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Bioshock Infinite |OT| No Gods, Kings, or Irrational Games

W

waters10

Neo Member
Dax01 said:
When I first finished BioShock, it was my favorite game of all time. My opinion has since changed, one of the reasons being I hardly go back to it. I measure how much I love games by how many times they draw me back in, and most importantly, how much fun I have with them.
Click to expand...
Bioshock was my favorite game of all time, so I disagree with your measure there. Games, like movies, can very a lot and some are better at drawing you back in just for fun, while others don't need that. My 2 favorite games this generation are Bioshock and Braid. 2 games I only finished once and may never touch again. But they such unique experiences that will keep me praising them.

Also, I prefer your first interpretation of the ending. It's just more powerful that way.
 
S

Sqorgar

Banned
DatDude said:
That still blows my mind. Infinite signifies everything wrong with this gen?

If only most games were even a QUARTER as good as infinite was, than by god would this gen be in such a more brighter light than it is currently.
Click to expand...
I have not won the game yet (I'm in
Shantytown
), but as someone who thinks that Infinite does indeed signify everything that is wrong this gen, let me at least try to defend this before the dog pile gets too large.

Bioshock Infinite is like a theme park ride. It really reminds me of something like Disney World's Haunter Mansion. You start in the line, where you walk up to this impressively spooky mansion. Over the loud speaker, there's wolves howling and ambient creepy sounds. There's tombstones that you can read for darkly amusing ambiance - behind a fence. You can't touch them or interact with them. And it's still just the line. Once you get inside, everybody is shuffled into a room where a disembodied voice narrates the theme of the house while you patiently wait for an animated scene to play out. Then you get on a cart where you are whisked between animatronic scenes.

Bioshock Infinite is just like that. You just move from animatronic scene to animatronic scene in a straight line. There's a lot of details and ambiance in the background, but you can't touch it. There are interesting characters but you can't interact with them. They might as well be robots. The storytelling in the game is literally walking in a straight line from one cutscene to the next.

The ironic part is that the game has a museum in it, where you walk literally between animatronic scenes while a narrator tells you what is going on. I can't tell if it is an ironic commentary on the storytelling in the game or if Ken Levine thinks irony is how you get wrinkles out of shirts. There are parts of the game that are literally on rails. How am I supposed to take that? Levine has to be in on the joke, right?

And before people jump down my throat about how it doesn't matter how the story is told because the story is so good, I don't agree with that either. There's just a hodgepodge of themes that are largely unexplored. They are just left there dangling. For instance, the game takes place in this giant floating city - which in no ways feels like a giant floating city. Maybe later in the game, this fact will be revealed to be important to the plot, but as an environment that I'm walking around in, it both feels too fantastical to exist and not fantastical enough to notice.

And the game is just not very subtle with its metaphors and commentary. You are explicitly birthed into Columbia. It was so subtle that you had someone come right out and tell you during your baptism. People praying to the founding fathers (which incidentally, is another thread that seems to have been dropped). This society is racist. Here. Throw a baseball at an interracial couple. History is written by the winners. Here's a museum where we take tragic battles from the past and draw them up as comical caricatures. Do you like propaganda about oppressing workers? Let's listen to it every 30 seconds.

The thing is, the first Bioshock wasn't like this. Not completely. Rapture was a singular environment that existed in two time periods - the utopia it once was and the distopia it has become. The first was subtle because it was rarely explicit. You had to figure it out by reverse engineering the distopia. And Rapture was built around a single theme rather than a dozen, and it was explored through a variety of different social situations. You saw Andrew Ryan's vision being both seductive and destructive. And the Big Daddys were mysterious and cool. It wasn't just a bunch of controversial ideas thrown against the wall to see what sticks. I do like the Waiting for Godot couple though.

Again, I have not won Bioshock Infinite. I'm only about halfway through. But I'm not enjoying it. Every time there seems like something I can sink my teeth into, it disappears or is treated almost with shallow contempt. I know there is a plot twist coming up, and I'm sure I'll enjoy the story more once it stops fucking around and starts moving, but I'm still not enjoying myself. It feels like a theme park ride. I walk in a straight line, taking in all the sights. I'm a passive observer experiencing an overly curated sequence of events that I have no control over or input into. Do I want the bird or the cage? Does it change anything?
 
V

ViewtifulJC

Banned
Levine himself said his storytelling was inspired by those Pirates of the Caribbean animatronics. He does this kinda obvious theme park ride stuff in BS1, too. It's not as subtle as Valve's signposting and world-building, so it can feel like you're being pulled along on a path, where HL1/2 I always feel my progression seems more natural and in my control(even if it's still ultimately a linear, scripted shooter)
 
D

DarkKyo

Member
Sqorgar said:
rant
Click to expand...

