Zero Punctuation: BioShock: Infinite
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I'd imagine Songbird is supposed to be the game's "Big Daddy" considering his role and his origins. Plus mechanically, they look similar.RTR said:
think of it this way:Marik Bentusi said:
elizabeth drowns any booker that takes the baptism, and any bookers that refuse it go on to live a happy and full life.
because of this elizabeth and our bookers never existed, but if elizabeth never existed then how does she drown comstock? because if the choice is made in the past again and comstock is created, the events of the game start all over again, resulting in all the comstocks dying and retroactively never existing to start with, she's made her own existence a failsafe to stop any more comstocks from being made or ever have been made. (hence the "infinite" part of the title, the game happens an infinite number of times because we need to keep erasing (or keep erased) the timelines whenever comstock does survive)
it's a sort of predestination paradox in that when that reality is created, it also creates the method of preventing its own creation
since no universe now contains a successful baptism, all bookers live out the rest of their lives normally, and ours gets paradox'd back to his office with the memories of the game, making him ask "anna, is that you?"
because of this elizabeth and our bookers never existed, but if elizabeth never existed then how does she drown comstock? because if the choice is made in the past again and comstock is created, the events of the game start all over again, resulting in all the comstocks dying and retroactively never existing to start with, she's made her own existence a failsafe to stop any more comstocks from being made or ever have been made. (hence the "infinite" part of the title, the game happens an infinite number of times because we need to keep erasing (or keep erased) the timelines whenever comstock does survive)
it's a sort of predestination paradox in that when that reality is created, it also creates the method of preventing its own creation
since no universe now contains a successful baptism, all bookers live out the rest of their lives normally, and ours gets paradox'd back to his office with the memories of the game, making him ask "anna, is that you?"
now if you've been excusing me, I'll need to have been sitting down to get my sense of time back in order
There's only one bit I flat out disagree with in this review: The party.
It might seem like we're the party and shit is getting messy because of us, but that's a lie. The place starts out all fine and ends with you walking out of the rubble... and that's only because you teleported into the rubble after everyone else had gone. You actually aren't there when shit gets messy, you just kinda walked into a world in which shit was already messy... from a world in which shit couldn't get messy. In fact, you get a statement explaining that the only messy shit the other you contributed before dying was to burn a building down. Then, afterwards, you keep showing up to areas where there was just a party not five minutes ago, but most party-goers are gone now and you're left dealing with the angry ones that stayed behind to clean up.
Otherwise, yeah, the rest of what he said was true.
It might seem like we're the party and shit is getting messy because of us, but that's a lie. The place starts out all fine and ends with you walking out of the rubble... and that's only because you teleported into the rubble after everyone else had gone. You actually aren't there when shit gets messy, you just kinda walked into a world in which shit was already messy... from a world in which shit couldn't get messy. In fact, you get a statement explaining that the only messy shit the other you contributed before dying was to burn a building down. Then, afterwards, you keep showing up to areas where there was just a party not five minutes ago, but most party-goers are gone now and you're left dealing with the angry ones that stayed behind to clean up.
Otherwise, yeah, the rest of what he said was true.
"The Gayest Quartet in Columbia" were first seen singing God Only Knows, a song that, according to Tv Tropes, was released in 1966. If you've gotten to the last third of the game, you'll know why this is significant.uchytjes said:
There was a forced stealth section? Wow, it was pretty terribly enforced as I completely missed it. What bit was it?Parakeettheprawn said:
That Guy Ya Know said:
The asylum level where there are those guys wearing the big helmets and the little guys running around wearing Jefferson, Washington and Franklin masks. The helmet wearing guys can't be killed and you are supposed to sneak past them so that they don't sick the masked weirdos on you.
Did you watch the trailer with the Boys of Silence and how they were hyped up to be "heavy hitters" or something like that? Turns out they're only in one part of the game.That Guy Ya Know said:
They were those weird guys in 1984's Comstock House who would sic the people wearing masks when they saw you.
EDIT: Ninja'd
I see. Never realised you're meant to sneak past those guys I just killed them all, I was only on medium so I didn't have any trouble. Actually I found that section quite interesting as it was the only part of the game where I had to worry about ammo.
