Horror games are great and all that, but what about games that make you the monster? Yeah. Chew on that for a second.
I'm not just talking about games that belong to the horror genre, either. In fact, spare those asymmetrical multiplayer games that are all the rage with their worryingly young audiences, there are few actual horror games that let you assume the role of the villain. But that doesn't mean there isn't a deluge of titles where you play as a creature so vile, so menacing, that the residents of their worlds undoubtly view the player as evil incarnate. Far from it. The games on this list may not all be spooky in tone, but your character is still the stuff of actual nightmares.
]]>Streaming giants Netflix have a BioShock movie to make and, after pointing their golf club at various directors, they’ve selected Francis Lawrence. He’s best known for overseeing three of The Hunger Games movies and is working on the prequel coming out next year, The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes.
Netflix have also hired screenwriter Michael Green for the BioShock flick. Green wrote the Kenneth Branagh versions of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile. I guess that means he’s got experience of period settings.
]]>Earlier this month, RPS turned 15 years old, so it only seemed right that this month's Time Capsule entry should be the year of our birth: 2007. Looking back, it was a good year for PC gaming, with the release of Valve's Orange Box alone giving us three new stone-cold classics to enjoy. But what other games from the year of our Horace deserve to be preserved and saved above everything else? Find out which games made the cut below.
]]>BioShock: The Collection is the latest freebie on the Epic Games Store. Grab it anytime between now and June 2nd and BioShocks 1, 2 and Infinite are free to keep forever, including all the add-ons such as Minerva's Den and Burial At Sea.
]]>Netflix has announced a partnership with Take-Two Interactive to produce a BioShock movie. No writer or director is attached to the project, but it's the latest in several attempts to turn the 2007 first-person shooter into a big budget movie.
]]>Jingle that pointless metal money over here, little human. You need a place to put all that ridiculous cash, and I know just the thing. Vending machines. They are like regular shops except imagine your Mars bar didn't leave the shop assistant's hand and you had to slap their arm to loosen it free and afterwards they just smiled at you as if nothing was amiss with vacant eyes like two pilot lights and a tin voice like someone speaking through an office intercom which suddenly erupts with high decibel hatred: "WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS OF VALUE".
Here are the 9 best vending machines in PC games. Have a good day.
]]>If it's not baroque, don't fix it. Little architecture joke for you there, just to kick off a dry topic with a giggle. You see, appreciating architecture is for people in beige cardigans. Folks who subscribe to magazines printed on paper so thick you can still calculate the tree’s age. You know the type I mean. Spectacled couples with non-Ikea coffee tables. Thirty-year-olds. People like you! Here are 11 examples of very satisfying architecture in PC games.
]]>I have spent the winter holidays making a list, checking it twice, trying to find who is naughty on ice. But unlike the popular red-clad demon of the north, my list is reserved for terrors, demons and critters larger than 4 feet tall. I’m talking about cold monsters. They’re very chic this week. You see, while Nic has been battering majestic species of endangered giganto-moose in our Monster Hunter World: Iceborne review, I have been working hard to catalogue the frostiest freaks this side of video gaming. Here you go, the 8 coldest monsters in PC games.
]]>There are only five days left to furtively flick through your cousin’s Facebook page in a desperate attempt to understand them as a person. But you do know one thing: they love to play those videogames. That’s enough to go on, surely. You can just type “gamer gifts” into the cybervoid and see what comes out!
No. Do not do that.
Here are the 8 worst gifts for PC gamers, and if any other list goblin tells you otherwise they are a scurrilous crook and they want your money.
