f13.net

Discussion after you've beaten the game. If you scroll past this post and fuck yourself, it's not my fault.

Only being able to play it an hour or so at a time I'm far from finished but the other thread was getting into spoiler territory so I'm continuing the little sister discussion here...

I don't think you should "harvest" the little sisters because the very first one noticed you were still breathing and let you live, she could have just gone ahead anyway but she didn't want to kill you.

Current point in game: Fishmarket - Upper Wharf, have camera.


Dear God this is creeping me out. Thanks to some asshat posting on the T2k Board, I found out before the  tape that you come from Rapture, or were born to parents who were from there. I know the Tattoos mean something, but  I haven't figured it out. Especially creepy, to me at least, was Slicers singing "Jesus Loves me". I went to Elementary school  at a Christian school, the ones that have the Christian flag flying with the American flag. That was the first song we were ever taught to sing. Hearing it from a group of five ear olds is sweet, if not a little unnerving. To hear it from  a group of sick twisted shells of human beings cowering in rancid filth. . .  it was mercy to launch a grenade into the group and blow them all to kingdom come.

Atlas is talking to me, but I don't trust him at all. I don't trust Tannenbaum, either, but I made the mistake of  rescuing a Little Sister and now I can't kill them. I Probably would trust Ryan more, because he thinks I'm a spy. At least I know he hates me.

I pity the person who doesn't listen to the tapes in this game.

I love Hacking.

I was a bit disappointed in that the creepiness didn't seem to extend through the whole game. The medical level had a good feel, but once you get to Sandor, it seemed to become much more 'run & gun'

Plus, shrinking the view even further, and adding a distort from the Big Daddy helmet sucked. I had to stop for a while as I was having bits of motion sickness.

I got the 'good' end, does harvesting the sisters give much more Adam than saving them? 80 each + 200 bonus every 3 seemed enough to buy most things I wanted.

I'm a bit into medical, and boy are melee splicers wimpy and easy to kill. The gunners are pretty accurate and get 2-3 hits for free unless you really get a jump on them.

I despise jump scares so I play this game like a total pussy. I hack every camera and turret in sight, then piss off splicers and lead them back to my ring of death.

Edit: Also, for some reason the retail version runs worse than the demo. God only knows why.

How much RAM does your PC have?

Don't neglect the camera. I decided to play again, for the 'evil' ending, and see how well 'research' worked. Good god, I seem to be doing double damage to most stuff (including Rosie!) and turrets can be hacked without the now tedious minigame.

In short, act like a Tourist, and photo everything you can, as often as you can. Then all you need is a wrench.

2 gigs.

Beat the game finally, got the good ending.  Kinda nice ending but ... god damn.  Pretty short I think.  60 seconds of high drama.

Need to see how the evil ending pays out.

me and my friend started yesterday about 2pm and played through aprox 9 to 10 hours.  he was on easy mode saving the little girls, i was on medium killing them.  he beat the game in about 9 hours; i had a few crashes due to my non retail video card (wasn't game related crashes, get the same issue in war3) got through 5/8 of the sections.  other than that, the game ran flawlessly.  no lag on the highest settings and it only hitched maybe a few times in hours of gameplay. what impressed me more than anything with this game was that in 10 hours of gameplay, the game didn't bug out or crash once for him- on a laptop. 

one gripe i have is the difficulty difference in easy to medium is rediculous; he would stand in front of 4 or 5 guys and maybe use 1 health pack whereas i could lose 3/4 of my life from a single opponent if i wasn't paying attention and they got the drop on me.

the good ending was okay, but i'm not sure anything would be good enough after that awesome ass end fight.  have yet to see the evil ending, things go slow with my icy wrench and camera =)

Icy Blast + Shotgun = Dominate.
I also want to see how stealth assassin (All Wrench Buffs + All Wrench Sneaking) works out, might be necessary on Hard.  All I know is loot off enemies isn't important.  On Normal I was stocked on all ammo types all the time.  The end boss fight was cake because I just nuked him with grenades in all three  phases.  I see when it's best to use grenades, but still, cake.

Have to see how it is on Hard.  Is there a 4th difficult setting? I can stand playing through a second time but a third might be a bit much.

I wish beating hard unlocked something more difficult. while it's certainly not cakewalk by the last third of the game the ass-kickery available made it pretty easy.

I got the evil ending, but I'd saved nearly all the girls...except 2. And that was pressing the wrong mouse key in the dark. Doh.

Is there only 2 endings? One where you save every girl, and one where even taking one is enough to be evil?

The final fight isn't that hard on medium, if you have max grenades/heat seekers, and/or maxed out chem thrower.

I'll need to go through on hard as the first person sneaker with the wrench.

Impossible, the computer sees you before you can sneak up on them, the game cheats like that because it's not a sneaker.

If their back is turned you can often hit them before they turn around. However given the very linear and narrow maps it can be hard to impossible get them in that position.

I find it's pretty easy to sneak up on things while crouching, even without stealth tonics. and then I can enjoy the ever so perverse pleasure of Shockémon Snap!

I killed one and got the good ending.

Many times I wondered to myself, "Wait, why the fuck am I doing this when I clearly know that something's 'not right' ?"

The Ryan reveal was perfectly done and really gave the player an excuse for 'find the key, walk this corridor, find the other key' on rails type gameplay that you pretty much had to suffer.  It was the Rip Off of Shodan but with a much much more subtle message.

Clever.

There was no illusion of choice, save in the way that you handled the Little Sisters.  And, once you find Tennenbaums Creche, I simply couldn't kill another one.  Thank Christ I'd bought most of my plasmids by then.  :)

Beat it, got the good ending as well. Being the kind of pussy I am there's no way in hell I can replay and do the evil ending. Not with kids. *sighs*

I do wonder though, how the post-Ryan game plays if you're evil. Do you still wake up in the creche with the girls all being helpful? That wouldn't make any sense.

I also felt like a heel because I went through like 3 of the girls during the big daddy escort part. Sometimes it was just too difficult to keep them alive. If there's any part of the game I'd like to replay and get perfect it's that one.

Yes.  Yes, you do.   :evil:

However, it was that point that I couldn't do it anymore.  Nor, probably, could I on a replay. 

As to the rationale :  Tenenbaum wants rid of Fontaine, no matter the cost.  If that's some nutball who's been hacking up children, so be it.  Bear in mind her history is just as checkered.

Hacking the turrets in the area and laying down a couple proximity mines is a big help for that spot.

I couldn't imagine not hacking the area to hell and back.   Turrets, pet security copters, and the alarm system went a long way for me.  Even with the help it still took more than a few save/reloads to get through it. 

I did hack the turrets. It never occured to me to lay down a proximity mine. Do you get an achievement for not letting any of them die?

Apparently if you photo turrets enough, you auto hack them when you try.

Shit.

I never use that fucking camera...

No.  Don't worry about any achievement with that section of the game.

Edit: I made it the first time through.  If you've fully researched your foes, have the Plasmids for damage bonus, and on the first section use the Crossbow, Proximity Mines on the second, and Proximity mine the far passage while using the Chemical Thrower, Shotgun, or any other fast kill combination for the ones that pop right in front of her, you're good.

Save your frags and Heat-seekers for the last Big Daddy.  You can and will be able to fully restock your equipment at this point right after him, so just go hog wild on him and take him out.

After taking pictures of enough Houdinis I automatically turn invisible while standing still.

I forgot how I got that Plasmid, but if that's the case, then I'll remember that for my Hard playthrough.  But yeah, Chameleon is pretty much the single most-abusive Plasmid in the entire game. Ambush? No problem.  Security Bots? Pshaw.