I'm sorry, I don't see the relevance. If this game, one of the most highly anticipated in recent years, had always-online DRM, don't you think some of the reviews would have mentioned it? You can rest safely knowing that Bioshock Infinite does not have an always-on DM requirement.1rock said:
I'm well aware that internet connections have variable reliability. Heck, my own connection is down more often than it should be. But taking 5 minutes to load Google? Something is very wrong there. That's not just a matter of an unreliable connection - that would be an indication that you're attempting to run Netscape Navigator on a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud MODEM.
That's just not credible. How are you posting on The Escapist, if that's the case? The Escapist's pages are far slower to load and less reliable than Google.
Again, Bioshock Infinite does not need to be online at all.
A new game to keep me away from Minecraft sounds good. The biggest question is, do you have such scarce ammo like in System Shock 2?
Yeah it was a bit forced, I still liked it better than going back to the shooting... but I'll take anything I can get from this game really. You'd think with the whole SONGBIRD theme they'd do a better job weaving song and music into your powers and interactions.... but no. It's relegated to tiny little pieces.Abandon4093 said:
Nope. Elizabeth will even throw you ammo when you need it. The only issue there is that you sometimes run low on ammo for the two guns you are carrying, while having plenty of ammo for other guns you don't have. But it's not a big deal.Hutzpah Chicken said:
Religious Nutter =/= Sense
I don't think you could have had a Religious figure and have him make any form of sense, beyond understand religious fervor, to which I'd have to wrap myself up in a straight jacket to understand religious doctrine.
I don't think you could have had a Religious figure and have him make any form of sense, beyond understand religious fervor, to which I'd have to wrap myself up in a straight jacket to understand religious doctrine.
As so often, well put Yahtzee!
Infinite IS a butt, with partially shit-covered walls, but still cozy and better than most other butts.
I never said i wouldn't like it (even in another thread about the topic where i already pointed out many things i found flawed within the game), but i also stick to my statement, that it is overrated by most "famous" reviewers (though cozy, it definetly isn't a "perfect", 10/10 butt) and therefore Yahtzee's review is, including all sarcasm and nitpicking about it, in fact the best "major review" i've seen so far.
And because the shiny things inside this butt you can talk about are which make me even more interested in this type of game, i wanna discuss some of them some more
.
Minor spoilers ahead, when there come major spoilers, i'll mark them.
First, the Vigor thing.
However, for me, that doesn't make it really better in this case. I think it is one of those little fan-services they implemented in the game, or maybe they were a bit to lazy and thought "so, how do we explain the Vigors now? - Whatever, just make some relation to Rapture and we're good to go".
Now, why wouldn't i like this explanaition? Well, nothing against fan-service, but i find it out of place, when it messes to much with the consistency of the material itself, which this point does in my opinion (also the reason i sometimes find it hard to feel good about some reboots/ spinoffs, but that's another thing)! First, Fink is a techician and a marketeer, being the reason i would buy, that he was adopting/ stealing some of the technology from Rapture, but the Plasmids are on a very different level! They have nothing to do with "technology", but are obviously bio-genetic augmentations, which in Rapture are first developed through the discovery of the deep-sea slug, which itself produced actual [a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid] plasmids[/a], and which were later implemented in the Little Sisters simply to increase productivity, being the only way to be able to supply Rapture with what most of it's citizens were longing for by then. So my questions i haven't found answered yet would be: How would Fink be capable of reproducing this biologic "miracle" in the first place? He doesn't have the expertise, noone else is mentioned who could have (the Luteces are prodigies in physics, but not bio-genetics), also, where are all the sea slugs or Little Sisters producing this stuff? Or are there some sort of sky slugs, which produce the salts? Or does he just scramble up bird poo and makes it into salts? How is he able to deal with the high addiction and mutation problems which were part of Raptures downfall (and while the uncontrolled mutations seemed to have kicked in rather late, when splicing wasn't monitored anymore, it is described that addiction and resulting psychical instability appeared rather early on some subjects consuming ADAM). Correct me, if i've missed it, but all this is left open, leaving me with the impression that the game's nerrative is loose at some points where for example Bioshock was rather well constructed and it makes me feel like it would just say "you have superpowers now, some enemies have them as well, others don't, that's just how this game works, now move along please".
