Post by Harkovast on Dec 16, 2014 0:53:19 GMT
Most of the things I talk about in this section are 100% pointless irredeemable bullshit.
You look at most of these shows and think "why they hell was this made? What was the point?"
Our collective media is over run with nonsense like Transformers 2 or the Matrix Sequels they are just empty, souless exercises in pointlessness. They have no creative spark and no reason to exist.
This got me thinking of a little philosophical question..
What is worse- Something that is completely pointless crap or something that had INCREDIBLE potential and fucked it up?
In a way the wasted potential is more aggravating to me because you are getting a glimpse of something good and then having it cruelly dashed.
Such is the case with Bioshock Infinite.
If you haven't played the game yet I am going to spoil the shit out of it for you with ten bajillion spoilers.
So if you want to play the game stop reading and come back when you've played it.
Or just keep reading...I wont tell....
Bioshock Infinite is probably the most ambitious game I've ever played. The scope of the story and setting absolutely blew me away.
It all takes place in the early twentieth century on a crazy flying city called Columbia.
This place is fucking AWESOME!
Flying houses, mechanical horses and over the top patriotic American imagery (these guys literally pray to George Washington!) really make for a setting totally unlike anything else.
But then suddenly things take a dark turn as you realise the town raffle is to determine who gets to throw baseballs at the inter racial couple first...
Yeah these guys are crazy racist, warmongering, super religious assholes and rather pleasingly the game doesn't beat around the bush.
The racism is VERY in your face.
You see black people in uniforms with their heads bowed serving their white masters, racial caricatures of rat like Chinese people with sharp teeth....pretty uncomfortable for people with early 21st century mind sets!
The plot involves saving a mysterious girl who has the power to open "tears", gateways to other dimensions and alternate realities. The tears are the source of the fantastical technology of Columbia and can be used mid battle to summon supplies and allies.
Pretty bad ass, right?
Now you might be thinking-
"Okay Hark, what is this fucking shit?" (alright you might not swear as much in your head as I do...but I''m going somewhere with this.) "You are making this game sound amazing so far! I come here for hateful, bitter reviews full of bile! Have you gone soft on us?"
Ah, but that's just it!
The cruelest cut of all is delivered after giving someone hope....just so you can snatch it away.
I saw the promised land of gaming Nirvana!
But then things started to go wrong...
Not all at once, not like a gradual decline in quality.
More like I began to notice cracks through the paint work, began to see fault lines and failures that each compounded on each other till the entire structure crumbled.
Let me start listing some of those failings...
The main bad guy is an evil cult leader called Comstock who controls Columbia with his claims to be a holy prophet.
And this guy is BORING.
I mean really, he is sooo fucking dull.
He is evil, racist and a hypocrite...you know, just like you would expect an evil cult leader to be.
The big twist (spoiler time! Hooray!) Comstock is the alternate version of the main character from another dimension.
This revelations comes literally right at the end of the game and is literally the only interesting thing about Comstock.
And the same is true of the other characters....they are all just kinda dull.
Considering the way the story focuses on the characters so much, having them be this lame and uninteresting is pretty unforgivable.
This Comcock asshole doesnt even make much sense. The departure between him and Booker makes sense, where their paths diverge and they take different routes and all...but it never explains when Comstock became a massive racist.
That is the key part of his policies and cult...but it gets no explanation. Booker is not racist...but nothing happened to make him not racist. Comstock is racist, but nothing happened to make him racist either. The more you think about this twist the less sense it makes!
There is an evil industrialist guy called Fink...who is evil and greedy...*yawn*....
There is Daisy Fitzroy, a revolutionary leader who wants to over throw Comstock ("The whitemans prophet! The rich mans prophet!") Who seems pretty interesting...until she turns evil and decides to try to kill you for no reason and then gets abruptly killed off.
I know its not fair to compare to a previous game in the series (but when was I ever fair around here?) but the orginal Bioshock gave us amazing characters like Andrew Ryan, the objectivist lunatic who would rather burn down everything he owns than hand it over to "parasites".
Even minor characters is Bioshock had way more impact than these new ones. An insane surgeon that is killed off as a relatively early boss declared he was going to do for surgery what Piccasso did for art, and fight the tyranny of symmetry.
No character in Bioshock Infinite comes close even to that level of awesome.
Most boring of all is the girl you are there to save (Elizabeth) and the main character, Booker Dewitt.
Elizabeth is really well animated and the voice acting is ace...but these two assholes just have nothing interesting to say to each other.
They are so glum and serious all the time, making occasional pretentious comments or feeling bad about all the killing they've done up to this point.
