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OUTDO SANDER COHEN
IN CREEPINESS
Aslightoverreaction.EXTRA LIFE
NOW PLAYING I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I REINSTALL (^) I WHY I LOVE I M U S T P L A Y
atmospheric or theatrical touches
which Fort Frolic’s designer, Jordan
Thomas, had included and thus Fort
Frolic started to meld into the
bombast of the rest of BioShock.
I would’ve quit earlier. Especially
given every EVE refill meant sitting
through another injection animation.
But I stayed, and it’s because I
wanted to see more glimpses of this
underwater world.
Absentmindedly pinging
a crossbow bolt into the
head of a splicer was made
a bazillion times more
palatable by the shadow of a
shark passing over a glass
tunnel. Faffing around with
the squillionth Pipe Mania
minigame to pay slightly less for
napalm was offset by sightings
of red coral formations outside
the Hephaestus region.
I’ve since tinkered with the .ini
file so I could access the free
camera and toggle the UI. The
bathysphere opening is great when
playing normally but fantastic when
watching it from the outside,
stopping to watch turtles skim past
neon signs or getting sidetracked by
shoals of fish.
DUMPSTER DIVING
Playing BioShock also helped me
make a bit more sense of BioShock
Infinite. The latter is still flawed and
rather dull, but elements like finding
bullets in chocolate boxes now had a
reference point rather than simply
being weird. The original BioShock is
all about finding cash, snacks and
proximity mines in ashtrays.
Occasionally this rummaging
came together in a brow-raising
way (one splicer had two cream
cakes and a length of a hose in
her pocket, which sounds like
the recipe for one hell of an
evening) but more often it was just
nonsense. No more nonsensical than
the contents of pockets in Fallout
and other games, but in
BioShock the detail in the
world design makes this
pocket-and-bin lucky dip feel
far more incongruous.
Limiting resources can make
decisions within a fight sequence feel
important. You aren’t just able to fling
bullets indiscriminately or heal
whenever the fancy takes you. But
games have found less clunky ways of
achieving the effect over the years, or
of rebalancing the rarity of each
resource to better support
experimental play.
It’s the same story with the bins
and pockets. Hiding resources
incentivises players to scour areas,
making these feel more like
consequential spaces which the
character inhabits, rather than dead
zones. But BioShock represents a
more basic implementation than I’m
generally used to now.
Infinite used the same idea and I
remember being so confused by why
anyone would hide edible hotdogs in
bins. With the added context of a
BioShock playthrough I assume the
developers were treating this loot
system as one of the defining
elements of BioShock or as a knowing
nod to the original. It doesn’t make it
less weird, but I guess it’s interesting
that BioShock’s protagonist has
always been a raccoon. I mean, I
assume that’s the twist?