Jimquisition: Jimquisition Awards 2013 - BioShock Infinite

[Thanatos2k]

Pc is objectivly superior. Besides, you can use a 360 controller if you dislike the keyboard that much.

I agree that Dishonored powers were overpower, but that's a different issue, it was fun to play and it felt better good.

So you want me to play on a PC with a controller to only end up being at a disadvantage against other players? PC is only objectively better with regards to graphics, which are the least important part of a game. I'm playing Dishonored now, which isn't very good looking but it's a bunch of fun, it can't be much of a looker even with max settings on a PC.

The fact that you admit you have a disadvantage is exactly why it's objectively superior. The point of an FPS game is to point, move, and shoot. Mouse keyboard is the best way to do this in the fastest and most accurate manner. Circle strafing while maintaining aim on a controller is laughable.

Do you play football with one hand tied behind your hand and call it superior? I'm sure you could play football that way, and the players would "get used to it" and even eventually get good at it, but don't pretend it's a better game that way. (Edit: And NO, I'm not talking about soccer!)

 

[Thanatos2k]

Also, I gotta ask to people who liked BI story since I never finished.

Is it that good? How does it compare to 999 ?

999 is better. BI gets a little paradoxical at the end, much more so than 999 - which can actually make sense if you think through the situation and build a set of rules for their "situation." BI never really makes sense. BI also goes for more metaphorical crap than direct event-driven stuff like 999 has.

Really?
Then I really don't feel like finishing BI.

But I really liked 999, so much that I'm afraid Zero Escape won't feel as good.

You didn't play VLR? Play it now!

 

[Evonisia]

Time to admit it folks: Bioshock Infinite is the best first-person shooter released since Half-Life 2.

'insert laugh harder futurama video'

Want me to make a list of fps with better mechanics than Bioshock Infinite?

You can try, I'm going to love proving you wrong.

Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty World at War.

Can you tell me with a straight face that BI had better gameplay than those COD's?

I'll go one or two better. Halo 1, Goldeneye, and Doom. Expertly crafted with the right amount of pacing, variety, level design, and player agency, all through genuinely new and exciting forms of gunplay and character alteration.

Though BI is in good company, I think.

Goldeneye has horrible controls, Halo has regenerating health (Bioshock Infinite went halfway with that awful mechanic), and Doom is flat and doesn't have mouse aiming.

All three of those are inferior mechanically to Bioshock Infinite.

See, the thing is about people who say Bioshock Infinite has bad gameplay is that they're really suggesting that all FPS games have bad gameplay. There's REALLY nothing very different that hasn't been done before in popular genre-leading FPS games of the past. So people start in with all sorts of nonsense reasons like "the pacing" or "doesn't support the narrative" or all sorts of things trying to dance around things that they can't really say are wrong because it's not exactly different from things they claim are good.

Halo: CE has the exact same health system as BioShock: Infinite, so no it's not inferior (considering the fact that this is the only point towards it being inferior according to you).

 

[Evonisia]

Jimmy, who said that Bioshock has LD? I seen legitimate criticism of the reaction of the NPCs, and that the superpowers make no sense in the world, but the LD thing feels like straw figure.

It was explained that the "blueprints" (or the idea, whatever you wanna call them) for the salts were stolen by Fink and the Lutesces from Rapture through a portal. The same machine that they used to steal Elizabeth. Can't remember if it was explained how Adam can exist there, but I imagine the Lutesces worked out a man-made elixir to replace it that they implemented in the actual salts. What other critisisms have there been about salts? I haven't been following too closely about the argument, and I'd be interested in hearing some more.

The fact that the salts don't cause any mental issues which the plasmids did. The plasmids were a major part of BioShock 1's story and yet nobody thought to take the salts from Columbia? Rapture fell 40 years after Infinite, why did nobody think of this? You could have avoided the whole disaster Ryan... oh wait, they (the writers) don't care and gave a very crap explanation.

 

[Bruce]

I couldn't stand Bioshock Infinite. It found the Vox Populi plotline to be quite despicably racist, and also when you get right down to it, Elizabeth is not the heroine of the game, she is the villain.

The ending basically amounts to her deciding to destroy an entire multiverse because she doesn't like how it turned out.

 

[The Goat Tsar]

Time to admit it folks: Bioshock Infinite is the best first-person shooter released since Half-Life 2.

'insert laugh harder futurama video'

Want me to make a list of fps with better mechanics than Bioshock Infinite?

You can try, I'm going to love proving you wrong.

Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty World at War.

Can you tell me with a straight face that BI had better gameplay than those COD's?

I'll go one or two better. Halo 1, Goldeneye, and Doom. Expertly crafted with the right amount of pacing, variety, level design, and player agency, all through genuinely new and exciting forms of gunplay and character alteration.

