I didn’t rely really on the plasmids much at all either but it’s cool they hit a series of gameplay elements. Clearly you could use shock and fire for most situations but the grav gun telekinesis was one I should have used more.

I came to Bioshock really late over a year after release so to a degree I knew the main choices. I also knew there was absolutely no benefits for a half way decent gamer to harvest the girls. If you save them you get an addtional plasmid and in the end you get more atom by saving them and you get a better ending. Going into the game I knew that. Maybe a more balanced reward for harvest/saving would have been interesting but I knew going in exactly what I was going to do. Maybe that is my fault but oh well.

Regardless I’m still on the fence for 2. The multiplayer means nothing since I won’t knwo anybody who is going to play and I’m worried about playing as a big daddy and how they are going to connect 1 into 2. 1 for a most part worked very well as an isolated story so how they are going to intertwine them needs to be interesting. Also the Big Sisters seem kinda lame as much as I don’t have a problem blowing away women with heavy weaponry lol

I did my play though on Hard and this was the game that started that trend for me and shooters. Really the mechanics in this game work well and minus one checkpoint and the final boss I didn’t have too many stopages so I didn’t find the difficulty to harness any foul will. Actually playing it a little harder was fun. For a strong gamer I would recommend this game to be played on Hard due to my experience. It’s nothing compared to COD4.

JJA your homepage is just turning revolutionary.

The main problem with Bioshock was that it was an underground city, and that ruined the suspension of disbelief for me. And, associated with that were the claustrophobic level designs, and a motion blur system that gave me motion sickness every time I played it. Additionally, I played it right after beating the first and second L4D games so I was a bit burnt out on fighting zombies.

Good call on Shadow of the Colossus, that’s easily my favorite PS2 game.

And, yes there is a black market in the game. That’s what the whole smugger’s den stuff is about.

The reason you were always so low on ammo is directly related to those goddamn chambers. Since the player can never die within the game, you are respawned in the nearest vita chamber with *whatever supplies you had when your life bar dwindled to zero.* So if you depleted all your ammo while taking on a big daddy, then “died,” you were brought back with the depleted inventory, not what you had when you first entered the fight. The standard “revert back to previous save” would be much better here, because on hard difficulty, ammo and health are already in limited supply. But when splicers don’t re-spawn, and all you have left to kill are big daddies, dying while in a firefight leaves you paralyzed with nothing to fall back on. It’d be much better if the developer just did auto saves, as per the industry FPS standard.

That’s probably my only complaint about this game. Just the setting alone and the stories that are told within the game make up for that short-coming. Rapture is probably the most unique and richly-built environment in a video game. It really made me feel like some awful shit went down. I was almost kinda shocked you used the word “linear” to describe Bioshock. Maybe I was just a bigger fan of exploring the cool environment that it didn’t register to me that I was, in fact, on a linear path.

The plasmids and weapons were all awesome, IMO. Almost all of them had 3 stages of upgrade…fully upgraded electro shock & fire combined with level 3 shotgun or machine gun was awesome. The different kinds of rockets, grenades, trip wires, telekinesis, whirlwind, hacking the turrets to float around as your ally…they were all variables to use in any combination to approach each and every encounter. I thought there was nearly an unlimited amount of freedom, not to mention the environmental traps you could set. Did you ever acquire new slots to make room for more plasmids? I think I had at least 5 different plasmids available to switch on the fly.

Vanlandw’s comment on a dark, adult story/setting hits the nail on the head with his beautifully simple summary. This game and Shadow of the Colossus are two video game worlds that I truly felt like I was a part of, and each aspect is presented in a way that doesn’t make the gamer feel like an idiot.

Rant over.

vanbergs

But I enjoyed the story

I had less enjoyment with the hacking singular mini game. Easily solved by having more then one game or having a different way to hack. I also was very disappointed in having a typical “big” ending boss. Halo 1 did it right bypassing any boss battles and Bioshock should have avoided the typical end “big bad”.

The only thing i liked about the Vita Chambers was at least there is an explanation for them and they remove loading screens caused by death.

Plasmids are just something different then grenades and I’m shocked you said nothing about the issue with the “choices” in the game.

Also I saw on your “black market” comment I didn’t know there was any black market at all.

http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Businesses

I figured most of them were owned by the powerful of Rapture (Ryan, Fontaine)

Your scale I would give it a 3