Bioshock Infinite

6 months after the game's out, Gamespot has a 2nd review...about time someone actually said those words...though I'll give credit for some great art and such too...

edited 10th Oct '13 4:28:58 AM by onyhow

Why would they even do a second review of the game? And by somebody that clearly didn't like it the first time around, much less the second?

Don't ask me...

I gotta say I quite agree with the 2nd review though...

Meh. I got through his complaining that the main character is unsympathetic because he kills enemies in an FPS, that Elizabeth is portrayed as a trophy for the player to win, and that there's too much action and not enough time to gawk at the beautiful scenery in this FPS, then had to stop because I was reaching, "you are ridiculously wrong" overload.

... How on God's Green Earth is Elizabeth anything even vaguely like a trophy?

By not actually playing the game and knowing what you are talking about.

Finished the game about two days ago. Figured out that Comstock was Booker when I heard the voxaphone about Comstock being "older" due to the tear machine. Did not entirely expect my figuring to be right, however, and still was pretty shocked by the other turnabouts.

Really liked the Luteces, Elizabeth was pretty good, Booker was interesting. Comstock was no Andrew Ryan, however. Liked Columbia well enough, but Rapture topped it for atmosphere. Nice to actually see some real, living, proper citizens, though.

I still think that, should Levine make another Bioshock, he should try going for a cyberpunk setting, like System Shock 2. I still feel that, as good as the Bioshock games are, he still has yet to surpass it in terms of story, setting, gameplay, and mechanics.

I CALL SPACE LIGHTHOUSE

Which is weird considering how clunky the mechanics for System Shock 2 got at times. And I do love the way the Bioshock games have done their combat. Switching is so easy and fun. Combining the powers with the weapons practically sings. It's just so unfortunate that it comes at the expense of all the other features System Shock 2's gameplay had.

The answer, obviously, is a hybrid system replacing the clunky of the old with the sleekness of the new, while filling in the modern's shallowness with the classic's depth. Same as always. And like always, it will never actually happen.

Also yes, space lighthouse needs to be a thing.

And SHODAN!

Indeed. As much as Frank Fontaine and Comstock try in terms of reveals and villainy, they pale in comparison to SHODAN:

I'm of the opposite view. Keep going further back in time. Renaissance era, clockpunk city deep underneath the Earth!

I'd vote for that. Some kind of Bio-punk would also be cool. Like, plant stuff in a jungle setting.

All that because a man tortured by his past decided to become a Born Again Christian. In almost every universe, a baptism was Booker's Start of Darkness. Wow. Constants man.

I'm not used to seeing a multiverse story have a character who breaks the rules so abruptly, so the whole Elizabeth merges End Of Game!Booker with his past self part bugged me. Doesn't add up - killing the past Booker would only work if... well, his memories got "merged" without deliberation. Elizabeth's abilities aren't fully explained, and her final status is left ambiguous, but it's not an impossibility I suppose, given that she was rewinding Booker through parts of his past that she wasn't conscious of or even present for at the time.

I want to see where Burial With Sea goes first. Is it going to show us Booker from where Infinite left off, with him and Elizabeth moving to Rapture at some later point? Is it going to be a prequel into an alternate universe where they ended up in Rapture?

edited 17th Oct '13 7:51:41 PM by FOFD

I think it's going to be a totally separate side story, with Booker and Elizabeth each playing different characters.

It seems like the Burial At Sea version of Elizabeth has something in common with the main version.

The DLC Booker will probably be a completely unrelated rube though.

Being a Christian myself, I think it was more that he was looking for a quick and easy solution to his guilt. Rather than allowing himself to become a better person by being baptized, he instead carried on with what he was always doing under the assumption that his sins were automatically washed away. There is a difference between showing faith and just saying faith.

An the note of settings, I've always been more of a fan of futuristic and/or cyberpunk settings more than classical and steampunk ones. A lot more can be made of that then being restricted to older time periods. Hence why I think the next one should be more like System Shock 2 in terms of setting and gameplay.

Comstock's faith is one of the questions that still isn't answered at the end. Was he a genuine believer suffering from tear-induced dementia who really did think he was a prophet, or did he know what he was doing with the tears and purposefully lied about the origin of his "visions" and his end goal? It's really hard to tell, since all we know for sure is that he wanted Elizabeth to conquer the world after he was gone. We can assume he truly believed in the baptism (though he managed to completely miss the point of it), but even that's a bit ambiguous. Personally, I think it's the first interpretation, I'm just saying it's unclear. We don't really ever hear anything from him except when he's preaching for an audience.

