BioShock - They weren't kidding...

[Coldkill]

I got it working yesterday, and completed it today. I must say. That was a good game. Would you believe it that someone is trying to start a lawsuit against 2K Games about this not being ready? I agree there are quite a few bugs but god damn that was a freaking awesome game.

Ending was ok, to be expected really. An interesting story though.

[brkl]

Very odd. Most games are more or less unfinished when they are released, but I can't say how Bioshock would be one of them. Haven't had a single crash and it runs better than I expected.

[Cigol]

It's a well made game (aside from some jarringly obvious scripted triggers) but it's extremely derivative of other games so I'm not seeing anything particularly new here guys. Whilst it's an enjoyable experience I can't help but feel that I'm being discriminated against for having played similar games in the past. If you've never played Deus Ex, System Shock 2 or Half-Life 2, then fair enough; Bioshock probably represents the pinnacle of gaming in your eyes.

...but I have played those aforementioned games (and then some), so Bioshock with its ridiculously poor AI, monotonous combat and truly unspectacular gameplay leaves me feeling a little empty. Everyone is gushing with superlatives but I just don't understand it

[Coldkill]

I did figure that they copied from a few other games. Especially HL:2 with the wrench. Common! That's just silly talk...

[Intrepid Homoludens]

It's a well made game (aside from some jarringly obvious scripted triggers) but it's extremely derivative of other games so I'm not seeing anything particularly new here guys. Whilst it's an enjoyable experience I can't help but feel that I'm being discriminated against for having played similar games in the past. If you've never played Deus Ex, System Shock 2 or Half-Life 2, then fair enough; Bioshock probably represents the pinnacle of gaming in your eyes.

...but I have played those aforementioned games (and then some), so Bioshock with its ridiculously poor AI, monotonous combat and truly unspectacular gameplay leaves me feeling a little empty. Everyone is gushing with superlatives but I just don't understand it

Actually I must disagree with you conditionally. System Shock 2 came out about a year after Half-Life and Thief: The Dark Project (System Shock 2 was released August 1999) and I imagine that Irrational Games/Looking Glass Studios had already been working on it a while when Half-Life came out. So in this light it seems that Ken Levine had ideas similar to Valve and even Warren Spector in terms of how a game can be experienced. Such visionary minds often think alike and you'll find parallels in other fields like art, architecture, and science.

Bioshock is essentially System Shock 2's spiritual successor, and in some ways a distillation and continuation of the core concepts of SS2. Levine isn't so much trying to give us something we absolutely have never seen before, no. That's not what he was about. Instead, he seemed personally and genuinely interested in exploring the abstracts that he originally introduced in the first System Shock, then investigated further in System Shock 2.

I have played Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Thief: The Dark Project, Deus Ex, and the demo of System Shock 2 (sadly I did not play the full game). You can definitely pick up conceptual elements from Deus Ex and Thief in Bioshock as well.

So as far as your thinking of Bioshock as 'derivative' in general (if that's what you meant), I think that's very inaccurate. Ken Levine, alongside Warren Spector and Valve, can be seen as pioneers in this regard so those other games that you claim Bioshock derives from are themselves lesser derivatives of those very same games that Ken Levine, Warren Spector, and Valve created.

However, you would be much more accurate to say that the ideas in Bioshock are a kind of further exploration of the original ideas in System Shock 2, but those ideas are similar to - not derived from - the ideas behind Half-Life, Thief, and Deus Ex.

[miffy495]

At least they did it in a classy way.

...Now would you kindly find a crowbar or something?

Gave me a little chuckle anyway.

[Coldkill]

Heh yeah. Would you kindly gets repeated a lot in the game.

[LOPcagney]

Wow. This is likely the most cinematic FPS I've ever played, and that includes Half-Life 2. You'll know why when you get to the piano bit:

Fitzpatrick's piano solo and subsequent execution.

[n0wak]

Wow. This is likely the most cinematic FPS I've ever played, and that includes Half-Life 2. You'll know why when you get to the piano bit:

Fitzpatrick's piano solo and subsequent execution.

Fetch quest aside, there's quite a few of these in Bioshock , that whole theatre district part was my favourite part of the game. Especially some of the little side rooms. You walk into a room. The floor is flooded. The lights are dim. All of a sudden this droning starts with the soundtrack. Then you come across these plaster figures of people posed by Cohen. The atmosphere was great.

Not to mention the little Tchaikovsky "Waltz of the Flowers" sequence

But yeah, too many fetch quests.

Also: for those that finished the game, I like this subtle attention to detail

copy link: img180.imageshack.us/img180/627/note2ma4.png

[Coldkill]

Hmm I didn't realise that photo. Good one though. I quite enjoyed the story of BioShock which gets a .

Agreed with the collection quests though. Kinda annoying after a while (by the end I was just thinking "GOD LET IT END ALREADY!!" and it did a short while after ) so for that.

Overall it's a but still good and worth playing imo.

[Wrestlevania]

On the subject of crashing (and BioShock software bugs in general), I'm getting some rather panic-inducing freezes when I do something interactive, like try hacking a machine of some sort. Not all the time, but at least once an hour or two.

Last night though I had an all out crash; went to hack a vending machine in Gatherer's Garden (I've been on holiday since launch and only just got back Tuesday this week) and the game just locked up. I was expecting it to transition to the hacking mini-game, but nada. Just died proper and I had to switch the machine off via the button on the front of the console itself.

Really irritating, as I lost about 30 mins exploring; also because the game auto-downloaded its first patch last night for me, too.