It sounds to me like you want some kind of virtual reality, not 21st century video games. Games this gen have always been about setpieces and story. You trade interactive gimmicks for the illusion of a fantastic adventure. Is that not what entertainment in our era is? Movies are the same way. Games are an experience and Infinite is one of the best of those. I'd say finish it before you get too huffy about the story.
 
K

Kajiba

Member
Cleaning up getting all the achievements.

Is there a way check which kinetoscope or telescope you're missing? I'm only missing one and I have no idea which one it is lol.
 
C

Cudder

Member
Kajiba said:
Cleaning up getting all the achievements.

Is there a way check which kinetoscope or telescope you're missing? I'm only missing one and I have no idea which one it is lol.
Click to expand...

Other than cross-referencing the ones you collected to a list online and seeing which one is missing, I don't think so.
 
S

Sola Scriptura

Member
After clearing my Xbox 360 cache and trying to load one of my previous saves in case the update does indeed stop the infinite money/gear glitch, I discovered that the game refuses to load a save that comes from an updated version of the game after removing said updates.

Irrational, you wily devils, you.
 
R

Ricker

Member
The last Boss in Bioshock 1 sucked,especially compared to how awesome the game was,and its the same here...what an awful fight,yeah I suck at it but it's still bad...how many damn
Zeppelins do I have to destroy when the game tells me to kill all the zeppelins...its taking forever and eventually the blue thing explodes and I have to start allllll over
 
F

Fine Ham Abounds

Member
Sqorgar said:
And before people jump down my throat about how it doesn't matter how the story is told because the story is so good, I don't agree with that either. There's just a hodgepodge of themes that are largely unexplored. They are just left there dangling. For instance, the game takes place in this giant floating city - which in no ways feels like a giant floating city. Maybe later in the game, this fact will be revealed to be important to the plot, but as an environment that I'm walking around in, it both feels too fantastical to exist and not fantastical enough to notice.

And the game is just not very subtle with its metaphors and commentary. You are explicitly birthed into Columbia. It was so subtle that you had someone come right out and tell you during your baptism. People praying to the founding fathers (which incidentally, is another thread that seems to have been dropped). This society is racist. Here. Throw a baseball at an interracial couple. History is written by the winners. Here's a museum where we take tragic battles from the past and draw them up as comical caricatures. Do you like propaganda about oppressing workers? Let's listen to it every 30 seconds.
Click to expand...

I don't completely agree with some of your points, but I certainly do with this. This is the specific reason why I don't think it works terribly well as a story where you are supposed to extrapolate the symbolism of the world reflecting Booker's internal conflict. It's too heavy handed for something that then chooses not to delve deeper into the themes it is bombarding you with.

For what it's worth, the plot almost completely changes direction halfway through to the point where it feels like a new plotline takes over. YMMV, but for me it at least got more interesting than what it starts with.

DarkKyo said:
It sounds to me like you want some kind of virtual reality, not 21st century video games. Games this gen have always been about setpieces and story. You trade interactive gimmicks for the illusion of a fantastic adventure. Is that not what entertainment in our era is? Movies are the same way. Games are an experience and Infinite is one of the best of those. I'd say finish it before you get too huffy about the story.
Click to expand...

I read this, and it really does make it sound like it is representative of all the things that went wrong this gen.

I don't really agree though, there's more gaming meat here than just being hand-held through setpieces on some misguided quest to borrow validity from another medium.
 
B

beastmode

Member
Ricker said:
The last Boss in Bioshock 1 sucked,especially compared to how awesome the game was,and its the same here...what an awful fight,yeah I suck at it but it's still bad...how many damn
Zeppelins do I have to destroy when the game tells me to kill all the zeppelins...its taking forever and eventually the blue thing explodes and I have to start allllll over
Click to expand...
3
 
C

Coffee Dog

Banned
Well, beat it. Give it probably a 7 or 8 out of 10. Probably would have felt bad spending the whole $60 if it wasn't a gift from a very generous friend.

Everything gameplay related was serviceable, it was just corridor shooting with no real upgrades beyond "do x% more damage" and the vigors were all incredibly boring save the water tendrils and crows. I mean seriously, every single one has the same alternate with the traps? Lazy as hell man. Have some fun with your powers, irrational. Enemies AI was par for the course, I guess. Level design was nothing special. Bosses sucked because all they had was a shitloads of HP and a tendency to shake the fuck out of your screen in place of actually challenging you, they were just annoying and in some cases boring.

