Zero Punctuation: BioShock

John Funk

U.N. Owen Was Him?
Dec 20, 2005
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Gus_Smedstad said:
I know the point of the Zero Punctuation video reviews is absurdist humor, so there's not a lot of point in taking them seriously as reviews. Yet I can't help but see the contradictions between this and his column on Psychonauts.

In the Psychonauts review, he complains that gamers gave Psychonauts the shaft by not buying it, and that in doing so they struck a blow against unusual games with great writing and creative backgrounds. Games as art, he even says. The review even starts with a bit where he instructs you to hurt yourself with a pencil in punishment for not buying Psychonauts.

Then along comes Bioshock, an unusual game with great writing and a creative background. A game that is arguable "art." And he complains about it being popular and too easy.

It's quite true that if you strip away all the writing and the background and the art direction and look at the bare gameplay elements, Bioshock isn't a first tier game. It's a somewhat easy shooter with a few novelty bits like telekinesis. Though "somewhat easy" is a relative term, I found it challenging enough on Normal that I was never bored, and I did the usual nervous creeping about thing that's common to any first time playing through a shooter.

Both games are memorable for all the things about the setting, and it would be nice they were wrapped around an extraordinary game as well, like Deus Ex was. Yet between the two, it's much better to wrap such a setting around an average-to-good game that's not too difficult to play, rather than a tedious below-average game that's hideously frustrating in parts. Croshaw complains that Bioshock kicks you in the crotch, but in fact that is exactly what Bioshock does not do. And for that I am grateful.

- Gus
Well, like he says in the beginning--nobody likes him when he's being overly positive :p So he opted to focus on the negative qualities for the sake of humor.
 
Sep 10, 2007
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I just registered with the sole purpose of making this comment, in regard to people complaining about how easy the game is with all the respawning chambers around. Have some integrity and play the game without using it even a single time. What's stoping you from simply ignoring the respawn option and playing like it simply isn't there. Quicksave before every major battle and try to conserve health and ammo like you usually do in an FPS. Problem solved, everyone's happy.

Sorry if someone already posted a similar comment, to be honest i didn't have the patience to read through most of the 2nd page and the whole 3rd.
 

Lametta

New member
Sep 9, 2007
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Anyways just tried to view the bioshock zero punctuation vid on you tube..
If you click the vid thats the message you get:


This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party.

Seems like they cant handle criticism

P.s: Well i didnt use the vita chambers and still played the game through :>
 

Russ Pitts

The Boss of You
May 1, 2006
3,240
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Lametta said:
Anyways just tried to view the bioshock zero punctuation vid on you tube..
If you click the vid thats the message you get:


This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party.

Seems like they cant handle criticism
Actually, we can't handle people ripping our videos without asking permission ;)

You can still view the video in its original home, here at The Escapist, by following this link:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/1394-Zero-Punctuation-BioShock

And you can view all of Yahtzee's videos here:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation

We aim to please.
 

jilas

New member
Sep 5, 2007
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yahtzee i watch your video post on youtube (fable review) and after i watch the rest and each week i whait for the next. dont stop you are the best. from your number one french fan!!!!
 

cmdr_zoom

New member
Jul 17, 2007
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There's another demographic that likes easy gameplay, heavy on the atmosphere: aging gamers. I'm coming up on 40, and I no longer have the twitch reflexes to play some games on Medium, let alone Hard. (Having to step down to the easy difficulty on both Kingdom Hearts II and Viewtiful Joe was rather humbling; I still think the difficulty progression for the latter, Kids-Normal-Adults, should be reversed.)

I'm old enough to have played, beaten, and loved the floppy version of the first System Shock. (Don't think I ever finished the CD, though.) I gave SS2 a miss because, at the time, it was actually too creepy for me. Not having that problem yet with Bioshock, surprisingly enough; either the added years or the lack of worms must have helped. My lack of experience with SS2 probably makes this game seem less unoriginal, too. Good.

I accidentally spoiled myself about certain key plot elements, so at this point I'm just seeing how it all plays out. This isn't much different from how I'm used to playing classic Sierra/LucasArts adventures, with a walkthrough in my lap: as a multimedia experience, not a puzzle. So far, I haven't died once, but it's still early in the game, and I picked Easy difficulty despite having played shooters before, since I didn't know how punishing (or lenient) Bioshock would be until I actually got into it.

Yes, there are Vita-Chambers about every 20 yards; one wonders how anyone ever dies in Rapture. And yet, I point out to some of the complainers that all these really do is automate the quicksave/quickload process that so many shooter-players have become so habituated to that it's practically a reflex action. If the "serious" players are going to use the save/load feature to almost completely eliminate risk or waste of resources, why not put everyone on the same footing? I realize this leaves you with nothing for your twitchy trained fingers to do, but I can't really say I'm sorry. The only thing I might change is to make only one per level, so you have to jog farther and there are more opportunities for what the old Hacker's Guide to Sin refers to as "post-mortem confusion, which sometimes becomes pre-mortem confusion."

