SecretAsianMan

Arkham City is the next game on my list I'm going to play once I finish Bioshock Infinite. I'll keep an eye (ear?) out for these things.

I can see how that would be fun but it's just something I would never do. Melee combat in any game with long range weapons is so counter intuitive to me that I can never wrap my head around the possibilities. I'm also a bad sniper so my comfort zone tends to be in the mid range stuff.

I'm the opposite I think. I loathe melee combat in any first person game so when I played Bioshock 1 I loved setting up traps and using combinations of the powers and weapons during encounters, especially with the Big Daddies because you could plan out how you wanted the fight to go. With Infinite, I'm not feeling any of that. I don't mind the 2 carried weapons limit because I'm used to that by now, but you have such a small reserve of ammo that you're constantly forced to change weapons. That in itself doesn't bother me, but combined with the similar-but-not-quite-the-same weapon types that the Vox and Founders have that use different ammo and the way that I'm constantly accidentally looting a body instead of picking up his dropped weapon in the midst of a fight means that I'm often frustrated during combat. The vigors help some but I'm not feeling the same synergy that I did in Bioshock 1. Setting up traps in Infinite seems pretty useless because the space is either very large and open due to the skylines/hooks, or the enemies just stay back and shoot and never trigger the trap. Of course, I might also be down on the combat in Infinite because the last thing I did was the TERRIBLE siren fight, which magnified all those problems exponentially. Tempted to make a Frozen joke but it's been done enough.

My best run in a while, though I only make it to Olmec

Yeah, that was complete nonsense. Actually even calling it nonsense gives it too much credit.

To get back to the subject of the actual game, I just finished the siren fight. Holy shit, that was the worst thing. No ammo, no salt, endlessly respawning dudes, zero help from the tears, and a really loud annoying boss who's a FUCKING GHOST THAT I'M SHOOTING WITH BULLETS. I don't even want to play any more tonight, that was just so awful.

I hate to be nitpicky but actually we do. It's just not as widely publicized as Black History Month.

I've avoided referring to the intent of the devs because I hate that idea. Unless you speak to them directly or from an interview they've given, you can't really know what their intent was. And ultimately I'm not totally convinced it even matters. I've argued before that intent and outcome are two different things that often don't align. I would prefer to think that they did not intend to give the game the kind of racist tones we're arguing about, but in the end many of us still have that impression. That said, I think Dewar was making a reasonable extrapolation of the common course these kinds of discussions take, even if no one stated so explicitly.

I can see that side of it too, but I think her sending the Vox against Booker is a stronger argument that she wants power since a living Booker would undermine her. The racism bit comes from having Elizabeth kill her, which seems to be reinforced by the DLC's idea that she had to die to empower Elizabeth.

The game itself makes it about race. Daisy specifically talks about the white man being oppressive. The propaganda in the game isn't deriding the Vox because they're poor, but because they're not white (or in the case of the Irish, a specific kind of white). Comstock, on several occasions, says that being white is inherently superior. Here are 2 audio logs directly from the game You can argue that the game does or doesn't have a message about whether any of this is right/wrong or that the devs are/aren't racist themselves. But when you have a character in the game say those kinds of things, then have another character say that a Black woman is just as bad as that guy, you can't really say that race has nothing to do with it.

I hadn't thought about it that way, mostly because I'm not done with the game yet, but man that shit is super gross. Not that I would expect them to make Daisy a shining moral paragon because that would also be pretty unbelievable, but reducing her existence to a single purpose like that is pretty disgusting. I've stated before that I enjoy how Elizabeth just doesn't understand racism, but now it seems like the game is saying her point of view is WRONG and to prove it she has to kill the evil black woman who's threatening a child. Her thoughts literally went from "I don't understand why they have to be separated" to "Fitzroy is just as bad as Comstock isn't she?". It's really creepy and disturbing. I kinda hate that I'm even asking this question, but are there any Chinese Vox? I've seen Black and Irish Vox, but aren't there 3 minority groups being oppressed in this game? Granted I haven't been paying that much attention so I've possibly missed it. And I'm not counting the gunsmith Chen Lin.

I'm really tired and I just spilled coffee all over my desk. My keyboard is being weird now and my desk is sticky. This is not a good start to the day.

