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  13. <p id=t><b>Bioshock Infinite Review</b></p>
  14. <p id=st>Actually a few hours.</p>
  15. <p id=g><b>Comstock Castle is some bullshit:</b></p>
  16. <p id=s>Listen, developers. I know you're some of the most disappointed, dispassionate, and dejected people alive on the planet. But let me make this clear: if you ever, EVER, put a stealth segment into my high-skies adventure first person shooter, I will find your game, hang it from a tree, then burn the corpse in the public arena and show everybody just how and why you fucked up.</p>
  17. <p id=s>You know what I love in a video game? I'm not even exaggerating - you know what I completely and utterly fucking <i>love</i> in a video game? When you take all the established mechanics that you've set up, the entire twenty hours of gameplay that you've made, all of it, and then throw it out the window as if it was nothing. I fucking love when you teach the player to use your powers to tear up dozens of enemies, and then putting them in a scenario where you have to sneak around the enemies, lest you get utterly fucked. I'm sorry that this enemy has arbitrarily decided to be immune to death with zero prior warning, so I guess I'm a dumbass for expecting the game to work the same way that it always has for the entire time that it has thus far.</p>
  18. <p id=s>I wouldn't mind if the motherfuckers were a bunch of mindless zombies who died in one hit. But giving me zero options but to sneak around some cunt with a camera on his head, having to run away from twenty assholes with a baseball bat who knock down my shields faster than a fucking turret, and having to constantly turn around and pick them off one-by-one in the vain hope that I'll survive for another day, is, in scientific terms, a dick move for motherfuckers.</p>
  19. <p id=s>I <i>love</i>, I am in complete <i>love</i> with a video game, that prioritises careful positioning and resource management, throwing us into situations with multiple options to proceed, and then taking us back into 1993 where game developers have zero ideas but to throw fifty skeletons at a player and force them to waste all their ammo and shoot their way out. In a game where weapons have the black market price of a five-minute-fuck, this is a massive waste of resources and effort for a level that the player by all rights should be able to tear shit up in without grinding the action to a screeching halt having to run away from an invincible enemy we have zero indication is invincible.</p>
  20. <p id=s>And when you do get past the enemies, in rooms you can't go back to because you'll get caught and have to fight twenty more dudes, you end up in the guillotine with enemies who will happily shoot you with giving up an edge of their skin. The difficulty spike in this level isn't even challenging like the previous levels, which at the very least had some vigor you could bullshit your way through. The enemies in this level will kill you in two seconds before you can even react, and because you have zero dodging abilities, with enemies that you cannot see or fight unless you know beforehand their exact position who will take out half your health in two hits, there is no choice but to die in order to proceed. The challenge here is unfair - it's not reasonable to say "git gud" when the game is deliberately fucking over the player.</p>
  21. <p id=s>There is zero good feeling to completing the level, because completing it is a chore of trial-and-error where you keep dying and having your money and ammo drained to fight enemies that you should have had the opportunity to be aware of and throw on the ground before they decide to make you feel like an idiot for trying to enjoy a game. Anybody who considers it a fair aspect of game design to pit the player against odds that they could not change until they died is either a dumbass or a masochist - and I don't know who I least want to be designing my video games.</p>
  22. <p id=s>Alright, truth be told this was supposed to be a rant about Comstock Castle, but given that this was better than what I wrote for my "actual" Bioshock Infinite review, bear with me. What was originally supposed to be a game that I play for myself and then dumped out of my mind like a rousing bout of Team Fortress 2 has turned into a game that, despite all of its efforts, I find myself bitching about at every opportunity, and the somewhat solid gameplay gets brought down by a thousand different niggles, not related to the thousands of niggles the game tries to make us feel bad about. And like Team Fortress 2, this game is a clusterfuck of ideas brought on by the cartoonish gaze of a development team the size of Iceland's coast guard, leading to a series of unfocused ideas made possible by a world made of Pop! Vinyls.</p>