]]>What is the true hallmark of a BioShock game? According to the press release about the new 2K-founded studio Cloud Chamber, wot is making a brand new BioShock, it's "iconic, first-person shooter gameplay". Before Binfinite came out, original series lead Ken Levine said in an interview that it's the "incredibly detailed world" each game lets you explore. Or maybe it's the PoLiTiCs? BioShock, famously, includes a pretty basic critique of the wet fart that is Objectivism, causing people either to argue it was a searing work of political genius, or be furious that it wasn't a work of searing political genius. Perhaps it's the settings? BioShock and BioShock 2 were set in an underwater city, and Infinite was set in a floating one. I can only assume the new one will just be about a normal city. But run on centrist principles. The most dystopian system of them all!
But of course, none of these things are really the hallmark of a BioShock game. What truly makes the series stand out is that you can shoot flying animals out of your hand, because of DNA. And I think we all know what that animal should be used as ammunition in the new BioShock.
]]>Pretty pop-philosophy FPS series BioShock is to return, 2K announced today, with a new game coming from a new studio. 2K don't reveal even the name of the new game, let alone in which sort of strange city it'll (surely?) be set, but it's official: BioShock is back, baby. 2K have muttered about resurrecting it several times in the years since the release of BioShock Infinite and demise of creators Irrational Games, and this time it seems to be real. The new BioShock is being made by Cloud Chamber, a new studio who'll be working on the game "for the next several years." Don't hold your breath. Unless you're underwater. In which case, do.
]]>Minigames are the coffee Revel of videogames. They are harmless, infrequent and unpleasant to think about. We accept their presence, yet no one has ever eaten a pack of Revels and wished for more coffee nuggets. Nobody completed Final Fantasy X and thought: “Needs more Blitzball”. That minigames exist as a mild distraction inside the glowing guts of other games is itself ridiculous. Imagine you were on a golf course, and hole 12 turned out to be its own 8-hole pitch ‘n’ putt. “This is stupid,” you’d think, and then you would play pitch ‘n’ putt for the rest of the day in a mindless stupor.
Here are the 7 most gratuitous minigames - but do they all deserve to be here?
]]>In Vectorpark’s Sandcastles, you build fantastic towers and watch the waves erase your work every 10 seconds. It’s a very direct metaphor for the global climate crisis that threatens to flood coastal cities and exacerbate natural disasters. Sandcastles confronts us with our totally predictable watery doom, but we also find fun and expression in our totally foreseeable destruction. When the planet dies, at least we’ll be entertained.
Before you commit to starving and drowning, you should probably understand how and why it’ll happen. To imagine this nightmarish hellworld, readers can flip through climate fiction novels (“cli-fi”) and movie-goers can watch a big unprofitable climate disaster blockbuster every few years. But us mouse-clickers, we obviously don’t read books or watch movies. Instead, we play with climate. Behold, the climate crisis game.
]]>I say “watch” because this week's podcast takes place in a real room in front of a real audience (don’t worry, there’s an audio version too). At Rezzed in London this month, we thought it’d be fun to re-enact three of the most memorable scenes of PC gaming, exactly as you remember them. So strap on your eye-wideners and prepare for some wonderful acting. Including a 100% faithful adaptation of the most notorious moment in any Final Fantasy game: the death of... Aerosmith?
Alice! Alice, what have you done to these scripts!?
]]>Cyber Monday is, of course, a pure and honest celebration of all things cyber. We hack the planet as one, united against corporations, capitalism and the class divide. Then we all burn our 4K televisions and go off to have a massive rave-orgy in an abandoned sewer. Such is the way of the Cyber Monday Warrior.
But it's not all talking in C++ and overthrowing distant tyranny. Cyber Monday is also a time to remember the sacrifices made in the name of the hacking. None of these are quite so tragic as otherwise great games laid low by poorly-judged hacking minigames, forcibly inserted by executive pressure to pad out the running time. Today, let us honour the fallen.
]]>Then the bus EXPLODED. Hello, this is the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, and we are here to talk about the best game openings and intros. Whether they are cold opens or slow burns, we love a good first impression.
]]>For a series built around the deconstruction of Aryan bodies, it’s taken a long time for players to take the hint that Wolfenstein’s ubermensch William Blazkowicz is Jewish.
