This post contains minor spoilers from the video game BioShock.

My plan with BioShock was to completely ignore it. I never specifically followed it before and during its release, and I never got excited for it. Good thing, too, as I thing it came out while my 360 was gone. With so many games coming out, I figured I’d have to ignore a few, and for some reason BioShcok just didn’t click with me early on, and I didn’t let myself like the demo for fear of wanting the game. Anyways, Harry, who has now been mentioned in three successive blog entries, lent it to be because now his 360 bricked, and for the second time, too. Since he really has no need for the game until his box gets back, he insisted I tried it. While it’s fairly short by today’s standards, (and, for that reason, is a game I still don’t feel I need to own) I’m very glad I did.

I don’t think there’s a single genre of games I love completely, but I do understand what the PC FPS crowd is saying about BioShock. It really is quite easy, and I do believe that it being on a console has something to do with that. Vita-Chambers are frequent, so when you die you re-spawn right near the enemy you were fighting with half your health and all the items, money, etc. you had before dying. There is really no reason to worry about dying. In fact, some times it helps you. For example, if I go into a room with a Vita-Chamber and have less than half of my health and only one first aid kit, I can let someone kill me. Then, I come out of the Vita-Chamber with more health than I started with, in the same room, with the same enemy, ’sept this time the enemy has less health since I shot at it a bit before I let it kill me. Strategies like this make it really easy to progress, but since hacking is incredibly easy (at least, it was for me) and you’ll spend most of the game attempting to pick up more money than you can carry, you’ll have no trouble walking around with full health and EVE (the pick-up you need to use special abilities) and enough items to keep you that way. Not only is the game itself quite easy, but so are most of the Achievements. I managed to get every badge except the one for playing through the game on hard difficulty (I played on medium) after a single play-through. On top of that, I didn’t harvest any Little Sisters, but before the final fight I still had around 700 ADAM to spend. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get all the Tonics that I didn’t buy many Plasmids and only one or two health upgrades. I can only imagine how much easier things would have been with twice the health and/or EVE and some second or third versions of the Plasmids I already had.

That said, the game is still worth of all the nine and ten out of ten reviews. It is incredibly atmospheric, looks great (though I found textures were a bit slow to load, and sometimes didn’t load at all on the dead bodies) and has a great story, though, in my opinion, has a bit of a weak ending. The weapons are fun to use, especially the crossbow, and the various types of ammo work well. The camera is also cool, but after a while it starts to get a bit annoying. Luckily, with a couple of Tonics and some tricks, it isn’t very hard to max out your research. I actually finished my research long before most people do, if you double back to one of the earlier areas and take photos of the weak versions of the same enemies, the hard(ish) splicers you find later on aren’t much of a challenge. The Big Daddies are super cool, and are quite hard to defeat early in the game. Once you get the crossbow, however, it’s quite possible to beat Elite Big Daddies without taking a hit. (And you always have those Vita-Chambers to back you up, anyways.) One of my favorite parts of the game was listening to the soundtrack. As soon as it popped up for download on the Cult of Rapture official site, I grabbed it, so it was interesting to see where all the songs I already knew quite well were actually used. Cohen’s Masterpiece is still my personal pick out of all the tracks. (Side note: All the tracks from the score are tagged incorrectly, check out this link for the proper tags, especially if you’re using Last.fm.)

I’m having a hard time conveying my appreciation for this game. Maybe it’s how black and white the two endings were. It reminds me of when I played Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. It said that every choice would affect the game, whether you chose Dark or Light powers, etc. In the end, though, none of it matter except for one binary situation at the end. BioShock is similar in that aspect, which is really unfortunate. Other than that, the story is awesome. I loved the audio diaries, the contribute most of the story, and it’s cool to meet up with characters you’ve already heard logs of or visit locations that someone talked about earlier. Some of the diaries also give out little bits of info like door codes that aren’t needed to continue, but will lead you on a short side quest if you can find where to use them. So, to try and get back to where I was going with this, I think I just can’t praise it all that much right now because I’m a little upset with the boring ending after the plot twists the game pulled on you earlier. On top of that, I tried to go back and play it on hard (which is just an annoyance more than a challenge) but the game keeps freezing after very short periods of time. It’s not the typical glitch from the patch that is fixed by clearing the game’s cache, nor is it my 360. After all the times my old console froze, I’ve figured out how to differentiate between the two. Regardless, this game is a ton of fun, but if you haven’t gotten it yet you probably had the same opinion as I did to begin with. Rent it if you have the time, it really is a lot of fun. Thank you very much for lending it to me, Harry.

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