I don't like the lack of inventory and the use-it-or-lose-it health pickups. And yet, I note that both DOOM and Half Life (1), giants of the PC shooter genre, had the same system. So ***** if you like, but don't say it's a console thing.

Just a voice from the far end of the pool: not a console gamer who thinks that the FPS genre begins and ends with Halo, or a dilettante used to Minesweeper and Solitare, but a former serious PC gamer who just can't keep up anymore, and is glad he doesn't have to play with two fingers on the F5 and F8 keys.
 

Nanolathe

New member
Sep 6, 2007
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I note that both DOOM and Half Life (1), giants of the PC shooter genre, had the same system. So ***** if you like, but don't say it's a console thing.
... Games that were made in 1993 and 1998 respectively. God forbid that we should expect just a little more from a game made almost 10 years later!
 

RevolutionMan

New member
Sep 17, 2007
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Look, I see this argument all over this thread and I MUST get this out. You guys don't know what a casual gamer is.

By definition from the gaming industry, a casual gamer is someone who mainly plays a game like H alo for a minimum of 5-10 hours a week or more. A hardcore gamer is someone who still plays old games like Fallout and Deus Ex, and still heralds them as the best games ever.

Ask a beer drinking frat boy what Deus Ex is. Better yet, ask anyone with a 360 what Fallout is. I bet 10 percent TOPS knows what it is, and 5 percent of that has even played it or seen the discs.
 

Geoffrey42

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Aug 22, 2006
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RevolutionMan said:
By definition from the gaming industry
Care to provide a source?

If I were an industry, being profit oriented and all, I might classify people by the amount of money they spend, or the amount of time they invest in my products. But that's just me...
 

Firia

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Sep 17, 2007
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"I know what you're going to say; Yahtzee, you charismatic stallion--."
Puahahahaa! I did your humor!

I have to say, when I was playing Bio Shock at a friends place, I started to realise there was no penalty for dying, when a Big Daddy killed me while I was standing next to a respawn point, and I respawned, resumed the battle, died, and repeated the process again until Daddy died. I wondered, "So, what's the catch? I couldn't have done all that sans med kits without some sorta penalty to something." Nope, death is a new begining, and it's all good in the hood. :p

I love your humor. Keep it up!
 

RevolutionMan

New member
Sep 17, 2007
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Geoffrey42 said:
RevolutionMan said:
By definition from the gaming industry
Care to provide a source?

If I were an industry, being profit oriented and all, I might classify people by the amount of money they spend, or the amount of time they invest in my products. But that's just me...
The source would be some long lost reading material in XBM and in the archives of Gamespot. It was long ago when I read that, but I can tell you that the industry classifies customers in many ways. Casual and Hardcore by hours and popularity of the chosen games. Despite me knowing that they do demograph people by how much money the spend as well, I fail to understand that very thing. How can you call someone Hardcore if they spend 50-60 bucks every three days on a new game? That's just stupid, and almost none of the new games are even worth that much. That's not Hardcore.
 
Sep 19, 2007
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The piece about brutally ripping off fallout is so true. the game had such an eerie fallout feel to it that I half expected enclave soldiers to be behind everything and start popping out.

All in all, yes a great game, probably better than fallout 3 will be, but if this is best game of the year then our gaming industries truly need to kick it up a notch. Good review Yahtz.
 
Sep 11, 2007
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StewartAndColbertPwn said:
All in all, yes a great game, probably better than fallout 3 will be, but if this is best game of the year then our gaming industries truly need to kick it up a notch...
NMA Forum Member Spotted.

Also, he was joking. This game is awesome. It and a few other noteworthy games of the past decade have pulled gaming ever closer to being a true 'art' form. Describing it as a 'great game' and then saying that everyone should be ashamed of it is really, really stupid.

So, yeah, I hope it does become game of the year and you choke to death on your own negativity.
 

RevolutionMan

New member
Sep 17, 2007
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Phantom Planet Is Missing said:
StewartAndColbertPwn said:
All in all, yes a great game, probably better than fallout 3 will be, but if this is best game of the year then our gaming industries truly need to kick it up a notch...
NMA Forum Member Spotted.

Also, he was joking. This game is awesome. It and a few other noteworthy games of the past decade have pulled gaming ever closer to being a true 'art' form. Describing it as a 'great game' and then saying that everyone should be ashamed of it is really, really stupid.