  23. <p id=s>That last paragraph was all I had written for my real review - an example of that famous German efficiency of cleaning out your closet and shoving it into something else. That said, excuse me for fucking up the format a little. A lot, actually. Am I obliged to stick to a format that is inappropriate for the work which I ended up making? Oh, fine, I'll hammer it in.</p>
  24. <p id=g><b>Why I played it:</b></p>
  25. <p id=s>Yahtzee told me to.</p>
  26. <p id=g><b>Elaborate, scrub:</b></p>
  27. <p id=s>Oh, Christ, writing is hard!</p>
  28. <p id=s>Whenever I feel like I need something to play, silly me for having five games and ten novels in my PC waiting to be read, I'll look through the Zero Punctuation end-of-year "Top 5 and bottom 5", which is one of the highlights of my year along with the Vinesauce Christmas stream, where everything gets comfy and I can feel like a kid again instead of an adult doing adult things like writing 2000 words every weekday and 4000 words every weekend for a job I don't get paid for and can't show to my employers or my family because they'll be pissed off that I have "cunt" on the front page as well as all the furry porn I keep linking to and with an audience that doesn't message me and the constant feeling that you're not doing as well as you should and having to wonder what you're going to write about next and when you read a new piece of media if you're going to write a review about it and if it's even worth it to spend your time on anything where you spend an hour playing and two hours writing making it a hell of a time to complete any book out of the constant niggles that you apply it to with the mind of a critic and all of that is just me so you keep doing you and I'll keep doing me. Not giving up or anything, just that writing is hard.</p>
  29. <p id=s>Bioshock Infinite was given "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7rMUvEPXK0">Game of the Year</a>" in the 2013 list, which is now two of Yahtzee's "Games of the Year" that I didn't enjoy, the other being Undertale, and every time I say that word it gets more and more stale, dry, and tasteless, with metal in my mind whenever I bring it up because I had to live through the clusterfuck that happened upon its release and the six months of aftershocks before it finally faded out of the public consciousness. This is unlike Bioshock 1, which as I continue to look fondly upon as an example of how gameplay and story mingled with eachother like the fingertips of a young couple, and how the two were of such exceptionally high quality that it makes me wonder what we did to deserve such a fantastic game. Also Spec Ops: The Line, which was the 2012 Game of the Year, so don't think all his opinions are bullshit because of a few big duds.</p>
  30. <p id=s>The line that made me decide I had to play the game was "Bioshock and System Shock were horror games in which you were late for the party and have to piece the events of the party on a gloomy hungover Sunday morning, whereas Infinite is a pulpy, swashbuckling adventure and you're just in time for the party, because the party is you". If a game could make me feel like I'm single-handedly responsible for all the fun shit that occurs in it, instead of being a glorified AI completing a series of arbitrary missions in order to fulfill its "fun" quota for the day, then that's an offer that I can't refuse. Unfortunately this ended up never coming to pass, unlike a game like Minecraft where the fun only exists because I exist, having a world to fuck with and a world that fucks with you. Minecraft really doesn't get enough cred; I guess that's what happens when ten-year-olds cop your playerbase.</p>
  31. <p id=s>Unfortunately it never came to pass, not just because of the implication that this would be a sandbox-like game instead of a series of linear events, but because of numerous bad design decisions of the story, graphics, and gameplay leads to a video game that is somewhat fun to play for the first three hours and then <i>rapidly</i> deteriorates afterwards. Giving away my opinion of the game at an instant, eh? Well, seeing this was originally about Comstock Castle, let's bitch some more about that.</p>
  32. <p id=g><b>How it works:</b></p>
  33. <p id=s>More like how it DOESN'T work. Am I right fellas? Right? Hahahahahaha audible laughter.</p>
  34. <p id=s>You know (you didn't, but now you do), I died a hell of a lot more in Deus Ex than I did this game, but Deus Ex was always fair. You were always aware of were enemies were, and even the sections where stealth was encouraged could be turned into a free-for-all with a few grenades. It gave you options for every situation, unlike in this game, where all of the options are designed to kill one enemy really fast as opposed to killing a bunch of enemies in a group, unless you picked up the right weapon early on designed to do just that, but fucking forgive me for not having the ability to predict the future.</p>
