Some spoiler-ish speculation, regarding the origins of Vigours:
Jeremiah Fink is a dirty rotten inter-dimensional plagiarist. His production company borrowed songs from our universe, and it seems likely that Fink Manufacturing lifted some of its tech from Rapture. Songbird is sort of a flying Big Daddy, bonded to Elizabeth, and Vigours are probably just re-engineered Plasmids. Fink will soon be hearing from Andrew Ryan’s lawyers!
In addition to those named, Slate had Shock Jockey. In fact, it’s implied that Shock Jockey can’t be that rare since they have an advertising campaign around powering your home with it and at least one or two homes you come across have Shock Jockey powered locks.
I want everyone to know that I nailed it.
[spoiler]*I suspected Comstock was the same person as DeWitt before entering Monument Island, and knew it for a fact inside the Hall of Heroes. HoH actually spoils everything implicitly, because here Comstock has basically laid out his past history - and it’s identical to Booker’s. If you look closely at the loading screen, you can see that Booker’s birthdate is the same as Comstock’s.
*I figured that Elizabeth was Booker’s daughter pretty darn quick.
*Knew instantly that Booker’s debt wasn’t money - it was guilt. Moral debt all the way.
Things that do still bother me/I’m unclear on:
*The villains in the piece are mostly vague. Even Comstock isn’t that well defined as a character, besides being a mad dictator. Fink is an obsessive control freak but that really that interesting. Daisy Fitzroy has almost no character at all. This is something of a shame, because these three figures effectively define the central conflicts of the story. I say they should definitely have been better integrated.
The wiki says, “Like Robert, the device had an ill effect on Comstock as well, and he became delusional.” - did I just miss that voxphone? I didn’t see anything which led me to believe he was insane in any sense, except for being a total bastard.
*Was it just me, or did Comstock never particularly comments on religion at all? Aside from a few mentions of God, his religion definitely seems to be all about himself. Then again, I suppose worshipping yourself is the oldest religion of mankind. 
*We never learn who Anna’s mother was. Would be very interesting if Mrs. Comstock’s alternative-dimensional version was Booker’s wife. After all, he evidently had enough of a relationship to stay together and have a daughter he would then take care of. It’s unclear what happened to her, of course - she could have died or left Booker for some reason, though it’s odd that she’d leave her daughter is so.[/spoiler]
There’s a voxphone which says precisely this; he was peering into another universe - implied to be Rapture - and copying secrets of plasmids.
On Vigors:
While there are enemies with Vigors, I did have to wonder why they were so rare. Consider it: there’s plenty of Vigors to go around. Fink has a plant turning out vigors constantly, no fewer than one Vigor every few seconds. Columbis can be a huge city and still everybody could have multiple Vigors. And unlike Rapture, there were no Tonics to give passive benefits, which many would prefer to Vigors.
Regarding religion, my understanding from reading a few articles is that the game originally had more blatant religious material in it but Levine pulled back on it in favor of making it more Comstock-oriented.
Here’s one such article discussing how one of the developers almost quit over the religious themes. The article pre-dates the launch of the game so I don’t think it’s spoilerish.
I think the guy that had a fit over the religious aspects of the game, did in fact end up leaving.
“Vigours”, really? We don’t truck with your dirty foreign spellings in Columbia!
Finished it. Yay! I don’t have a lot to add to the speculation on the ending in this thread. I think you guys more or less nailed it.
I had a lot of trouble with the final battle until I figured out that you can deploy a bunch of Return to Sender traps in front of the ship core and keep it from taking damage for a long while. That plus Winter Shield (the gear that makes you invulnerable briefly after getting off a skyline) is what finally got me through the battle. I just kept hopping on and off the skyline and hitting enemies with Shock Jockey and sniper/RPG rounds while waiting for the bird to recharge so he could take down another zeppelin. I’m not sure it was the best strategy but it worked for me.
I’m obsessive about exploring every nook and cranny in this type of game, and even so I ended the game having found only 73/80 voxophones. I also missed a handful of kinetoscopes/telescopes. I’m debating whether to just try to be extra-vigilant when I do a second playthrough, or whether to just cave in and use a walkthrough to find them all. Probably the latter. I’m going to take a few days off and then give 1999 mode a whirl. This game rocked my socks off.
PS: Took me about 20 hours to finish.
Oh, one more thought: I think my favorite little bit of humor was when you go into the arcade and see all the “Dimwit and Duke” machines, and Elizabeth says, “Ooh, the new one is out! You know, the release was delayed three times.”
I’m nowhere near finishing it, but one thing I’ve noticed - one of the paintings in
Fink’s Good Time Club is Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt, which was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, part of the biggest art theft in history. No idea if that’s relevant to the story.