Though BI is in good company, I think.

Goldeneye has horrible controls, Halo has regenerating health (Bioshock Infinite went halfway with that awful mechanic), and Doom is flat and doesn't have mouse aiming.

All three of those are inferior mechanically to Bioshock Infinite.

See, the thing is about people who say Bioshock Infinite has bad gameplay is that they're really suggesting that all FPS games have bad gameplay. There's REALLY nothing very different that hasn't been done before in popular genre-leading FPS games of the past. So people start in with all sorts of nonsense reasons like "the pacing" or "doesn't support the narrative" or all sorts of things trying to dance around things that they can't really say are wrong because it's not exactly different from things they claim are good.

You can't say those three games are mechanically inferior to Bioshock Infinite. Some people like regenerating health. Some people don't like mouse aiming. It's not bad, it's just different.

I could go into detail about why regenerating health is bad, but I can admit it's more preference based than some of the other things. Mouse aiming on the other hand is not "just different" - it's a factually superior aiming method proven time and again against controllers and arrow aiming. The point of an fps is to shoot your gun where you want the projectiles to go, and nothing does that better than mouse aiming. So yes, Goldeneye and Doom are mechanically inferior. It's not entirely their fault (Doom is a product of its time, and Goldeneye is on a console) but it's undeniably true. Same with any FPS on a console.

The issue I had with Bioshock Infinite's gameplay had nothing to do with the gunplay, I actually liked that. It was the enemies. Almost all of them were way too easy to me, but then I got to the handymen, who were just dumb. They were just giant bullet sponges that did tons of damage, I feel like they could've had more interesting mechanics and counterplay.

What difficulty were you playing on....? The harder difficulties are pretty damn hard.

Ah okay, I see what you're saying about the mouse aiming then. I wouldn't hold it against Doom or Goldeneye, though, seeing as how they were products of their time, as you said. But I agree they're mechanically inferior.

I played through the game on the hardest difficulty it gives you at the start. I haven't played it through on the mode you unlock by beating the game, but that's because I wasn't very motivated too. I found the handymen REALLY annoying on hard, didn't want to go up against them again. The firemen and raven priests were fun to fight, but the handymen weren't.

EDIT: On a side note, I'm also not a fan of regenerating health, the only shooter where I was ok with it was Halo. So far the best health system I've found in a fps is in the new Shadow Warrior game. You can heal up to half your health with an ability, but have to use health packs for the rest. I also like the stronger, mini-boss enemies in Shadow Warrior, the giant minotaur creatures are how I feel handymen should've been done, if you're familiar with them. Of course, in Shadow Warrior, there's not much in the way of story...

 

[Grach]

Other than that, the typical "bullet sponge" complaint about most of the enemies beyond the standard dime-a-dozen soldiers. I'm not asking for CoD-style "one to three shots will kill any enemy" style combat, but good lord...you shouldn't have to unload 5 clips of ammo into some guy to bring him down.

I loved the game, because it actually engaged me in way other than shooting through russians. But I completely agree with you, especially on the case of the Handymen. I had to actually tone down the difficulty from hard to normal because I couldn't get past the second (or third? the one before you meet Daisy) handyman. That's frankly a first time for me.

Spoiler: Just in case. My 2nd issue with BS Infinite involves the ending so I'll use a spoiler box.

2: I still say that the ending to the story doesn't work, and no one will be able to convince me otherwise. By that, I'm specifically referring to the plan to completely get rid of Comstock, permanently. To wipe him completely away from all of existence so that there's no way any of the madness he caused could happen again. For starters, if every choice you make spawns a universe in which the opposite of that choice is made, I don't think you can wipe out a choice by killing yourself before that choice is made. Why? Because you're making a choice to kill yourself, so that would create a universe in which you refused to make that sacrifice. "But...but...but the choice to kill Booker was made out in that Limbo area where all the lighthouses are! Therefor it doesn't really count!" Oh go fuck yourself with that explanation. That was never, not once, established during the ending that "any choices made in this area don't spawn a new universe" and beyond that it's highly debateable when the choice was actually made. If somehow killing himself in that ethereal baptism pond somehow has consequences on the universe, then that implies that any choice in that pond would have consequences. Such as, I don't know, allowing Elizabeth to hold you under and drown you? As opposed to flipping the fuck out, pushing all the hers off of you and trying to run away. I'd say THAT'S certainly a possible outcome of that situation, no matter how slim the chances are. Thus a new universe is spawned in which Booker refuses the suicidal sacrifice.

Beyond that, doesn't the very existence of Burial At Sea prove that the ending didn't work? Granted, I haven't played it yet, but if all the wrongs were righted by Booker's sacrifice, then Trans Universal Elizabeth shouldn't exist anymore if Comstock doesn't exist anymore. So what the fuck?

