That’s right, I’m playing Bioshock 2.
I initially had my doubts, as I hadn’t particularly liked being a Big Daddy in the final phase of the first game. Happily, they dispensed with the distorted view through the helmet porthole, which had been my main criticism in I. Subject Delta is pretty spry, too. He gets around just as well as Jack ever did, despite the weight and bulk of his suit.
The drill effing rocks and I love me the shit out of doing a daddy dash. The other weapons vary from pretty good (rivet gun and spear gun) to useless waste of time even when upgraded (shotgun). The tweaked versions of the familiar plasmids really tickled me. Great hilarity can especially be derived from creative use of a fully upgraded cyclone trap. The tonics? There seem to be an awful lot of them that one need never bother with. I guess their inclusion simply as items to find is reason enough.
The new designs for the splicetards are…disturbing. They were just kind of cartoonishly shizzed up in the first game. They’re genuinely oogie now. The writers kicked up the level of perversion and sexual violence among them as well.
The overall emotional vibe I get from this game is sadness. Everything is the result of grand dreams that went to smash. Fontaine, Lamb and Suchong are, perhaps, the only characters who were evil fucks purely for the sake of being evil fucks. Even they, though, didn’t set out with the goal of creating an undersea Hell full of tormented psychopaths. Mostly, the denizens of Rapture were, in their pre-splicetard days, guilty of nothing more than being too ambitious.
Usually, I run through shooter games like a kill-crazed weasel on crack. It was a point of pride for me to leave no Barneys or scientists alive in Half-Life for example. Yet, the Bioshocks bring out the softie in me. I’ve never harvested a little sister or even let one die in the proving grounds. In 2, I’ve spared NPC’s where the option presented itself. In retrospect, though, I may reload last night’s save and kill Stanley Poole. He was such a reprehensible lowlife in his treatment of his daughter that maybe I was mistaken in sparing him.
Got to say, as video games go, the Bioshocks have the best, most emotionally involving story I’ve yet encountered.