Okay, I got it… then beat it. My spoiler-free response:
What is… wait… no… that… I don’t… but… oh… no no no… now just wait one moment here… but… okay… but I… no… okay, when is the earliest you can take more of my money, please?
Ha ha. I knew you’d get sucked in. It’s a little short and has some foibles (what game doesn’t) but it’s so gorgeous and viscerally appealing for an FPS game that, like you, I just…forgot about my quibbles and played it and loved it.
Anyone else catch the Firefly reference in Battleship Bay?
Finished it. Great game, with excellent graphics (a bit too cloudy though), great story, and fun gameplay. I disliked the over reliance on convenient amnesia in the storytelling and the final battle was extremely tedious, but overall it was very good. The section at the Comstock House where you find the alternate Elizabeth who was tortured, indoctrinated, and then eventually destroyed New York was one of the best sections of a video game I’ve ever played. From the audiovoxes of her waiting to be saved and losing all hope to the stealth factor and gameplay of the level itself, I loved that level, possibly even more than the first part of the original BioShock. And the level of emotional response it garnered from me was amazing.
Great game. Now to replay the original.
In case someone would like to hear the anachronistic versions of the music (which as far as I know is not available on the actual Soundtrack of the game), a play list was made on Youtube here. There are spoilers in the Youtube comments.
I have to say, I am truly astounded that they haven’t released an Official Album with the original songs and the Edwardian-style covers. I would have thought that would be extremely popular.
Sorry if this has been addressed already, I searched the thread with no results, but who knows.
There’s a scene in the TV commercial (and I’m not going to spoiler-space a damn commercial) where the girl is on a horse wearing a noose, and it looks like the player is going to shoot the rope to save her. I’ve played the complete game, and never saw anything like this scene. I presume this is something that was cut out of the game, right? Did anybody else see that scene in gameplay?
No, it’s completely made up. And not using the game engine. There’s a disclaimer notice on it saying “Not Actual Game Footage” or something similar.
Between the plot scene, the art/graphics and the music, it feels like the commercial production team won a bet along the lines of “How far can we make this unlike BSI and still get paid for our work?”
That commercial makes no sense whatsoever if you’ve played through the game, there’s no way that the citizens of Colombia would lynch the lamb. The seed of the prophet shall seat the throne, and drown in flame the mountains of men. Even the Vox seem to bear her no ill will.
Playing through again on 1999 mode, possession is my best friend. Some nice Easter eggs;
[spoiler]Shoot Rosalind Lutece. Missed. Missed again!
Is the death of Songbird in BioShock 1? I’m more inclined to believe that they were just odd Rapture atmospheric noises that they co-opted for the Songbird.[/spoiler]
I finished the game last night.
I started off not really liking it, for a number of reasons. It’s more of a shooty game than the first one was, and there’s less emphasis on planning traps and ambushes (even though most of the Vigours could be planted as a trap) and more on sky-lining around looking for a mob to drop onto.
So I never really got into the fighting so much, and by the end I’d dropped it down to Easy to stop myself constantly dying in the most ridiculously small fights - I guess I’m not very good at shooty games.
I did like the exploring though, and putting together the storyline from the audio tapes was just as compelling as it was in the previous games.
A few thoughts on the plot, covered by spoilers:
[spoiler] I thought it was done very well, actually, and the whole plot holds together pretty well. Most of the questions I had about the plot are answered in the audio tapes I didn’t manage to find (and have since read on the Bioshock wiki).
Looking back, it seems to me that whilst jumping through a tear to find a world where Chen Li is still alive is reasonable, it seems like massive overkill for what is a minor logistical problem for the Vox Populi in getting the weapon tooling to them. And it seems that that is the point were the whole thing really goes to pot. And they just jump through a tear to a place where the tools aren’t there anymore and just trust to Elizabeth’s wish fullfillment that it’s going to be the right place, and that the Daisy of that world is still going to honour an agreement that she never made to give Booker the airship? It’s not a move I would have chosen to make.
Also, I note that they could have missed the whole Lady Comstock section if Booker had tried his hand on that gate. But there wouldn’t have been any reason to do that.
[/spoiler]
Good game, probably will never play it again, regardless of any story DLC.
I’ve got a couple of minor questions about the story:
Given the opening scene, why doesn’t Booker know he’s been “hired” by the Luteces? He seems to know someone hired him.
In the first (opening) lighthouse there’s a body that appears to have been tortured and a note to Booker to not “disappoint us”. Who’s responsible for that? The Luteces don’t seem the type.
Why the need to take Elizabeth to NY? If the whole point was to reunite Booker and Anna/Elizabeth they would have succeeded a lot sooner if he agreed to take her to Paris when they first commandeer the airship.
Once they realize they can control Songbird, why does Elizabeth kill him?