That hesitation betrays our definitions of Jewish identity as old-fashioned, and also reflects that the few prominent Jewish characters in games play into and reinforce stereotypes. While Blazkowicz is the most high profile character to break the mold, what does it say about games that the most diverse representation of a Jew we’ve seen is simply whiter than most?
]]>After Irrational Games was dismantled in 2014, the future of the Bioshock IP was left twisting in the wind. It certainly wasn't going to fall on former studio head Ken Levine, as he departed to run a smaller studio called Ghost Story Games which would have nothing near the production scale required to take on a new time-period magic-potion exercise in the violence of political ideologies and/or golf. But as part of a much larger 2K expose written this week over at Kotaku, it appears news has leaked regarding a Bioshock title in development at a super secret 2K studio. Or at least, you know, previously super secret.
]]>Cults in games have a long, proud tradition of getting to go full wackadoo. Mostly, they're a really nice device to lean on, especially in a game where you want to fill the world with collectibles and audio logs and you need some narrative to build that space. Also, they're pretty easy in that, if you don't give a flip about collectibles, you can generally parse that cults are evil and cultists deserve to die. I may have learned a few things about that the hard way this year. That said, Far Cry 5 releases this week and focuses on a cult in America that uses religion and being pretty crap people in general to take over an entire state. In preparation, we look back at some of the wackier cults to be featured in games' proud lineage of brainwashing.
]]>The game trailer is a sly creature. It wants to entertain you, to excite you, to embolden you with curiousity. But it also wants to sell you a bunch of code wrapped up in some 3D shapes. Some trailers turn out to be more artful than the game they’re hawking, others plant sneaky emotions in your head with music. However, some are better than others. Here are the best conflagrations of light and noise in PC gaming.
]]>When we meet the creators of fictional worlds, we often want to kill them. Whether its Bioshock's Andrew Ryan and his deadly Rapture, GlaDOS and the sadistic test chambers of Portal, or Kirin Jindosh and the Clockwork Mansion. The urge to destroy these builders is partly down to the nature of their constructions - deathtraps and mazes that make the architect a cruel overseer - but there is perhaps more to it than that. With spoilers for the above, Hazel Monforton investigates the role (and the death) of the author in a medium that invites the audience into the action.
]]>BioShock is ten years old! The first-person shooter set in the underwater city of Rapture was released on August 21, 2007 in North America (and on the 24th elsewhere), and I've been digging through RPS's archives for the things we wrote about the game upon its release.
]]>With the announcement of City Of Brass [official site] today, I was intrigued to learn what this group of Irrational veterans - key players on so many well-loved games like SWAT 4, Tribes: Vengeance, Freedom Force and of course, BioShock - had planned for their first-person Arabian Nights-themed roguelite. I got in touch with team lead Ed Orman to find out more about how Uppercut Games formed, and how their experience on so many big games plays a part in creating something quite so different.
]]>When a collection of former Irrational devs, who worked on BioShock, Freedom Force, Tribes: Vengeance and more, tell you they've got a first-person roguelite for you to play, it's well worth paying attention. City Of Brass [official site] is an Arabian Nights-themed procedurally generated FPS, arming you with a whip and a scimitar, and challenging you to see just how far you can get through its permadeath streets. The first footage and more details lie below.
]]>There's always a lighthouse, there's always a man, there's always a GOOOOAAAALLLL!
Perhaps misunderstanding the phrase "back of the net", Rocket League [official site] developers Psyonix have announced an oceanic haul for their bumper-to-ball sports 'em up. Next month will bring a free carfootie pitch set in a BioShock-ish undersea sportworld, named AquaDome. I always thought Andrew Ryan was more into golf (or golf was in him) but here we go. Two submersible-ish cars are coming as paid DLC too.
