Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

It’s not often that I get worked up about a video game. Okay, let me amend that. It’s not often that the political and social content of a video game causes me to examine my own internal philosophical and political underpinnings.

Here is my review of Bioshock for the Xbox 360.

All right. Let’s get a few things out of the way first. Technically speaking, the game looks fantastic. The water effects look great and you won’t forget for a minute that you are trapped thousands of feet below sea level. But it’s not just the water that looks great. The entire environment of Rapture is breathtakingly dystopic and gritty. I haven’t seen levels look this good since Gears of War.

And of course, the onset of claustrophobia wouldn’t be complete without some spectacular ambient audio, which the Bioshock developers were more than happy to provide. And there are some moments where ambient audio meshes disturbingly with the foreground, much like the Halo 3 Beta had done with turning other players’ gunfire into your background noise. But to compare Bioshock to anything like Gears or Halo is somewhat self-defeating. There is no comparison. HEARING a Big Daddy stomp across the floor above and then SEEING falling dust move across the ceiling is one example of how a player will sense the living, breathing ecosystem which is all but ignoring any meager attempts at survival.

Now, that doesn’t mean the game is technically perfect. Far from it, unfortunately. Too often, I saw dead rag-doll corpses get snagged strangely on the environment and then watch freshly killed splicers that should be lying limp twitching uncontrollably under the spell of some mis-calculated physics engine algorithm. You’ve seen these kinds of things before in other modern 3D games, but I was hoping to be immune from the kinds of physics and graphics bugs that have plagued other current-generation games. Bioshock is rife with them, where I saw a jarring corpse-twitch every half hour or so.

The worst problem, in my opinion, is the dreaded texture-popping-in-after-a-few-seconds problem that was made famous by Halo 2. I don’t know if it’s because my console is old, overheated after several straight hours of Bioshock, or I just need to chase the evil spirits out of the 360′s hard drive, but this has been a known problem for several years, now (and not strictly the domain of Unreal Engine games, though that’s where I see this problem the most). Can we get someone on this and fix it, once and for all? kthx

Now, granted, it’s fun to laugh at fanboys, but some of the criticisms quoted in our earlier article aren’t so far out in right field as we might like to think. Personally, I thought most of the animations were fine, but issues like texture-popping can only be HELPED by features like a standardized HDD or larger storage media. I’m just saying… the graphics are not a 10 out of 10 slam dunk. Definitely a 9.9, though.

Most of the glitches were graphical but there were some problems with some of the quests, as well. If you purposely or accidentally attack some of the quests out of order, there’s a good chance that the quest indicator, signified by a floating arrow that points the way to the next goal, will be pointing the completely wrong direction, but is instead politely leading to the goal for the next or previous quest. And the worst part are the maps. Now, mapping out fully 3D environs in a way that the player can easily follow is certainly a challenge, but please, make sure that the maps at least line up properly with where you really are. There were a couple times that I found myself magically floating outside time and space… well, at least if I believed what the map was telling me.

Despite these problems, I should point out that these bugs occur pretty rarely (with the exception of the corpse-twitch). But I can’t help thinking that some extra effort spent on QA might’ve caught at least SOME of the glitches.

Now, there are a few problems I have with the rumored “sandbox” nature of this game that has been bandied about… or… actually… the lack thereof. According to the FAQ for Bioshock:

Is this a Sandbox game?

Yes.

O RLY? (Yes, I’ve invoked the ORLY owl on this one.)

Unfortunately, just because “you can move freely back and forth through sections you’ve already visited” does not mean this is a sandbox game. GTA 3 is a sandbox game. Crackdown is a sandbox game. Spore is a sandbox game. Bioshock is NOT a sandbox game. There are no side-quests. There are no mini-games. There is a story. Now, there are multiple endings you can earn, but that doesn’t make a sandbox game, either. No more than Chrono Trigger is a sandbox game.

But, the fact that the story in Bioshock is fairly linear (albeit with various branches, based on your actions) does not mean that it is told poorly or takes away from the overall great experience that Bioshock provides. It’s just that nobody should be billing this as a sandbox game.

That’s not to say that the gameplay is sub-par in any way, shape, or form. Despite some inaccurate FAQ postings, Ken Levine and his crew have always billed this game as a shooter. And on that basis alone, Bioshock is brilliant. The gene-altering plasmids and “tonics” you can acquire in the game lend themselves to some truly innovative gameplay. You’ve seen the trailers, hopefully, so you should already know about combining proximity mines with the “target dummy” plasmid, but there are a wealth of combinations and strategies you can come up with on your own. Just like System Shock 2, you will find the weapons and powers that perfectly fit your unique playing style.

The gameplay is great, but let’s talk about what really makes this game shine. That is, the thing that lifts Bioshock above any other video game in recent memory. Dare I say, that which makes Bioshock a work of art.

The Story.

I’ll try to be as spoiler-free as I can, but if you’re worried, just skip to the end of the review where I give the final score.

This has been one of the first stories in a LONG time that was truly unpredictable. There is a twist, and when it happens, it completely changed the nature of the ENTIRE story that had been told to that point. It’s like watching The Sixth Sense for the first time, fresh and unspoiled. All the clues were there, but you were too used to the idea of something else entirely. I won’t say anything more about specific plot points that what I’ve already said.

However, I have a lot to say about the philosophical underpinnings of the City of Rapture. I consider myself an “Ayn Rand geek” in many respects. I’ve read most of her published books and many of her essays. I don’t consider myself an Objectivist in the strictest sense. For starters, I am not an atheist. Though, one could argue that being an Objectivist doesn’t require surrendering one’s belief in God, but that’s an argument for another time and place.

Being a fan of Ayn Rand’s philosophies and writings, I was a little disappointed at the way Bioshock portrayed the Rationalism and pseudo-capitalism of Andrew Ryan, the founder of Bioshock‘s fictional city of Rapture. Someone might come away from playing through Bioshock with the idea that the predominant theme of the game is that “capitalism and rational self-interest is evil,” or that any philosophy taken to an extreme is evil. Unfortunately, the world of Andrew Ryan is neither free, capitalist, nor rational.

In fact, the city of rapture is not a simple canvas of moral blacks and whites. Bioshock is a story about choice. What end do you choose, and by what means do you seek it? What will you become in the process?

After finishing the game, you may find yourself contemplating how or why the society of Rapture failed. If you let it happen, you will be faced with the internal “meat” of your beliefs and will be forced to reexamine your core values at an extremely visceral level.

But wait… isn’t that what ANY artistic masterpiece has ever done? I guess that would make Bioshock… art.

I’m giving Bioshock 5 out of 5 aeropausonauts. This represents that I found this game/story so compelling, that were it a play or musical, I would give Bioshock a standing ovation. Serious theater-goers know how truly powerful a performance must be to elicit such a response. Bioshock IS that powerful.