  35. <p id=s>Fine, Deus Ex also had its fair share of bullshit, such as the invisibility augmentation being worthless if you use a weapon during it, which is the chief reason why somebody would want to use the aug - to kill people without being seen. The AI ranges from having aim that is god-awful to godly, with snipers being a special annoyance for being an unconditional one-hit-kill if RNJesus decides that they're going to hit your head. Not to mention how if a robot sees you, you might as well quick load because those bitches will lay you out.</p>
  36. <p id=s>But the deaths never came out of nowhere - you always knew that a sniper got you, or a that you had a bad run-in with a robot. Their positions are so obvious. Even if you do die, quickloading costs a tenth of a second, you don't lose any resources or ammo or other things when you die, and you always have another option beyond doing the thing you just did and hoping that it works this time. That's the key thing that Dues Ex does, and the reason why it was so great. It gives you options.</p>
  37. <p id=s>If you want to go stealthy, just use the cloak vest and walk past some dudes. If you want to go loud, pop your armour and your grenade launcher and blow everyone up. If you want to take out at range, hide behind something and use your sniper pistol. If you want to knock someone out, sneak up behind them and stab them with a sword. To destroy robots, either use an EMP bomb, or explosives, and to destroy humans use whatever the fuck's in your inventory. You can pause and pop your augmentations at any time to not die, and the challenge them is reducing the amount of times you have to chug your resources like that. And this isn't even talking about the non-lethal weapons you get.</p>
  38. <p id=s>With Bioshock Infinite, your options are limited to shooting a dude, using powers to kill a dude, or using powers to restrain a dude to kill them. Stealth is completely out the window, so as to why the game included a mandatory stealth section in a game where you couldn't even sneak past enemies if you tried is fucking beyond me. You can't complete most objectives unless you clean house first, and Bioshock 1 has the decency to let the users sneak up to splicers before fucking them up.</p>
  39. <p id=s>You can't heal in a battle unless you find some oranges or Elizabeth randomly pimps you out with a health pack. While I liked Elizabeth very much for her ability to keep me in the battle without me having to pop out all the time to dig around in the trash (as well as the game generously providing trash cans everywhere, making backtracking a non-issue), it seemed to me as fixing a problem by throwing a hack on top of it, as opposed to providing gameplay which organically solves the problem of enemies fucking your shit up too much.</p>
  40. <p id=s>Elizabeth is a brilliant example of gameplay and story combining to make a great game mechanic, but the core of the game is still jank in regards to the flow of combat. My biggest issue with the combat is not knowing who the fuck is shooting at me or what the fuck is going on. I'll be trying to aim at an enemy and waving my field of view around trying to see who shoots me, but the environments are so poorly-composed that I have to lean into my monitor to see if that white speck of dust on a balcony is an enemy instead of a barrel.</p>
  41. <p id=s>A lot of reviewers, bless their souls, praised Bioshock Infinte for its graphics. I like its graphics, too - it's a very pretty game with a lot of environments that could be used as an example of how beautifully games can be rendered. The way that the graphics are applied to combat, though, are a load of hot ass. There's so much bloom, smoke, dust, spotlights, whisps, particle effects, and GUI buggery that I couldn't see a fucking thing most of the time. The mortar, or Devil's Kiss, power became my weapon of choice, because I could spam that bitch everywhere and have it explode without needing to peer through a smokescreen just to shoot a dude. And this is bad enough in regular combat - imagine if you're trying to aim at a sniper's head before he shoots your ass dead.</p>
  42. <p id=s>The gameplay isn't geared toward this random bullshit at all - it prioritises killing large-healthed enemies single-handedly and in sequence, as opposed to taking on a bunch of low-health enemies at the same time. All of the guns shoot accurately and in a straight line, without any grouping functionality to them at all. The vigours are good for doing damage over a large area, but the damage is never enough to kill, so you have to use the guns to kill them regardless. It's a game with weaponry that doesn't support the hoard mentality that the game throws at us, and if the maps were better designed to support tactical, man-on-man combat, then it would be a great game.</p>