They just aren't any fun to be around.
They aren't funny or jokey or loveable...just drab.
My first thought was that they should be a bit more flirtatious and have a little sexual chemistry.
But later on it turns out that Elizabeth is Booker's daughter...so maybe not!
And that leads me on to one of the biggest problems this game suffers from.
This one got rewritten to fuck.
It got remade and re-remade over and over again until some ideas are all over the place.
The original Bioshock (yes, I love Bioshock one, fuck off!) the whole world you were in was so wonderfully well realised. Everything gelled together, with each element fitting into the over all world and setting.
Here the setting just starts to feel like random shit thrown together without rhyme or reason.
In place of the tragic, haunting figures of the big daddies who were so central to he very fabric of Bioshocks world we get Handymen...big robot monsters you fight.
They have no particular role in the society of Columbia, they are just a big thing you fight sometimes.
I know they were originally meant to guard Elizabeth the way Big Daddies guarded the freaky young girls in Bioshock because in early promos for the game we saw them doing this. But then they added in a giant mechanical bird monster called "Song Bird"
to guard her...but then they just kinda left the Handymen in anyway...just kinda there...
And you never fight Song Bird.
It just appears in cut scenes.
No seriously.
The game has a giant mechanical bird monster and you NEVER fight the damn thing.
It just serves as a big deus ex machina to stop Booker getting out of the city.
The game starts out showing the city in working order where everything clean and lovely, then you step through a tear about a third of the way through the game and the place has become world war 3 in the clouds.
All the civilians have vanished never to be seen again and everyone we see is a complete psychopath hell bent on murdering Booker.
Daisy Fitzroys rebel quickly turn evil and just provide a different version of the same bad guys (soldiers in red rather than blue...wow real exciting!) I liked the idea of the rebels (the Vox) turning evil and showing their own dark side and mob rule (promo clips that were not in the finished game showed them brutalising government employees and mercilessly beating up rich people) but here there is no logic to their violence, not sense that they stand for anything different. They are just more assholes to shoot in the face.
Another enemy that goes nowhere is the "Boys of Silence". These freakish figures have huge helmets that turn them into a sort of walking security camera...in theory.
In practice you meet three of them in the whole game (four cause one hops out for an amusing jump scare) and most players beat them all without realising you are meant to sneak around them. If you don't sneak around them it makes no difference, you just have to beat up a load of fair easy enemies to get by.
The half assed use of a potentially bad ass enemy is just infuriating!
Either use the bastards properly or just dont put them in! Show a little creative fucking restraint! Put them in the DLC or something!
One time you fight a fucking ghost as an overly long, repetitive boss fight.
And yes, that does make absolutely no fucking sense! It seems as random in the game as it did when I say it here.
Also it is very evident that this game was originally meant to be more like the original Bioshock...but then they changed it...but didnt quite change all of it.
See in the original Bioshock everyone in the city (under water in that game) has gone insane due to the use of plasmids (crazy sea slug juice that gives you super powers...just go with me on this!) so everyone behaves that a disturbing lunatic called a Splicer.
Now in Columbia the people may be racist and xenophobic and jingoistic...but they aren't insane.
Except when they are.
The most blatant example of this is when the evil industrialist Fink decides he wants Booker to work for him. So he keeps sending in loads of different enemies to fight you, declaring that they are others who want to try out for the job.
This is, basically, completely fucking mental!
Booker never said he wanted to work for the guy, and when you want someone to work for you sending various armed killers to fight them is not the way to win them over. Fink is suddenly behaving like a deluded lunatic...or more to the point he is behaving like a Splicer.
It is very obvious that the tears were originally meant to make people crazy somehow but they dropped this plot line and this type of scene are just an uncomfortable left over from the game being rewritten too damn many times.
The plasmids here are replaced with Vigors...which are basically just plasmids.
They dont seem to make people crazy though...or even get used by anyone!
Booker arrives in town and seems to be the only person to realise there are bottles everywhere you can drink to get super powers!
A women at the fair at the start gave me a "free sample" of a drink that let me control machines with my mind. Not temporarily either, I permanently gained this power! Columbia is full of robot turrets and walking robot soldiers (called Mechanical Patriots who look like George Washington...okay yes they are cool but lets not get side tracked!)
So they fill their flying city with turrets and robots....then hand out a free sample of juice that lets you control robots and turrets.
And then I went to a vending machine and upgraded my power to let me control people (who shot their friends then killed themselves when it wore off.)
The bad guys had no defence against this, never tried to do it to me and there was literally no reason that I could do this stuff and no one else in the whole of Columbia did.
