Super minor spoilers:
I think I know what area you’re in (president masks + horn head from the commercials?). I mostly survived it because of the gear I had which gave you salts upon 40% of kills. I also had the melee attacks set enemy on fire x% of the time gear. Like you, I was looking desperately for ammo, but I don’t think I died once throughout the whole section
The choice between throwing the ball at the interracial couple, at the announcer or doing nothing? I tried to throw it at the announcer, later on I met the couple who gave me a piece of Gear.
Not long after that there’s the choice when you try to buy a ticket for the airship. The teller is shifty as hell so rather than demand the ticket I pulled out a piece let my gun do the talking. Elizabeth gave me a load of shit later on and called me a monster. Booker fortunately had a decent retort and told her that if he didn’t draw first he couldn’t have drawn at all, so she simmered down.
The game looks gorgeous too, early on I thought I was annoyed to find a bird glitching out by being perched in mid air, only to see it was a hummingbird whose wings I could see flapping. Took a while to get used to the iron sight aiming, on most shooters RMB brings up the sights, can’t tell you how much Salt I’ve wasted accidentally firing off Vigors. Playing on Hard too, not too many problems so far although I’m not that far in.
You can change the sights to the RMB. I did that early on, hitting “z” was just awkward.
I’m about eight hours in and having a lot of fun with it, but so far I’d still say that BioShock 2 is the best game of the series. On the whole, Columbia as a setting is just fundamentally less interesting than Rapture, but that shouldn’t dissuade people from buying BSI anyway. A few thoughts:
BSI one-ups the first BioShock in a huge way: the protagonist is an actual fucking CHARACTER this time around. I actually care about Booker in BSI, unlike Jack from BS1 whom I don’t think anybody gave a shit about.
The combat (IMO) was better in BioShock 2, but so far I’d say that the Vigors in Infinite are better than the Plasmids in either BS1 or BS2. Bucking Bronco in particular is fun-as-Hell to use.
I’m having fun with the skyhook mechanics, but I’m really, REALLY struggling to comprehend how the entire thing is even remotely possible in any construct of reality. I mean, I know I’m playing a BioShock game and so I shouldn’t be complaining about suspending my disbelief, but it just bothers me (for some reason) that the skyhook/skyline gameplay is so completely implausible. Still, it’s exhilarating, so it works enough.
She gives you a load of shit either way. If you demand the ticket you get a knife through your hand before pulling it out (ouch!) and killing a whole bunch of people. She simmers down with Booker’s retort that nobody sets up an operation like that and just lets their subject walk away.
Sorry about that, but at least it is an inevitable thing that you have to do in the game. I don’t think you can avoid that scene and advance the story.
Just beat it. Game time of 8 hours. I’ll be playing it again, since I missed close to a quarter of the audio tapes, and no doubt quite a few of the side missions and secret rooms.
But that ending… wow, that comes completely out of left field. I’m not sure how I feel about it.
An 8 hour game for 60 bucks?
I don’t care if it gives blowjobs too, I’ll look for it on Ebay in a few months.
Well I just finished the game. On hard difficulty I was only able to get past certain areas by dying repeatedly and slowly whittling down a bosses health. I’ve experimented with the different vigors but after I got “return to sender” I didn’t use anything else–it’s just so much more useful than the others.
Also, deciding which weapons to upgrade was a bit of a wash, as I could never consistently keep any particular weapon around for very long. Invariably I would run out of ammo and be forced to pick up whatever was laying around.
The ending left me a tad confused (massive spoilers):
[spoiler]As I understand it, Dewitt was a soldier who was present at Wounded Knee massacre and his tormented by his actions. He later has a child, Anne, and this is where the timeline starts to split. In an alternative universe, his child dies, and he later accepts a baptism by a preacher, becoming Comstock in the process. He hires the physicist twins who discover the secrets to levitating objects and opening dimensional rifts. He uses the technology the build the floating city of Columbia and attracts lots of followers. He grows increasingly radical with his beliefs (such as racial superiority and viewing everyone else as “inferior”) and begins to push for an apocalyptic agenda where the city declares war on the rest of the world and reigns down destruction from above with its superior technology.