  43. <p id=s>I would be able to forgive this, but the graphic design is so fucking terrible that it single-handedly brings down what would otherwise be a very enjoyable and vigorous combat system. If we removed all of the bloom and lights and particle effects and lit the maps well enough so that the player could see everybody who was shooting at him at one time, then we would have ourselves a game that lets the player shoot up an enemy, move on, and shoot up the next one without any need to retarget what they're looking at to confirm that this is the person we're supposed to be shooting.</p>
  44. <p id=s>There's a reason why competitive shooters like Quake have a very sparse art style; the more random shit you clutter up the screen with, the harder it is to focus on what you really want to, which is the player. Even in games that look like they have a budget, like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the priority is first and foremost the recognition of the players, which is why the particle effects are always limited to when a bullet is being shot at a wall, so that the player knows they're being shot at, and can recognise the player who shoots at them the instant they get into their field of view.</p>
  45. <p id=s>Simplicity isn't a cop-out that designers use in order to take earlier lunch breaks. It's a fundamental principle of design that perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove. The Bioshock Infinite developers got that wrong, choosing to keep adding in whatever graphic principles were in vogue in order to satisfy an arbitrary designation of "looking good", no matter how much the gameplay suffers. You cannot have a hardcore shooter with an art style that constantly distracts from the shooting, which is why it's so exhausting to play this game when every fight you get into makes you spend mental energy trying to decipher the scene.</p>
  46. <p id=s>I would suggest the art style could be used for a good bout of dumb fun, but the story takes itself so fucking seriously that it feels like I'm not even supposed to be playing the game. You have one goal, which is simply to get Elizabeth to New York and clear your debt. Given how the story takes us through some of the most ungrateful shits in a city built on racism, I am not convinced that I want to spend my vacation in a town that spends most of their tax dollars making the anti-Ghostbusters squad, not to be confused with the anti-Ghostbusters squad on Twitter, or the anti-anti-Ghostbusters squad on Twitter, and especially not to be confused with GamerGate, which is totally not a hate mob we swear on me mum's life.</p>
  47. <p id=s>Yahtzee said that the story was incredibly far up its ass, and I have to agree. Although the science mumbo-jumbo or the "racism is bad" lesson or the domestic abuse plot doesn't make me cringe, they're delivered so hamfistedly and so out-of-place with the gameplay that my reaction was to either jump around the map waiting for the cutscene to end, or just laugh at how hard the game is trying to make us care about its world, yet completely fails.</p>
  48. <p id=s>Why does it fail? I guess that's a good question. It fails because it feels like things are happening to us as opposed to things occurring because of us, unlike in Bioshock 1 where we felt that we were always in control of the situation, exploring it on our own terms and to fulfill our own motivations of "let's fuck up that guy", or in Mass Effect which made us feel the same way with its non-linear progression. Bioshock Infinite throws a metric fuckton of themes, environments, background details, and characters at us which we have absolutely no attachment to, and whenever some bizarre thing happens to me, I keep asking myself "Why do I even bother?".</p>
  49. <p id=s>I don't care about what happens to this town! I want to burn this town to the ground and crash it down to Earth and watch all of its inhabitants pray to God that they'll be saved. I want to take Elizabeth to New York and kill the mafia with my new superpowers so we can live our lives free and go out partying with blackjack and hookers like the good old days. I don't give a fuck about you - I'm Booker Dewitt, bitch, and I'm sending a message that you don't fuck with me. I want the DLC where I can go to New York and kill the motherfuckers who sent us to this godawful town in the first place. Where's the "Fuck you, got Mine" DLC? Why the fuck isn't this game built on "Fuck you, got Mine"?</p>
