Okay, let’s cut right through the hyperbole, the 10/10 scores, all that bullshit. BioShock is not that great. In fact, it’s hard not to be disappointed by BioShock. It is at once the most incredible and most frustrating game in recent memory.
BioShock starts off beautifully. After an amazing, cinematic opening, you are led into a series of scripted events that suggests a lot of care has gone into crafting a stunning experience for the player. This is reinforced by the way the story tacitly unfolds around you. When games have a story as strong as this, the designers sometimes feel a tendency to shove it down the player’s throat, as if to say “We paid our writers a lot of money and, by Christ, we’re going to get value for that money.” BioShock is different. By picking up crew ‘diaries’, you’re given glimpses into the back-story of Rapture, but you’re left to piece them all together yourself, if you want to.
And even if you don’t, there’s still plenty of things to shoot at – your first introduction to a splicer gives you a great taste of your vulnerability down here, and had me twitching at the controller in an equal mixture of excitement and terror.
After the first hour, however, things start to get a little lazy. The environments, which were so dazzling and atmospheric at first quickly become cramped and uninspired. The possibilities of a huge, sprawling underwater city become reduced down to a series of similar-looking halls and offices and you realise that the open sandbox has been replaced by a very linear shooter.
By the second hour, you begin to wonder if Wind Waker hasn’t been usurped as the most offensive abuser of fetch-quests to pad out a game’s length. Once you have settled into the rhythm of BioShock, the rest of the game is spent collecting random items strewn around labyrinthine levels. Often you are told to travel far away to collect something, and once that’s done, you are told to travel back to your starting position to collect something else.
It’s frustrating, lazy game design, and completely mars the experience. Because once you notice this, you begin to notice that there aren’t actually that many enemies in Rapture. There are, all told, five or six character models, repeated ad infinitum. You begin to notice that your vulnerability has disappeared and you are suddenly armed with an arsenal of massively destructive weapons and psychic abilities. There is nothing you can’t kill, and barring any major fuck-ups, nothing that can kill you. Even the Big Daddy, the iconic, melancholy giant of the game, is easy prey when you’re loaded up with a grenade launcher and shots of electricity.
There are still moments of genius to be found in BioShock. The meeting with the artist is genuinely entertaining and unnerving in a way that I wish more games would emulate. But there are very few of these standout moments in the game, and the majority is spent in unremarkable encounters with unremarkable enemies in unremarkable locations.
There’s no question that BioShock is a good game, but given a longer gestation period, it could have been a lot better. Even without the padding, it could have been a lot better. Give me a 10 hour game of solid quality over a 10 hour game with 8 hours of padding any day of the week.
Addendum
Other things I didn’t mention that also disappointed me about BioShock:
The ‘moral choice’ of saving/harvesting the little sisters – once again, games reduce morality into a completely binary decision.
The weapons/plasmid upgrade scheme – pointless and irrelevant. A double-whammy.
Glitchy physics – throughout the game, I don’t think I saw one corpse that wasn’t twitching in some way.
Edge Magazine (still the best videogame magazine out there) recently published its top 100 videogames of all time. It’s pretty interesting reading and, being Edge, there are a few questionable decisions. But this is what I love about Edge - they occasionally do some wild stuff, but always back it up with good, solid explanations.
I don’t think anyone actually understands how psyched I am for the release of the new Indiana Jones film next year. When I was younger and my age was still in single digits, I used to wake up extra early so I could go downstairs and watch all of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before school. Every day. For about a year. And if I had my copy here with me now, I’d probably be watching it now.
I came across a film called “Secret of the Incas”, a low-budget adventure movie from 1954 starring Charlton Heston which seems to be Indiana Jones’ most obvious inspiration. Heston plays Harry Steele (fucking awesome name), a square-jawed treasure-hunter who is determined to find the treasure of Machu Picchu in Peru. Like Indiana Jones, Steele walks around in a big brown fedora and leather jacket.
The similarities aren’t accidental either. Rumour has it that before production of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Senor Spielbergo and George Lucas screened this movie (along with China, starring Alan Ladd) for the cast and crew, to give them an idea of the kind of movie they were trying to create.
These clips from Secret of the Incas should give you a good idea of how well Spielberg & co. managed to recreate the tone of the earlier movie. In fact, you could go further and point out specific sequences in Raiders that were influenced even by these three clips.
I’d love to see this movie completely, but it’s impossible to buy Secret of the Incas. Nothing on Amazon, nothing on eBay. Even nothing on Bittorrent. Some conspiracy theorists reckon the movie is being “suppressed” by Paramount because of the similarities to Indiana Jones, reckoning that people would be up in arms if they could see how much this film influenced Raiders of the Lost Ark (although I personally think this is ridiculous: if people can’t that the Indiana Jones movies are nothing but a distillation of classic action movie staples, then these people should be banished to the wilderness immediately).
Whatever the reason, I can’t get a hold of it on the internet. Anyone got a copy of this lying around? I’d be willing to pay good (read: not ridiculous) money for it.
Slowly making my way through all of these in roughly chronological order. Monkey Island 2 next. I don’t think there’s a bad game in here.
BONUS CONTENTPress Play on Tape perform the Monkey Island theme live. If the first 30 seconds don’t make you smile, I guarantee the last minute definitely will.
This awesome teaser trailer is sometimes running in front of screenings of Transformers in the States. Now, as good as Transformers was, it would be hard to keep my attention after that trailer.
It’s probably a movie codenamed “Cloverfield”, which J.J. Abrams is supposed to have been working on for a while now. No real details exist except that it’s a big, dumb monster movie. Hooray! ‘Round these parts, we loves us some big, dumb monster movies. Even the Godzilla remake, but only for that one scene where Jean Reno’s does his Elvis impression.
Cute thing - the official site, which isn’t referenced anywhere in that trailer, or on any other official sources, is tracking visitors using Google Analytics. This word-of-mouth campaign is being dissected, one visitor at a time.
johnke.me