Also some of the Vigors themselves bother me: Where the Plasmids were mainly mutating the body, giving it bio-chemical properties or enhanced psychic abilities (throwing blobs of chemicals at enemies to confuse them, go all crazy with telecinesis or in Bioshock 2, scout areas with mental self projection, which i found rather awesome), i just don't get how some of the Vigors would function. Maybe i didn't pay enough attention within the game - shame on me if i didn't - but what does Bucking Bronco do exactly? Psychic powers maybe? But then, why can't i use them as it was possible in Bioshock and why do i have to use another Vigor (Undertow) to do the cool push and pull tricks, while this appears to work very differently and is presented very late in the game. Messing with gravity in some way? Possible, would work with the physic-theories presented throughout the game, but how would Fink be able to make this into a bio-genetic enhancement? What would hinder me from just jumping of the city and safely land on the surface again (while i also like the idea of a bedsheat parashute XD), or bring down the whole city to do so? And that Possession Vigor was just meh: Sure, "charming" other humans psychically or even chemically is possible, but you can't "charm" machines, which even is it's primary function - and that "specter woman" animation doesn't make it better! Sure, it makes combat much more fluent, but is even less logical than the plumbing mini-game presented in Bioshock, other than being some form of "technomancy", which is basically "magic" and in my opinion not comparable to what is presented in this series.
Weeell... so much about the Vigors for me. Of course you could explain all this with the whole multidimension-kazoo, but then again, you could rather mindlessly explain EVERYTHING within the game through this, which i find rather boring.If any of you has other suggestions or knows something from the game i don't, please tell me, but i better move on to my next point now
Another thing is BioShock 2 and no, Yahtzee, i'm not getting out now.
Because Infinite is much, much closer to BioShock 2 than it is to BioShock and you know it!
Starting with the similarities in the story:
The respective city is now in the control of a "religious zealot" (Comstock for Columbia and Sofia Lamb for Rapture - oh, look at that name, another Lamb!) who in their own ways want to change the entire world, with the help of a single girl (Elizabeth purging the surface for Columbia and Eleanor "transcending" the Rapture Family and possibly the whole world for Rapture), which then has to be taken care of by the respective protagonis who functions as a "protector", but ends up resolving the whole thing and even protecting the "protector" by herself. Ohohohow isn't that obvious?!
And just as mentioned about the differences from Comstock to Ryan, i find Sophia Lamb a much better antagonist than Comstock, pretty much as good as Ryan himself!
And now for (kinda) bigger
Furthermore i think BioShock2 is actually a good sequel to BioShock, considerring it more or less shows many of the premises presented in BioShock from the exact opposite point of view, which is rather nice narration. Of course, if you don't like the philosophy presented in BioShock2 in general, the game is not for you, just as BioShock is not for you if you don't like to think about Rand's Objectivism and the "laissez-faire" mantality presented in the game, or Infinite is probably not for you if you dislike quantum- and multidimensional-theories. However, gameplay-wise BioShock 2 was also not very different from BioShock itself, some things where improved (i found the version of hacking much better than both those of BioShock and Infinite) some stayed as cool as they were in BioShock (Tonics and stuff, which made for some cool combos, but are now replaced with stupid randomized gear - bleh) while other things, for example the combat, was just as "bad" as it was in BioShock already and apart from some new features, like the sky-devices and combat related rifts still is kinda bad in Infinite - just in slighty different ways - again. Oh and before i forget it, look at the health/recource system as well: Full (up to "tot much") health and eve (as the Plasmid resource, similar to "salts") replenishers covered in BioShock, reduced (less then half the amount) in BioShock2 and now in Infinite, no more carriable replenishers, but a support who occasionaly gives you what you need. Just saying.