  50. <p id=s>Because thinking about the events of this game, that's exactly the message I've been getting the whole time. Booker trying to take you to New York to get away from your captors? Fuck you, got mine! Need to steal a bunch of guns to start a revolution, only to have that revolution turn on you? Fuck you, got mine! Spooky ghost lady trying to kill her daughter! Fuck you, got mine! When the fuck does Booker get his? When does Booker get to say "Fuck you" instead of just being alone for the ride where everything bad happens to him? Booker gets to kill a bunch of slaves, but that's barely enough for just how much life took a dump on him.</p>
  51. <p id=s>Maybe Booker deserved it, considering how much a dumbass he is for making friends with Elizabeth. Never get high off your own supply, and never look inside the package you're delivering. If we're supposed to see Booker as a tough guy, it makes it really hard to believe when he screams whenever something bad happens to him, instead of manning the fuck up and going HAM. Booker is such a dumbass that he was knocked out on three separate occasions because of events that could have been solved if he moved a bit to the right.</p>
  52. <p id=s>Maybe we're supposed to see him as a sympathetic character, but you know, killing five hundred people throws that card out the window. The reason JC Denton and Commander Shepard are such great characters is that they never feel remorse for what they did - they always justify their actions based on what they knew at the time, namely that bitches are shooting at them, and they shoot back if they don't want to die. Having a character shit up the joint with morality in a game where morality is being tossed out the window by sheer virtue of gameplay <i>really</i> brings down the mood.</p>
  53. <p id=s>This game is the most jarring example of gameplay and story segregation I've seen in a while. Did you just kill two dozen thinking, feeling, human beings by burning them alive? I hope you enjoy the next five minutes of daddy issues! Yes, 2K games, we are completely interested in your powerful metaphor for discrimination and the confusion of the teenage mind, especially after we blew up the spooky ghost lady and the Michael Jackson tribute convention. No, we're one hundred percent interested in the folly of historical censorship and religious manipulation, which is why the George Washington Robocop fits completely into this narrative.</p>
  54. <p id=g><b>What I felt:</b></p>
  55. <p id=s>Oh, fuck me, I already laid it out pretty concretely, didn't I? After bashing the game for 3,000 words and recommending other games you could (and honestly should) be playing instead of this one, you might think this game is a heaving pile of shit. Well, calling it shit isn't exactly fair, as shit implies there is nothing to redeem it, like a game that you quit in the first hour because of how awful it is. The problem with this game is that I wanted to quit in the last five, which is a good sign of a game that went downhill hard.</p>
  56. <p id=s>This game is awful. But it's not awful because of its mechanics, or how ineptly it was constructed. It was actually made incredibly competently. I didn't get a single crash the entire time, the frame rate stayed constant 99% of the time and the other 1% I had the gall to look at a lock, the graphics make for some great screenshots despite being a bitch gameplay wise, and all the mechanics were intuitive and sensible. The base of the game is perfectly competent, which is a lot more well done than some other game companies can manage, like Valve, EA, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Id, Ion Storm, Square Enix, Eidos, and IO Interactive. Okay, a lot of companies. Why the fuck is our industry so dumb?</p>
  57. <p id=s>It's instead awful because of what is built on top of that base. The realistic physics and character animations don't fit at all with the goofy art style, causing the gameplay to become stiff and monotonous as you run away from enemies who will kill you in five seconds, abusing your last health-point invincibility to pray you kill the bloke shooting at you, and there's about a 50% chance that you will.</p>
  58. <p id=s>The gameplay isn't actually bad when you're starting out. It's actually really fun when you're limited in your weapons and abilities, feeling like you have the means to kill enemies without having to see every single one as a threat, and playing with the new powers and weapons is like trying out new toys. It's when the game gets late into things where every enemy has the durability of a bed frame and the same amount of deadliness where your gameplay options are severely limited. You end up spamming all your ammo and powers trying to kill enemies who has no rights being so hard to kill, especially when they come in swarms of dozens.</p>
  59. <p id=s>Don't be fooled into thinking this game is fun. It was fun. It could have been fun later on. But when you shoot in and out of cover for the first five hours, you've done it for the next fifteen. The game mechanics don't change, but the enemies get tougher, and the weapons are still as janky as the ones you got earliest on in the game, even the supposedly rare and powerful ones with a red icon. By the very end you throw survival out the window and rush into combat spamming everything, and that gets old <i>very</i> fast.</p>