Then again enemy sight radius is shit even when they can see you.  The AI was a huge disappointment in some areas like luring guys over to you or having them do anything more complicated than rush or find a health station when low on health.

Aw, man.  You missed out on a TON of bonuses by not using the camera.  On top of doing bonus damage to researched foes, which is awesome in and of itself, you gain abilities from research.  Researching Little Sisters gives you a bonus to health and eve, researching Bouncers gives you extra melee damage, researching splicers gives you free tonics, researching turrets, bots, and cameras gives you hacking bonuses.  The research camera is freaking sweet, use it and love it.

I got the evil ending because I harvested the first two I came across.  I rescued all the rest.  And maybe because 3 of the girls died at the last level.

And the evil ending sucks ass.  I was pretty pissed off, because I figured I'd get the good ending.  I didn't feel like I played through as a bad guy, and in the end it's like 'you are a sociopathic world ending maniac'.  WTF?

The camera became my default weapon after I got it. I take a lot more damage, but it's worth it for all the extras.

On the downside, the constant fuzzy focusing is giving me eyestrain.

I didn't really use the camera much until near the end when I was in the Big Daddy suit.  Since none of the enemies attack you, it's the perfect time to take pictures or backtrack and look for anything you might need to complete any achievements you missed.

whaaaat

the best time to snap pictures it is when something with nasty hooks is about to rip open your face, and for just a moment everything is serene and sepia (A - ding ding shwaa...discovery!)

then it all snaps back and you're firing a machinegun frantically while retreating, looking around for some kind of environmental doohickey that'll enhance your killination of this beautiful specimen. shocko!

If you wait until you're in the suit, the game's already over and you missed out on lots of playtime with the research bonuses, not cool!

I know.  I was saying mostly from an achievment standpoint (if you have a 360 and are into that sort of thing) if you want to get everything fully researched.  Of course the game is easy enough, on Medium anyway, that I didn't need any research bonuses.  If I play through it on hard somewhere down the line, I'd probably spend more time taking pictures.

promise you'll do it with gusto? or verve. ?!

I do use the camera and have got a ton of bonuses, but I used it sparingly and I honestly never thought to photograph electronic equipment.

A Loser is Me.

Of course, now I'm reading the 'spoiler' sites and forums, I'm finding that I missed quite a bit anyway.  That's probably a good thing from the replayability point of view.

I did it on HARD to start with, so now I can be more sedate.

I promise nothing.  I let my boss borrow my copy after I finished it anyway, since I don't plan on going back through it for a while.

Make sure to film the little sisters / big daddies. The damage hit for the daddies is significant at +++, and you get a permanent max health and eve bump for every level of little sister research.

And if you want to make your ammo shortages become few and far between, get the less breakage upgrade for the crossbow. Easily the best gun upgrade outside of your damage ones.

The crossbow actually pisses me off.  I've got no problem accepting  super powered blue kool-aid.  My brain locks up however accepting that a crossbow is more powerful than a shotgun.   I really wish they used something else for their sniper rifle equiv.

But it has explosive bolts !!


Also, did anyone else really, really, really go mad on the 'drain the lake bit where splicers are going to come at you' ?  I must have laid down all my electric bolts and all my prox mines and it turns out there was only about 3 or 4 splicers that charged me.  I know because I counted corpses later.  They didn't even make it into my room.

:(

Well, Half-Life 2 showed that a Crossbow can be more powerful than a shotgun.

Ok, I'm through. Have I got that ending right? A bunch of brainwashed girls running around in the outside world who are conditioned to stab every prone body with sharp objects? Man, their husbands better be light sleepers.  8-)

I never found an explanation for the tattoos on his wrists, does anyone know about that?  I thought maybe they represented the chains that Ryan's statues use but that would mean he'd of been tattooed as a baby which doesn't make sense.

I was thinking the tattoo was related to him being a genetic experiment and meant to be used as an identifier of him being a product of the great chain.  Or teasing you wondering if he's directly related to Ryan.

Considering the extent of the character's identity in the game is only in his hands, the chain distinguishes him from any other male character's hands.

Tattooed as a baby, I figured.  One could either see the chains as a cynical thing, 'the great chain' being tattooed on someone meant to be Ryan's assassin, or as a hint at the character's status as a slave.

After the reveal of your origins I'm pretty sure that it's simply a reference to the great chain. 

So does the story suck?

I don't really care much about spoilers, nor do I care that much about FPS games, so I'm only going to consider this if I can play it kinda like Thief and it has some good story and atmosphere to make the FPS elements managable.

And I don't think "twists" make a good story in themselves even when done well, and assuredly few computer games do them well.

On those notes, how does the story stand up? (Note: I think the Halo story sucks, I have really high standards etc etc)

I don't think the story itself is particularly interesting (especially if you've already played System Shock 2) but it is told well, and there are a few very cool scenes to remember.

Just finished it, and my thoughts on the game are basically:

-Too similar to System Shock 2...  You've got psi powers, research, hacking, vending machines, audio logs, and so on, despite them not fitting in terribly well with the setting (hacking in the 1950s?)... the same basic setting, the obvious plot parallells between SHODAN and Sullivan... the ability to see ghosts, which seems even more tacked on than it did in SS2...  There's even some audio log (in the plant area, I think) where the guy talks about going to stock up on "med hypos" before his next date...  yeesh.  I could see this as a semi-sequel to SS2 if it wasn't for the fact that the plot similarities between the two games pretty much spell out the big reveal before it happens (and I always hate those stupid "I've been manipulating you all along!" plots... they kill the replay value for me, since you usually have to go back and take orders from the guy you know is a villain).

-The environment kept getting in the way.  Just about everything seems to blur your vision badly, from being damaged to walking through streams of water (which are everywhere), to wearing that helmet or even just equipping the camera.  I get it, you guys know how to use the blur filter, please stop.  Audio logs had a similar problem, with jackasses one room over screaming "I'M SORRY FATHER, I'LL DO WHAT YOU SAY!" while I'm trying to listen to something.

Sullivan:  "You know, I played you like a violin, boy, haha, you never realized th-"
"AWOOOGA AWOOOGA KABLAM RATATATATATATA AWOOGA"
Me: "I'M SORRY, WHAT?  SOME RANDOM PEDESTRIAN THREE FLOORS DOWN"
"AWOOGA KABOOM AWOOGA RATATATATA EEP EEP EEP EEP AWOOGA KABOOM"
Me: "SET OFF THE SECURITY SYSTEM, KIND OF LOUD IN HERE, COULD"
"AWOOGA MERT MERT MERT KABOOM KABOOM RATATATA KABOOM AWOOGA AWOOGA"
Me: "YOU SPEAK UP A BIT, PLEASE?  MAYBE REPEAT THAT LAST PART?"
Sullivan: "-such a fool, we could have been partners, you and me, but-"
"MEEP MEEP KABOOM RATATATATA KABOOM AWOOGA"
Me: "WHAT?  WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BEAN FARMERS?  I'M LOOKING FOR SOME BOOTS, DO YOU KNOW WHERE THEY ARE?"
etc.


-That "would you kindly" scene was pretty awesome, even though I knew roughly what was coming.  I'm getting increasingly annoyed with these "false memory" backstories, which seem to be the new trendy version of the "amnesiac hero" cliché, but whatever.  I got the "good" ending, which I thought was surprisingly thoughtful, too.  The opening reveal in the bathysphere was beautiful.

-Seemed to be some unbalanced mechanics.  That one power where you turn invisible by standing still seems extremely unbalancing, other people have already commented about the wrench buffs.  Pistol seemed almost useless for anything but headshots, machine gun seemed worse.  I personally like exploitable mechanics, but I guess they bug other people.