However, constant exposure from the dimensional rifts has made him sterile, and he needs an heir to complete his vision. So he sends the male twin to another universe where he offers that DeWitt (which you play as the main protagonist in the game) a chance to “wipe away his (gambling) debts” in exchange for his daughter, Anne. He at first agrees, but changes his mind and pursues him. You and Comstock struggle for control of your daughter as the rift closes, and she loses her pinky in the process. At some point the twins become some kind of interdimensional beings, as does Anne, whom Comstock renames Elizabeth and raises as his own. She grows up as a lab rat inside a giant statue which was designed to slowly drain away her powers, so she can only “tear open” existing rifts rather than create new ones. All the while she’s guarded by a giant mechanical bird that acts as her jailer.
Meanwhile, DeWitt (the one you play in the game) carves an “AD” into the back of his hand as a reminder of what he lost (his daughter, Anne Dewitt). He later crosses through a portal (created by the twins? This part confuses me) where you arrive in Columbia sometime later after Elizabeth has grown up. Your memories end up jumbled in the process, and you begin to believe that your daughter had died, instead of being stolen. You play through the game, kill Comstock, destroy the statue, and Elizabeth regains her full powers. She then tells you that you didn’t REALLY kill Comstock: they both exist across countless parallel worlds, and in every one her counterpart suffers because of him. The only way to stop them all, is to go back to the “beginning,” the moment where DeWitt was baptized, where Elizabeth and a few of her counterparts drown you, preventing Comstock and the events unfolding in the game to ever come into existence.
What I don’t get though is, where did Songbird come from? And how did Elizabeth gain her powers? And what where they doing with the “power” they were siphoning from Elizabeth?[/spoiler]
I’ve got about 16 hours in and I am not close to finishing yet from what I can tell. A person finishing this game in 8 hours is astonishing and certainly not the norm if you do any amount of exploring.
Hmmmm… interesting. I guess I’ll read up and see.
Glad I went with my first instinct there, then.
As an aside, the game has an incredible soundtrack (as well as voice actors - recognised Jennifer Hale straight away, sounded like Naomi from MGS 1 and Keith Szarabajka as Slate; the Burned Man…).
The version of Will The Circle Be Unbroken that plays as you enter the city is incredible.
ETA; I’m 11 hours in so far playing on hard, only just fought my first Handyman, which stomped me into the mud - my advice, run, run and don’t stop running. I guess if you rushed it on easy it’d be considerably shorter, but then you’ve got yourself to blame.
Finished it on Hard, around 14 hours. Enjoyed it. I’m interested to see what DLC comes out for it.
Okay, for people who beat it on hard:
HTF do you beat that last flagship mission? I’ve tried it like 6 times now.
Finally got, it after about 2 hours of trying. I was like 95% close to finishing it almost every time.
I beat it on Hard. What your spoiler describes was actually pretty easy for me. By far, the thing I struggled with the most was:
[spoiler]Lady’s Comstock’s “ghost.” I just couldn’t keep up with the amount of enemies she was resurrecting. I’d mow down five or six, have less than a third of my health left, and get maybe one or two shots on her before she resurrected six more.
Ultimately, I managed to get to a spot where I’d just killed all the ghosts and Lady Comstock was resurrecting more, but within a very tight radius to herself. So I could just keep them all perpetually aloft with the floating horsie vigor while I took my time killing her.
[/spoiler]
Liar.
You know damn well that if it gave you blowjobs you’d easily shell out twice that much for it!
Endgame sperlers:
“He hires the physicist twins who discover the secrets to levitating objects and opening dimensional rifts.”
99% sure that they’re actually the same person, one just happened to become a male in one universe, and a female in another. “Constants and variables”, the sex of Lutece was apparently a variable unlike everyone else’s gender. They never existed in the same universe until the female invented the technology. Looks like the female only happened to exist in the universes where Comstalk exists, the male in universes where Dewitt never gets baptized.
“What I don’t get though is, where did Songbird come from?”
No idea. Maybe Female Lutece invented it?
" And how did Elizabeth gain her powers?"
Best guess I’ve seen is that she picked them up when she got her finger cut off between worlds.
" And what where they doing with the “power” they were siphoning from Elizabeth?"
I think that was simply to limit what she could do. One of the voxophones I picked up had scientists talking about killing her and making it look like an accident because they felt she was too powerful.
I’m on board with the rest of what you said though (besides the twins).
I’m slowly making my way through the game and I love it. The big stuff (game play, mechanics, story etc.) are all top notch and the little stuff is off the hook. I loved that little bit of the Beach Boys in barbershop quartet form.
So, I freaking loved Portal, Portal 2 and Halflife. I assume Bioshock is going to be up my alley as well. Should I get the first one or just jump in with this one? I’m on Xbox, if that’s an issue.