The Dord of Darien

Bioshock in-depth 1

Suspension of disbelief is an odd thing. It’s so easy to believe the stuff that’s really out there; it’s the things that are just slightly off that I get stuck on. For example, I have no trouble believing that the scientific establishment in Rapture developed an injection that gives people the power to shoot lightning bolts out of their hands. Similarly, I can believe that a plane can go down somewhere in the mid-Atlantic and just happen to land right next to this maybe-100-square-foot island where the game takes place. I can believe that the technology existed in the fifties to build a giant metropolis on the bottom of the ocean. What I have a hard time believing, though, is that Andrew Ryan could possibly be rich enough to finance this ridiculously expensive engineering project all by himself.

I’ve thrown a few hours into Bioshock at this point; as I say in the comments on this other post, I’ve cleared through the Medical district and dealt with that freaky surgeon dude. To date, there’s been quite a bit of stuff I’m impressed with, and also no small amount of things that just piss me off. So, hey, one thing I can say about Bioshock is that it’s noteworthy.

Let’s talk about the good parts first. The immediate first thing I have to compliment the game on is its visual and audial style — the art deco look and big band sound is fantastic, and the game uses a fair few authentic period songs to get the mood just right. The voice acting is also good; Andrew Ryan sounds as much like Howard Hughes as to make no difference, and all of the "audio diaries" you’ll pick up throughout the game are also well-acted. Granted, the game doesn’t skimp on the senseless accents, but at least when they’re performed well they’re not as annoying as they are at other times. The art deco metaphor is extended to the interface as well — the weapon selection tabs, the submenus, the map screen.

There’s a lot of interesting customisation available. The weapons, as far as I’ve seen them, are basically describable as "bog-standard" — pistol, machine gun, shotgun (though the close-combat weapon — the wrench — is introduced with a "find a crowbar or something" instruction that can’t help but raise a smile). The Plasmids, however, are quite interesting; to date, I can shoot the aforementioned lightning bolts, I can set people on fire with my mind, I can grab and throw objects with my gravity gun Telekinesis, and I have this "Enrage" power that, well, totally pisses dudes off. I haven’t tried that one yet, but the game assures me it’s cool.

Customisation doesn’t stop at weapons, though — there are three different types of "gene tonics" you can get that make you faster, stronger, and better. You can carry all the weapons under the sun simultaneously, but you get only so many plasmids and tonics at a time, thereby obeying the classic video game cliché that says you can carry unlimited large things but only a few small things at once. Many of the weapons also have certain "special" ammuintion types, which brings the total number of ways you can perform a mischief on some other dude up probably about to the six jillion they tell you in the ads.

Atmospherically, the game is less Half-Life and more Resident Evil; everything’s dark corners and heavy fog and scary sounds and monsters that jump out and go "boo." There’s a great moment when something temporarily blinds you, and then, when you can see again, if you turn around, there’s a mob right behind you just standing there and waiting. That doesn’t make very much sense, but it’ll make you jump — it’s way scarier than if the mob just attacked you while you were blind, like you know the Combine would do. Definitely a bit on the survival horror side.

So enough with the good. Now let’s get our hate on. First and foremost, it pisses me off that the game continues to hijack the action periodically to show me movies. And I don’t mean the benign way, like I go through a door and there’s a fade-out and then a cutscene plays. I mean the really awful way where I go through a door and all of a sudden the computer takes control of what is theoretically my fucking character and auto-pilots certain actions. I was willing to give that a pass during the introduction, because, hey, the game hasn’t really started yet anyhow, but it’s not confined to the introduction, and that’s completely inexcusable.

You remember Doom? You remember how Doom would give you a big empty room with a good pickup — usually the damn Plasma Cannon — sitting on a raised, lighted plinth in the centre of the room, and as soon as you pick it up the lights go out and a zillion mobs attack you? Yeah, Bioshock does that. But it takes it a step farther than Doom did, and has several waves of mobs spawn and attack you. Trust me, that trick was old halfway through Doom 2; that designers are still using it here in the future where we have underwater cities and lightning bolt injectors is just not good.