- Game didn't crash once for me, though it did minimize unexpectedly a few times, which was odd.

Still a cool game, I think, though.  I don't dig it as much as I did System Shock 2 (which seemed more internally consistent), but it's still fun.

That was hilarious :-)

Also true, which is why I turned on both voice and art subtitles. It means I can read what is being said while also keeping an ear out for approaching Splicers.

Thanks. Guess it's a No for me then.

Kail had the same experience I did.


This was a really cool game, but I still would prefer to play SS2 over again.

The story didn't really work either.  I've had a lot of time to sit down and think about it and the whole 'Rapture Coming Apart' just plain doesn't make any sense.  At least in SS2 people were being taken over by worms.

The end boss was also a complete yawnfest and I did it on HARD.  You jump about unloading on his face and it's over.  If I wanted that, I'd go reference my DVD collection.

Really, really nice game but overall a real dissappointment.  It's entirely possible to be both.

While I completely agree on the endfight that was WAY under Big Daddy difficulty, I thought the story made sense.
 
It the premise of Atlas Shrugged brought to its logical conclussion given the more negative aspects of human nature you can't seem to escape. If you think Ayn Rand is an idiot or a wishful thinker you can play the game and say "Told you so!".

I think you're filling in the story blanks in your own mind.

Don't do that - Go back and simply read all the logs.

I guarantee you'll come out of it saying 'What ?'

Rapture coming apart made perfect sense; it was founded on an idealistic philosophy that, much like communism, only works when everyone plays fair.  Enlightened self-interest being a motivator for people to achieve is grand in theory, until an unenlightened person with a baseball bat decides that they have a shortcut to success.  Now add in a highly-limited resource (Adam) that people need very badly as a spur for people to abandon any sense of fair play and voila!

I don't think there was ever any notion of fair play in the philosophy, on the contrary brutal no holds barred competition was a cornerstone.  You were sold weapons to accomplish this.  I haven't yet decided if the philosophy is an example of how pure libertarianism can go bad or pure laissez-faire capitalism.

Yeah, let's see if we can get a sticked spoiler thread moved to politics!

Oh For Fucks Sake.

Yes, it made perfect sense.  The story of how it did so did not.  Note I said the story didn't really 'Work' for me.

I'm not talking about fucking philosophy here, I'm talking about what actually happened.

For a start, I don't get why it was a highly limited resource.  It came from Sea Slugs.  Slugs.  In the Sea.  Where they were.  In the Sea.  Further, Adam seemed to be 100% recycleable.  So where did the shortage come in ?  Jap Nutbags logs and Bleeding Heart Woman suggest that the recycling came in later, but this is something that ended up being used for virtual frigging currency, so there must have been enough to BUILD a society on.

Sure, the Political, Psych and Philosophy Majors can now come in for a wank and say 'Aha, well, you see, when humans control the means of production and...' to which I'll say 'Shut the Fuck Up You Pansy Ass Dickwad' and demand to see HOW it all came apart.  I didn't, for example, notice a particular shortage of Adam when there was an infinite supply of FUCKING NUTTERS kicking my ass till I restored at the nearest stupid ass Vitae chamber to get right the fuck up.

Which bothers me too, since if It was tuned to Ryans GC, then he should have got up too.  Fucking Clownshoes that bit.


Fucking City in the 1950's that used Water to power the electronic machines.  Let's not start on the Idealistic Philosophy thing.  I was hacking Machines using Water.  Fuck me, it's 2008 and I can't even Cool my fucking PC using water.

I wish they'd stuck with Mind Worms.  Because Mind Worms make sense.

Sea Slugs Vs Mind Worms.  I'm all for it.

Maybe in the next game SHODAN can fight the resurrected Ryan.  That'd be awesome.


What I really, really don't get is this :  They KNEW that Adam fucks the mind up.  I don't give a fuck how cool it would be to come in to work with BEES COMING OUT OF MY ARM, if it turns me into a nutbag, I'm not going to do it.

Silly.

The main problem is that Levine chose to give us just bits and pieces and we are invited to find as many of those bits and pieces as we can and fill in the blanks ourselves.

I REALLY would lilke to read the whole backstory that had to exist before they split it up into Audio logs, cutscenes and visual clues.


Edit: Just for perspective. People know what heroin does to them and they still take it. One of the side effects of Adam (according to the audio broadcasts) is addiction.

I never bother trying to demand too much sense from sci-fi or fantasy because they can just make up whatever they want to explain it, as Xena on the Simpsons wisely said "yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it".  Maybe there is a hidden recorder somewhere saying that since the economy had no rules everyone farmed the fuck out of the slugs until they were extinct, then you had a limited quantity of something everyone had an endless craving for.  Who knows?

As for Ryan not coming back to life I assumed he programmed it that way since he was committing suicide, first by the self destruct, then by you.  I don't know why he chose to die like that since he could have told you to go sit in the corner until the city explodes.  I've learned to just make shit up to fill in plot holes in sci-fi fantasy games.  In my mind Ryan was going to die with his city, then you got to him and he decided that while he still wanted to die you might be able to save his city, so he ordered you to kill him to snap a bit of the control Fontaine had over you, bludgeoning daddy to death against your own will is bound to teach you a few things.  Is my explanation bullshit? Absolutely.  But then I recognize it's impossible for a sci-fi fantasy game to make sense.  I mean when you get right down to it if he had welded shut every Securis door you would have never got to him and there is something like that in every single game.  If evil geniuses built more walls and fewer doors they would always win.

Some of the logs indicated that if an Adam-using person didn't get more of the stuff occasionally their super-duper cells would go all fucked-up on them, thus the splicers being ugly and insane, so on top of the demand for Adam to do the initial splicing, everyone needed a steady supply thereafter.  City full of people needing a regular dose of Adam plus collapse of social order (and presumably the sea slug harvesting) equals batshitzania.  They were obviously having some issues with meeting the demand even before everything went tits-up, which is why they started recycling the Adam from corpses via the sisters.

As for Ryan and resurrection, some people think he disabled the vita chamber in his office so he'd stay dead.  I dunno about that, I wouldn't be surprised if he turned up later for a sequel, 'cause they did go out of their way mention that the resurrection chambers were built to work for him.

So, I don't get why the main character didn't turn into a splicer eventually with all that ADAM in him.

Sea Slugs.


From the Sea.

Presumably it takes a length of time without Adam to start getting fucked up, and thanks to Fontaine the character ends the game with a couple thousand Adam points, enough to live out his life.


Just because something is from the sea doesn't make it abundant within the sea.  Giant squid are from the sea, too, but we've only ever found, what, three of them?

I sort of read it as him trying to "redeem" you, the way he kept repeating how "a man chooses" and then ordering you to kill him... seemed like he was trying to get you to break your conditioning, to free you, but you couldn't do it.

I am a bit confused about Fontaine's plan, though.  So the big scheme is to take Ryan's fetal son, genetically condition him to follow your orders, then send him to the surface for a bit, then bring him back down to do what you want... I'm not sure why that bit with "send him to the surface" is in there, nor how he inferred that you, by yourself, would be able to kick the ass of the entire rest of Rapture (especially considering how powerful Fontaine is personally, why doesn't he just do it himself?).  Why not just keep him in Rapture?  Train him in how to use plasmids and things before the big day?  Why send him to do whatever it was he was doing on land?  Generally the purpose of sending a sleeper agent somewhere is so that they can be in enemy territory at a key moment, not so that you can bring them back unexpectedly.  And why bother with the false memories?  The only reason I can think of is to protect the secrecy of the big plan, but who the hell is he going to blab it to?  The vast majority of the population is beyond rational communication.  And Ryan already knew somehow, but couldn't do anything about it.