  60. <p id=s><b>Spoiler warning</b> if you're one of the poor unfortunate sods who's planning to play this monotonous and forgettable wreck, or are currently playing it, because you really have to experience this shit for yourself. Yes, I've said that having spoilers in a review defeats the purpose of talking about art as a whole and not the arbitrary designation of certain parts that we choose to can or cannot look at. The exception here is that I'm not telling you to go out and play some hot new game because there's a BIG TWIST at the end that pops out of the buses like the Jokes Clown. I'm spoiling this because it's so awe-inspiringly pretentious that you need to experience this shit for yourself. Unless you're not going to play the game, in which case, read on.</p>
  61. <p id=g><b>Spoilers begin</b></p>
  62. <p id=s>It's astounding that the final ending of this game is as masturbatorily self-indulgent as it nonsensical. After reaching the natural end point of a game which could have gone on with a story that's as bland as can be topped off with themes that don't go anywhere and are used for little more than set dressing and emotional manipulation, the game instead forces us into a walking simulator for the next twenty minutes, rife with slow time events that manage to be even more out-of-place than "press F to pay respects".</p>
  63. <p id=s>I wouldn't even mind if it was a cutscene, because at least then I could focus on the truly thrilling and not-at-all out of context dialogue, or drink out of a stein of water and maybe drown. At least then the game wouldn't be patronising me with what is essentially a glorified cutscene. I never understood why games like Half-Life got so much praise for their "interactive" cutscenes, with interactive being thrown around looser than Saddam Hussein's noose (ask your parents). I could understand being the first to do it in 1996 as a novelty, but every time after that is just giving the player to jump on things and shoot dicks into the wall. At least with a cutscene, you know to sit down and shut up and really understand what's going on, giving it some measure of importance outside of a game that lets you shoot dicks into the wall.</p>
  64. <p id=s>If I had to use a word to describe the ending, it would be "patronising". The game knows that if you've gotten this far, you're so desperate for closure that any ending short of a rickroll would have been acceptable, where being subjected to twenty hours of barely-connected events and plotlines that don't go anywhere would have made even the most patient man go "FUCKING END, ALREADY", and I should know, because I was that patient man and that patient man said that every five minutes. And then when the game ends, you fucking die! Wow, I guess it was taking my "fuck you, got mine" advice, with an ending that had as much impact as your farts in an elevator - slow, awkward, a little cringe-worthy, and with zero satisfaction for having done the deed.</p>
  65. <p id=s>Oh right, there's supposed to be some spoilers here. Turns out Elizabeth is your daughter and you're Comstock. Then a bunch of clones show up and drown you. This happens after you spend twenty minutes with some science babble about a billion billion different doors and you showing up in all of them, a scene set in Rapture from Bioshock 1 which is totally not fanservice guys we swear, and you supposed to feel bad for a baby that was never introduced to the plot thus far and ends up being laughably out-of-place with how much Booker cares about this random little shit he never knew.</p>
  66. <p id=s>The ending sequence is trying to parrot the ending from Bioshock 1, which got Ken Levine his dick sucked, a job ban from a game called Bioshock 2 which Yahtzee says was shit and given his review I agree with him, and permission to shit up the joint with this game. The difference between Bioshock 1 and Bioshock Infinite is while Bioshock 1's ending (the de facto ending, not the escort mission and final boss fight padding) blended gameplay and story in a way that had never been seen before in a game, brilliant to the point where even an <i>invisible wall</i> made sense in context, Bioshock Infinite's has nothing in the way of gameplay, and more in the way of trying to tie up more plot threads than an aboriginal loomer when the welfare worker comes for inspections.</p>