I don’t like the mob design. The gibbering voice clips are pretty cool, I’ll grant you, but the rest of it’s a bit bizarre. They move somewhat unnaturally, and I’m not sure it’s 100% intentional — I get that these dues are crazy, but they seem to run around in odd patterns and stop randomly. I preferred Half-Life’s more tactical mobs to the plain crazy here. Another issue is that there are a few different types of "splicers," but hell if I can tell them apart until after they’re dead and the loot mouseover tells me what type they were; a bit more in the way of visual differences would be nice. It’s also not cool with me that sometimes mobs will just plain old cheat; if a given mob is part of an "event" — for example, the Medical boss appears two times before you actually fight him — then you can’t actually do anything to him, even though you’ll probably waste some EVE trying to lightning-bolt-root him so you can bash the hell out of him with a wrench. Instead, what happens is you blast him, and then he does his event thing and leaves, costing you a bit of EVE and not rooting for one rotten second.

There’s a pretty stupid minigame that you have to play nearly constantly — HAKCING TEH PLANAT! There are bunches of turrets and security cameras and drones and so-on that you can hack to take control of, in addition to which almost all vendors can be hacked go get lower prices. The concept is pretty damn cool, I have to grant, but the execution is sort of… stupid. You connect a bunch of little pipe tiles to make a complete path from the start pipe to the end pipe. As minigames go, this one’s not terrible, but you have to do it an awful lot, and it stops being interesting pretty early on.

All of this probably seems like nitpicking — and, to be fair, it basically is — but there are three complaints I have that are actually pretty serious. First off is the configuration; the game has four option screens, and provides a lot of configurability, but has some… oddities. For one, it doesn’t know how to restart its sound engine, and any changes to sound settings require a restart of the whole game (and another time spent sitting through the minute or so of unskippable titles and disclaimers). Worse even than that, though, is that accessing the key bindings requires you to go through the "customise controls" screen first — not normally a problem, but Bioshock automatically throws away any changes you made on the controls options before you switch to key bindings. And it pops up a confirmation box every single time you try, even if you haven’t changed anything on the control options. Would it be that hard just to make it save the fucking changes instead of throwing up a nag screen? But the worst thing — a problem so amateurish I can’t believe it shipped in a commercial product — is that the key binding screen doesn’t work like every other options screen. The buttons on the bottom, instead of being the customary "save changes" and "cancel" buttons, are "save changes" and "reset to defaults." And once you press that goddamn reset button there is no going back — apparently the dangers of opening the key bindings screen warrant an annoying nag box, but hitting the fucking irrevocable "reset" button that they randomly put where cancel should be does not.

The game also, at least on my system, has a tolerable chance of crashing during saves. It’s not every time, or even every tenth time, but it’s frequent enough that I don’t think it’s a fluke. And, clearly, while saving is the worst possible time for the game to crash. If you were wondering, no, it doesn’t successfully save the game if this happens, but it doesn’t appear to mung its old save either, so you can pick up from the last save you made. However (and somewhat hysterically) it resets all options when this happens, including your bizarro custom key bindings.

My third serious gripe is that the game’s positional audio is, for lack of a better word, garbage. Wait, no, I do have a better word: shit. I won’t speak for everybody out there, but I for one rely very heavily on the audio cues to tell me what’s going on around me, and I can’t trust them in Bioshock. They consistently tell me that mobs are places where they are not, and fail to tell me where the mobs actually are. In all fairness, I don’t have a sound card capable of EAX2, but I shouldn’t need one; basic positional audio doesn’t require any fancy-dan proprietary effects formats, and no other games that I’ve played have this trouble. The whole Half-Life series can tell me just fine where the damn Manhacks are coming from, and, oddly enough, I use the exact same soundcard and the exact same headphones to play Bioshock.

Oh, one other fiddly complaint, while I’m thinking about it: I love the game’s atmosphere and period-ness, but I do feel the need to point out that it doesn’t seem to be totally aware of which period it’s set in. The big-band-art-deco theme belongs to the 20s, and Rapture is a city of the 50s. Not a big deal, but worth noting.

So that, long as it is, is the story of my first four hours or so in Rapture. There’s enough good in the game to keep me playing, but, man, it has a lot of rough spots. More to come, no doubt, as something new starts to piss me off.

July 28th, 2008 Posted by Darien | Games | 2 comments