Man, this is some pretty good timing. I just got to the part with Fitzroy last night. I wasn't totally sure what to expect going into it, but yeah it was not so great. I'm kind of with Frenetic Pony in that I can understand and even expected the revolutionaries to become more violent than necessary, but what Gormongous said is also true in that Daisy becomes the horrible monster well before she's even close to the leader of her oppressors. Fink is obviously one of those oppressors, but it doesn't seem like Daisy had any specific grudge against him the same way she does Comstock. Honestly though, Daisy started giving me a bad taste when she turned the Vox against Booker because he was a complication. Seeing all that try to be reconned to make Daisy seem more sympathetic and a martyr is just weird backpedaling. Gameplay wise, I now have all the vigors (I assume, the wheel is full). I thought the magnetic shield one was going to be a return of the telekinesis at first, but man it's super useful, especially against the mechanical forefathers. I strongly dislike melee in FPS games so the charge one is not appealing to me. Maybe it would be better if I could improve the melee attack the same way you can in the other Bioshocks, but the one slot for each type of gear means I'm never going to equip those pieces when I can recover health or salt instead. Moving around on skylines continues to be fun and my favorite part of the game. I actually liked fighting a handyman in a area with a bunch of them because I could continually jump from line to ground to line and completely outmaneuver him. I was afraid at first that it would make things too easy, but his ability to electrify the line meant I had to keep on the move which made the fight very fast paced and quite satisfying. I especially enjoyed finishing him off with a skyline strike. I'm now on my way to Comstock House. This area is kind of a pain in the ass. I think Architecture said it best.

I actually just passed that log, but I think there's one earlier that also refers to music coming from the tears.

New stretch goal for Frog Fractions 2

Patrick Klepek wrote some words about it. It's more about what Kickstarter really is than about the Oculus specifically, but it's pretty close to feeling how I do.

The next one should be episode π, then episode e, then φ, then √2... (you see, because they're irrational numbers. Math jokes!)

I'm digging the old timey treatment of modern-ish songs in this game. The barbershop God Only Knows and the gospel/soul Tainted Love actually made me stop and listen to them. I wasn't actively being shot at or pursed at the time, but story wise there was a sense of urgency so it's more than a little incongruous to stop in a dank cellar and sing a little ditty. Removed from everything else as an isolated moment I liked it but the placement was jarring.

If there is someone telling me to move away then I'm clearly missing it. The best indicator I got was in the aforementioned bar in Shantytown. The bartender not so subtly pulled out a shotgun but didn't immediately start shooting me so I had time to move away and not start a confrontation. The cops on the other hand are all too eager to just shoot me for no good reason even though I was walking around peacefully and without incident just seconds before. Maybe there's some kind of message here. The supposedly good cops are all rather trigger happy while the bartender in the bad neighborhood is much more civil.

That's a bummer. It seems like a weird easter egg type thing someone randomly decided to put in. I'm fine with those when they're just extras that don't really relate to the game but this was a nice moment between the two main characters. I was hoping to get more of those and hearing there's only one sucks.

I'm now in the universe where Booker was a martyr for the Vox Populi. One thing that's still frustrating to me is the whole stealing thing. Half the time I'll end up triggering people to start shooting at me just by being near a thing without even realizing I wasn't supposed to be there. If someone in the game had told me to move away, I probably would have but in most instances I'm basically forced to kill in self defense. It's rather annoying. There's a moment in the game where you can go to a basement behind a bar in Shantytown where there's a kid trying to get some oranges off of a high shelf. When you come down, he hides under the stairs. There's a guitar leaning against a chair you can interact with, which causes Booker to sit down and start playing while Elizabeth sings and gives the kid an orange. It was a nice moment, but it felt totally random and I don't quite get why it was there. Are there other things like this that maybe I've missed or have yet to encounter? I'm still not super into the combat in this game, with the major exception of areas with lots of skylines. Zipping around on those things to get to new positions is probably my favorite part of the game so far. Unfortunately it renders the vigors I currently have almost entirely useless but I'm not finding them super useful to begin with. Elizabeth continues to be useless other than as a key to open doors, although I do enjoy that she simply doesn't understand racism at all.

Is the combat really that difficult? I started on medium, which was way too easy. I bumped it up to hard and while it's no longer what I'd call easy, it's still not that hard. Elizabeth so far has proved largely useless to me. She never really gives me anything I need because I never really need anything from her. In fact, a couple times grabbing one of the items she throws me has actually been detrimental because I had to stand in place while the animation played out and basically let a bunch of enemies swarm me. Playing on hard is encouraging me to use my vigors more, but the use of them is more like the various types of offhand grenades in a game like Halo or COD than actual powers. I think I would have actually preferred those in this instance. In Rapture, the plasmids, little sisters, Adam, and splicers all match the genetic engineering theme. In Columbia, the vigors seem more out of place because everything is so much more mechanical. I can see Columbian science inventing a lightning grenade or a fire bomb or something that summons crows, but a magic elixer that gives you super powers feels like it was only there because the game has Bioshock in the title.

All I can think is that John Carmack now works for Facebook.

All three Bioshock games on PC from Amazon for $12 (US only, does not include any DLC)