’m finding it a tad too easy myself I never die my money is maxed out and the majority of my weapons are at full ammo. I spend most of my time hacking turrets and setting things on fire. I guess it’s just perfect for my playstyle where I naturally conserve every bullet and item I find until an emergency.
My favorite moments so far have been mostly abusing the Big Daddy plasmid where he protects me. Nothing like setting up a Big Daddy fight then killing the winner. Once I had one following me around while I looked for a splicer I was supposed to kill for the artist missions I noticed the Big Daddy kicking the hell out of a splicer but ignored it. Suddenly I got a mission update he had killed the boss while I didn’t fire a shot. Sadly though this can get you into trouble if while he’s following you he walks over a booby trap he turns on you needless to say if you’re not ready for it it can have fatal consequences for you.
The only glitch I’m running into is when the high detail textures don’t kick in when they’re supposed to. It happens all the time I’ll see a blurry ugly mess that doesn’t change until I stare at it for 5 seconds. Sometimes it never seems to change very annoying.
BTW I’m playing the PC version I had no problems with the validation though it annoys me I have to activate it online but still have to play with the DVD in the drive. I hope the Nvidia drivers get better they seem a little flaky when playing other games (my wife has had some serious issues with the Sims 2 not rendering houses properly) My system isn’t the greatest but I’m playing @ 1280 x 1040 everything set to high. No slowdown if I keep shadow maps off and only a little stuttering with it on.
I didn’t like the camera, I thought it was a weak implementation of the concept (same for the “inventing” which might as well just be called “shopping list”). I found that you could maximize the research very quickly by just working it like the paparazzi and just shooting as many photos as possible. Since film is common and cheap, I capped all of the research right around Hephaestus.
Beat the game last night, but I ran into a bug right at the end that really undercut the enjoyment. I’ve got the 360 version, and was trying to get all the achivements on my first play through. One of the achievements is to find all the tonics in the game, and one of the tonics can only be received if you save all the Little Sisters, instead of killing them. Well, I saved them all, got the achievement for that, but no tonic. Where the tonic was supposed to be, I got four medkits, instead. Dammit. Closest I’ve come yet to getting 100% gamerscore on a 360 game, and had it snatched from me at the last possible moment.
Other than that, great game. I don’t really mind having to play through a second time to get that last 50 points, but I wanted my next one to be totally evil. Now I’ve got to play the good guy again to get that last tonic, assuming it shows up when it’s supposed to this time.
Yesterday I thought this game was awesome. Now I think it’s both awesome and shitty. I’m almost done with it and have recently come to the conclusion that the combat just isn’t that fun. The lack of a death penalty, specifically in that the enemies maintain their health levels, ruins any sort of tension in the battles. Killing an enemy is accompanied by a relief that an annoyance is removed rather than a feeling that a true victory was achieved. It also makes more sense to die than use your health kits and hypos. That is just plain bad design.
I did 100% save and didn’t get a tonic in my last bundle either. It was a bunch of ammo in my case.
For me it was the endgame that brought the game down the levels just got longer there was nothing new to see after awhile just the same splicers only with more health. It really needed something new to make me want to wade through that last bit.
Why conserve the kits? I easily left 70% of the money in the game behind because I was always at $500 after awhile I could just ignore whatever happened to me because I knew I could always refill at a station or a vending machine. That I think is the biggest flaw in the combat there was no need for a strategy after you got the right upgrades. Even Big Daddy fights only required a little bit of thought and if you had enough money to buy the right ammo you could nuke them pretty easy. That’s a pretty big change from the first level where you were scrounging for ammo and had to make every shot count.
I wonder if playing it on hard will change my mind? I’m thinking about trying again but upping the difficulty though I’m afraid it’ll only make the game more tedious instead of giving it a more tactical edge.
And since I’m poking my nose into every corner (instead of just following the goal arrow), I’ve picked up a couple engineering tonics that lower the hack level (which I think reduces the number of short-circuit pieces on the board) and slows the flow. Rapture will phear my leet skillz. 
