Mediocre Greatness

Crap in a pretty box is apparently a really, really good game.

It almost feels like the average gamer has simply accepted mediocre games as the norm. I have never, in my life, seen such high reviews and sales for utter crap. I’m going to alienate myself from a majority of the gamers out there and say, right now, Bioshock was nothing special. Here are my reasons why:

Bioshock should be renamed “Aquatic Doom”, because that is really all it was. Doom, but with really, really pretty water effects. Now, don’t get me wrong I love me some pretty water effects, but being the disgruntled old gamer I am I require a bit more.

I require a fun combat system. Bioshock does not have a fun combat system. If it takes 5 wrenches to the head (on easy I might add) to kill a regular person, I want to be them, because I’ve tried it and I can’t last more than one wrench to the skull without collapsing in a heap on the floor. The guns were all but useless since you could literally wrench people faster than shooting them (which doesn’t make much sense) which is good because I constantly ran out of ammo since I’m a spray-and-pray type of gamer. I’m sure if I was more a precision shooter, I would have had plenty of ammo but I don’t play that way. That’s the first sign your game is not “Game of the Year” worthy, when an obvious and popular style of play completely ruins the game.

Oh, I almost forgot about the plasmids. I enjoyed them very much . . . for the first 20 minutes or so. There was something very satisfying about electrocuting someone or setting them on fire or sending a Big Daddy in on them. But the novelty quickly wears off. Besides, I’ve done this before in Deus Ex: Invisible War, it is nothing new.

I require fun game play. Bioshock had moments of both fun game play and extremely frustrating sequences that made me want to stop playing the game. Warning to all game developers: Never, I repeat, never design scenarios (even accidentally) that make players want to quit playing! There were two situations I remember that I literally wanted to quit playing, permanently. Both times were pretty early in the game, when I first picked up the telekinesis plasmid, but I didn’t have room for three plasmids yet. Well, I traded out Electricity for it, since the game basically tells you: “To continue you must have the telekinesis plasmid”. But then I couldn’t shut down any drones, turrets, or cameras without wasting all of my ammo on them. Great, now I’m out of ammo, that plan worked well. So, I reloaded my save and swapped out Pyrokinesis. The only problem was that you needed fire to melt the ice to get into the other areas, so again, I was screwed. It seemed like either way I was forced to suffer for listening to the game.

What the hell happened to Fun being the #1 requirement and goal of video games?

The next situation was getting the key (god I wish I could remember its exact name) to the one side room. The key is in another room so that you must use telekinesis to pull it through the window. The only problem was I accidently hit the wrong button when I grabbed it, because a splicer literally spawned on top of me, and I tossed the key into the far room and it landed behind a wall. I now cannot get the key, at all. I spent about an hour trying to get it again, because my last save was about 30 minutes back (and ironically the save was right when I picked up Telekinesis, so I’d have to go through all that shit again). Well, needless to say, I came to the “Fuck this!” conclusion and continued into the game. That isn’t a conclusion you want the gamer to get too, ever, for any reason.

I require a believable story. I said “believable”, not necessarily “good”. I really could care less how “good” a story is because, let’s face it; video games have notoriously bad stories. Your average video game story is something just above lesbian anime fan fiction, mainly because it is written by people who would probably otherwise be writing lesbian anime fan fiction. I pity video game “writers”. I know their job consists mainly of spell checking and “fixing” the designers “dialogue” and “back story”, but they get blamed for bad “story” when really that had very little creative input. Bioshock does not have a believable story. First off, it’s the 60s and you are in an underwater city (which even today is, at best, barely feasible). The opening sequence is just painful to try to put together. First off, the plane crash is extremely inconsistent. If the plane would have crashed into the water, it would have hit the water all at the same time. The sequence, however, shows you in the water (and the tail of the plane in the distance) and then the mid-section of the plane slams into the water. So, logically, that means the plane blew up in the air since that is the only way to explain how different pieces of the plane hit the water at different times. Ok, fine. But somehow I landed right next to the damn entrance to Rapture (which, by the way, has no damage to it even though a plane just crashed/exploded right next to it). Ok, fine. Then I enter Rapture and what’s the first thing I do? Enter the spooky, creepy pod thingy that takes me underwater. Yeah, that’s definitely something I would do in that situation. Now we’re down in Rapture, we watch one poor guy die, then we find a wrench to “defend ourselves” and kill some dude who jumps out at us. Ok, fine, that part is actually sort of believable. But then, for no apparent reason, I inject myself with some random goop? What the fuck?

Of course, the rest of the game attempts to “explain” all this, but really no amount of explaining is going to convince me that someone wasn’t smoking pot the day they came up with this sequence. It’s terrible in both consistency and believability. Oh wait, I forgot to mention, if you look carefully, the tail of the plane at the beginning of the game is completely different from the one that slams into the tunnel. The sizes are different and so are the tail fins, so I guess a second plane happened to crash with you? Maybe we crashed into another plane in mid-air? Sure, that works. As you can see, I have to pull shit out of my ass just to make sense of the story’s inconsistency, but this is one of the best “stories” in all of video games? Wow, video game stories must be really, really terrible.

And now for the grand-daddy reason the game was “so awesome”, the moral decisions. No offense, but it’s just pixels, I have no moral or emotional attachment to a collection of polygons on the screen that I just met in game. The Little Sisters are portrayed as evil, dark, terrible monsters, when really they look just like little girls, except with red eyes. The grand moral decision of the game is whether I hit X or Y? I didn’t like how the game pressured you to “harvest” them, and pressured, and pressured, and pressured. But then, right before you “harvest” them, you are given a second option with no immediate benefits from a person you’ve never met before and are told is just as “evil” as the Little Sisters themselves. It doesn’t sell the options. The game only sells one option, which you are a “bad person” for listening to. That doesn’t make sense. If you teach a child (someone who doesn’t know any better) that something bad . . . is good, then they have no sense that the bad thing they do is bad, at all. That’s what the game did. It nearly forces you to believe you are “ending suffering” or “killing monsters” because it never gives an explanation. It tries to trick the player into doing a “bad thing” by disguising it as something you are supposed to be doing. That isn’t a moral decision; it’s misleading an ignorant bystander who just happens to have a 50/50 chance of doing the “right” thing.

Ok, ok, I can’t be all negative about Bioshock. The game isn’t that bad. It isn’t a great game, but it doesn’t suck as much as I make it out to be. There are plenty of worse games out there, like Quake 4. My frustration comes with the fact that was “Game of the Year” and rated the number one game for the Xbox 360. This game is not “Game of the Year” worthy. It is a pretty, somewhat more fun, underwater version of Doom with a “cool” story. Not good, “cool”, meaning anyone who actually thought about the story and analyzed it for more than 10 seconds realized it was dumb and everyone else absolutely loved it. Like MTV.

I honestly can’t believe that all the other games released this year were worse than Bioshock. Granted, I really haven’t played many that I personally enjoyed more, aside from Team Fortress 2, Portal, Call of Duty 4, Super Mario Galaxy, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, Crackdown, GRAW 2, Hellgate: London (Yes, I actually enjoyed it), Mass Effect, Peggle (which I think should be “Game of the Year”), and Titan Quest: Immortal Throne. Ok, so there were a ton of games that were more fun than Bioshock. I thought that was the requirement for “Game of the Year”. The game which is the most FUN is the winner. Not the game with the most hype (which actually failed to deliver). Not the game with the prettiest water effects (which they were, I must say). Fun, fun, fun!

Why doesn’t anyone care about fun games anymore!?!

I blame game journalists, again.