Fucking Fink is selling this shit but doesn't have any super powers!
This makes no fucking sense!!
It sucks the heart out of this fantasy world, as its own rules and nature dont add up!
Another left over element from the original game is moral choice. The original game had a moral choice to either kill the little girls for power or rescue them, resulting in different endings.
This time you SEEM to get choices, but really there are no choices at all.
The awesome scene where you are asked to throw the first baseball at the interracial couple kind of loses its impact when you realise that which ever choices you make you get stopped by a police officer who recognises you. Why even put that there if you are not going to really let me choose? Its just another relic of the original ideas they had for this game that were rewritten and redone so many times.
But perhaps the most shocking thing that sucks in this game...is the game part.
The game play is really pretty shitty.
I means its not dreadful, but its really uninspired.
You just go around blasting people in a series of dull enemies in fairly uninspired gun fights.
The Handy Men are the lamest enemy of all...aside from that stupid fucking ghost battle! God damn that took a long time AND it was stupid! Do I look like fucking Scooby Doo? Why am I fighting a ghost? A FUCKING STUPID GHOST? ARGH!
The violence also kind of detracts from the good bits of the game.
Right after the baseball raffle the cops grab Booker...so he rams a spinning mechanical hook device in one of their faces then uses it to smash all their heads in (in my case causing their heads to explode with electricity.)
This made me feel uncomfortable, and not in the way that was intended.
Clearly the racism was meant to make me feel okay about the violence I was now inflicting, but it just seemed ugly to me in this context.
It made me feel like a hypocrite when I criticise the brutality of this society then turn around and become massively MORE brutal than them.
Worse yet is the fact that this society is bad and all...but these aren't insane mutants. My character goes around killing people (in this case police officers) who really dont have any say in things. I don't know if they are all racist, or if they were just raised in this society and don't know any better. Now while Booker may need to defend himself the violence becomes so over the top that it jars with the games attempts at a serious message.
Look...I want to like Bioshock Infinite! I really do!
And I normally want to hate everything because I have a twisted evil soul!
But this one I wanted to be as amazing as it promised to be...
And its that disappointment, that glimpse of the incredible, of what could have been that makes it hurt so much.
Bioshock Infinite is not the great game it could have been...SHOULD have been.
But its not a bad game either.
It's an okay game.
And somehow....that's worse.
You look at most of these shows and think "why they hell was this made? What was the point?"
Our collective media is over run with nonsense like Transformers 2 or the Matrix Sequels they are just empty, souless exercises in pointlessness. They have no creative spark and no reason to exist.
This got me thinking of a little philosophical question..
What is worse- Something that is completely pointless crap or something that had INCREDIBLE potential and fucked it up?
In a way the wasted potential is more aggravating to me because you are getting a glimpse of something good and then having it cruelly dashed.
Such is the case with Bioshock Infinite.
If you haven't played the game yet I am going to spoil the shit out of it for you with ten bajillion spoilers.
So if you want to play the game stop reading and come back when you've played it.
Or just keep reading...I wont tell....
Bioshock Infinite is probably the most ambitious game I've ever played. The scope of the story and setting absolutely blew me away.
It all takes place in the early twentieth century on a crazy flying city called Columbia.
This place is fucking AWESOME!
Flying houses, mechanical horses and over the top patriotic American imagery (these guys literally pray to George Washington!) really make for a setting totally unlike anything else.
But then suddenly things take a dark turn as you realise the town raffle is to determine who gets to throw baseballs at the inter racial couple first...
Yeah these guys are crazy racist, warmongering, super religious assholes and rather pleasingly the game doesn't beat around the bush.
The racism is VERY in your face.
You see black people in uniforms with their heads bowed serving their white masters, racial caricatures of rat like Chinese people with sharp teeth....pretty uncomfortable for people with early 21st century mind sets!
The plot involves saving a mysterious girl who has the power to open "tears", gateways to other dimensions and alternate realities. The tears are the source of the fantastical technology of Columbia and can be used mid battle to summon supplies and allies.
Pretty bad ass, right?
Now you might be thinking-
"Okay Hark, what is this fucking shit?" (alright you might not swear as much in your head as I do...but I''m going somewhere with this.) "You are making this game sound amazing so far! I come here for hateful, bitter reviews full of bile! Have you gone soft on us?"
Ah, but that's just it!
The cruelest cut of all is delivered after giving someone hope....just so you can snatch it away.
I saw the promised land of gaming Nirvana!
But then things started to go wrong...
Not all at once, not like a gradual decline in quality.