  67. <p id=s>Like I said, the gameplay and story are segregated worse than the Israel-Palestine border, and the ending demostrates that perfectly by having no gameplay. Just as well, seeing as the high-octane cartoonish combat (at least before it became a chore) fits into the story about as well as a Jew in Palestine. I would think that it would be impossible for this game to seamlessly blend story and, like the Israel-Palestine War, and I was right, because being subjected to gameplay that took a break every ten minutes to hear daddy and daughter whine about their problems has about as much flow as an Israeli checkpoint. The theme of today's review is Israel. Every time you clap your hands, one car bomb hits a tower.</p>
  68. <p id=g><b>What I learned:</b></p>
  69. <p id=s>There's really not much you can do with a review after you make a Palestinian car bomb joke, and any attempts afterwards would be redundant. I wonder why the bloody fucking hell I even have this section now that I've had my reviews be 10% of the length of <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>, and any basic reading comprehension would already assert my opinion on a work. But let's bloody well try with this experiment anyway, and see if we can gain anything out of this section.</p>
  70. <p id=s>I'll tell you one thing I learned - don't shit the bed when writing a story. If you find yourself stuck deep in a hole, it would be in your best interest to dig yourself out instead of going headfirst into the core of the earth. Suck it up and retract on the plot points that aren't working out, instead of stubbornly holding onto them, finding out at the end there isn't enough time to explain them fully, and so you have to tie them all up with the efficiency of an Israeli bulldozer. I'd say to stop beating a dead horse, but the horse has already been buried. <i>By bulldozers</i>.</p>
  71. <p id=s>And as for what I didn't repeat in my review, I would say that having a game with a very nice base that uses it inappropriately is like having a chocolate cake and slapping sardines on it. Yes, they taste good separately, but now that you've mixed the two together, it's like crossing the beams in Ghostbusters - a fucking disaster, not to mention a bad tasting cake. That's what best describes the gameplay in graphics in Bioshock, as well as the gameplay and plot, and the gameplay and level design. You might thing the gameplay is the issue here, but it's actually everything else - the gameplay is perfectly functional. It's the other aspects that cause it to crash and burn.</p>
  72. <p id=s>If there was, for instance, a mod of this game that removed all of the story elements and featured a non-stop barrage of gameplay, like in DOOM, then it would be a damn fine game. But having to deal with a story that doesn't go anywhere and constant stops in the action to listen to plot points I don't care about really brings a damper to my enjoyment of the game. That's one thing that didn't carry over from System Shock - the ability to ignore the story if you hate it. I remember an era where games didn't even have a story, and the earliest introductions had to make a compromise between having one, and having a lot of action. Now we're in the era where the action is of secondary importance, and I think that's a really ineffective direction for games to go in.</p>
  73. <p id=s>The one unique thing about games is that they're meant to be played. Some people will take this to mean that they have to be fun above all else, but that's a very basic and ignorant stance to take. What games instead must be is <i>engaging</i> above all else, and provide some reason for its existence. If you have a game with a shit story but good gameplay, then it's easy to like the game if the story doesn't distract. But, if a game has a great story but shit gameplay, then it's harder to justify playing it because of how unengaging the game part of the game is - though this doesn't apply to games with <i>decent</i> gameplay like Spec Ops: The Line. I'm talking bottom of the barrel, here.</p>
  74. <p id=s>To focus on story instead of the gameplay shows a level of disrespect to video games that you rarely find in other mediums. You don't see a movie told entirely in narraration, nor a comic book told entirely in words. So as to why video games are ignoring their chief draw, namely the actual game, in favour of pushing narrarative ideas that other mediums do so effortlessly, is a massive missed opportunity. We have the home field advantage when it comes to interactivity, so why are we throwing away interactivity? Perhaps it's the fever dream of a bunch of bored developers who don't really care about games. Maybe it's the ramblings of a group of insane artists who are experimenting within the boundaries of what a game ca n - nope, it's the former. Definitely the former.</p>
  75. <p id=bf>Froge Washington Robocop - <a href="index.html">Froghand</a>.</p>
  76. <p id=f>Today's page was updated on October 03, 2016!</p>
  77. <p id=f>Awfully bold of you to name the third game after a concept higher than three.</p>
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