We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

This guy deserves your full attention. I really admire him for his ability to keep a critique of a game interesting (and intelligent) for 40 minutes.

Well, I had to push aside time in my day... (I also don’t particularly like things in video format like this since I read/think ~800 WPM on a good day, which all goes out the window when it’s audio—also most reviewers on the Internet have no real credibility because they are just some person on the Internet who for all I know sniffed glue before running their mouth *the hypocrisy is duly acknowledged).

THE FOLLOWING IS LONG AND PROBABLY ANNOYING AS HELL THAT’S WHAT MY BRAIN IS LIKE ON THE INSIDE OLD AND CRANKY AT HEART I USUALLY TEMPER MYSELF A BIT BETTER

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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.

So here’s the thing: nearly anything I agreed on is actually something very few reviewers even disagreed on (didn’t list all of them above, only the things I felt like saying something about). Most of the video I could not agree with no matter how well or poorly supported. I also find it strange that he never touched on the game’s use of religion, since... well, most mass media simply gives it a clumsy treatment at best, and.

But there are signs of a functioning brain and not a whole lot of grasping at straws, plus I liked the first three minutes, plus I like his accent so he’s not exactly on my “Never do that again” list (I guess audio is good for something).

I actually like MGS2's story after seeing his review.

I will play MGS2 one day, so I think I’ll refrain, but I hear so many complaints about it that I already think it can’t be as bad as I’ve heard.

(An interesting argument I have heard, though: MGS2 makes a good deal more sense in its cultural context. That is not to say that it went over any better in Japan, really. At any rate, if you want to think of a game that makes daring steps, BI really cannot hold a candle to MGS2.)

Mind going into more detail on that?

So in the FPS genre, there are a few strains of game. Taking multiplayer out of the equation (which is an important part of the genre and a huge contributor to its longevity), as well as excluding the first person role-playing games which bear a lot of semblance to FPSes (e.g. The Elder Scrolls, arguably Borderlands, etc.), you are left with two major variations the way I’ve seen it, with some mixing allowed between the two and certainly a lot of permutations allowed within the primary mechanics.

Wolfenstein 3D, the game that popularized the genre, predates these variations and perhaps could be said to lie between the two if you had to go back today; you have to be methodical about killing enemies since they can drop you pretty easily and ammo is not plentiful. You have three weapons that all take the same ammo; the difference is the rate of fire.

Doom is the progenitor example of one variation. Let’s call it old-school (pretty sure some people already call it that). You get out there, you shoot everything in sight, the visuals can often be described as a bloodbath, you mow down swarms of enemies, you typically have several weapons (hooked up to hotkeys) and you carry all of them, level design is not necessarily particularly scenic and (most of these games being pretty old by now) to beat a level, you will probably need to find a keycard and put it in a door, which isn’t too exciting but what is exciting is that a lot of these levels had easter eggs and hidden powerups you really had to go out of your way to find. You will really want to know the circle-strafing technique, if enemy weapons are slower than instant (hit-scan). PROTIP: To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies. Some other games of this type: Doom II, Quake, Serious Sam, Painkiller, Duke Nukem 3D.

Half-Life is arguably a highly influential old example if not the first of the other variation. I am not sure what to call it; cinematic, new-school, modern, I don’t know. The enemies are not really so fast, taking cover becomes very important, you are likely to have some restrictions in your weapons, you may have a shield/armor as well as health more regularly than in the other variation, one of these may regenerate on its own, you are more likely to have elements borrowed from other gameplay genres such as quest listings (I discounted RPGs because they started cross-pollinating very early on), but one thing that particularly stands out is what Half-Life did first: have lots and lots of set pieces that give the impression of a living world. Some others of this type: Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War.

Again, these are just general categories, perhaps more like a spectrum. When I say we are making Half-Life over and over again, what I mean is that it is rare to see another “old-school” FPS made these days, even though there is the occasional return to form. Although not all the constantly recycled mechanics come from just this one game, all these games owe a lot to it. And yes, a lot of the mechanics really do seem recycled to me. It could be said there isn’t a whole lot you can mix up with FPSes, and it’s true that the mass market seems not to be too tired of them still, and yet I can’t help but think there might be something missing that could be added.

(I actually don’t much care for FPS anyway, so what would I know? oh god i am nervous to submit such a foolish megapost)