So if you, Yahtzee, or anyone else sharing this opinion
Because this analysis about Infinite:
Infinite IS a butt, with partially shit-covered walls, but still cozy and better than most other butts.
I never said i wouldn't like it (even in another thread about the topic where i already pointed out many things i found flawed within the game), but i also stick to my statement, that it is overrated by most "famous" reviewers (though cozy, it definetly isn't a "perfect", 10/10 butt) and therefore Yahtzee's review is, including all sarcasm and nitpicking about it, in fact the best "major review" i've seen so far.
And because the shiny things inside this butt you can talk about are which make me even more interested in this type of game, i wanna discuss some of them some more
.Minor spoilers ahead, when there come major spoilers, i'll mark them.
First, the Vigor thing.
Silk_Sk said:
R.Nevermore said:
Maybe i've skipped the respective Voxophone too, or maybe i got it but it was one of the few i found rather uninteresting and therefore can't remember that well (i do remember that some of Columbias techs & ideas were adopted from other dimensions, but wouldn't have known this specific detail about the Vigors).Jennacide said:
However, for me, that doesn't make it really better in this case. I think it is one of those little fan-services they implemented in the game, or maybe they were a bit to lazy and thought "so, how do we explain the Vigors now? - Whatever, just make some relation to Rapture and we're good to go".
Now, why wouldn't i like this explanaition? Well, nothing against fan-service, but i find it out of place, when it messes to much with the consistency of the material itself, which this point does in my opinion (also the reason i sometimes find it hard to feel good about some reboots/ spinoffs, but that's another thing)! First, Fink is a techician and a marketeer, being the reason i would buy, that he was adopting/ stealing some of the technology from Rapture, but the Plasmids are on a very different level! They have nothing to do with "technology", but are obviously bio-genetic augmentations, which in Rapture are first developed through the discovery of the deep-sea slug, which itself produced actual [a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid] plasmids[/a], and which were later implemented in the Little Sisters simply to increase productivity, being the only way to be able to supply Rapture with what most of it's citizens were longing for by then. So my questions i haven't found answered yet would be: How would Fink be capable of reproducing this biologic "miracle" in the first place? He doesn't have the expertise, noone else is mentioned who could have (the Luteces are prodigies in physics, but not bio-genetics), also, where are all the sea slugs or Little Sisters producing this stuff? Or are there some sort of sky slugs, which produce the salts? Or does he just scramble up bird poo and makes it into salts? How is he able to deal with the high addiction and mutation problems which were part of Raptures downfall (and while the uncontrolled mutations seemed to have kicked in rather late, when splicing wasn't monitored anymore, it is described that addiction and resulting psychical instability appeared rather early on some subjects consuming ADAM). Correct me, if i've missed it, but all this is left open, leaving me with the impression that the game's nerrative is loose at some points where for example Bioshock was rather well constructed and it makes me feel like it would just say "you have superpowers now, some enemies have them as well, others don't, that's just how this game works, now move along please".
Also some of the Vigors themselves bother me: Where the Plasmids were mainly mutating the body, giving it bio-chemical properties or enhanced psychic abilities (throwing blobs of chemicals at enemies to confuse them, go all crazy with telecinesis or in Bioshock 2, scout areas with mental self projection, which i found rather awesome), i just don't get how some of the Vigors would function. Maybe i didn't pay enough attention within the game - shame on me if i didn't - but what does Bucking Bronco do exactly? Psychic powers maybe? But then, why can't i use them as it was possible in Bioshock and why do i have to use another Vigor (Undertow) to do the cool push and pull tricks, while this appears to work very differently and is presented very late in the game. Messing with gravity in some way? Possible, would work with the physic-theories presented throughout the game, but how would Fink be able to make this into a bio-genetic enhancement? What would hinder me from just jumping of the city and safely land on the surface again (while i also like the idea of a bedsheat parashute XD), or bring down the whole city to do so? And that Possession Vigor was just meh: Sure, "charming" other humans psychically or even chemically is possible, but you can't "charm" machines, which even is it's primary function - and that "specter woman" animation doesn't make it better! Sure, it makes combat much more fluent, but is even less logical than the plumbing mini-game presented in Bioshock, other than being some form of "technomancy", which is basically "magic" and in my opinion not comparable to what is presented in this series.
