New Topic/Question
The full game comes out next tuesday. If any of you pick it up let me know, it's going to have an amazing story and I would love to talk about it with whoever picks it up.
p.s. here is a great OP from another forum with links to video, reviews etc.
Quote
DEMO IS OUT!"ALL MY DICKS"
BIOSHOCK
Bioshock has been in development since late 2004 and is the spiritual successor to PC classics System Shock and System Shock 2.
Platforms: PC and Xbox 360
Release date: 8/21 North America, 8/24 PAL
Developer: 2K Boston (formerly Irrational Games)
Publisher: 2K Games
Players: One
Rated: M for blood and gore, drug references, intense violence, sexual themes, and strong language
Box art:
Regular edition -
Limited edition -
Limited edition
At Gamestop/EB only in the US and Canada
$70 MSRP on 360, $60 on PC
Comes with a soundtrack CD, making of DVD, special case, and this -
Setting and story
It's 1960, and your plane has crashed into the ocean. You find your way to a lighthouse, go inside, walk down some stairs, and find a submarine with a corpse in the driver's seat. Having nowhere else to go, you get in and pilot it down to the bottom of the ocean, where you find a ruined uptopian society called Rapture.
Rapture was built in the 1940s by a Howard Hughes-like industrialist named Andrew Ryan. He was born in Russia, but after losing his family due to the corruption of the Soviet Union, he moved to America and became a wealthy, respected inventor and industrialist, and a patriot. The Great Depression, New Deal, and the dropping of the a-bombs, he was driven away from his beliefs and built Rapture. It was meant to be a safe haven for who he considered to be the world's best and brightest, and at its height, its population was in the thousands.
Rapture resembles the Art Deco look of many 20s and 30s American buildings.
Scientists in Rapture studying the surrounding ocean discovered a sea slug that secretes pure stem cells, which were found to be able to change one's physical or mental capabilities, cure disease, and heal injury. This was named "ADAM". This became Rapture's main currency soon enough, and eventually led to a civil war between Ryan and the scientist who discovered it, leaving the city in ruins and destroying all natural sources of it.
When you arrive, the city is in disrepair and most of its citizens are dead. The majority of the ones who are not have been driven mad.
Your goal is to reveal the mysteries of Rapture, and eventually escape.
Big Daddies and Little Sisters
Roaming Rapture are Little Sisters, little girls obsessed with harvesting ADAM, and Big Daddies, their protectors. You're told both that Little Sister aren't people, that they're just monsters, and that they're actual little girls you need to save.
Big Daddies are basically boss fights (although the game has others). They can take huge amounts of damage, and you might even have to run away from them to gather more ammo on occassion. They wont attack you on sight, in fact they'll completely ignore you unless you come too close to them or their Little Sister, then they're bring down the pain.
Little Sisters harvest ADAM from the corpses that litter Rapture. The ONLY way (the only way) you can get ADAM and enchance your character's abilities is to kill the Little Sisters and get it from them, but to do so you need to get through their Big Daddy.
Other enemies
Security Bots: Throughout the city of Rapture, they are called via alarm by various security cameras. Security bots appear to hover and fly using the same method as helicopters and are armed with machine guns. When disturbed, the security cameras' siren will sound and an unlimited supply of security bots will pour out for a limited time. The only way to take them down is to shut off the security system by using ADAM to turn it off. The security system can also be suborned by the player, either by "hacking" it or using the "Security Beacon" plasmid on an enemy.
Splicers (there are many different kinds): Deformed, genetically modified Rapture citizens who are now remnants of Ryan's army, the Aggressors cannot survive without ADAM due to their extensive biological modifications. They wear little or no armor, and normally roam the levels of Rapture, searching for other inhabitants to kill and steal ADAM from. As their name would suggest, they are aggressive and quick to attack, and will use their enhanced physical strength, group tactics and, sometimes, semi-biological weapons to kill all in their path.
Gameplay
Bioshock is a first person shooter with horror and RPG elements. You've got guns, you know, like a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, etc. You can customize your guns by modding them with objects (garbage and shit) from around Rapture to hold more bullet, shoot faster, reload faster, shoot different types of ammo, etc. You've also got plasmids, which are basically Bioshock's magic. Stuff like lighting things on fire, electrocuting things, making tornadoes, using telekinesis, etc. You can also hack shit and set traps.
What do critics think?
