Ludeus Maximus

Great art direction, good graphics, pretty decent storyline

bland, uninspired gameplay. My experience was colored by playing it on hard mode, which essentially meant that I ran out of ammo all the time and just had to let myself respawn at the vita-chamber and spam magic until everything was dead, but even if I had had ammo the guns weren’t very fun to use. I have a feeling that it was better on easy or medium, but nonetheless shallow. About halfway through the game I started running out of ammunition all the time and just decided to stop saving and start using the automatic respawn machine (called the vitachamber ingame). While the vitachamber reduced my use of quicksave/reload, ultimately I was having more fun when I was using quicksaves and actually conserving ammo. After the initial “new game” headrush I quickly became bored with the gunplay, which was too inaccurate for skill to take much account. The use of powers to lay traps wasn’t enough of a focus and most of the abilities were generic “do damage” types. Hacking was quite fun and an actually decent use of minigames, but didn’t seem to be that important to overall progress. The character system was annoyingly mysterious; there was no way to tell what powers were good or what expansion slots to pick. Waiting for Big Daddies to have little sisters around was also quite annoying, not to mention that on hard mode they take your entire inventory and then some to kill.

What really undoes Bioshock is not so much its weak gameplay as the final boss and ending. All along the binary moral choice has been weighted to reward dogooders more than evildoers (Raph Koster, anyone?). But the final decision is not yours; you must kill your enemy rather than spare him or rule at his side. Why make a game about moral choice and then take it all away at the most significant decision?

7/10, just for the art and story (up until the final battle)

Since I’ve decided to start doing things again, I should be making more blog posts soon.

For now:

Reading Kotaku is a great way to start hating both the game industry and games journalism. They’re pretty much fanboys of the worst sort (the ones who don’t think they’re fanboys) and the only thing worthwhile about their site is the comments section (sometimes good, other times filled with retarded console warriors) and their frequency of updates. As the antidote to IGN, GameSpot and whatever else they are nearly as bad as the poison. The Escapist is sometimes good, RockPaperShotgun I should read more of, but overall I don’t think a good “games are art” journalism rag has sprung up, partly because there isn’t demand for one. Let me just throw in a little Metacritic hate here because apparently thats the standard by which publishers/developers judge their critical success. Obviously review scores are important, but the reliance on them as  a way of measuring your game is silly. Game reviewers judge against the industry standard which is generally crap. I’m not saying that game reviewers should start calling all games crap and comparing their stories to Hollywood movies or novels (rather unfavorably, of course), but that critics could be a little harsher, expect a little more than just a change of art style or a new level of polish of gameplay that’s been done to death. Strike a balance between pretension and the industry’s low standards for itself (or its economic realities, mostly). The reason to be slightly mean is that despite those economic realities the industry could still be making games at a creative level leaps and bounds above what it is. In discovering the casual user and his $$$ the industry still hasn’t made a game for everyman that’s truly good, and the Wii gathers dust in the corner. Pleasing both the hardcore and casual users while making a true next-gen experience is a great pitch to a publisher but doesn’t tickles the senses in reality. [/endrant]