I like the art style. A lot. The faces looked jacked up beyond the main cast, but that's whatever. There were a lot of low res textures too, but I expected as much. Way too much bloom for my taste in a lot of scenes though, made it hard to see guys in some areas in the beginning, though it either stopped happening or I stopped noticing a couple hours in.

Music was good, though some of the loops in combat got annoying. VA was great, of course.

I liked elizabeth a lot. She was a good character who I enjoyed the company of when it came to the story. Gameplay wise though, it broke the fuck out of my immersion when I realized that she was some kind of invisible god child that does nothing but spew ammo and health at you, invulnerable to the enemies advances. I know they didn't want an escort mission, but at least have her hide convincingly than run around like a lost child mid firefight.

The pacing really screwed with me, it takes like half the game to get to the primary gimmick and then it's all poorly utilized until the game is over.
The game is about the possibilites of the multiverse and you are only in one interesting place (the asylum) before the ending, where it actually utilizes it's potential for five minutes before ending.
On top of that, way too much shooting that just feels forced. It's ok for the narrative to take a breather sometimes. The carnival part early on? I loved that. Also, it's damn short for being a primarily single player game. Beat it in 11 hours.

The main villain sucks in that he doesn't have nearly the appeal or charisma that a villain should have if put in that central role. He's more the communist lady nobody remembers from bioshock 2 than Andrew Ryan. I like the idea behind him, but he needed to be written better so that he comes across as the charismatic kind of guy who could actually obtain that position of power. On top of this, the society seems rather written rather immaturely as "religious white people are all racist pieces of shit" which might have gone over well if there was any quality of subtlety to it in the least.

Overall, it was a pretty average game that is elevated by the story and setting that the bioshock team was able to give it. However, since that appeal has worn off after the initial playthrough and I've experienced the story, the mundane mechanics are what's going to be preventing me from returning to the interesting and beautiful world of columbia. I would like to see more of these barely related Bioshock games, but only if they figure out how to innovate as much in the gameplay as much as they have tried in their story, as this whole thing felt way too safe for me.
 
S

Sqorgar

Banned
DarkKyo said:
It sounds to me like you want some kind of virtual reality, not 21st century video games. Games this gen have always been about setpieces and story. You trade interactive gimmicks for the illusion of a fantastic adventure. Is that not what entertainment in our era is? Movies are the same way. Games are an experience and Infinite is one of the best of those. I'd say finish it before you get too huffy about the story.
Click to expand...
Why do we need the illusion of a fantastic adventure when games give us the ability to actually have one?

There's an optional quest in Infinite where you translate something on the wall and it tells you something about a broken clock at midnight. I thought, oh hey, something to figure out! Then the girl says, it probably means to set this clock - the clock right next to you - to midnight, so do that. Hit square. It is set to 12:00 automatically and the clock opens revealing a safe. What an epic waste of my time and attention.

Compare that to... pretty much any other game ever made. Is it more fun to watch robots solve puzzles or solve them yourself?
 
H

Hot Coldman

Banned
Ricker said:
The last Boss in Bioshock 1 sucked,especially compared to how awesome the game was,and its the same here...what an awful fight,yeah I suck at it but it's still bad...how many damn
Zeppelins do I have to destroy when the game tells me to kill all the zeppelins...its taking forever and eventually the blue thing explodes and I have to start allllll over
Click to expand...

Use songbird on the gunships, as those are more dangerous. Jump onto the Zeppelins, possession trap the enemies onboard, run past them, sabotage the engine, jump off.

The rest is straightforward.
 
I

InaudibleWhispa

Member
Only just noticed now that I never got an achievement for completing the game. Anybody else have this issue? Will re-playing from the last checkpoint unlock it?
 
C

conman

Member
DatDude said:
Again that root of racism is a metaphorical symbolic representation of the chaos that is ensuing within Booker. It's supposed to symbolize the man he once used to be, and the city and it's conflicts of racism, american extremism, etc. They are all symbolic metaphorical representations towards the man Booker once was.
Click to expand...
Turning racism and American exceptionalism into "metaphors" is exactly the sort of intellectual dishonesty that many of us were pointing out very early on in this thread and early on in our experience with the game. That's precisely the sort of "bad faith" historical work that runs throughout the game. One may as well say something patently wrong-headed like "dark skinned people are the conjured specters of white guilt." It's bad history. It's bad writing. It's also silly. Not to mention subtly racist.

