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UNDER DA SEA!!

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KvP:
So far I'm about 85% through the game and I've just recently put my finger on what's not sitting with me with this game that should be great. It's that the theme doesn't gel. Sofia Lamb is haphazardly tacked onto the setting, and the inversion of politics from Objectivism to Collectivism is about as lame in the game as it sounds on paper. It's not fresh. They should have known better than to add a completely new character to Rapture and act as though she was always a major player even though she's never mentioned in the first game. Lamb also isn't given the sort of attention that Andrew Ryan was in the first game, and she's not half as interesting. All we're really told is that she had a daughter who you're attached to, she's a psychologist, and she spouts a bunch of bullshit about Collectivism that's never really matched up in the gameworld - What was really remarkable about Bioshock 1 was how the themes interacted with the setting. Andrew Ryan built a anarcho-capitalist paradise and every new place you visited and every diary you listened to added new insight into both the promise and the eventual failure of his vision. Sofia Lamb, on the other hand, is just a psychiatrist who talks big but at the end of the day is just a tin-pot dictator with an army of mental patients under her command. Nothing in the game tells us anything at all about how Collectivism can horrifically fail. Instead of "Anarchy = Insanity!" it's "Idealism = Insanity!", which is far too broad of a theme to be of any interest.

The gameplay IS improved, though. They added just a little more variety and better AI to splicers, which is a nice. However they didn't really add enough - Rapture is really just the same as it was in Bioshock 1, and without the spooky thematic journey (for lack of a better term) it's not a very interesting place to revisit. From a storytelling standpoint I was also underwhelmed. The game did not make a good impression at all in the first hour or so - The opening cinematic felt like a rehash of the climax in Bioshock 1, and the Little Sister telling you "Eleanor missed you, you need to go find her" was about the lamest example of telling over showing in what should be a world-class game (I felt like Bioshock 1 did more showing than telling) I also missed the stories told through the diaries - aside from a select few characters (most of which you meet in the world) it seems like a lot of the diaries are one-offs, which is disappointing.

Maybe if 2K wasn't so intent on quickie sequels to improve their share value (around the time Bioshock 1 came out the only things that kept them from going under were Bioshock and I think GTA4) they could really build upon what made Bioshock 1 such a success. But they didn't. This game was a pretty major dissapointment for me. I give it a C+.

Storm Rider:
This sounds pretty much exactly like what I was afraid of. Unfortunate, but I'll probably still pick it up when it inevitably hits budget price. 2K was practically giving away the original around a year after it came out.

Scandanavian War Machine:
I got the original Bioshock for free when I bought a 360 at Fred Meyer. It was an in-store coupon. Pretty sweet deal.


I'm gonna do the same and wait for this to be not so full-priced because I just can't justify buying it any time soon.

Tom:
I buy all my Xbox games 2nd hand, during the big sales. No game I have is an exception.

LTK:
I've given the multiplayer mode a try now. At first it looks very well-crafted: You pick a character - those range from an engineer to an athlete to a fat cat, and that's where the differences end - and proceed to the prologue, where you wake up on the floor recovering from your first plasmid splice. Then you can roam around the apartment. From there you can select your weapons, plasmids and tonics, put on party masks, listen to characters' audio logs, and uh, play a little music. It looks nice but there's nothing in there a menu couldn't do better.

The match selection is a bit confusing. It doesn't have dedicated servers, so no user-friendliness there. It gives you a "Find Match" option to select one of the standard mutliplayer fragfest game types with a slightly different name. Then, it appears that it randomly groups people with the same game type selected into a match, but I'm not sure of that. There's no other option available than to select a game type. After that you wait until enough people join in and the game starts.

I enjoyed the gameplay itself very much, however. It keep things much simpler than conventional Bioshock: Two weapons, two plasmids, and three tonics. You can arrange different combinations in three available item sets, and swap between them while waiting to respawn. You start with a pistol and shotgun, electro bolt, incinerate and winter blast. As you gain levels, or ranks, different weapons and plasmids become available, but there doesn't appear to be a choice in which you do and don't want to get. You can get points by killing enemies (duh), photographing their corpse for a damage bonus (a creative alternative to teabagging), hacking turrets and machines (vending machines are refill stations for eve and ammo, you can rig these to explode), finding Big Daddy suits (these spawn in the map from time to time, haven't yet found one), killing players in Big Daddy suits, and picking up vials of adam that are scattered across the map. So, plenty of opportunity to get up in ranks if you're not good at shooting. Gonna try the other game types soon, too.

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