Garnett Lee from 1UP says it's the best game he's played since Half-Life (1998), and thinks it will be the game of the year.
PCZone UK gave it a 96/100 and said -
quote:
+
Captivating, well-told story
Movie quality voice-acting and script
Emergent combat allows for huge variation in tactics
The soundtrack, the location, the visuals
The many, many Plasmids and the brilliant final levels
-
It ends
Bioshock is an expertly crafted game in every respect, a truly worthy successor to what's considered one of the PC's greatest game, and a game that, we feel, will be a milestone in PC gaming. Never has the medium been used as a storytelling device in such a beautiful and engaging way, and never have we been drawn so deeply into a gameworld. Long live Rapture.
OXM UK gave it a 10/10 and said -
quote:
...BioShock is a novel compressed into a first-person shooter. It manages to be both a tricky, exciting action game, a fascinating creation of an enclosed world and a deep enquiry about what it means to be human - a trick most action movies and books fail to achieve. It also plays with you at every stage, confounding your expectations and your control over events repeatedly, from your control over your weapons, Plasmids, plot, self...
And this is where we have to stop ourselves - we don't want to spoilt it. What we can tell you is you'll be playing this game for months to come, exchanging story elements to build up the bigger picture, and arguing about what it all means. Come, join the argument, play the impossible game.
PC Gamer UK gave it a 95/100 and said -
quote:
These are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades; narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as Bioshock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful. I spend my career, and my gaming life, waiting for a moment when a game just astonishes me, when I can't believe what I'm seeing, what I'm doing. Bioshock has five.
Video
Watch these if you haven't:
Gamestop E3 demonstration - http://uk.gamespot.c...hock-stage-demo
Ecology feature - http://www.gametrail...ayer/23296.html (big) http://www.gametrail...ayer/23297.html (small)
Bioshock page on Gametrailers has everything else - http://www.gametrail.../game/2610.html
Screenshots
There's enough in this post already, if you want more go here - http://screenshots.t...57/BioShock/p1/
http://media.xbox360...105/imgs_1.html
Links
Official site - http://www.2kgames.com/bioshock/
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioshock
IGN - http://xbox360.ign.c...793/793105.html
Gamespot - http://www.gamespot....hock/index.html
Xbox.com - http://www.xbox.com/...mes/b/bioshock/
BIOSHOCK
Bioshock has been in development since late 2004 and is the spiritual successor to PC classics System Shock and System Shock 2.
Platforms: PC and Xbox 360
Release date: 8/21 North America, 8/24 PAL
Developer: 2K Boston (formerly Irrational Games)
Publisher: 2K Games
Players: One
Rated: M for blood and gore, drug references, intense violence, sexual themes, and strong language
Box art:
Regular edition -
Limited edition -
Limited edition
At Gamestop/EB only in the US and Canada
$70 MSRP on 360, $60 on PC
Comes with a soundtrack CD, making of DVD, special case, and this -
Setting and story
It's 1960, and your plane has crashed into the ocean. You find your way to a lighthouse, go inside, walk down some stairs, and find a submarine with a corpse in the driver's seat. Having nowhere else to go, you get in and pilot it down to the bottom of the ocean, where you find a ruined uptopian society called Rapture.
Rapture was built in the 1940s by a Howard Hughes-like industrialist named Andrew Ryan. He was born in Russia, but after losing his family due to the corruption of the Soviet Union, he moved to America and became a wealthy, respected inventor and industrialist, and a patriot. The Great Depression, New Deal, and the dropping of the a-bombs, he was driven away from his beliefs and built Rapture. It was meant to be a safe haven for who he considered to be the world's best and brightest, and at its height, its population was in the thousands.
Rapture resembles the Art Deco look of many 20s and 30s American buildings.
Scientists in Rapture studying the surrounding ocean discovered a sea slug that secretes pure stem cells, which were found to be able to change one's physical or mental capabilities, cure disease, and heal injury. This was named "ADAM". This became Rapture's main currency soon enough, and eventually led to a civil war between Ryan and the scientist who discovered it, leaving the city in ruins and destroying all natural sources of it.
When you arrive, the city is in disrepair and most of its citizens are dead. The majority of the ones who are not have been driven mad.
Your goal is to reveal the mysteries of Rapture, and eventually escape.
Big Daddies and Little Sisters
Roaming Rapture are Little Sisters, little girls obsessed with harvesting ADAM, and Big Daddies, their protectors. You're told both that Little Sister aren't people, that they're just monsters, and that they're actual little girls you need to save.
Big Daddies are basically boss fights (although the game has others). They can take huge amounts of damage, and you might even have to run away from them to gather more ammo on occassion. They wont attack you on sight, in fact they'll completely ignore you unless you come too close to them or their Little Sister, then they're bring down the pain.
Little Sisters harvest ADAM from the corpses that litter Rapture. The ONLY way (the only way) you can get ADAM and enchance your character's abilities is to kill the Little Sisters and get it from them, but to do so you need to get through their Big Daddy.
Other enemies
Security Bots: Throughout the city of Rapture, they are called via alarm by various security cameras. Security bots appear to hover and fly using the same method as helicopters and are armed with machine guns. When disturbed, the security cameras' siren will sound and an unlimited supply of security bots will pour out for a limited time. The only way to take them down is to shut off the security system by using ADAM to turn it off. The security system can also be suborned by the player, either by "hacking" it or using the "Security Beacon" plasmid on an enemy.
Splicers (there are many different kinds): Deformed, genetically modified Rapture citizens who are now remnants of Ryan's army, the Aggressors cannot survive without ADAM due to their extensive biological modifications. They wear little or no armor, and normally roam the levels of Rapture, searching for other inhabitants to kill and steal ADAM from. As their name would suggest, they are aggressive and quick to attack, and will use their enhanced physical strength, group tactics and, sometimes, semi-biological weapons to kill all in their path.
Gameplay
Bioshock is a first person shooter with horror and RPG elements. You've got guns, you know, like a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, etc. You can customize your guns by modding them with objects (garbage and shit) from around Rapture to hold more bullet, shoot faster, reload faster, shoot different types of ammo, etc. You've also got plasmids, which are basically Bioshock's magic. Stuff like lighting things on fire, electrocuting things, making tornadoes, using telekinesis, etc. You can also hack shit and set traps.
What do critics think?
Garnett Lee from 1UP says it's the best game he's played since Half-Life (1998), and thinks it will be the game of the year.
PCZone UK gave it a 96/100 and said -
quote:
+
Captivating, well-told story
Movie quality voice-acting and script
Emergent combat allows for huge variation in tactics
The soundtrack, the location, the visuals
The many, many Plasmids and the brilliant final levels
-
It ends
Bioshock is an expertly crafted game in every respect, a truly worthy successor to what's considered one of the PC's greatest game, and a game that, we feel, will be a milestone in PC gaming. Never has the medium been used as a storytelling device in such a beautiful and engaging way, and never have we been drawn so deeply into a gameworld. Long live Rapture.
OXM UK gave it a 10/10 and said -
quote:
...BioShock is a novel compressed into a first-person shooter. It manages to be both a tricky, exciting action game, a fascinating creation of an enclosed world and a deep enquiry about what it means to be human - a trick most action movies and books fail to achieve. It also plays with you at every stage, confounding your expectations and your control over events repeatedly, from your control over your weapons, Plasmids, plot, self...
And this is where we have to stop ourselves - we don't want to spoilt it. What we can tell you is you'll be playing this game for months to come, exchanging story elements to build up the bigger picture, and arguing about what it all means. Come, join the argument, play the impossible game.
PC Gamer UK gave it a 95/100 and said -
quote:
These are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades; narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as Bioshock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful. I spend my career, and my gaming life, waiting for a moment when a game just astonishes me, when I can't believe what I'm seeing, what I'm doing. Bioshock has five.
Video
Watch these if you haven't:
Gamestop E3 demonstration - http://uk.gamespot.c...hock-stage-demo
Ecology feature - http://www.gametrail...ayer/23296.html (big) http://www.gametrail...ayer/23297.html (small)
Bioshock page on Gametrailers has everything else - http://www.gametrail.../game/2610.html
Screenshots
There's enough in this post already, if you want more go here - http://screenshots.t...57/BioShock/p1/
http://media.xbox360...105/imgs_1.html
Links
Official site - http://www.2kgames.com/bioshock/
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioshock
IGN - http://xbox360.ign.c...793/793105.html
Gamespot - http://www.gamespot....hock/index.html
Xbox.com - http://www.xbox.com/...mes/b/bioshock/
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