Spoiler: Spoily spoily

The problem with the ending is something that Yahtzee touched upon on his review of Infinite. It ends with Booker killing himself because it's suppoused to signify that by killing the player, it also kills the other side of player. The one that keeps causing misery in the world of Bioshock, since the player himself continues to play the game and continues the franchise for the sake of entertainment. That's what Yahtzee referred to as the point of maximum wanky metanarrative.

As for burial at sea, I just gather it's the story of another Booker whatsoever, one who was simply born into the world of the original Bioshock. Besides, "trasnuniversal Elizabeth" applies to more than one Elizabeth.

Seriously if Elizabeth can create tears to alternate worlds why can't she escape by herself?

She can't.

Spoiler: Well, actually...

She can do it, except said power is being controlled by the angel statue, since it's a giant coil designed for that specific reason. In fact, the first thing she does when Songbird destroys it is open up a tear to Rapture in order to kill the now out of control Songbird.

Why does anyone consider Booker a hero when he spends the whole game going on a murder rampage against police officers?

No one does at first.

Spoiler: Then...

You get to another timeline where Booker looked for Elizabeth in different way, getting himself killed and martyrized by the Revolution, who actively seek out policemen to murder them.

Why does Comstock even want Elizabeth to be his heir given that she's constantly trying to defy him? Why does anyone want Elizabeth to be Comstock's heir when they have to spend all their time forcing her to do what they want (why not launch a coup after Comstock dies)?

Because they're crazed fanatics of Comstock and his ideology and Elizabeth is way too powerful an asset to abandon. Comstock needs this power specifically so that his vision of the world can be fulfilled.

Why don't the Lutece Twins use their powers to save Elizabeth or give Booker some more help?

Spoiler

Because that would skewer their results. Scientists don't usually like that. They don't care about the misfortunes that Booker goes through, they just want to see how many tries does it take Booker to eventually find out the truth about Comstock. Judging from their "heads or tails" count, it's been a lot. To them, it's just another experiment. Same initial conditions for all instances, different results.

I'm sorry man, but it looks like you didn't even gave the game a chance to begin with.

Off-topic: The help button on the captcha window has been jiggling absolutely all the time. Does this happen to someone else?

I find it one of the most irritating things I've come across recently.

 

[Goliath100]

There are a fair amount of people who...

Do they people have names?

It was explained that the "blueprints" for the salts were stolen by Fink and the Lutesces from Rapture through a portal.

The problem is that the abilities have not affected Columbia in any meaningful way.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Pc is objectivly superior. Besides, you can use a 360 controller if you dislike the keyboard that much.

I agree that Dishonored powers were overpower, but that's a different issue, it was fun to play and it felt better good.

So you want me to play on a PC with a controller to only end up being at a disadvantage against other players? PC is only objectively better with regards to graphics, which are the least important part of a game. I'm playing Dishonored now, which isn't very good looking but it's a bunch of fun, it can't be much of a looker even with max settings on a PC.

The fact that you admit you have a disadvantage is exactly why it's objectively superior. The point of an FPS game is to point, move, and shoot. Mouse keyboard is the best way to do this in the fastest and most accurate manner. Circle strafing while maintaining aim on a controller is laughable.

Do you play football with one hand tied behind your hand and call it superior? I'm sure you could play football that way, and the players would "get used to it" and even eventually get good at it, but don't pretend it's a better game that way. (Edit: And NO, I'm not talking about soccer!)

Aiming and shooting a real gun is much more difficult than even using a controller. Playing a shooter on a PC is much easier than using a controller so a shooter is just too easy on a PC. Shooting a gun in PC shooter is further away from shooting an actual gun than using a controller to shoot a gun. What about the controller's analog buttons that allowing leaning to not be purely a digital input. A console shooter is objectively better in that regard.

 

[SilverUchiha]

Yet to play it, but I'm also one of those horrible people that didn't play the first Bioshock either. Due to a lack of not having a console/device capable of playing it when it first launched and then just never really developing an interest to go play it with so many other things out and taking my time and attention. I hope to one day get to both that and this because while this might have a fair share of criticisms I've seen, it still LOOKS interesting and fun.

Also, feel free to scold me for not playing either OR for knowing the spoilers to both prior to playing the games. I generally don't care about things being spoiled for me if I know I'm not going to get around to playing or watching them in the foreseeable future.

 

[SilverUchiha]

I wonder if Jim is going to give that Alien game a raspberry award

I'm looking forward to next week when he does his top ten shit games of 2013 (assuming he does repeats what he did last year). That was probably my favorite part of the his award show. But if he does bring that game up at all, that'll likely be where we see it... along with Final Fantasy: All the Bravest.