]]>BioShock: The Collection [official site] on PC is good-lookin' but, it's fair to say, A Bit Dicky, pulling off the impressively bungled trick of both recreating some of BioShock's original issues and throwing a clutch of new ones into the mix too. Take yer pick from enforced mouse-smoothing, no 5.1 sound, messed-up 21:9 support, limited FOV, no graphics settings outside of antialiasing, anistropic filtering, resolution, vysnc and a clutch of crashes. Many of these, though not the crashes, can be resolved via ini file editing (a guide to that is here), but in this, the third consecutive Year Of Luigi, we should not be expected to dirty our hands so.
The good news is that 2K are planning to grab a five-iron and bludgeon most of the major problems into submission. The bad news is that it doesn't look like we can expect a full settings menu any time soon.
]]>Almost ten years after our first trip to Rapture, the BioShock trilogy has been re-released and (in some cases) remastered. The Collection [official site] looks lovely but it's far from perfect.
Today, we're looking back though - a lot has happened since the first game’s arrival, including the departure of director Ken Levine from the studio that made two of the three games, and a resurgence of the first-person immersive sim as a genre. Here, we consider all things Bioshock and decide, among other things, which of the games is actually the best.
]]>Almost ten years after we first daddied and kindlied and golfed, BioShock has today returned in an apparently fancy-panted remastered version, aka Bioshock: The Collection [official site]. Sadly it’s not in the best of shape, in terms of what we PC folk tend to demand from our settings menus and whatnot, but perhaps a more overriding question is but how does it look?
I shall show you, in thirty different ways. A few thoughts of my own just beneath the cut too.
]]>Bioshock: The Collection [official site] is out today (and free to owners of the originals), which from a PC point of view is most exciting because it gives a big old spit'n'polish to the first two games in the series (Infinite is unaffected on PC, being relatively contemporaneous as it is). Unfortunately it seems that BioShock 1 Remastered particularly has not been as well-loved on PC as it perhaps should have been. It has only the barest-boned of graphical settings, it's saddled with particularly nasty mouse-smoothing that can only be turned off via ini file hacking, and there are various minor screwy graphical boo-boos too. History is repeating itself: remember the FOV and DRM drama of 2007?
Details - and some fixes - below.
]]>Bioshock: The Collection [official site] is out next week, and as such you'll be able to play the first two Bioshock games and all of the single-player DLC in renewed detail. Bioshock Infinite is thrown in there for good measure, but it already looks so pretty on PC they're leaving it as is. 2K Games also plan to give the updated versions free to people who own the originals. How? What's the catch? I checked, and it turns out it is surprisingly painless. Read on!
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I know that sounds like asking "have you eaten bread?" or "ever had a crush?", but Have You Played's purpose is far more to inspire discussion after the fact, or prompt a replay, than it is as a buyer's guide for someone with an empty gaming plate.
]]>I've got two VR headsets in my inappropriately small home, and I spend more time feeling guilty that I'm not using them than I do using them. Conceptually I love the tech, and I sporadically have a fine time with 'experiences' - i.e. virtual tourism to real or made-up places - when it comes to games-games I'm yet to get all that much out of it. But what about non-VR games rendered after-the-fact in VR? Could this be the full-fat virtual reality gaming I'd imagined when these headsets were first announced?
]]>So I can't play the original BioShock because I can't deal with injections at all. I played Binfinite, though, and that was better, although I think some of the DLC is perhaps not my cup of tea in terms of icky moments. That's why I'm now watching the BioShock: The Collection Remastered [official site] trailer through my fingers, ready to cover my eyes at any moment should a needle make a sudden appearance:
]]>"Day 4. I've looked everywhere, but I can't find anything to eat or a clue to get me off the ship. Just... more audiologs! They're everywhere! For some reason I keep listening to every minute of every one thinking there'll be some useful information but... they're just filler! Filler that's driving me to madness!" - South Park: The Stick Of Truth
It's hard to argue. They're kinda dumb. But I'm still fond of this stupid little trope.
