#483: BioShock (2007, X360)

BioShock is perhaps best described as a tale of two different games. One is the competent first person shooter, perhaps a bit light on enemy variety but big on providing a lot of fun ways to do combat, and with some good character building elements to boot. Now, this game is, by itself, pretty damn good for roughly the same reason that Gears of War and the first Halo succeeded, namely the 15 seconds of fun principle. The 15 seconds of fun principle holds that, basically, if your core gameplay mechanics are fun, it doesn't really hurt you all that much to not spend much time shaking up the gameplay. In Halo this meant that since it was simply a lot of fun to go around tossing grenades and thwacking grunts and elites and whatever, it didn't matter that it turned out that that was all you'd be doing for the next 8 hours (and it didn't matter, at least not to me).

For BioShock this means that, in large part due to the huge number of plasmids at your disposal, you are bound to find at least a few combat methods that you find yourself enjoying the hell out of and this fun is enough to pretty much carry you through to the end of the game, despite the enemies being all very similar and there being very little in the way of big changes to the core gameplay (nothing even at the level of Halo's vehicle segments). For me specifically, it was a combination of telekinesis and using plasmids to boost my wrench power to the point where it became the only weapon I needed (of course, when all you want to use is a wrench, it becomes pretty damn useful). Others I'm sure liked to use the alternate ammunition for their guns (like setting tripwires with the crossbow), or to use a wider variety of active plasmids (like fire, or ice, or BEES). The point is, there is enough available to the player that they can adjust things to suit what methods they are finding the most fun to play. Furthermore, if the 15 seconds of fun begins to wear out, it gives them the option of switching things up. So, again, by a purely gameplay centric perspective, BioShock has a whole hell of a lot going on for it, and we haven't even touched on the setting, story, and characters that actually wind up making the game what it is (that being the best game of 2007 this side of Super Mario Galaxy).



The second game here is the one featuring one of the most compelling settings I've ever seen in a video game - alternating beautifully between the disturbing and frightening and the majestic and inspiring. It's important not to underestimate how something like setting can dramatically enhance a title. BioShock could very easily of been set in some space station manned with space marines (like, oh, Halo) - the excellent gameplay would remain pretty much unchanged, Big Daddys could be robots, Little Sisters could be little Salacious B. Crumb type creatures or space imps or something, the pistol could be a space pistol, etc. It could still look pretty damn amazing too - Unreal Tournament 2004 and Gears of War showed that you can still do really interesting things with game architecture amongst a horde of space marines. All that said, to say that having as incredible and unique an environment as Rapture wasn't probably the single biggest factor in its success would be pretty disingenuous. Rapture's pull, such as it is, mostly comes from the way it manages to highlight at nearly every turn both how spectacular this world was (and still is) and how far this world has fallen. The player is presented at nearly every turn with gorgeous art deco architecture while simultaneously offering visions of the horrors that has befallen it. Perhaps most incredible is how beautiful this horror can be - in its own way - and this coming from a guy who is normally genuinely turned away from the grotesque - BioShock makes it work by having it seem to be so fitting amongst the splendor one sees.

The setting manages to, in its own way, tell a story and become a character which is itself more compelling than about 95% of what is on the market. The player feels compelled to explore every nook and cranny - not for the hope of discovering some new item or upgrade (not that these don't exist, but they are fairly sparse - except for the huge amounts of disposables like ammo laying around) - but for the hope of discovering some new hint towards explaining the background of this environment, in the form of an audio book diary, or perhaps some secret area used by Rapture's saner denizens before they too were attacked by the splicers who've taken over.

The audio books deserve a special mention - in general, I don't care much for cut scenes in video games. They strike me as a surprisingly lazy way to go about telling story - that rather than embracing the medium itself, developers are simply using the storytelling conventions of film. On the same plane of the uninspired is the scrolling text box (taking cues from books this time). Now, I'm not saying that having story told through these means is bad, of course, countless great stories have been told in these fashions - but I greatly prefer games that can tell their stories in ways that don't stop the gameplay dead in its tracks. The gold standard here is of course, the Half-Life series, but BioShock comes up with some interesting solutions as well. This is where the audio books come in - allowing for the rich backstory of rapture to be brought to life for the player without ever actually pausing the action - they simply play in the background. Add in some excellent voice acting, and you got yourself a stew going. Compare this to the likely alternative - written diaries, likely confined to some submenu or something. Not only would you lose the acting and the sense of the writer/speaker being brought to life, but more importantly, no one would ever read them - why pause the action to read some text?



Special mention should also be made of Andrew Ryan as a character compelling in his conviction and dedication to his strict moral code as well as in how this makes him at once both the most sane person in the city and the most insane at the same time.

BioShock
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Irrational Games
Released: 8/21/2007
Obtained: October 2007

9.5/10