Weeell... so much about the Vigors for me. Of course you could explain all this with the whole multidimension-kazoo, but then again, you could rather mindlessly explain EVERYTHING within the game through this, which i find rather boring.If any of you has other suggestions or knows something from the game i don't, please tell me, but i better move on to my next point now
Another thing is BioShock 2 and no, Yahtzee, i'm not getting out now.
Because Infinite is much, much closer to BioShock 2 than it is to BioShock and you know it!
Starting with the similarities in the story:
The respective city is now in the control of a "religious zealot" (Comstock for Columbia and Sofia Lamb for Rapture - oh, look at that name, another Lamb!) who in their own ways want to change the entire world, with the help of a single girl (Elizabeth purging the surface for Columbia and Eleanor "transcending" the Rapture Family and possibly the whole world for Rapture), which then has to be taken care of by the respective protagonis who functions as a "protector", but ends up resolving the whole thing and even protecting the "protector" by herself. Ohohohow isn't that obvious?!
And just as mentioned about the differences from Comstock to Ryan, i find Sophia Lamb a much better antagonist than Comstock, pretty much as good as Ryan himself!
And now for (kinda) bigger
While Comstock appeared to be nothing but a zealot, but otherwise just a kinda more dick-ish version of DeWitt, the only thing marking his background story was, that he got his baptism and then went all "now i'm hearing angels talk to me! we gotta destroy all the silly humans on the surface, because - ehm - because they aren't like we are, yes! And anyone who follows me shall survive and then live in the newly created world, while all others shall be crushed by my army of mindless followers... I AM THE PROPHET, hurpadur", or he simply saw what might be possible through the rifts and kinda just went for it or something like that.
While Sophia was just as articulate and intelligent as Ryan was and even out-talked him in some public discussions, as presented through the adio-logs in BioShock 2. You could call her a very well designed modern "theologist", merging her believes with the science (psychology) she practices, while those scientific qualities were the reasons she was invited into Rapture in the first place, contrary to Comstock, who is kinda "just there and pissed about everything". Her idea of (forced) transcendense by biologically merging the minds of a whole society through the use of Plasmids was very interresting to me when i played the game (and in a wicked way kinda still is), also considerring i'm studying philosophy and by that i already came in touch with this (transcendental philosophy) myself before playing the game. And, while her army also did not much more than mindlessly follow her, most of them were psychological wrecks she recruited when she was "treating" them.
As already mentioned, i think that is just as cool of a background-story as Ryan's is and a much, much better one than Comstock's
While Sophia was just as articulate and intelligent as Ryan was and even out-talked him in some public discussions, as presented through the adio-logs in BioShock 2. You could call her a very well designed modern "theologist", merging her believes with the science (psychology) she practices, while those scientific qualities were the reasons she was invited into Rapture in the first place, contrary to Comstock, who is kinda "just there and pissed about everything". Her idea of (forced) transcendense by biologically merging the minds of a whole society through the use of Plasmids was very interresting to me when i played the game (and in a wicked way kinda still is), also considerring i'm studying philosophy and by that i already came in touch with this (transcendental philosophy) myself before playing the game. And, while her army also did not much more than mindlessly follow her, most of them were psychological wrecks she recruited when she was "treating" them.
As already mentioned, i think that is just as cool of a background-story as Ryan's is and a much, much better one than Comstock's
So if you, Yahtzee, or anyone else sharing this opinion
would care to explain to me what exactly was so bad about BioShock 2, but wouldn't also count for the other BioShock titles, i would be very thankfull for that.V TheSystem V said:
Because this analysis about Infinite:
I find rather interesting, considering i've heard similar complaints from SystemShock fans about BioShock and now this, going from BioShock to Infinite. I for myself enjoyed every title in the series so far - apart from the flaws every title in it has - even tried some SystemShock 2 (not much for now), but in slightly different ways. Therefore if people are able to point out what exactly feels disappointing about the respective title compared to another, i can understand and respect it.1337mokro said: