Bioshock 2

Because ctrl+f isn't showing that there is a thread on it here. Am I deluding myself by thinking this gamehas a good story?

No, people were just expecting a lot more from it after the first game's story.

Which, given the industry's conservative climate, was always expected.

I loved it more than the original. I think it's more challenging, more enjoyable, and has a stronger plot that doesn't suddenly fall apart in the final act. It doesn't have the strong twist, or the benefits of being as fresh, but it still has strong, vividly grotesque characterisations, serious thematic intent and lashings of camp couture that make Bioshock what it is.

Plus, I'll always advocate a game that has class concerns central to it's narrative — something that the original game notably lacked despite the brief appearances and strong influences within the text. It was a pretty gaping flaw that we only ever hung out in expensive boutique stores, art galleries, state of the art facilities and penthouses outside a brief trip down to the docks, yet the back story was often focussed on a civil war between the haves and have nots. A bad combination of tell-don't-show and Hide Your Poor.

I did think that Sinclair was kind of bland (something I largely blame on the performance's emphasis on shallow showmanship.) He's fine in the game's first acts, but by the time we get around to the finale the actor lacks the gravitas needed for his role. I also think that the actress who played young Eleanor gives a woefully bad performance in the line of spotty British snots, but that's more to do with transatlantic malappropriation than anything else.

I think the big problems with the game were that the atmosphere went fairly stale the second time around and the story was largely built on Retcons, giving it the impression that it was mostly just riding the original's coattails.

That being said, I actually enjoyed the game well enough personally. Gameplay was entertaining enough, and while the moral choice system was predictably much shallower than advertised, I felt the ending did a better job of driving home the consequences of the good/evil paths than the original. I just wish the NPCs hadn't kept poofing out of existence once you were done with their levels.

I get the sense that there was some rushing on the part of the developers there. Hence the bizarre disappearances of Tennenbaum and Grace (should you have saved her).

I guess Bioshock2 is also one of those games where, if you've already played the original, you can probably tell whether you'll like it from the promotional material. If you're thrilled that you'll get to romp through Rapture again as a semi-Big Daddy fighting the new Big Sisters, you'll like it. If you're annoyed that they're reusing a lot of themes and elements from the original "But bigger! But the exact opposite ideology!", you won't. It's not going to totally subvert your expectations of it.

The story was certainly good, but I didn't like how they fundamentally changed Rapture's history regarding the class warfare issue. In the first game you get the sense that Andrew Ryan had somewhat succeeded in making sure that Rapture's citizens had their fair shot at success and a decent life, and that he really cared about making sure that the innovators succeed as much as possible. It only started to fall apart when Fontaine showed up and started to "game" the system and prove to be a more shrewd businessman than Ryan.

But the sequel makes a lot of subtle, but significant changes. Ryan brought in a ton of cheap laborers and set them up in some dreadful living conditions, and the audio logs even seem to imply that he really didn't care what happened with them. Whenever somebody brought up an idea that he disagreed with, even art, he censors or imprisons them. Furthermore, the citizens of Rapture itself are shown as being xenophobic in how they treated the diving team that accidentally stumbled onto their underwater city, choosing to either execute them or perform hideous experiments on them for no reason other than "they're outsiders". It's as if the very idea behind Rapture was broken from the start, and that Ryan was a total hypocrite.

The other issue was with the gameplay. While it was certainly fun, it was more or less the same as the last, but just slightly improved. You sure didn't feel like a Big Daddy because you were just as vunerable as Jack, and the Splicers treated you just the same instead of fearing like the other big daddies. And there was WAAAAAAY too much ammo available near the endgame, even on hardmode.

Recently got into this. This is just made of awesome.

The storyline is a lot more compelling and the weapons are infinitely a lot more fun and useful to use. And your guide is a bit more interesting. I can just tell that good old Sinclair is gonna get it for helping Delta.

d Roy, you're awesome. I totally agree.

Man, this game is going way too easy on the player. Also, Decoy 3 is broken as hell.

You know what is the most satisfying thing you can do in this game?

Finishing off a Big Daddy, or even a Big Sister, with Drill Dash. That just makes my day.

Providing ADAM test subjects...well, Sinclair ain't no saint, that's for sure.

Waterwalking never gets old. It feels so...wonderful.

edited 25th Oct '12 2:16:50 PM by dRoy

Okay wow, this is just incredible.

Playing as a Little Sister? Damn!

Meltzer and now Sinclair...damn.

Heh, Big Sister Eleanor is awesome.

edited 25th Oct '12 3:58:59 PM by dRoy

Triple posting. Deal with it.

My God, the ending was beautiful.

Always Rescue.

Honestly, the story itself isn't BAD and the gameplay is actually BETTER than 1. However, the HORRENDOUS retconning involved to shoehorn Lamb into Rapture's history really made me hate this game. Seriously, Alexander and Sinclair had their names appear in the original at least ONCE yet Lamb, who was supposedly Ryan's greatest rival was NEVER mentioned? I am aware that the story was radically altered at some point (originally there was going to be a single Little Sister as the Big Bad) but this is just silly.

Another thing I hated were the environments. To me, what made the original this amazing experience was wandering through these amazing looking world that despite being partially destroyed yet retained a lot of its beauty. In this game, we wander through slums, prisons and maintenance stations, and a red light district and the few places that would logically fit in the original's world (such as the resort and Dionysus Park) are all so degraded they become horribly generic. And I'm sorry Nicknacks but I disagree that the original "hid the poor": you had an ENTIRE SECTION featuring the slums and Fontaine's home for the poor. Why do we need to make a whole GAME of that?

Truth be told, I think this game could have been redeemed if they did one simple thing: NOT SET IT IN RAPTURE. Example: have Lamb still have her collectivist ideals but instead of going against Ryan head on, she mostly kept to herself. When Rapture fell, she and Alexander could trick Tenenbaum into going with her to a secluded location, perhaps a desert or an island, so that she could work on a cure only to double cross her and started kidnapping people to form her "family" only to fall back on the old splicer's. You could even keep Delta, have his comatose body brought over to be reverse engineered. You could have a new setting, avoid retconning and looking like a quick cash grab which is what this sequel heavily resembles.

Nevertheless I think this game has its merits. I liked Sinclair's journey from heartless bastard to someone having some vague ideas of decency. Like I said this is better gameplay wise. And despite the retcon aspect I like the idea of Lamb: ever since I first heard of utilitarianism I wondered what would happen if someone took the "greatest happiness to the greatest number" principle to the logical extreme. And the result is quite scary: if you claim to love everyone equally, then you basically love no one. You are in essence a psychopath albeit one with a warped sense of morality. And I think Lamb captured that quite well, especially with her interactions with Eleanor.

edited 26th Oct '12 10:03:25 AM by Psyclone

Whoa, they did? Never noticed that.

I see where you are coming from.

I found Minerva's Den to be more interesting story-wise than the main game. Guess the idea of a crazy Russian and his machine that can predict the future appeals to me better than some jerky lady who taunts me like a broken record and was never mentioned in the last game despite being one of the biggest pains in Ryan's ass.

edited 26th Oct '12 3:23:06 PM by Kev-O

Arguing that 2 was a bad game (or that Lamb was a bad character) just because she wasn't in 1 feels like such a petty argument. I understand that it might pop your realism suspension, but I can't see how it would do so badly enough to derail an entire game.

Even so, I think 2 gets away with it. You spend very little time in Rapture, and never have much of a conversation. Plus her name was eradicated from the records. *shrug* I bought it. Your loss if you didn't.

Oh more dilapidated opulence, how thrilling.

