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It still kills me that they had that whole passage of time conceit for the game, yet a character spends the entire game living in a mansion chock full of corpses he never bothers to clean up.

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I played Windosill over the weekend. It was included in some Humble Bundle somewhere along the way. 

Excellent, quick game. If you are into what the Amanita folks are doing, grab Windosill. It'll take about an hour.

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I dunno if this counts, as it was only a demo, but I just finished the demo for Gorogoa after seeing Jonathan Blow tweet about it.

 

It's a really cool little puzzle game. It works like one of those children's books with holes that allow images from one page to show through to the next, except you're the one figuring out how the different scenes should combine and show through one another. That's a bad explanation, but the best I can do.

 

Anyway, it's short (max 15 mins), free, and quite pretty. Check it out.

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momentous occasion, since the steam summer sale been banging my head against this one

 

finally finished Bioshock Infinite this weekend on PC.  total 12hrs for one play through on hard...i was scouring deep for all the pick ups, ended up 37/80 achievos on first run which i think is ok?  

 

i cannot see myself coming back to this one though, even 1999 mode.  i felt against the wall some encounters and with more difficulty/less health the first Handyman would bring tears.

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momentous occasion, since the steam summer sale been banging my head against this one

 

finally finished Bioshock Infinite this weekend on PC.  total 12hrs for one play through on hard...i was scouring deep for all the pick ups, ended up 37/80 achievos on first run which i think is ok?  

 

i cannot see myself coming back to this one though, even 1999 mode.  i felt against the wall some encounters and with more difficulty/less health the first Handyman would bring tears.

 

I'm actually in the midst of a first run myself.  I'm playing on medium specifically because I'm not looking for a challenge from the game and would rather just have fun with it (although I will admit that medium does seem a little too easy).  1999 mode has no appeal to me at all.

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finally finished Bioshock Infinite this weekend on PC.  

How did you feel when you finished it?

 

I felt a little...empty. As though I had just wasted a good amount of time. The so called "brilliant ending" left me thinking "Really? That's the best you can do? Magic meta-physics?"

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How did you feel when you finished it?

 

I felt a little...empty. As though I had just wasted a good amount of time. The so called "brilliant ending" left me thinking "Really? That's the best you can do? Magic meta-physics?"

 

I read that in the voice of the torturer from the Princess Bride.  How do you feel having just lost X hours of your life?

 

On the ending, I have A LOT of problems with BI.  Like, I think it's a terrible game.  And yet I still like the ending, if you take it out of context of everything else.  There was actually a good idea there, just terribly executed. 

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I read that in the voice of the torturer from the Princess Bride. 

I will definitely take that as a compliment. 

 

What I hate most about BI is that I finished it. I took all those 9/10 review scores to heart constantly thinking "I'm having fun, I'm liking this game" all the while rushing through it desperate to have it end. 

 

How did you feel the ending could have been executed better? To me it felt like a complete cop-out so I'm interested to hear how it could have been good. Maybe it'll make me think differently of BI.

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How did you feel the ending could have been executed better? To me it felt like a complete cop-out so I'm interested to hear how it could have been good. Maybe it'll make me think differently of BI.

 

It's not that the ending could been better, it's that the rest of the game could have been better.

 

So there are infinite possibilities, but we only get to see 2 versions of the world/characters. And you have absolutely zero control of jumping worlds, what you see, nothing. All of it takes place in Columbia, except for Booker's office and the baptism scene. Some of the previews with content that was eventually cut, and the ending, point towards a different game. A game where you get to go more places with the portals. Perhaps a game that can branch and twist depending on what portals you choose to take. A game where each character has a variety of people that they could evolve into. A game that explores the ways Booker can change by visiting the iconic moments of his life.

The way that the Vox Populi are handled is just terrible, and racist. But a game where the Vos and Daisy could be shown in a variety of ways, a game that explores the possibilities, could get away with a negative portrayal of Daisy, as you would actually see other sides of her as well.

 

Then there's the respawn mechanic, which is never actually explained.  What's happening is that every time you die, the sibling are going and recruiting another Booker, and guiding him to the point where the previous one failed.  They are looking for the exact path that will allow Booker to rescue Elizabeth, and it is taking them dozens of attempts.  But the devs wanted a "gotcha surprise" towards the end when the "tweeest" is revealed.  So you never learn what's happening to you.  What if there was no twist?  What if Booker, from the opening scene, knew that Elizabeth was his daughter?  Knew that he would probably die, had died, and would die again to save her.  Knew that he had the potential to be a monster.  What if multiple Bookers acted together at times, with some intentionally sacrificing themselves so that one could live?  They made a giant "What If?" machine, and then didn't let you play with it.

 

I think it's a better story if you don't hide all this stuff.  Let the player know, and there are some fascinating things you can talk about in regards to guilt, sacrifice, family and shame.  But because they didn't want to reveal anything until the very end, all of those themes get crammed into a cutscene at the end. 

The ending pointed towards a complex game exploring multiple paths and the nuance of how people evolve over their life. Unfortunately that game never got made.

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I agree wholeheartedly with Bjorn and he pins down things that bugged me that I didn't even realize at the time. Additional story complaints:

 

The parts of the game where you shifted to the future seemed like a complete non-sequitor to the rest of the game. I didn't see anything in the present that made it seem like suddenly Elizabeth would turn into a monster and destroy New York. I really didn't see much of a purpose to her initial kidnapping either. I really liked the ending, but it seemed like a lot of the infrastructure to support it was cut sometime during the dev process.