If it's at all a concern, I'm not seriously discrediting religion, just superficially amused by the idea that religion was, perhaps ostensibly, what transformed Booker into Comstock.

Cyberpunk might have more possibilities, but my understanding of the various 'punks is that a game like Deus Ex Human Revolution would be considered cyberpunk. If Bioshock were more like Deus Ex, I'd find that jarring. Bioshock is somewhere in the steam/bio/hydropunk category, if my Google Searches bore any fruit.

But for the purpose of escalation, moving from a crumbling city under the sea, to a prospering city in the sky, to a city with a focus on digital information, cyberspace, and other futuristic concepts makes a weird kind of sense.

edited 18th Oct '13 9:08:48 AM by FOFD

Personally, I think Comstock both did and did not believe. He believed as much as he needed to in order to justify his behavior to himself. He was the believer who will reinterpret the Word of God to suit his opinions, rather than molding his opinions to the Word of God. Comstock took his baptism to be a blanket forgiveness of all his sins, because that's what he really wanted out of it. He wasn't repentful. He had no real desire to change himself or to be a better man. He just wanted to stop feeling guilty. Baptism was the placebo that let him go, "Well, all my sins are forgiven, time to get back to being awesome."

He's a devout believer in his own version of the faith, which is different from Christianity in whatever way Comstock needs it to be in order to justify his behavior to himself. If Comstock chooses to do X, he can tell himself that he's doing it because God wishes it, because if you look at this passage and that passage in just the right way it kind of looks like God was talking about this when he said that. Men like Comstock are masters of self-delusion.

He might even believe that Rosalind's windows into other worlds are a gift from heaven rather than a scientific curiosity. All he would have to do is tell himself that it's so; that she succeeds only because God wishes her to. He's already invented the idea that Rosalind is an archangel of Heaven sent by God to grant him these visions, after all. If he convinces himself that's true, then everything he does with the portals is completely justified, because God wants him to do it.

It would fit with why he barely gave a damn about Booker, or how his alternate self turned out so differently. I expected a little more interaction between them. I mean, even if he was a deluded old man, if you saw an alternate version of yourself that didn't go through the same transformation as you, wouldn't you be at least a little curious?

Zero morality, so who cares why there's a possibility that {Comstock} might not have fashioned Columbia and become a religious leader. He was the version of himself that God chose to make a prophet. Maybe that's the way he saw it.

edited 18th Oct '13 11:08:05 AM by FOFD

If anything, I think Comstock probably didn't even think twice about screwing over Booker, because why should he? He's Father Comstock. He has the moral high ground. He's a Good Person, graced by God, whose every action is guided by a divine hand! And Booker is basically what he could have been without - the evil, scumbag asshole that didn't become the holy messiah.

The game does have a lot of the structure and conventions of the "rescue the damsel from the tower" archetype. It subverts the hell out of most of it but not everyone will pick up on the subversion.

I said something about this in another thread (and am tempted to do a blog post about it. Multiple times, the game asks you to save the girl. The first time, Elizabeth is simply an object to Booker, a means to an end: "Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt." The second time in Finkton, Booker has to come to terms with Elizabeth as a person with wants and needs and motives of her own, and come to a mutual understanding with her, though she is still a means to an end. The third and final time, Booker has rejected the original bargain: he now cares about Elizabeth for Elizabeth's sake, he is righteously angry at what Comstock is trying to do with her and the stakes on the line are both the fate of the world and his very own soul.

edited 18th Oct '13 12:10:54 PM by Elle

And all throughout the game, it's Elizabeth saving Booker as much as it is the converse. At the end, she kills Booker. So much for the Distressed Damsel stereotype. Anyone who doesn't get that is either willfully blind or hasn't bothered to play more than ten minutes into the game.

Technically, it takes a couple hours to get to where you even meet Elizabeth in person...

Also, I admit that I rolled my eyes when the police captured Elizabeth in Finkton. It was slightly Distress Ball-y.

edited 18th Oct '13 12:29:31 PM by Elle