Indeed.


Sea Slugs.

They came from the Sea.

The whole Fontaine thing was bollocks.  I'd rather I'd be genetically aged in a day (which was hinted at) and then given 'false' memories.  The whole 'You got off and went round the world and then hijacked a plane to crash in the sea' was utter, utter drivel.

But apparently it's because Fontaine's DNA was keeping him away from Robo Turrets.

Or some such shite.

I'm getting very bitter about this.  I blame the Sea Slugs.  Perhaps I need some Sea Salt.

Putting the main character out of Rapture also put him out of Ryan's reach, making sure that daddy couldn't wrest him away from Fontaine's control.  As for 'why not do it himself', Fontaine was a coward.  The vita chambers wouldn't work for him, he'd have no second chances if he got killed.  Better to have an effectively immortal sap do his dirty work for him.

 :roflcopter: Predictable.  Some of your gripes have merit, but man, you really can work yourself up over stuff like this.


This I mostly agree with.  The game is not a classic.  If someone asked me to rattle off the "best games ever" this will not get included.  Too many nitpicky problems that were somewhat exacerbated by the less than perfect execution of the environment.  There was a decent amount of stuff this game did better than SS2 but it just well woefully short with the environment.  Too big, too many enemies, too little done with ghosts and set pieces.  Almost no tension compared to SS2 where it was there in tons.  You'd think with all of those crazy plasmids we'd have more mob variety and more mobs doing crazy shit. 

I didn't care much for the interface also.  Too much hidden information that should have been present at your fingertips. I should have gotten an achievement for getting through that gauntlet without losing a little sister.

I enjoyed the experience though and might actually play through on Hard (got a majority of the achievements though).  Medium just got kind of easy at the end where cash was in no shortage and you could just use optimal ammo for everything, trivializing most encounters.  Big daddies were just too easy with unlimited electronic buck (stun + electric damage).  Fontaine wasn't a difficult boss fight either. I expect to die at least once trying to beat an actiony end boss.  The sisters stabbing the shit out of him was pretty neat though.

Why are you so upset with sea slugs?  The supply was limited by little girls available, not the slugs, or am I missing something?

There was a recording from Tanerbaun that clearly said that they needed the little sisters to be able to get a lot more Atom than the slugs provided by themselves. Without the little sisters you couldn't get the massive amounts everyone wanted.

Yeah.  Adam was made from the cells of some sea slug, they were the source of the stuff.  There wasn't enough supply for the demand, however, so they made the little sisters to recycle it by drinking the blood of the dead.  The slug-things in the sisters extracted the bits of Adam from the corpse blood, and when they were full, they'd be harvested.  Coincidentally killing the girls in the process.

So y'see, the sisters weren't the original source of Adam, they were walking repositories of the stuff.  And since the sea slug production line was likely no longer in operation by the time the game takes place, there is no other Adam supply available to the main character.

Why does this remind me of that one Simpsons episode?  UP AND AT THEM!

PS, EDIT:  Ironwood, you're a hardcore sicko, and I say that with respect.  I kicked every single puppy in KOTOR and never even went back to see the light side ending, I cut like fifty peoples necks in that hotel level in Hitman and thought it was hilarious, but I can tell you right now I wouldn't be able to waste any of those little girls.

Ach, that's nothing.  It's entirely, entirely weak the way they did it.  Once you've pulled the first ones stomach out and realised that 'Fade To Black' is the weakest fucking emotional trigger in the world and there ain't even a fucking body, you just don't care.  All you think about is another Combat Tonic slot.

Then you get to T's Creche and you feel ROTTEN.  Then you read a spoiler site that says 'You're Getting the Shit Ending for Even Wasting One of those little Fucks' and suddenly it's Apple slashing time all over again, because, hey, it's just a game and you've already fucked yourself for 'GOOD' stuff and the 'GOOD' ending.

I'll admit that the Big Daddy Escort was a little more difficult because you have the 'Angelic' wee girls and, in fact, they're spouting off about Angels every five seconds.  Makes it not as funny when the spider slicer cuts her open with a hook.

As for you Rasix, you said the same shit I said, but you don't care.  I do Care.  This was meant to BEAT SS2.  It didn't by a very, very long chalk and I'm enormously dissappointed.  And, like the scab in my mind, the more I pick at it, the more annoyed I get.

And you don't need to come in here and ply me with bits of the story.  I get the slugs and the Adam shortage and the where the wee girls come in.  I just think it's entirely weak.

This wasn't a game about Politics, or shortages or human failings.  This was a game that said 'When a society takes drugs that make them insane, insane stuff then happens.'

Big Fucking Whoop.


Mind Worms.  The next game better have fucking Mind worms.

So what happens if you just point your gun at one of the little nippers and hose her?

They're Immune.

There's even shitty backstory to cover the glaringly wrong programming.

 :roll:

Okay, finally finished it. And by 'finally', I mean I was glad to get to the end.

BioShock is a great game and deserves the accolades it gets. In fact, it might even be the perfect game for a professional games review, because the quicker you get through it, the better the game looks and plays out. However, the plot is a mess that seems to have been hacked together to fit in with the twist of Fontaine = Atlas and planning to kill Ryan by sending a genetically altered, vat grown child that has Ryan's genetic material after him. It was like someone grabbing a great intro and reasonable twist in the middle, but a lot of the rest of the story to fit.

I got the good ending; I don't think I can be bothered to play through for the bad ending. For the people who did: does Tenenbaum help you after you kill Ryan if you've been harvesting Little Sisters?

I just youtubed the evil ending. (http://youtube.com/watch?v=bxXNfkR2kjw)  I shouldn't have to say it but, that link is obviously one hell of a spoiler.

Fucking pussies.

I also just finished it.

I felt that the ending was a pretty big let down. I got the good ending. Honestly, my favorite part was the "Would you kindly..." starting from when you see it written on the wall. After you are rescued by Tenenbaum, the game sort of goes all run and gun, and I was a bit let down.

A few thoughts.

Atlas = Fontain. Boring. The Atlas character seemed to have much more "life" to him, the Fontain character was so boring to me. I was let down by him as the bad guy. Ryan was creepy in that obsessed kind of way, Fontain was just generic power hungry goon. I think they could have done much better with this "twist".

I was waiting for the ending to bring a goon conclusion to the story, but it just sort of ended. I also agree that like some one already said, the medical part in the beginning was very creepy, but after a while, it just wasnt scary any more. Also, the big daddy mask shit was stupid. Lets blur the camera more please.

Also, I played through the whole game using mostly Shock, Incinerate, and Telekanisis. No need for any of the other plasmids. Also, I used the shot gun and machine gun. One upgraded it was just so powerful. It might have also been that I went photo crazy. I never even considered photographing little sisters or gun turrets though. Incinerate 3 is very powerful, I dont know if many of you found this out, but it stacks a DOT of people each time you hit.

I see great irony in that BioShock, which seemed to have choice as a central theme, gave the player very little choice on what to do. You are always obeying someone.

Also, the intro scenes, while probably the best introduction I've seen in any game in a long while, makes zero sense when you realise that Fontaine's plan is to have you survive a plane crash into water. What would have made more sense (but not looked as good) would have been your character surviving an explosion on a boat. That's a lot more survivable than a plane crash.

it wasn't a crash though, 'twas a mysterious crash. in a mysterious crash "survivable" is finding yourself with no physical body but the ability to swim, smoke, and find love in a world gone topsy-turvy.

