I am at PAX (again)

August 23, 2007

I wonder what I thought I was going to be doing on Thursday. Playing Bioshock nonstop and then tossing socks in a bag before my flight? I have a huge list of things to do and it was only by 4 PM that I managed to finish all of them. Packing, cleaning, washing and drying... I only touched my Xbox 360 controller to charge the battery.

It's a good thing Bioshock isn't absolutely perfect because then I'd have nothing to talk about. You've probably noticed how I spend more time complaining than complimenting, even when I'm dealing with a gem like God of War II. My new favorite Final Fantasy XII has its major sins, but I will give credit to Bioshock for only letting me nitpick on its lapses.

One thing I really like about Bioshock is your character's movement rate. You seem to move just fast enough when the controller is maxed out, plus your slower "creeping" speed is great for gathering atmosphere. I don't feel like I'm sneaking up on someone like in Splinter Cell, but that I'm tiptoeing around a haunted underwater mansion. The problem is that this speed isn't totally constant. You notice it early in the game when Atlas takes out the first splicer. Sometimes your full running speed is cut down to 70% for no apparent reason. It's a bizarre bug, and I can't tell what causes or cures it.

Coming from a horror high like System Shock 2 we expected excellent quality audio and Bioshock delivers. There are plenty of audio logs left around the city and they didn't fall into Doom 3's trap of having lots of random guards leave "gee this place is creepy" audios that always end with a three digit security code. You hear the same voices over and over, sometimes in chronological order, sometimes not. Listening to the new soulless Andrew Ryan over the speakers and the old idealistic Andrew Ryan on the audio logs is startling.

But (and this is a minor but) there's never any real connection with the presence or placement of the audio logs and, say, reality. I have no doubt that these people would create a bunch of audio logs (look at how popular blogging is today), but why would they be scattered around everywhere? Wouldn't you keep those things in your room or something? It was like this with System Shock 2 and technically I'm not bothered by it. I just wonder why Irrational hasn't done anything about this game convention when so much else of their universe fits together.

Rapture is also getting slightly less scary. I'm thinking it's because Bioshock is a smart first-person shooter rather than a first-person role playing game. In a FPS the point is having guns and using guns to kill people (see Black for the perfect gun fetishist example). In a RPG the point is moving the plot along. If you have to shoot somebody to keep moving then fine, shoot him, but it's not the focus of the game. So in FPS games they're not going to short you on bullets. Headshots are fun but not vital to ammo conservation. In a horror RPG like System Shock 2, every bullet is priceless. There are no vending machines dedicated to dispensing long range death. You, the player, feel scared because you can't waste a single shot. Resources like health and, um, mana are always low.

Something else that I find interesting is that despite being in an underwater city at the bottom of the ocean, you never really find yourself in danger of drowning. I surely thought they would give us rooms filling with water or cracking pipes to contend with, but you're only in danger if you stand in a pool and someone tosses some electricity your way. Kind of a missed opportunity, you know?

That's all I can come up with for now. The rest of Bioshock - the graphics, the Big Daddies, the hacking - all of it is just fan-bloody-tastic. I'm really floored by the richness of the environment. Even when I'm not in the underwater forest of Arcadia I'm amazed by the detail that goes into every nook and cranny.

It may not be wise to tell you that Sunshine has the keys to my apartment. I need somebody to stop my mailbox from overflowing and she usually comes over anyway to play Zelda, so there we go. Just because I'm in Seattle doesn't mean that you can't have a Friday night Mario Party. It just means I will have marginally less input on where to go for dinner.