Spoiler
times are approximate, the following are not necessarily complete bulletproof critiques so much as my initial impression

- 0-3 - yes, you can’t step on toes without stepping on toes and why they decided not to step on toes here can only be attributed to their constant wishes to sell, just like that box art decision.
- 3-6 - this is a debatable point—affordances are the kind of thing you need to worry about as a designer, so not presenting just two choices may make the player own the choice more, but I think the whole point of that sequence in the game was that you/Booker are going to be coerced into a lot of things throughout the game. I personally question the notion many people have that everything that is undesirable yet noticeable to the player is bad game design. It may be contributing to a bigger picture, and in this particular instance, I would say it is. This game makes an incredible number of things happen off-camera, including where Elizabeth goes.
- 6-8 - The enemies are concentrating on the guy with the gun instead of trying to capture a girl who Watsons around the place. Okay, it is kind of the easy way out to make Elizabeth, but come on, if you are asking for a fun “escort mission”, you have to have an companion who acts like a human. And maybe, just maybe, she is equally as competent as you if not more so despite everything that has conspired to make it not so. (also BI is an easy-ish swashbuckling adventure more than it is a sequel to a sequel to one of the scariest survival horror games of all time. I think reinvention is okay, and this game got rewritten so many times it had to ship out in some form, warts and all.)
- 8-9 - he criticized a number of things that could have just as easily been a criticism of what made Halo (CE) good; I these parts are misdirected and not at all the game thinking you’re too dumb to cycle through more than two weapons. It is a problem with BI, though. The thing is, in BI running out of ammo is a chore since you can just pick up a new weapon any time, and in Halo—where you also have two weapons and run out of ammo readily—weapon selection was an “interesting choice”, to use Sid Meier’s definition (this is especially true if you have not yet memorized the levels), since you have to worry about scarcity, the choice is pretty clear once you know what each weapon does, and the way you use weapons, unlike BI (as he rightly points out), is a bit more advanced than just pointing and shooting, and enemies react way better. The way medkits work in Halo is also better; since the mechanics regarding that are only slightly different (BI lets you upgrade, and also it is obviously better in every way to max shield before ever touching health, removing one interesting choice that “could have been”), I have to conclude that it is bad balance in BI. These are all meant to be short responses, but I’ll cut it off soon after dispensing a bit of wisdom paraphrased from a designer of them 90s shooters, said in the 90s: the best place for an ammo pack is right where the player has run out (I suspect it follows that a med kit should be similarly situated). Again—being undesirable to the player is not necessarily bad design.
- 10-11 - if that is one of the most poorly thought out engagements you’ve ever had in a video game for real, there is nothing I can say that won’t sound catty.
- 12-13 - again with the two weapons thing, which is not the wrong thing per se. Encouraging you to pour money into upgrades only to find that the choice back then was not presented to you clearly is what went wrong, and definitely agree that Vox weapons are a cruel and pointless thing to have.
- 18 - lets slide the thing I wouldn’t have
- 19-20 - could not disagree more. particularly shameful—“you couldn’t formulate a more counterintuitive nonsensical cop-out if you tried; it runs totally in opposition to the concept of parallel worlds.” (1) try me (2) so does visiting parallel worlds
- 21-25 - huge exercise in point-missing, and if I could object to everything, I’d be here all day, plus were I such a great writer I’d say what was good in a long-ass article of my own, but I’m not, and could not possibly convince anyone that reading a poorly organized 12000 word apologia of a game that wasn’t completely that great is a good use of their time.
- 25-26 - something like a fair point, but there have been stranger cases in real life; plus she seems to have had some social contact in her golden cage and is established as having read plenty, and has more naïveté than she seems to be credited with in this short portion.
- 26-26:30 - plot holes, yup.
- 26:30-26:45 - didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, either, but can more easily be excused than he is willing to do here (ties into one of the points missed during the point-missing session).
- 26:45-27 - yep, none of those vigor enemies were given a proper introduction, there is absolutely no stated reason the vigors are there, and it seems only freaks use them for the glory of fighting Columbia’s enemies.
- 27:10-27:20 - There was a reason Columbia was in the sky and this was stated in the game through various hints that you have to hunt for and reconstruct; it was isolation, much like Rapture, but unlike Rapture they had an army to build, a cult to expand, and terrestrial industries to support the city. That is not the WTF part of a flying city at all—at such a high altitude, you’d get frostbite, not be able to breathe, have the city spotted with the unaided eye for miles around (and trackable by governments worldwide), the list goes on. The only part of that that’s really explained away is that the Lutece exploited something or other to make it float in a way that isn’t energy prohibitive.
- 27:20-27:50 - This certainly has been making less and less sense since SS1
- 27:50-27:55 - Funny, but (1) it’s not like this sort of thing hasn’t been the bread and butter of lazy game webcomics since the 90s and (2) this is a thing you chose to do in a way and you aren’t really obligated or directed to do it; the compulsion is largely your own even if it is how most people including myself end up playing the. So it runs contrary to the idea had in 3-6 the way I see things—if you own the decision where to throw the baseball, you own the decision to eat out of trash cans. Even if it’s uh... not really a story point and the stakes are lower so ownership of decisions is not so important.
- 28-34 - holy crap, not going to touch everything, having been at this for a few hours already, but needless to say Bioshock’s shallow and dubious “moral” choice system kicked off a long trend of similarly shallow and dubious “moral” choice systems that were in no way fun to play, and I’m glad BI didn’t have it. The false choice segments in BI seems to me a wink and a sardonic smile that they have taken it out back and shot it forever.
- 34-35 - Oddworld got plenty of press and marketing back in the day, so I don’t know exactly what he’s on about here? Seriously, I didn’t open a game magazine for months that didn’t have an ad. It is no surprise to me that more than a decade down the road people just don’t talk about an old franchise that hasn’t seen a new release in some time and people didn’t really consider super great back in the day; pop culture discussions have a short shelf life. Nice that it got a comparison, I guess. I think it would have been stronger to slip it earlier in the critique, but that’s not my call. Games journalism and a lack of proper non-ecstatic criticism on this game, on the other hand, oh boy yes. Unfortunately, liking Bioshock Infinite is kind of like liking Quentin Tarantino films; you never know if the person who professes liking such things is really a fan of experiments with the limits of taste, or just has no taste at all. But then you get into games and you are almost always getting a feeling it’s the latter.
- 35-36 - fair enough, I was pretty sick of the age of everything being a bad platformer, too. But it’s possible BI is part of a last hurrah for the single-player FPS genre if you think the “genre cycle” applies.
- 36-37 - I don’t know whether this was meant seriously, because it doesn’t seem as serious as the rest, thus I will not rip it because that would be a serious treatment.