After killing Ryan I just have no desire to finish the game out.  I mean the story is essentially over at this point, it's just kill fontaine and A)be a hero or B) be the villain.

My question is and i may have missed it or its not been explained yet but...how did you get on the plane?

As far as I know, you were given a cover identity by Fontaine and used it to buy a plane ticket.  The actual nuts and bolts of the story don't make too much sense (or, if they do, I missed the tapes that explained it), so I wouldn't worry about filling in the holes.  I think most of it is just there to set up the intro and that scene with Ryan.

As best I can work out, your character (who's name is Jack, btw) was sent to the surface when they were chronologically 2, but physically probably looked 19 or 20 or so. You then catch a plane, open the package you were given, hijack the plane, crash it near an entrance to Rapture and things kick off from there. I can't see Fontaine being the patient type in giving you time to form a life outside of Rapture before he'd want you to take out Ryan.

I'm having difficulty figuring out BioShock's timeline. For a game where the narrative is meant to be so important, I'd expect things to fit together more smoothly.

I beat Bioshock over the weekend, and, while those who are looking to point to video games as a sophisticated medium are pointing at this as their new example of it, this was much shallower than a "Zelda" or a "Grand Theft Auto."

The much-hyped moral stickyness of the game boils down to whether you press the X or Y button to dispose of the gatherers. Everything else is just run-and-gun shooter.

The art design of the game is a cut above what you see in most games, and its 30's deco style is really consistent throughout the game. The exterior shots of Rapture are really cool. But the art design is built into boring level design. The maps never really feel like a city. It's just rooms and corridors. It's polish and production design built over very antiquated mechanics.

It seems like corners have been cut in this game. The scripted sequences that are taken for granted in top-tier single player action games are almost absent here. The maps are not designed around creating a sense of place.  The idea that Rapture is a city torn by a war between Fontaine and Ryan is a subtext developed exclusively in the audio files. The game is just a series of rooms and hallways with splicers spawning in to attack you.

It seems like the whole premise of the game was supposed to be the choice between harvesting and rescuing the little sisters, a premise that was evidently gutted rather than seen to fruition.  Emerging in the safehouse full of little girls makes no sense at all for players who have been killing the little sisters, and for those who have been rescuing them, the whole Point Prometheus level makes no sense. If you rescued the girls, why do you have to look like a Big Daddy to get them to open the doors for you? Didn't one of the girls open the door of the safehouse for you before you got the suit?

One obvious inference is that the game was meant to branch into two paths depending on how you had been making the one relevant choice the game gives you, and ultimately that was shelved for efficiency and getting the game done.  Likewise, the idea the idea that that choice should have been a difficult one is thrown out too. Since you get a gift with 200 Adam for every three gatherers you save, the penalty for playing the hero is insignificant.  So to the extent that a central idea of the game is to offer the player an opportunity to do something noble while putting a greed incentive on doing something repulsive, that idea is likewise gutted, probably because they didn't want to work out how to balance the game around some players having very little Adam and some players having lots.

Also, the audio diaries are an awful way to tell the story. They are totally external to the game play. They might as well just print the backstory in the manual. 

I watched the "Making Of BioShock" video that came with the Collector's Edition. It seems that the game went through so many iterations that perhaps it became a matter of what could be sewn together into a releasable product. The art book shows a lot of stuff that was cut from various versions of BioShock, up to the SLO Pro Big Daddy model (which apparently a lot of work went into).

I still think that BioShock deserves kudos for trying something different and for looking so good. However, when you look at the player journey, a lot more is implied in it than actually happens.

I wonder if Irrational's lack of success with the Freedom Force sequel and then purchase by 2K saw BioShock limited in its eventual release.

Oh fuck off.

They ended up with nothing different and if we reward eye candy now we'll continue to get substandard games.

Fucking ridiculous;  We got a shooter that was little or no different than Far Cry.

I am in the middle of replaying System Shock 2 now, and to my horror I must admit that most things I liked about Bioshock was leftover System Shock love.

I would really buy a new copy of System Shock 2 if they remade it with the Bioshock engine. Except, I couldn't replay ever so often due to the DRM reaming I'd get.

Fuckers.

I have SS2 in front of me but havn't been brave enough to reinstall yet. I got motion sickness last time I tried to give it a go. :(

Didn't the note from the letter you read on the plane have a "Would you kindly" in it?

Ahh, here we are:
(http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/627/note2ma4.png)

He hijacked the plane and brought it down at the rapture lighthouse's coordinates.

Which still begs the question 'Why ?'


I'm still a little unclear as to why the hell Fontaine was so desperate to GET OUT of the city and seemed unable to, yet had the ability to send this fetus half way around the world to hijack a plane to get back.

Ok I beat the game again on hard and once more on normal with intent to be a badass and am now ready for review + comic.

God I better get to that asap

I don't remember Fontaine wanting to get out of rapture, I thought he wanted to stay there and control it.  He only pretended to want to leave while in Atlus form.

He pretended ?  To his Mind Controlled Clone ?

Ok.

Explain that one to me.


In fact, explain why in the name of fuck he bothered with the Atlas shit in the first place.

A WIZARD DID IT!
A WIZARD DID IT!
A WIZARD DID IT!

Because he was a fucking con man, as admitted the whole Rapture thing was a long con to him. Deceiving people is what he get his rocks off obviously.

And don't forget he still had everybody to fool that could listen in on your radio transmissions. Not that that mattered, Fontaine is just a compulsive liar. He only told you to rub it in when he thought you would die anyway.

Fontaine didn't come up with Atlas to fool you, he did it to fool the citizens of Rapture.  Likewise, I rather suspect he wasn't going to the trouble to deceive the mind-controlled vat-grown man-baby, but rather he was avoiding tipping off Ryan and Tannenbaum about your identity; they may have taken steps to break his control if they'd suspected that you were the man-baby in question.  It would've been a really short game had Ryan known from the start who you were:

BIOSHOCK - THE IRONWOOD EDITION

Atlas: WOULD YOU KINDLY KILL RYAN FOR ME, SLAVE!  YOU'RE MY SLAVE!  I MADE YOU!
Ryan: Oh, you're back.  I'm your daddy.  Would you kindly hop back in the bathysphere and leave?  Thx.
You: Okie, daddy!

GAME OVER

Quick Review.

Whoever wrote the story should find a new line of work.

Whoever did the atmosphere should get a raise.

Is this actually implied in the game anywhere?  Because I can make up non-canon excuses for character's nonsensical behavior myself, if I feel the need.  :wink:   As far as I can tell, though, A) They were interested in decieving the main character for reasons that are never explained, since they went through the whole "false memories" rigamarole, and it's not like Ryan can read your memories, and B) Ryan already thought you were an agent of the CIA or KGB, and was trying to kill you because of it; how would being an agent of Fontaine been any different?  And unless Cohen was somehow the linchpin to Fontaine's scheme, I can't think of anyone else who wasn't already charging at you trying to bludgeon you to death WITHOUT knowing about your background, and it's not as if a relationship like that can get a lot worse.

I mean, it's a neat story to play through, very atmospheric, but the plot is not making a whole lot of sense to me in retrospect.  There are huge gaps in the story that I'm not getting.  And maybe I'm missing some key logs or something, but it still seems to me that there are way more question marks than I'm confortable with.

I believe in one of Fontaine's radio addresses he says that Tenenbaum and he put you in that bathyscape. Also, Tenenbaum extracted the fertilsed egg from Jolene. So Tenenbaum already knows (or can guess) about who you are. However, given that Suchong did the mental conditioning work, I don't think Tenenbaum necessarily knows that side of the equation.