I kid of course, but the first game rarely ever gave voice and subjectivity to the poor of Rapture. The game was fairly consistently about how privatised government could lead to anarchy, dehumanisation, exploitation and despotism, but limited its area of effect to the middle classes. One of the biggest problems with full blown objectivism (or neo-conservatism and several other right wing policies) is the extreme divide between the poor and the rich, and the great quantities of people who would be marginalised. The first game never really addressed this, outside lip-service extolled by Atlas's insincere regime. Considering the large role the anarchists played in Rapture's back story, it's strange that they had so small a voice in the first game, and while I'll give you that we did get to visit an orphanage (one just down the road from some luxury apartments, so I'm not sure what conclusions we're meant to draw from that), we certainly didn't visit any slums. I think you might be confusing those with Neptune's Bounty, which contained a hotel and several import/export businesses.

The sequel provides a fairly even balance: there are white collar workspaces, private parks and institutions, but we also travel through three sites of marginalisation (a political prison used to house anarchists and other disruptive elements, living space repossessed by the poor and homeless, and a red light district) that place a more expressive — and I'd argue more honest — face on the exploitation that the first game was often so bad at portraying.

You ask why we need to make an entire game about it? Setting aside the fact that they, in fact, didn't, it's because they spent an entire game criticising the exploitation that people suffer under Ryan and Ryan-like regimes while never providing a voice to those most affected!

...

There's a lot I love about Bioshock 2. I think it's a very clever game.

@d Roy - Both names are mentioned in the Audio Diary about the Vita-Chamber in Rapture Central Command. There's also "Sinclair Spirits" in Fort Frolic.

@Nicknacks - The area where Atlas' headquarters was located looked a lot like a slum to me. Anyway, I think a better look at the poor's plight in Rapture was, of all things, the prequel novel, Bioshock Rapture, where we get to see the slow descent into chaos which as it turns out was not SOLELY due to ADAM. It also addressed an issue that I'm amazed the games to my knowledge didn't address even once: how the hell does making a society based entirely on competition work when the "losers" can't just pack up and leave if things get unbearable?

Like I said, Bioshock 2 isn't a BAD game, it's just disappointing (to me) compared to the original. It's the Bioshock equivalent of Deus Ex Invisible War.

edited 27th Oct '12 4:36:46 AM by Psyclone

They're not slums. They're a stone's throw from the rich part of town and a big Fontaine ego-stroke that was adapted into a military base. They're also completely devoid of anything extolling the subjective experience of being marginalised, just a couple of ironic messages about the privatisation of the anarchists.

Not to be rude, but isn't this called poverty and/or death?

edited 27th Oct '12 5:02:26 AM by Nicknacks

Not as good as a whole as the original, but I loved the story and characters. Delta was a more interesting protagonist. I was beautiful seeing the horrible counterpoint to Ryan's horrible point.

Plus, Lamb is wonderfully a bigger hypocrite then Ryan. With every rant about how perfect, selfless, and pure Eleanor is, you can just hear Lamb's arrogance and pride. Eleanor may be the messiah, but Lamb was the messiah's mother who passed on the proper, perfect values to her.

I'm just there to kill psychotics and chew bubblegum. And my diving helmet keeps stopping me from chewing bubblegum.

I absolutely loved all the moments walking underwater.

Say, has anyone actually tried to Harvest the Little Sisters? I didn't have the guts.

I did on my second run. It's always a little uncomfortable that I find evil options get easier over the course of a playhrough in games that feature them.

Ah, but did you harvest Mark Meltzer's daughter?

(If you did you're a horrible, horrible person.)

The more I play Bioshock 2, the more I think it's really under-appreciated. While the multiplayer is completely shoehorned in, Delta's story is pretty well-crafted, and there's no deflation of tension like their was near the end of the first game.

Still, the whole morality system of both Bioshock games is cheap and two-dimensional; here's to hoping that they don't bring it back in Infinite.

The entire point of Andrew Ryan in the first Bioshock was that he was a zealot who still let his thirst for power overwhelm his values; even the Fontaine, the villain, was a better objectivist than he was. He was a symbol of how no extreme philosophy can hope to work against human nature. Sure, an objectivist system would give everyone a chance, but systems are run by people, and people can act however the hell they want and justify their actions however the hell they want. That's why you have things like an "objectivist" using mind-control pheromones to enslave a population.

edited 29th Oct '12 7:17:34 PM by Scardoll