All is good on the gaming front. Sure it's not going as planned and in fact it's probably going backwards but I'm happy with the progress in the wrong direction that I am taking ;) Like a lot of people I know I have a huge backlog of games that I've purchase and not played. I think at last check I'd only played 38% of the 154 games I'd bought. I made some headway on that and then bought another 30 games. I also set up my spare PC to run with the TV as a monitor and use a wireless game controller so I could play a heap of those games in a more comfortable setting. Then I downloaded emulators for a dozen consoles or older pcs that I've played throughout my lifetime, spent a few days pouring through online game libraries identifying and acquiring every game I can every remember playing on those platforms. Then when I started to play em I found the menuing systems (or complete lack of) for every emulator to be inadequate or annoying when trying to control with a game controller so I spent 2 weeks learning Java FX and writing Smooth Navigator. The app now works but tbh I've been slack on taking the final steps of setting up default configurations I like for the emulators so it's still annoying to play the games. I'll finish it one day and when I do my game backlog will quadruple ;)
Speaking of not finishing things, I played Bioshock (the first one) and almost enjoyed it and almost finished it. I shall now don flame retardant clothing and review it (spoilers will also ensue) ....
I started playing this game and found it awesome. Set in a dystopian underwater society, run by power hungry mad men and populated by insane, genetically enhanced citizens it wasn't long before I was having a blast running around smashing heads with wrenches and getting genetic enhancements of my own. The world was gritty and atmospheric and the populace amplified that feel with their mildly humorous and often disturbing actions and dialog. When I watched one of them attack and slap a pony tailed little girl only to then be smashed up against a wall by the girls burly protector and have a large drill rammed into his face I immediately thought "shit just got heavy". The game would continue in this vain with the player encountering different classes of enemies and having to choose whether to destroy or free the Little Sisters (the aforementioned child) who have been enslaved and are working dark purposes for unseen benefactors. There's a few major players in the game all adding their own perspectives, truths and lies to the ongoing story and it really is an enjoyable, albeit dark, experience. As a guy who really likes a dark game Bioshock should have been perfect match for me. So here comes the foreseeable but...
...some of the game design choices really detract from the experience. A minor complaint is the number of buttons required to generate effective combat. Different weapons, different ammo types for each weapon, different genetic alterations, movement controls, reload button, hack robots button, interact button (useful for health stations); there was just so much that could possibly be going on. It wasn't an issue until later in the game when enemies became more difficult and the different classes were often combined in a way that required different techniques (enhancement and ammo combinations) to more effectively dispatch of them that became a bit of a cluster. It wasn't extreme but it detracted a bit regardless. It's not that I don't like difficult games, its just that making a game difficult by requiring a player to grow 2 extra fingers feels like a bit of a cheat on the developers behalf.
I think the major issue for myself was with a simple game mechanic that I suspect was designed to keep the game flowing but instead kept me detached from the game. You rarely get to see any of the major players in the game face to face, with most of the interaction coming over radios or from tape recorded journals. As opposed to jarring or often boring cut-scenes, the developers went for audio story telling which occurs while the game continues to roll on. I nearly quit very early in the game when I received my second genetic enhancement and had no idea how to use it because the auditory instructions were missed among my frantic ducking for cover from a grenade lobbing enemy. This continued throughout the game. I'd clear a room or area before triggering an event only to have that event launch some aural progression of the story line and spawn a number of enemies at the same time. Of course the game gives the option to play back the messages but that just left me standing in a pool of bodies while someone rambled about something that may or may not have been important, fearing to continue the game lest I miss the message for the second time. So I soon gave play back the flick and found myself often following 1 sentence hints from my journal rather than feeling any sort of investment in the game or the characters within it. In the end I just felt like I was doing random and possibly pointless quests in a rather cool landscape. So when I finally got to the end boss I had one go at killing him, got beaten when he was at half health and then just watched the game ending on youtube. It's kind of sad that I didn't feel like I missed out on anything by finishing the game in that way. I have the sequel but I'm not in a rush to play it.
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