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God dammit, i really liked BioShock Infinite, but you guys always seem so universally down on it that i can't muster any will to try and make a defense of the game.

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I found it worth it to go back and read the Bioshock Infinite thread once I completed the game. A lot of the same complaints are expressed there, though not as succinctly.

 

Edit: For the record, I actually liked it, especially the end, I just wished that the middle had more to it. It felt like a slog at the time.

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God dammit, i really liked BioShock Infinite, but you guys always seem so universally down on it that i can't muster any will to try and make a defense of the game.

 

Sorry man, I really don't intend on taking down anyone else's enjoyment of it.  There just hasn't been another game that made me as angry as BI did while I was playing it. 

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God dammit, i really liked BioShock Infinite, but you guys always seem so universally down on it that i can't muster any will to try and make a defense of the game.

 

I liked it quite a bit as well. I agree with a lot of the complaints I've seen leveled at the game but for me the atmosphere and Booker/Elizabeth dynamic was strong enough that the subpar aspects of the game didn't get to me too much.

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God dammit, i really liked BioShock Infinite, but you guys always seem so universally down on it that i can't muster any will to try and make a defense of the game.

I liked the game, too, and I am similarly frustrated by the constant hatred! My solution is to shout "BI is a great game!" whenever I see more than twenty posts in a row declaring its status as the worst game of all time. I don't blame anyone for disliking it, but ehhh it's like every time it's brought up people feel the need to shit all over it. Not that I have anything against sharing your opinions with people. I do it all the time. But ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

 

The constant vitriol feels, to me, the same as people who scream, for example, about Gone Home not being a game every time it's brought up in conversation. Well, except for the part where I respect BI haters' opinions, and I don't respect Gone Home non-game preachers.

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I want to play BI again just to see how great it looks. I thought it was a solid enough shooter with absolute gorgeous visuals and a story that could've been more coherent.

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Very much agree with Griddlelol about the feeling of emptiness, and annoyance at the ending. Now, I was already fairly dissatisfied with the game's story by the time I got to the ending, but I was still quite interested in seeing how they wrapped it up. As it turns out, they wrapped it up via the use of three tropes which particularly annoy me.

1. When the dampener thing is destroyed, the thing that's holding back Elizabeth's powers, she suddenly stops being a normal character and instead becomes an all-knowing narrator who speaks in riddles while Booker goes "Huh??" a lot.

 

2. I was really enjoying the idea that, despite the game's flaws, it was still a story in which I was sort of just some guy. I mean to say, the idea that my character was not the most important character in the world, and destined to save it or whatever. Games that actually buck this trope are so rare. But no, it turns out I'm not only the most important character in the world of BI, I'm actually two out of three of the most important characters in the world.

 

3. A lot of what I think is best described as "time travel bullshit". The whole Luttece twin scheme, and Comstock stealing Elizabeth from Booker, the way all that fit together, was relatively clever, but the very ending, where all the Elizabeths drown Booker, just seemed to not make sense. Am I wrong? It really felt like they suddenly went from the sort of time travel (/multiverse) story where everything is carefully arranged to fit together, to the sort of time travel story where you can just take a bunch of characters and put them any place and make anything happen to them so long as it's poignant, and it doesn't have to make any logical sense.

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How did you feel when you finished it?

 

I felt a little...empty. As though I had just wasted a good amount of time. The so called "brilliant ending" left me thinking "Really? That's the best you can do? Magic meta-physics?"

 

holy smokes, sorry, didnt mean to make this a big BI discussion.  i was just so happy to be done with it

 

as to the ending -

 

i completely agree.  being a year later i had heard all sorts of hype, amazing reviews, nominations for awards...even threw headphones off whenever spoilers of the end were appraoching...and then meh.

 

i really expected them to play on the multi-dimension thing...like a really long loop and they kept going lighthouse to lighthouse trying to un-f*ck the other worlds and essentially spinning their wheels.

 

and was almost there in the scene where you saw other pairs walking on the docks

 

dk, im glad i finished it, and im also glad i can uninstall it.  live, lives, will live.  dies, died, will die sorta thing

 

 

and! for the record.  i think i liked the game - just not the actual story

i think i was disheartened after Daisy was shot, and then down spiral kidnapping, future world, and hooked up to the Matrix plug machine.

 

it was really great looking, set pieces, enemies, plasmids were cool...and as usual the side story voice acting was stupendous.  i think the traps and melee executions were out of place...but not deal breakers

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I absolutely loved BI right up until the first combat encounter. I spent an hour wandering around, exploring the world, reading everything I could and generally loving every minute. Then I got a button prompt that resulted in my shoving a rotating hook in a police officer's face. The overwhelming rush of disappointment as I thought "Welp. I guess this is the game I'm playing now." is one that I don't think I've ever really felt from any other game. That said, I finished it, and enjoyed playing it. The gameplay was fun, the story was kinda dumb but whatever. But man, the gap between what I hoped BI would accomplish and what it actually delivered is so fucking wide...

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Twig, on 25 Mar 2014 - 03:00, said:

I liked the game, too, and I am similarly frustrated by the constant hatred! My solution is to shout "BI is a great game!" whenever I see more than twenty posts in a row declaring its status as the worst game of all time.

I was wondering about that. So it's a coping mechanism for yourself to do that?

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