 

[the_retro_gamer]

The first hour of bioshock infinite was fantastic and set up the world very nicely however the game for me went down hill from there. I did not find the plot to as gripping as most people said it was, and I found the plot was very unfocused. Though in my opinion, half way in I found that the plot was completely dropped and only came back at the end of the game. I really tried to love bioshock infinite but only left me feeling it was just another mediocre experience.

 

[Pebkio]

I am well documented for disliking Bioshock Infinite the first week it was out. I bought it on day one... I preordered it way early. Thst is why I have to disagree with your "obligatory popular game backlash" thing. I think everyone was blinded by the shiney from when it was new and your "obligatory popular game backlash" was just being being able to finally clear their heads.

Sure, there were always going to be people who liked it... but there were far too many for what kind of story it was, how it was presented and, of course, the bland Halo-esque gameplay.

When I wrote a small review for it (not on the Escapist so I won't plug the link) I brought up that I really liked the riding on a rail thing. But everything else bugged me: the two weapon limit; the copy-paste guns; the sniper rifle was unbalanced. Even the powers are all designed with gunning in mind when the first two bioshocks let you focus on plasmids as an alternative.

As for the story, it's balls. There was a clear case of an M. Night Shyamalan type of setup, with simplistic concepts presented in the most convoluted way. There was even that "what a twist!" moment. And it was presented in that exact way. One of the worst examples of story-telling I've ever seen in a game outside of JRPGs. THEY HAVE YOU WALK THROUGH HALF AN HOUR OF EXPOSITION! No gameplay, no puzzle solving, just you and a physical manifestation of "explaining shit". They, in fact, leave a lot of the information you get throughout the gameplay completely on the ambiguous side to make the non-game part more poignant.

And the story isn't even that good. Buckaroo Bonzai and the Convolution from the Fifth Dimension! The whole thing centers around a Deus Ex Machina pair of siblings causing the whole thing to happen to no reason in the first place. A small spoiler, but they COULD'VE tried to explain why Miss Lutece felt she had to get so involved and all they did was demonstrate how dedicated she was to the meddling.

Sure, you can say that it's the best narrative-driven FPS in 2013... but that's not saying a whole hell of a lot.

And yeah, there's no Ludonarrative Dissonance... I just think that people are trying to define why they didn't like this game. What'd I'd like to see is Jim STOP obsessing on the people who are obviously wrong and START addressing the actually relevant complaints about the game.

---

Basically, I don't think the game got ENOUGH hate when it first came out. Everyone is overreacting to the hate it's now getting because they saw too much love at first.

 

[Shjade]

My only problem with Bioshock Infinite was that the combat was actually kind of boring. The weapons were your standard affair of pistol, machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher and sniper rifle, and they took away all the fun mods that existed in the previous games. The Vigor's were cool in theory, but the way they worked in game also felt kind of dull. If they'd kept the combo traps from Bioshock 2, then they may have been more fun.

The combat wasn't terrible, but it felt significantly weaker than the rest of it. Making preparations to fight Big Daddies was great fun in the previous two, and setting up a defensive area in Bioshock 2 was also a joy. In Infinite it felt like a standard shooter.

I'd more or less agree with this, with my biggest annoyance being the whole only holding 2 weapons at a time thing, especially considering how random and scarce various types of ammo were. Just irritating.

Visually it's pretty stellar, the voice acting is excellent, pretty much everything to do with its overall aesthetic is great.

Story-wise...well. I suppose I should probably spoiler this bit even if I'm not going to get really specific.

Spoiler

Two things, one minor, one not as minor. The minor thing: a little less than half an hour into my first playthrough, I mentioned to some folks in an online hangout I frequent something to the effect of, "If he turns out to be her father I'm going to be pissed." Welp. Not that that's necessarily bad writing, but when key points of your ending are that predictable that early into the story...it's not ideal.

The not as minor thing: the ending. I'm not going to say it's the worst ending in the history of video games or demand it be changed or blah blah blah Mass Effect 3 nerdrage, but from a writing standpoint, it just felt wrong. As in poorly executed. It was left hanging at a poorly chosen point. It wasn't just the lack of immediate resolution, it was the combination of both a lack of any kind of concrete resolution and the way in which it implies that, really, nothing you did through most of the game mattered anyway. Not going to get into the whole rant here, suffice it to say I found it to be far below par compared with most of what had led up to it. It was so close to being excellent and they just sort of fumbled things right at the end where even a small addition could have made it whole. Was extremely disappointing in the way it somewhat soured the rest of the experience.

This is just the analytical writer side of me getting bothered; I doubt it was as offputting to most people, and it's certainly still a good game. I don't think I'd go as far as game of the year, though. Probably not even in my top 5, but I'd have to look back at my list to check on which games were actually released this year. It's not something I tend to track.