So, yeah, I hope it does become game of the year and you choke to death on your own negativity.
Art was never fun. I never found the Mona Lisa entertaining. It's nice to look at, and games should be nice to look at. But if it's supposed to be ART instead of a GAME, then I'll start looking elsewhere to burn time. Bioshock is just one more tool that perpetuates the "beer drinking frat boy demographic" as Yahtzee put it. It has crazy mad awesome graphics and people jump all over the band wagon. But it's really not fun or challenging. If the game included a mechanic that allows me to spawn a few paces away from where I died, I'm going to use it because the devs intended it to be used. I'm going to play their game; I shouldn't have to modify what I do to make it challenging because they want to pander to some console assholes.

And for the record, I'm not an NMA member as that other guy might be, but I feel the same way about Fallout 3. I have an emotional attachment to those games and Bethesda is making it into something it CAN'T be. They're just too stupid to realize it. And unfortunately, so is everyone else.
 

Redfeather

New member
Sep 18, 2007
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RevolutionMan said:
Geoffrey42 said:
RevolutionMan said:
By definition from the gaming industry
Care to provide a source?

If I were an industry, being profit oriented and all, I might classify people by the amount of money they spend, or the amount of time they invest in my products. But that's just me...
The source would be some long lost reading material in XBM and in the archives of Gamespot. It was long ago when I read that, but I can tell you that the industry classifies customers in many ways. Casual and Hardcore by hours and popularity of the chosen games. Despite me knowing that they do demograph people by how much money the spend as well, I fail to understand that very thing. How can you call someone Hardcore if they spend 50-60 bucks every three days on a new game? That's just stupid, and almost none of the new games are even worth that much. That's not Hardcore.
Sorry you're begging the question [http://begthequestion.info/] there. You might share that opinion [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion], but it's hardly the authoritative, industry-wide accepted definition handed down by the gaming gods from on high...or anything.
 

ZippyDSMlee

New member
Sep 1, 2007
3,959
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cmdr_zoom said:
There's another demographic that likes easy gameplay, heavy on the atmosphere: aging gamers. I'm coming up on 40, and I no longer have the twitch reflexes to play some games on Medium, let alone Hard. (Having to step down to the easy difficulty on both Kingdom Hearts II and Viewtiful Joe was rather humbling; I still think the difficulty progression for the latter, Kids-Normal-Adults, should be reversed.)

I'm old enough to have played, beaten, and loved the floppy version of the first System Shock. (Don't think I ever finished the CD, though.) I gave SS2 a miss because, at the time, it was actually too creepy for me. Not having that problem yet with Bioshock, surprisingly enough; either the added years or the lack of worms must have helped. My lack of experience with SS2 probably makes this game seem less unoriginal, too. Good.

I accidentally spoiled myself about certain key plot elements, so at this point I'm just seeing how it all plays out. This isn't much different from how I'm used to playing classic Sierra/LucasArts adventures, with a walkthrough in my lap: as a multimedia experience, not a puzzle. So far, I haven't died once, but it's still early in the game, and I picked Easy difficulty despite having played shooters before, since I didn't know how punishing (or lenient) Bioshock would be until I actually got into it.

Yes, there are Vita-Chambers about every 20 yards; one wonders how anyone ever dies in Rapture. And yet, I point out to some of the complainers that all these really do is automate the quicksave/quickload process that so many shooter-players have become so habituated to that it's practically a reflex action. If the "serious" players are going to use the save/load feature to almost completely eliminate risk or waste of resources, why not put everyone on the same footing? I realize this leaves you with nothing for your twitchy trained fingers to do, but I can't really say I'm sorry. The only thing I might change is to make only one per level, so you have to jog farther and there are more opportunities for what the old Hacker's Guide to Sin refers to as "post-mortem confusion, which sometimes becomes pre-mortem confusion."

I don't like the lack of inventory and the use-it-or-lose-it health pickups. And yet, I note that both DOOM and Half Life (1), giants of the PC shooter genre, had the same system. So ***** if you like, but don't say it's a console thing.

Just a voice from the far end of the pool: not a console gamer who thinks that the FPS genre begins and ends with Halo, or a dilettante used to Minesweeper and Solitare, but a former serious PC gamer who just can't keep up anymore, and is glad he doesn't have to play with two fingers on the F5 and F8 keys.
Thats why theres a easy and hard mode,but to take what should have been a great game re'in'vent it for consoles and then poorly port it to the PC ontop of it...
-----------------------------
RevolutionMan
they a re going in the wrong direction for FO3 they need to make a huge game not a 20 hour RPG lite fest, if they can pull off the game play it should make for "half" a FO game, if not tis just another raped IP that hollywood mistreated again....oh wait I meant "the industry"....