More like I began to notice cracks through the paint work, began to see fault lines and failures that each compounded on each other till the entire structure crumbled.
Let me start listing some of those failings...
The main bad guy is an evil cult leader called Comstock who controls Columbia with his claims to be a holy prophet.
And this guy is BORING.
I mean really, he is sooo fucking dull.
He is evil, racist and a hypocrite...you know, just like you would expect an evil cult leader to be.
The big twist (spoiler time! Hooray!) Comstock is the alternate version of the main character from another dimension.
This revelations comes literally right at the end of the game and is literally the only interesting thing about Comstock.
And the same is true of the other characters....they are all just kinda dull.
Considering the way the story focuses on the characters so much, having them be this lame and uninteresting is pretty unforgivable.
This Comcock asshole doesnt even make much sense. The departure between him and Booker makes sense, where their paths diverge and they take different routes and all...but it never explains when Comstock became a massive racist.
That is the key part of his policies and cult...but it gets no explanation. Booker is not racist...but nothing happened to make him not racist. Comstock is racist, but nothing happened to make him racist either. The more you think about this twist the less sense it makes!
There is an evil industrialist guy called Fink...who is evil and greedy...*yawn*....
There is Daisy Fitzroy, a revolutionary leader who wants to over throw Comstock ("The whitemans prophet! The rich mans prophet!") Who seems pretty interesting...until she turns evil and decides to try to kill you for no reason and then gets abruptly killed off.
I know its not fair to compare to a previous game in the series (but when was I ever fair around here?) but the orginal Bioshock gave us amazing characters like Andrew Ryan, the objectivist lunatic who would rather burn down everything he owns than hand it over to "parasites".
Even minor characters is Bioshock had way more impact than these new ones. An insane surgeon that is killed off as a relatively early boss declared he was going to do for surgery what Piccasso did for art, and fight the tyranny of symmetry.
No character in Bioshock Infinite comes close even to that level of awesome.
Most boring of all is the girl you are there to save (Elizabeth) and the main character, Booker Dewitt.
Elizabeth is really well animated and the voice acting is ace...but these two assholes just have nothing interesting to say to each other.
They are so glum and serious all the time, making occasional pretentious comments or feeling bad about all the killing they've done up to this point.
They just aren't any fun to be around.
They aren't funny or jokey or loveable...just drab.
My first thought was that they should be a bit more flirtatious and have a little sexual chemistry.
But later on it turns out that Elizabeth is Booker's daughter...so maybe not!
And that leads me on to one of the biggest problems this game suffers from.
This one got rewritten to fuck.
It got remade and re-remade over and over again until some ideas are all over the place.
The original Bioshock (yes, I love Bioshock one, fuck off!) the whole world you were in was so wonderfully well realised. Everything gelled together, with each element fitting into the over all world and setting.
Here the setting just starts to feel like random shit thrown together without rhyme or reason.
In place of the tragic, haunting figures of the big daddies who were so central to he very fabric of Bioshocks world we get Handymen...big robot monsters you fight.
They have no particular role in the society of Columbia, they are just a big thing you fight sometimes.
I know they were originally meant to guard Elizabeth the way Big Daddies guarded the freaky young girls in Bioshock because in early promos for the game we saw them doing this. But then they added in a giant mechanical bird monster called "Song Bird"
to guard her...but then they just kinda left the Handymen in anyway...just kinda there...
And you never fight Song Bird.
It just appears in cut scenes.
No seriously.
The game has a giant mechanical bird monster and you NEVER fight the damn thing.
It just serves as a big deus ex machina to stop Booker getting out of the city.
The game starts out showing the city in working order where everything clean and lovely, then you step through a tear about a third of the way through the game and the place has become world war 3 in the clouds.
All the civilians have vanished never to be seen again and everyone we see is a complete psychopath hell bent on murdering Booker.
Daisy Fitzroys rebel quickly turn evil and just provide a different version of the same bad guys (soldiers in red rather than blue...wow real exciting!) I liked the idea of the rebels (the Vox) turning evil and showing their own dark side and mob rule (promo clips that were not in the finished game showed them brutalising government employees and mercilessly beating up rich people) but here there is no logic to their violence, not sense that they stand for anything different. They are just more assholes to shoot in the face.
Another enemy that goes nowhere is the "Boys of Silence". These freakish figures have huge helmets that turn them into a sort of walking security camera...in theory.
In practice you meet three of them in the whole game (four cause one hops out for an amusing jump scare) and most players beat them all without realising you are meant to sneak around them. If you don't sneak around them it makes no difference, you just have to beat up a load of fair easy enemies to get by.
The half assed use of a potentially bad ass enemy is just infuriating!
Either use the bastards properly or just dont put them in! Show a little creative fucking restraint! Put them in the DLC or something!
One time you fight a fucking ghost as an overly long, repetitive boss fight.
And yes, that does make absolutely no fucking sense! It seems as random in the game as it did when I say it here.
Also it is very evident that this game was originally meant to be more like the original Bioshock...but then they changed it...but didnt quite change all of it.
See in the original Bioshock everyone in the city (under water in that game) has gone insane due to the use of plasmids (crazy sea slug juice that gives you super powers...just go with me on this!) so everyone behaves that a disturbing lunatic called a Splicer.
Now in Columbia the people may be racist and xenophobic and jingoistic...but they aren't insane.
Except when they are.
The most blatant example of this is when the evil industrialist Fink decides he wants Booker to work for him. So he keeps sending in loads of different enemies to fight you, declaring that they are others who want to try out for the job.
This is, basically, completely fucking mental!
Booker never said he wanted to work for the guy, and when you want someone to work for you sending various armed killers to fight them is not the way to win them over. Fink is suddenly behaving like a deluded lunatic...or more to the point he is behaving like a Splicer.
It is very obvious that the tears were originally meant to make people crazy somehow but they dropped this plot line and this type of scene are just an uncomfortable left over from the game being rewritten too damn many times.
The plasmids here are replaced with Vigors...which are basically just plasmids.
They dont seem to make people crazy though...or even get used by anyone!
Booker arrives in town and seems to be the only person to realise there are bottles everywhere you can drink to get super powers!
A women at the fair at the start gave me a "free sample" of a drink that let me control machines with my mind. Not temporarily either, I permanently gained this power! Columbia is full of robot turrets and walking robot soldiers (called Mechanical Patriots who look like George Washington...okay yes they are cool but lets not get side tracked!)
So they fill their flying city with turrets and robots....then hand out a free sample of juice that lets you control robots and turrets.
And then I went to a vending machine and upgraded my power to let me control people (who shot their friends then killed themselves when it wore off.)
The bad guys had no defence against this, never tried to do it to me and there was literally no reason that I could do this stuff and no one else in the whole of Columbia did.
Fucking Fink is selling this shit but doesn't have any super powers!
This makes no fucking sense!!
It sucks the heart out of this fantasy world, as its own rules and nature dont add up!
Another left over element from the original game is moral choice. The original game had a moral choice to either kill the little girls for power or rescue them, resulting in different endings.
This time you SEEM to get choices, but really there are no choices at all.
The awesome scene where you are asked to throw the first baseball at the interracial couple kind of loses its impact when you realise that which ever choices you make you get stopped by a police officer who recognises you. Why even put that there if you are not going to really let me choose? Its just another relic of the original ideas they had for this game that were rewritten and redone so many times.
But perhaps the most shocking thing that sucks in this game...is the game part.
The game play is really pretty shitty.
I means its not dreadful, but its really uninspired.
You just go around blasting people in a series of dull enemies in fairly uninspired gun fights.
The Handy Men are the lamest enemy of all...aside from that stupid fucking ghost battle! God damn that took a long time AND it was stupid! Do I look like fucking Scooby Doo? Why am I fighting a ghost? A FUCKING STUPID GHOST? ARGH!
The violence also kind of detracts from the good bits of the game.
Right after the baseball raffle the cops grab Booker...so he rams a spinning mechanical hook device in one of their faces then uses it to smash all their heads in (in my case causing their heads to explode with electricity.)
This made me feel uncomfortable, and not in the way that was intended.
Clearly the racism was meant to make me feel okay about the violence I was now inflicting, but it just seemed ugly to me in this context.
It made me feel like a hypocrite when I criticise the brutality of this society then turn around and become massively MORE brutal than them.
Worse yet is the fact that this society is bad and all...but these aren't insane mutants. My character goes around killing people (in this case police officers) who really dont have any say in things. I don't know if they are all racist, or if they were just raised in this society and don't know any better. Now while Booker may need to defend himself the violence becomes so over the top that it jars with the games attempts at a serious message.
Look...I want to like Bioshock Infinite! I really do!
And I normally want to hate everything because I have a twisted evil soul!
But this one I wanted to be as amazing as it promised to be...
And its that disappointment, that glimpse of the incredible, of what could have been that makes it hurt so much.
Bioshock Infinite is not the great game it could have been...SHOULD have been.
But its not a bad game either.
It's an okay game.
And somehow....that's worse.