However, Ryan has figured a lot of it out. It takes him a while to work out the "would you kindly" control phrase and who you are, but, once he does, he lets you in.

Fontaine loves being smarter than everyone else and fooling them all into playing his game.

I agree though that there seems to be an audio diary or three missing that actually spells all this out. And why Fontaine thought you'd survive a plane crash into the water.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/1394-Zero-Punctuation-BioShock

Including STALKER with Deus Ex and System Shock 2 is more of a stretch then including Bioshock.

Oh, and yes, it was very funny. As Yahtzee tends to be.

Even without sound, I know I'm going to agree wholeheartedly with that guy.

Again, for the benefit of those still listening :  Bioshock, fun fps Game.  Not a classic, not a 9/10 out of 10, and, here's the real fucking kicker;  I have ZERO interest in playing it again.  Like, ever.  I may as well use the CD for my coffee cup.

Dissappointment is my middle name. 

Ryan stops trying to kill you once he figures out who you are, and Tannenbaum breaks the mental lock once she gets her hands on you, as well as demonstrates a great dislike for Fontaine.  It's a presumption on my part that she would've thrown a wrench in his plans if she knew he was Fontaine at an earlier point in the story, and since Ryan gives a very clear demonstration of knowing the magic words, it only makes sense that he'd have used them to his advantage before it was too late, rather than allow you to wander around the city and break through his defenses.

That review was pure goodness.

Oh God, That was ME, except with an English accent and he could talk a lot faster.

Funny as hell and 100% true.

That's all highly speculative, though.  If Ryan could do it, if Tennenbaum could do it... I don't see where it's even implied that it's possible in the story, though.  Tennenbaum has to have you knocked out on the operating table for a good period of time to do anything, and even then she's only able to fix part of it.  Ryan clearly knows your trigger words when you march into his office, and he doesn't seem intent on using it to his advantage then, even at the cost of his life.  I mean, yes, theoretically, you can probably construct some framework that makes the whole thing coherent, but shouldn't it be mentioned somewhere in the game if it's important to understanding what the hell is going on?  I finished the game, yet still don't understand the game's fundamental premise, why Fontaine bothered with ANY of the stuff that he does in this game.  As far as I can tell, the argument I'm hearing is that Fontaine gave you all this screwy mental conditioning to fool Ryan and Tennenbaum, because if they'd known the truth, they might have undone his screwy mental conditioning.  Seems a bit circular, you know? So maybe Fontaine has some kind of psychosis where he values deception so highly that he concocts insane plans wherin he fakes his own death and creates a hidden army of splicers, but then decides to suddenly stop being deceptive at the key moment, or whatever, but if that's the case, it should be mentioned in the bloody game.  Not just leave it at "Fontaine is a con man" and assume that this somehow includes an explanation of why he would kidnap his arch rival's embryotic son, super-accelerate his aging, enslave his mind, send him to the surface, and then order him to hijack a plane and crash it into the ocean.  And in order for this to work, a dozen other kind of "well it doesn't actually say this, but..." scenarios have to be made up.  And now we start getting into these weird "what if" scenarios where major characters and events have to be explained by convoluted chains of events which aren't alluded to in game.  While I suppose it's possible that this is a very tightly written story and the threads are just so subtle that I'm not seeing them all, it's also possible that it's a fairly rough and unfinished story that was thrown together for a few excellent scenes and then left to hang while they went to work on how to get the player to stop falling through the floor in level six, like the stories in 99% of other video games.  There's only so far I'm willing to take this hypothetical invisible plot before I just end up saying "fuck it, Yeah, a wizard did it."

1) Fontaine loves conning people. Especially smart people.

2) Fontaine ends up at Rapture and sees a lot of opportunites for grift. He gets a big legit income from Fontaine Fisheries and another illicit income from running the smuggling.

3) Tenenbaum discovers the sea slug (i.e. ADAM producer) but needs money to develop it. The smugglers give her the money. She starts hanging around with Fontaine. It is possibly a romantic liason.

4) Fontaine Futuristics develop ADAM functionality that everyone in Rapture wants - Tenenbaum works on ADAM, Suchong works on the plasmids.

5) Fontaine obviously keeps the smuggling going and grows his power. He wants control of Rapture. His Little Sister orphanages and poorhouses provide him with plenty of raw human resources.

6) Tenenbaum develops a conscience and has a falling out with Fontaine at some point. She knows about Fontaine's plan to get at Ryan through his son since she was the one who pulled the egg out of Jasmine Jolene. Suchong looks after the mental conditioning and experimentation on Ryan's genetic offspring. According to one hazy memory of a radio communication, Fontaine tells you that he and Tenenbaum put you into that bathyscape to the surface. This has to occur prior to September 1958, as does Tenenbaum falling out with Fontaine.

7) Ryan, fearing the loss of control of Rapture, starts to abandoning his Objectivist ideals and eventually nationalises Fontaine Futuristics. All plasmids are hence rebranded Ryan Industries. I'm guessing this happens in 1958. Suchong comes to work for Ryan.

8) Fontaine "dies" in a shoot-out in 1958. He reinvents himself as Atlas, friend to the working people and leader of an underground against Ryan.

9) Atlas builds a guerilla movement that attacks Ryan's power base and forces him to start locking people up in Apollo Square. Ryan's former friends turn against Ryan, who is now a dictator.

10) On New Year's Eve 1959, a horde of Fontaine's workers riot and Rapture's society collapses, driven by the collapse of order and the effects of ADAM.

11) Jack arrives home at some point in early 1960.

Don't get me wrong, there are some huge holes in the story, mostly driven by the difficulty of nailing down a timeline for all this to happen. But imo it's a long way from "a wizard did it" (except for the genetics manipulation bit in the story - that's magic, no matter how many lab coats it tries to put on).

I dunno... I think maybe my problem is mostly just with Fontaine himself.  Everyone else I can kind of understand, or at least I think I do.  But Fontaine just baffles me.  Most of the stuff I'm not getting seems to revolve around him.  Why steal the baby in the first place?  As far as I'm aware, the main reason you being Ryan's son is important is because the bathyspheres are keyed to work only for someone with his genetic code, but the lockdown (unless I'm mistaken) was fairly recent, almost certainly some time after Fontaine harvests the egg and sends the main character away... so why steal the thing in the first place?  Does he just go around nicking embryos, or what?  Why send the kid out of Rapture?  Fontaine was building an army of splicers in secret down there, why was this one guy sent away while the others weren't?  Why give him false memories?  I can understand him wanting to trick someone, but conning someone who is both under your mental control and has memories provided by you seems a bit like bringing a bazooka to a paintball tournament.  And if he's not doing it for kicks, it seems like a stupid plan, since pretty much the whole reason you go after him is because he's screwing with your head. 

Why bring him back to Rapture?  Partly this ties in to "why send him away in the first place," partly it's "why doesn't Fontaine do it himself, since he's an engine of destruction and Atlas evidently has more mobility than you do, despite the alleged lockdown" and partly it's about the timing.  Rapture has clearly fallen to shit, the city is taking on water virtually everywhere.  What does Fontaine want "control of the city" for?  The people?  They're all irrepairably insane, as far as I can tell.  The buildings?  They don't look like they could last a week without attention from some workmen, all of whom are either dead or gibbering madmen.  The ADAM?  He's already got almost all of it.  The money all has Andrew Ryan's face on it, so I doubt that it would be considered legal tender outside of Rapture.  If Fontaine brought you back earlier, so that you could take control of the city while there was still something to salvage, or later, after the crazies had killed each other off, I could maybe understand it, but he seems to bring you in right when the danger is highest and the payoff is lowest. 

