BioShock

I started this game last weekend. Two nights ago, I made a very weak (and flawed) decision. Remembering my New Years resolution to beat a game every month, I began to worry that I wouldn't be able to commit to BioShock and beat it by the end of February. I bought Braid instead, and as regular readers will recall, I beat that game just yesterday morning. Resolution upheld - or so I thought. I soon remembered that my resolution was not just to beat a game every month, but to end each month with a net reduction in my backlog tally. By purchasing Braid only to beat it, I had made no net progress. Furthermore, another part of my New Years resolution was to stop abandoning games after starting them. Clearly, I needed to beat BioShock after all. And I did so today. And I did it the right way - without harvesting any "Little Sisters" along the way. (Little Sisters? I'll get to those.) BioShock is a game set in an alternate 1960 in a city on the ocean floor called "Rapture." You play the role of Jack, a plane crash survivor who happens upon a sea surface entry to the city. Rapture is one of the most interesting and immersive video game environments I've ever "been" in. Rapture's story is that it was created by a man named Anrdew Ryan who was sick of the governments of the world and their tendencies to tax, censor, and regulate. The whole thing reeks of Ayn Rand, allegedly, and her principles of objectivism. Of course, in an entirely unregulated city, things are bound to go awry. And when Jack arrives there in 1960, the whole place is post-apocalyptic; a civil war between Ryan and another powerful man named "Fontaine" has left most of the inhabitants as deranged mutants and much of the city itself lying in disarray. For the first few levels, I couldn't stop myself from stopping and looking around at all the impeccable details. The Art Deco styles and total abandonment of everything made for an initially eerie mix. In fact, I spent the first third or so of the game cowering in fear as shadows lingered on walls and death threats were made in the darkness. I didn't much care for the game at this point, likening it to a mundane horror game using scare tactics to get a rise out of the player. Most of all, I feared the Big Daddies. Allow me to back up for a minute. In Rapture, science, and especially bioengineering and genetics, progressed much more rapidly due to the lack of regulation and legal issues with things like human testing. As a result, scientists were able to splice new genes into people, giving them superhuman properties like the abilities to conjure up fire and lightning. In order to do all of this research and splicing, a vast supply of stem cells was needed. These stem cells are called ADAM (using the superhuman abilities requires you to spend "EVE"). As more and more people tinkered with their own bodies, more and more ADAM was needed. Because of this, Little Sisters were created and dispatched to collect ADAM from corpses. Little Sisters are just innocent little girls embedded with some chemicals. When you catch one, you're given two choices: harvest them - in other words, drain them of all of their ADAM (and life, in the process) - or rescue them. It is this great moral dilemma that had a lot of critics raving about BioShock, but frankly, I didn't see anything special about it. Sure, it made a first-person shooter more like a role-playing game, but as a longtime RPG fan I've seen and endured "choose wisely" shit like that all of the time. At any rate, in order to save or kill a Little Sister, you first have to deal with a Big Daddy. The Big Daddy is the face of the BioShock series. It's purpose is to protect Little Sisters as they go around collecting ADAM. It's essentially a giant, lumbering deep sea diver. Some, like the one on the game's cover, have giant drills for hands. And like I said, these things were just wicked to deal with at first. But I knew I had to beat them in order to save the Little Sisters. (Yeah, that's right, I chose the hero's path. No big deal.) For the first few levels of the game, nothing made me sink dejectedly and think "oh... shit" more than hearing the recognizable groan of a Big Daddy in the distance. But here's the weird thing about BioShock: it gets easier with time. Most games get increasingly difficult, and a number of them stay the same, but this one actually got much simpler the further in I got. You collect more and more weapons and plasmids (abilities like "gain extra health from items" or "increase defense") over the course of the game and upgrade them too. Slowly, I began to run around levels with more confidence. As I did so, I began to enjoy the game more and more. I began to relish the Big Daddy hunt, seeking them out wherever I went, eager to blow them away with grenade launchers and electrified shotgun shells. Sometimes I even took them out even when they were escorting no Little Sisters - in other words, for no reason at all. Beating the final boss - and no spoilers about who or what it is - was a task I found extremely easy. Like, if anything, I was a bit disappointed, and I'm never disappointed by easy final bosses. I'm sure if I had played the game on a harder difficulty setting I wouldn't be gloating about how easy the second half of the game was, but "normal" is good enough for me, seeing as how I've got sixty games to beat. I'll end this lengthy, half-summary of a recap with two recommendations. Firstly, play this game. Once I quit being a pussy, it only took about eight to ten hours to beat, and it also got a lot more fun and interesting. Admittedly, by the time I stopped being "scared" of Rapture, Rapture also stopped being interesting and seemingly endless in scope. Oh well. Secondly, when you do play this game - and I can't stress this enough - do the "right thing" and save all the Little Sisters. If you don't get to all of them, at least don't harvest any of them. The game's ending depends on your actions. Were you a savior or a monster? I had to check out the "so, you killed some innocent little girls" ending on YouTube and can promise that the more rewarding one comes from being a hero. Furthermore, it's not an Xbox achievement or PS3 trophy to harvest any Little Sisters. There's seriously no reason - the extra ADAM means nothing, ultimately - to harvest the Little Sisters. I look forward now to buying and playing Bioshock 2. But not this month.