As a point of contrast, think of something like Max Payne 3. The moment when Max finds himself in the favelas he remarks in a voice over that the favela was conjured by his own troubled psyche. But then the game goes on to prove just how egocentric and ethnocentric Max is being, as if the (brown) world even cares about him, let alone so much that its sole purpose is to "haunt" and "torment" him. The difference is that in Max Payne 3 that thinking is revealed as a wrong-headed white American fantasy. But in Bioshock Infinite, if your reading is right, that fantasy is revealed to be "Truth": that the uprising of oppressed peoples isn't real and is just a reflection of Booker's inner turmoil and trauma.

Sqorgar said:
The thing is, the first Bioshock wasn't like this. Not completely. Rapture was a singular environment that existed in two time periods - the utopia it once was and the distopia it has become. The first was subtle because it was rarely explicit. You had to figure it out by reverse engineering the distopia. And Rapture was built around a single theme rather than a dozen, and it was explored through a variety of different social situations. You saw Andrew Ryan's vision being both seductive and destructive. And the Big Daddys were mysterious and cool. It wasn't just a bunch of controversial ideas thrown against the wall to see what sticks. I do like the Waiting for Godot couple though.
Click to expand...
Yup. Bioshock was the story of Rapture. Bioshock Infinite is not the story of Columbia--though early on, it makes you think that it is. And most of my issues with the game's sloppy writing and hollow socio-historical work might have been resolved if the focus had remained on Columbia. But it doesn't.
 
T

The Librarian

Banned
conman said:
Turning racism and American exceptionalism into "metaphors" is exactly the sort of intellectual dishonesty that many of us were pointing out very early on in this thread and early on in our experience with the game. That's precisely the sort of "bad faith" historical work that runs throughout the game. One may as well say something patently wrong-headed like "dark skinned people are the conjured specters of white guilt." It's bad history. It's bad writing. It's also silly. Not to mention subtly racist.
Click to expand...
Seems to me like you're criticizing just to criticize. There's nothing bad or wrong about using American exceptionalism, racism (although in this case, it wasn't a metaphor), capitalism or communism as metaphors for something different.

I've been doing, and the amount of fighting in the game makes sense if you view it from the point that
Columbia is founded because of Booker's sins, and some of the sins tie into slaughtering a lot of people, and so here he is doing it all over again in Columbia. He's battling his own past.

Yup. Bioshock was the story of Rapture. Bioshock Infinite is not the story of Columbia--though early on, it makes you think that it is. And most of my issues with the game's sloppy writing and hollow socio-historical work might have been resolved if the focus had remained on Columbia. But it doesn't.
Click to expand...
The story from the beginning is about Booker and Elizabeth. There's no bait-and-switch. There's also no "hollow socio-historical" work, as the game doesn't set out to make a comment about communism or capitalism or even racism and fail to adequately do so. Delving too deeply into those topics would distract from the main narrative and would serve to bog down the story.

You keep criticizing the story for what it's not trying to be. There's no "truth" as you describe, as the result of
Columbia, and by extension of it, is Booker's sin's
. There's also the interpretation that the whole game may or may not comment on America's conservative movement, but I don't think that's not as concrete as just telling a tale of Booker and Elizabeth.
 
E

EekTheKat

Member
Dusted off my PS move and doing a
1999
playthrough with it, and so far it's been pretty pleasant to go through.

There's a weird glitch with the reticle that causes it to be a dot on the screen instead of a full crosshair, but other than that it took a couple minutes to calibrate and I was on my way.

I use a minimal horizontal dead zone, and a slight vertical dead zone. turning speed is two notches down from max. Of note is that there is no iron sights with the Move, it's just a varying degree zoom depending on weapon.
 
E

electricpirate

Member
My standard caveat for 1999 mode, don't reload. The game balance is far better if you die a few times getting through tough fights, and the penaltie will incentivize you to play better than a reload.
 
S

Sqorgar

Banned
Dax01 said:
Seems to me like you're criticizing just to criticize. There's nothing bad or wrong about using American exceptionalism, racism (although in this case, it wasn't a metaphor), capitalism or communism as metaphors for something different.
Click to expand...
There is if you are hamfisted and shallow about it.

There's also no "hollow socio-historical" work, as the game doesn't set out to make a comment about communism or capitalism or even racism and fail to adequately do so.
Click to expand...
Are you playing the same game I am? It absolutely sets out to make comments about capitalism and racism and then falls on its ass.

Delving too deeply into those topics would distract from the main narrative and would serve to bog down the story.
Click to expand...
Then why have them at all? Couldn't the same story be told without such distracting elements?

Infinite honestly feels like a Bioshock clone, where the creators try to emulate everything that people liked about Bioshock without understanding why it worked in the context that it did. It's like they just had a list of checkboxes. Novelty city? Check. Controversial topics? Check. Plot twist? Check. Plasmids? Check. Retro-futurism? Check. Big Daddy Things? Check. Ego tripping leader who is treated like a god? Check. And so on.
 