[Ginger]

It's a well made game (aside from some jarringly obvious scripted triggers) but it's extremely derivative of other games so I'm not seeing anything particularly new here guys. Whilst it's an enjoyable experience I can't help but feel that I'm being discriminated against for having played similar games in the past. If you've never played Deus Ex, System Shock 2 or Half-Life 2, then fair enough; Bioshock probably represents the pinnacle of gaming in your eyes.

...but I have played those aforementioned games (and then some), so Bioshock with its ridiculously poor AI, monotonous combat and truly unspectacular gameplay leaves me feeling a little empty. Everyone is gushing with superlatives but I just don't understand it

Why does a game have to do anything new to be good? The aspect of Bioshock that impresses me the most is the atmosphere it creates through it's imerrsive world, that's what drew me in a gave me a spectacular experience (I'm not that far through yet, I'm in the gardens of arcadia). One thing I did find was that lack of punishment of dying can lessen the urge to survive and make me gun-hoe, I rectified that by ceasing to play every time I died, that way I'm always desperate to survive as I don't want stop and that desperation made the world terrrifying at times.

[Ginger]

Ending was ok, to be expected really.

Damn u that should have gone in a spoiler I'm not far through but pretty sure what the ending will be now

[Noyb]

On the subject of crashing (and BioShock software bugs in general), I'm getting some rather panic-inducing freezes when I do something interactive, like try hacking a machine of some sort. Not all the time, but at least once an hour or two.

It happened to me in the demo on a Vista laptop. I fixed it by downloading unofficially updated video card drivers, since the laptop company doesn't bother to update them manually, and the official ones are locked out of laptops. So, updating your drivers should help, if you haven't already.

[Wrestlevania]

Thanks, but that might be a little tricky...

/me points to signature

[Noyb]

Thanks, but that might be a little tricky...

/me points to signature

d'oh.

[Cigol]

Why does a game have to do anything new to be good? The aspect of Bioshock that impresses me the most is the atmosphere it creates through it's imerrsive world, that's what drew me in a gave me a spectacular experience (I'm not that far through yet, I'm in the gardens of arcadia).

Maybe because it's an interactive medium with very little variance in underlying gameplay mechanics? Actually my point isn't that a game should neccessarily do something 'new' but that the experience should be made fresh. If you've played the three previously mentioned games ('Deus Ex', 'Half-Life 2' and in particular 'System Shock 2') then you will have a great feeling of deja vu from the get go (...and god help you if you've played more than those three games!)

Maybe there are parallels to other mediums such as film and literature, I don't know (?), but if you have an inordinate amount of experience in the field of gaming to such a degree that you can recognise the hallmarks and underlying structure from a quick play through and guestimate what's going to happen, how it's going to happen (etc) and so on and so forth... well for me that's a bad place to be in. I shouldn't be punished for my well travelled ass cheeks - I should be rewarded but there's no homage, there's no telling nod. It's all derivative of earlier material packaged into a different colour scheme and under a different name.

One thing I did find was that lack of punishment of dying can lessen the urge to survive and make me gun-hoe, I rectified that by ceasing to play every time I died, that way I'm always desperate to survive as I don't want stop and that desperation made the world terrrifying at times.

It's a pity that the combat is so unsatisfying of itself that the difficulty is artificially ramped up and people have to go to such silly depths to generate the kind of fear you'd expect to be its strength. As game design goes surely this is a huge misstep?

[Cigol]

Truly hilarious Bioshock review you may or may not have already seen

[Coldkill]

Yay for ZP. That was funny.

[Wrestlevania]

Expertly done with no spoilers given away (in my opinion).

[LOPcagney]

Expertly done with no spoilers given away (in my opinion).

Well, the ending thing was kind of a low point of the review, spoiler-wise. He came way too close to giving something away, and

with all the emphasis on the binary moral choice presented in the Little Sisters and the already announced duel endings, his review only further confirmed my suspicion that you get the bad ending by harvesting the Little Sisters and the good ending by saving them. I have yet to finish the game, and I'd consider this a major spoiler. I was also disappointed to find out that the endings were so polarized.

[miffy495]

Anyone else playing on 360 currently getting hosed by the latest patch? For me, it's gone from running perfectly all the time to stuttering when I try to fucking turn around. This is infuriating. I think I'm getting pretty close to the end too. I may need to switch over to Metroid for a while until they release a new patch that undoes this one. Damn them for breaking my game just as I was getting to the climactic parts.

[Wrestlevania]

When did this patch come down the pipe? To my knowledge, I've only had one update prompt when firing up the game on my console, and that was last Thursday (I think, maybe Wednesday).

My game hasn't frozen at all since I got back (and patched). It's still prone to the odd momentary pause when I go to hack something though, but hasn't outright died like it did just before I went on holiday. Haven't played it very intensively either, mind, but things have improved slightly I think.

eljay gave me a top tip which might help, however: hold both bumpers when starting the game until the red 2K logo appears on-screen. This resets the texture cache--you may be experiencing "texture thrashing" possibly, where new texture data is simultaneously copied into the cache whilst old data culled from it.

[miffy495]

I'll give it a try next time I hook up the 360, but now I'm really into Metroid. (TV can't have both the 360 and Wii hooked up at the same time. Grrr...) Both so good. Can't decide. I think I may actually prefer Metroid, but I can't say why.

[toblix]

TV can't have both the 360 and Wii hooked up at the same time. Grrr...)

Mine can't either, so I just let the Wii stay connected over the SCART. Would you say the 480p component signal is worth disconnecting the 360 for?