And then, after you kill Ryan, he stops being the masterful con-man and goes into threatening mobster mode.  Why?  That's not con artist behavior; con artists don't shout "Aha, gotcha!" just before you hand them the money.  And they certainly don't sit there and call you up to taunt you as you charge their house with a grenade launcher.  If he couldn't kill Ryan on his own, why does he think he has a chance against you, who were able to cut a swath through half of Rapture to get to Ryan, and then blasted through the other half to get to Fontaine, getting stronger the whole time?  After you ice Ryan, why doesn't Fontaine kill you?  Does he really think that those two security bots (versus the twenty or so which you've already taken down) are going to stop you? 

I'm just not seeing how it fits together... I just get the feeling that he was this kind of filler character who did whatever needed to be done in the plot to make the cool things happen.  He's the consummate deciever, except for the last half of the game where he's not.  He's a brilliant planner and criminal mastermind, except his plan doesn't make any sense.  He's a power hungry thug who plans on killing you, but he has no problem with you getting more and more and more powerful as you go after Ryan.  I dunno.  I'm just not getting him as a character, and since he moves most of the plot (especially the parts of it which take place during the game), I'm having trouble seeing it.  Ah, well.

"Once you strip that down the badguy might as well just be Showdown with a waistcoat and a copy of Atlas Shrugged"

LOL. Finished it, enjoyed the hell out of it. It was appropriately spooky, atmospheric and fun. Well worth the price of admission.

I agree with most of the comments here about the story, and specifically I agree with Ironwood that I doubt I'll play through it again anytime soon. But I finished it once (a rare occurrence for me these days), and found it to be creepy, frightening, entertaining and well worth the $50 I spent on it. Yeah the story fell apart, the moral 'choices' weren't, the RPG aspect was pretty thin and it lacked the outright "JESUSSHITFUCKINGHELL" factor of SS2, but it was still one of the best games I've played this year easily.

SHODAN.

:)

Something else that's been bothering me for a while :  There's no likeable character in the game.

They're all inherintly selfish and evil.  Even Tennenbaum.  System Shock 2 had a wealth of different characterisations ranging from the evil and selfish right up the heroic figure struggling for redemption of his fathers sins and defeating even genetic ruin.

I don't give two tugs of a dead dogs cock about anyone in Bioshock.  They can all die in a car fire.

The only ones I truly cared about where the little sisters. They were the only victims in the story. So, I finished the game to save their little asses. That and whoever scripted the moment in the orphanage is an evil SOB. Showing them to me in that context ensured I had to go blow Fontaine's and Ryan's faces off. Fontaine more than Ryan.

Oh, and as for "why you" I think it had to do with the self destruct. I got the feeling only someone keyed to Ryan's DNA could stop it.

Fontaine didn't baffle me because I've known people essentially like him. Sociopaths who you only get to know are sociopaths because they've grown old and dumped their cover personas after bouncing between scores of social groups and s.o.'s that they've schmoozed. manipulated, and broken the trust of.

In the spoiler interview of Ken Levine, he says that Fontaine just sort of represents emptiness. He's the irredeemable monster that breaks Ryan's ideals because he thrives in the freedom that Rapture's society gives its people expecting them to do the best for society in the end.

Yeah, when we say people can't have good things because they are broken we essentially mean people like Fontaine.

Ah and ikeable characters, personally I found Bill McDonagh quite likeable. It was sad finding him dead.

I'm not reading any of this thread, because I'm still playing, but I just wanted to say that I'm glad I couldn't be a cold hearted bastard and kill any little sisters.  I'm just now into the little orphanage, and like the Grinch, my heart just grew three sizes.

Now I feel all sappy and icky.

Heh, just wait until he reaches the last fight, then.

But yeah, the orphanage was definitely a moment of, "Oh shit, this place would've been a disaster of guilt if I'd been killing them all this time..."

Guilt which dries up the instant you realise you're fucked for the endings anyway, so you may as well eat all the bitches.  And their little dogs too.

Saw the youtubed endings, and man... you guys got shafted. Is that what passes for "resolution" nowadays? Nuke the planet? loler

I did have a question though, is there an explanation given in the game why someone designed such a system for ADAM filtration. I mean, why would they use a little-girl filter in the first place? Is there some particular scenario, or did they just stick that in there to make it all "dramatic" and whatnot?

Silly, don't you know that Little Girls Tummies are the best place to rejuvenate ADAM ?

There was an explanation.  It was bollocks.

Christ, I can't even remember it now.  It was to do with Sea Slugs.

There were definitely at least 3 audio logs talking about the creation of the Little Sisters.  But you shouldn't delve to closely into it, as you'll realise it's complete fucking nonsense.

The audio log of the parents whose child was stolen to become a little sister was heart-rending until you thought about it.  That's not telling to a collapse of a society, that's an outright break.  I could maybe accept that little sisters were grown artificially :  That the population used their own children is just fucking rubbish.


EDIT :  Try THIS (http://blogs.ign.com/Irrational_Games/2007/05/23/55572/).  Might be interesting.  I have given up caring.  My Bioshock CD is currently under Elena's clothes somewhere.

Okay, finished it last night, and enjoyed it.  Unlike some of us (Ironwood), I don't overthink the plots of videogames...

What did disappoint me, though, is that the sense of dread you had in the beginning of the game really goes away fairly quickly.  For me it only really lasted through the medical ward.  After that I was a torchifying, hacking machine of destruction.  That's something that System Shock 2 never relented on; I was scared shitless throughout that entire game.

Yeah, good game, but definitely not worth the 10's a lot of gaming review sites were giving it.

Hey, I resent that;  there wasn't anything for me to overthink.

 :wink:

Yeah it was briefly resurrected when those plaster splicers started attacking and when I had to worry about corpses jumping up but you adapt pretty quickly to the atmosphere.

I strongly suspect most reviews didn't go past the Andrew Ryan showdown, or even past the medical ward. Up to then it was quite good.

Perversely, one of my favorite parts of the game was finding out the fate of 'Papa Suchen'.  Hearing him scream on that audio tape and then seeing a doctor's corpse on a table with a giant Big Daddy drill sticking out of his chest made me chuckle.

Yeah, those plaster splicers were a magnificent, bastardly act.  Walking into that one shop, walking back out and seeing all of the 'statues' missing, that really lead to an, "Oh.  Um, that's not good." moment

As for the sisters, their role was solely to be hosts to the slug parasite-thing that was doing the actual Adam purification.  For some weird reason  (ie convenience of storytelling) the slug wasn't compatible with fully-grown hosts; Suchong laments in one of his logs that the sisters' super-regenerative powers can't be given to an adult.

Best moment in the game for me was when I got the Power to the People buff, turned around, saw that the chair that was previously occupied was now empty.  Had about a second to say "oh SHIT" right when the first plaster splicer attacks you.

Straight out of a movie, that scene.

I believe that the BioShock narrative probably works best when you run through it as quickly as possible. It's when you stop and think about it that things start to fall apart.

They used little girls as the system for producing ADAM because it the sea slugs couldn't work as effectively in larger bodies and it was found that re-feeding ADAM to the slugs increased ADAM output 4x, or something. Why only little girls? Fontaine made that decision; something about only needing one toilet in the orphanage (which is junk, as anyone who has ever seen a girls vs guys line for toilets).

However, BioShock really does use science as magic in many respects.

I thought it was because Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dogs Tails interfered with the efficient production of ADAM, whereas Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice caused the production to go through the roof ?