C

conman

Member
Dax01 said:
Seems to me like you're criticizing just to criticize. There's nothing bad or wrong about using American exceptionalism, racism (although in this case, it wasn't a metaphor), capitalism or communism as metaphors for something different.
Click to expand...
But the problem is that those aren't "metaphors." They're socio-historical realities. To transform them into aspects of an individual psyche is the worst kind of postmodern relativism. It transforms "politics" into "aesthetics" and empties those deep, concrete realities into interchangeable ornaments of individuality. IMO that's less a sign of what's wrong with game design, and much more emblematic of what's wrong with our current technological/political climate (but that's an issue for another forum).

I've been doing, and the amount of fighting in the game makes sense if you view it from the point that
Columbia is founded because of Booker's sins, and some of the sins tie into slaughtering a lot of people, and so here he is doing it all over again in Columbia. He's battling his own past.
Click to expand...
Exactly. It instrumentalizes the suffering of oppressed groups. It's the political equivalent of passive aggression. "Why do these dark skinned people continue to torment me? Why does the violence of my racist past haunt me?" It isn't all about you, Booker. And the game really could have explored how effed up it is to twist violent history into individual "sin" (as I argue Max Payne 3 does). But it doesn't.

The story from the beginning is about Booker and Elizabeth. There's no bait-and-switch. There's also no "hollow socio-historical" work, as the game doesn't set out to make a comment about communism or capitalism or even racism and fail to adequately do so. Delving too deeply into those topics would distract from the main narrative and would serve to bog down the story.
Click to expand...
I have to agree with the above poster. You must have been playing a completely different game. Not only does the game hit you over the head with its "Big" political messages, but the entire PR campaign (marketing, interviews, etc.) has been hitting this over the head, as well. It is, in fact, a bait and switch.

You keep criticizing the story for what it's not trying to be. There's no "truth" as you describe, as the result of
Columbia, and by extension of it, is Booker's sin's
. There's also the interpretation that the whole game may or may not comment on America's conservative movement, but I don't think that's not as concrete as just telling a tale of Booker and Elizabeth.
Click to expand...
There's a way to do both (personal narrative and history/politics). Most great narrative--whether film, literature, or epic poetry--engages in both. You don't have to choose one or the other. And you certainly don't have to subsume one within the other (as BI does).

But as I said, it's absolutely fascinating to see where the game goes wrong, and the fact that we're even having this sort of a discussion about games is awesome. But that doesn't get BI off the hook.
 
R

RDreamer

Member
Sqorgar said:
Are you playing the same game I am? It absolutely sets out to make comments about capitalism and racism and then falls on its ass.
Click to expand...

It didn't really set out to make a statement on capitalism (I'm not sure I see that topic in there very much at all) or racism, it
set out to make a statement on an ideology. Much like Bioshock 1, which the ideology was libertarianism, this one also revolves around an ideology. This time it's that you can erase the wrongs of your past merely by accepting that you are now saved. It's the hollow baptism sort of ideology. I know there isn't really a fancy word for it, but that's really what it's making a statement on. If you do bad things, you can't just absolve yourself of them in one moment without doing anything at all. After that point then those things just become a part of you even more entrenched than before. Because you think you're saved from them, then there isn't anything morally wrong with them anymore. You have to make a good-faith effort to change who you are, and actually repent.

The reason this is put into the form of Columbia is because it is a statement on some modern day political ideologies with a foundation much like what I'm talking about. In America we have people that glorify the past, and any critique of it is hating America. Saying we were once racist assholes is tearing that whole thing down, and people don't want to hear it. Just because something is "saved," in this instance for America it would be perhaps better put "good," or "a great country," or just "one of the best countries," doesn't make everything we've done and continue to do OK. If you build your foundation on things like racism, and you never accept that those are bad things and repent, and instead insist that those must have been good because they were a foundation, well then you will continue in this way.

It's about taking the easy way out to salvation and/or repentance. If you do that, then you don't fix your actual problems. They bubble up and destroy you. This is true for people, and this is true for countries.
 
S

Sola Scriptura

Member
SmithnCo said:
Heard about this, too bad it's so tedious. I had too much money in 1999 mode anyway so it wasn't much help there, but it respawns the guys near the big statue, so you can farm some kill cheevos if you need to.
Click to expand...

It is incredibly tedious, unfortunately. Worth it in the long run, though, if you plan on upgrading a lot in 1999 mode where money is more scarce.
 
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