Seriously, ignore the whole story.  Enjoy the water effects.

I want to talk to this guy Levine.  Mostly to punch his face.

If it's up on YouTube or if you know someone who bought the BioShock CE box, watch the Making Of... video. I get the distinct impression (or I'm looking at it squint-eyed, your pick) that BioShock suffered from three too many re-writes as the setting changed yet again and the monsters were altered and suddenly the game engine was optimised in a new way. I think almost everyone agrees that the first bit of BioShock is excellent, but it is the later levels that let it down.

In between there is the war between "Atlas" and Ryan.  There was a recording from Diane McClintock lamenting how Ryan didn't like her any more after the scarring she suffered in the New Year's attack, followed by one about how she'd joined Atlas's resistance movement, and how they'd killed a little girl for her ADAM, and how it broke her heart to do it but but it was Ryan's fault for putting them in this position, et cetera.

Suchong also mentions that using the girls as "gatherers" (sucking blood/ADAM/? out of corpses) started during the war, because there were all these corpses lying around needing to be recycled.  This is what led to the development of the Big Daddies, since even with their super-regenerative powers it wasn't going to be cost-effective to send the girls out into a war zone unescorted.


As far as the whole sea slug thing, my reading of it was that the sea slugs don't generate ADAM directly themselves, but secrete some enzyme that breaks normal tissue down into ADAM, which is some sort of stem-cell-type tissue that can be easily "shaped".  That's why the worker who got bit by the slug regained the use of his hand -- his damaged tissue was broken down into ADAM, which then simply grew itself into a new hand in the absence of any fancy plasmids telling them to grow a hive of bees or what have you.

The girls initially simply provided a convenient place for the slugs to live while they turned blood into ADAM.  Before the war, the slugs were "fueled" by the girls' own bodies (like parasites) and produced ADAM at a slow but steady rate.  After the war started, there was this sudden surplus of human tissue lying all over the place, and the ADAM industry adapted by developing the "gatherer" system.


I'm not convinced Ryan is dead.  Not that it really matters since we're most likely not going to see a sequel, but he could very easily have respawned in a Vita Chamber and then escaped in a sub during the confusion that followed his death.

Actually we're supposed to see sequels every couple years according to Irrational. On what, I can't imagine. Maybe the other super sekrit underwater cities?

Playing as a little sister growing up in New York/Tokyo/London and discovering her powers as the government tries to capture her to aid in the cold war and Rapture survivors still itching for some Adam try to harvest her.

Boilerplate baby!

I'd play that.

That actually would be pretty cool.

Oh God, STOP.

Just finished.

Anyone have a link to the good ending?

Four favorite things that I'll remember the game by in a year:

1) Atmosphere.
2) Suchong's audio and him having a Daddy drill in his corpse.
3) Killing little girls then realizing that they're little girls, aka. the Tenebaum safe house.
4) A man choses, a slave obeys.

The good and bad endings are both all over youtube, should be a pretty easy find.

Better yet, the CIA gets ahold of a teenaged little sister, and sends her into Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos where she has to insert heroin into the body bags of dead soldiers  (the kids love ironic reversals!).  It all goes bad when a renegade colonel living in some bizarro primitive compound with a horde of jungle underlings decides that she's just an errand boy for the man, and that he has to get rid of her.  She then needs to terminate his command with extreme prejudice and free the POWs from the Hanoi Hilton.

Why am I not producing these games?

This is probably the best assessment of the game I've read, you're 100% right. I swear this game must have shipped to reviewers with some special kool aid, because the amount of perfect or near-perfect scores this game received across the board is absolutely baffling.

From a Gamespot interview with Ken Levine, creative developer behind BioShock (http://au.gamespot.com/pc/action/bioshock/news.html?sid=6179423&om_act=convert&om_clk=newlyadded&tag=newlyadded;title;1):


I think this explains a lot.

I haven't beaten the game yet but I'm at the "make a big daddy suit" area.

Notes:
1. Suchong's death tape is great after basically learning what a cold hearted prick he was over the whole course of the game. I kinda wanted to talk to the guy or maybe even kill him, but it was pretty satisfying.

2. Atlas/Fontaine confuses me since his motivations make no sense in some areas. Why steal an egg to grow a copy of Ryan and send him away and have him come back via a method that would kill just about anyone? Why pull the mask off the instant Ryan dies? I'd have been way more stunned had Atlas lead you on a bit further after that (like to meet him so you could "escape").

3. Why didn't Tenebaum drop a dime on Atlas the instant she noticed you were working for him without knowing it?

4. What the hell was that audio log in the apartment where some character I don't recall talks about finding a half-knitted blanket? I must have missed something because I didn't understand who or what it was about.

5. "Would you kindly" is such a general phrase. What a terrible command phrase.

That reminds me. I heard something hilarious happens when you piss off Cohen by killing his dancers. I never did it because I was on a 6 hour playing binge and it was 5 in the morning.

4. That was Security Chief Sullivan.  He was Ryan's main muscle in Rapture.  He had no problems torturing bad guys, but as time goes on Ryan has him going after people that he feels really don't deserve it.  Eventually, he's ordered to put the bump on Anna Culpepper, a rival musician to Sander Cohen who basically likes to badmouth him and Ryan's policies.  He's pretty conflicted about having to do it and the tape you listened to is him expressing his guilt after the act.  There is a tape in the casino in Poseidon Plaza that might fill in more of the picture for you.

Gray areas of morality?  Your only choice in the game is wether or not to rip apart little girls and feast on their innards to accumulate more God like powers, how the fuck is that a "gray area"?  It's black and white and hence the endings.

2) Fontaine uses Ryan's genetic material (i.e. you) to get past a lot of security systems that would have apparently activated if you weren't Ryan. He drops the mask once you shut down the self-destruct mechanism because he desparately needs to tell someone how clever he is and how he's won.

3) There's not much evidence that Tenenbaum works out who you are prior to you killing Ryan.

Nothing hilarious happens if you kill Cohen's dancers. If you let him live at Fort Frolic, then visit his apartment in Olympus Heights, he's got some splicers dancing for him. Kill them and he comes down to fight you. Once you kill him, you can take a picture of his body for the "Irony" achievement on the Xbox360, then explore his apartment.

I couldn't bring myself to kill the dancers.  They weren't hurting anybody, they were just minding their own business, so I left them alone.  Of course, I shot Cohen in the face the instant he appeared on the stairs in Fort Frolic before it occurred to me to think, "Oh wait, maybe he wasn't about to attack me.", so he wasn't alive to be in his apartment when I got there.

I think when I found the dancing splicers I accidentally pissed them off by knocking over the phonograph or something.  Cohen didn't do anything hilarious because, like Kitsune, I put a crossbow bolt in his eyehole the first chance I got.  It didn't seem prudent to leave him to his own devices any longer.  Creepy little fuck.

I don't recall him doing anything hilarious beyond him getting pissed off enough to try to kill you.  If he's still alive at that point though, it does give you access to his room, which you wouldn't be able to get into otherwise.

Access to his room being important and intended though as there is a Power to the People station up there.

After finishing the photograph collection I was pretty much just milling around at the foot of the stairs, unsure about what was gonna happen.  When Cohen appeared, I whipped out the crossbow, snapped it up, and had a bolt in the air towards his face in an eyeblink; it was the fastest headshot I'd ever made.  He didn't even finish his first sentence.  His creepy behavior had wound me up so much that a non-violent solution never even began to occur to me.

On my second playthrough in hard mode, I let him live.  I was hopeful that I wouldn't have to kill him to get into his apartment, but c'est la vie.