]]>Suddenly, we have an embarrassment of System Shock riches. First System Shock Enhanced, then a Warren Spector-augmented System Shock 3, and now System Shock Reboot, a total remastering of the first game. It's just poor old System Shock 2 that's left in the cold, as EA jealously guard the rights to the sci-horror series' most acclaimed instalment. That's another day's concern, though: right now, let's talk about the free alpha demo released to promote System Shock Reboot's Kickstarter. When they say 'reimagining', just how much similarity and how much change does that actually mean? It's compare and contrast time, chums.
]]>Rapture is still one of my favourite video game places, and I'm quite keen to return to it all fancied-up. Following a string of leaks, publishers 2K today announced BioShock: The Collection [official site]. It's coming our way in September with all three BioShock games and their singleplayer DLC plus a video series with words from sweet Ken Levine. Most notably, the first two are being revamped - though 2K say Binfinite is pretty enough already. It is quite pretty, that's true. Here, catch a few glimpses at the nice improved Rapture in this announcement trailer:
]]>BioShock: The Collection is the deeply uninspiring name for a bundle of all the previous BioShock games that for some reason 2K are still refusing to acknowledge. It's now been rated by bodies around the world, including the ESRB, and yet 2K still remain schtum. Which is weird. Anyway, it'll contain all three games, and in case you've forgotten, "Cutscenes also depict intense acts of violence," and the c-word makes appearances. All games should be announced by the ESRB! It'll potentially have had a little brush up and tidy, to look prettier on the young people's modern consoles, but that's not yet confirmed. Right, I've somehow included all the news about this above the jump, so join me for some fascinating sea-life facts below. BioShock is set in the sea, and that's my excuse.
]]>And now on Vague, Possibly-Nothing News Hour, it's the apparent leak of something called The BioShock Collection, which appears to comprise BioShock 1, BioShock 2 and BioShock: Infinite Art Budget. Which isn't super-interesting in itself, given we've all been able to pick up said bundle or the components thereof for absurdly low prices in various Steam sales. What is twisting my Plasmids, man, is that the leak claims this pack is coming out for Xbone and PS4 in addition to PC. Which might meant that we're in for a - oh lord, save me from the buzzwords - next-gen spit'n'polish of the series.
]]>Expansion packs were once a core part of playing PC games, but they can often feel less essential in a world of constant updates and microtransactions. Original game Alec, expansions Adam and Graham, and brief DLC Alice gathered to discuss their favourite game expansions and why they still think the model works.
]]>Books! They're like films without pictures, or games that are all cutscene. Old people and hipsters really like them, teenagers think they're like totally lame, and quite frankly we should all read more of them. There are countless games inspired by books - most especially Tolkien, Lovecraft and early Dungeons & Dragon fiction - but surprisingly few games based directly on books. Even fewer good ones.
]]>Ken Levine has moved onto other projects, and Irrational essentially no longer exists, but publishers 2K have declared that the BioShock series will continue nonetheless. Good, I'm glad: the games so far have had downs as well as ups to say the least, but they have, to a one, attempted to do things that other big-budget shooters do not. It'd be a terrible shame if that was lost and the floor ceded to yet more military-inspired prepostero-realism. I'm also fascinated to see what a BioShock game that wasn't led by someone who has, for better or worse, become something of a figurehead for game stories and high concepts would look like. Would they become more free to explore their own worlds, less hampered by the need to meet expectations of Big Ideas and Ultimate Answers?
There are things I'd like the next game to try. There are things I desperately pray it doesn't do. These are just a few of each. Would you kindly take a look? (Contains some spoilers for BioShock 1 & Infinite).
]]>What are the best Steam Summer Sale deals? Each day for the duration of the sale, we'll be offering our picks - based on price, what we like, and what we think more people should play. Read on for the five best deals from day 5 of the sale.
]]>Rumblings in the towers of Take-Two have gotten me wondering about the status of the BioShock franchise. GameSpot are reporting the publisher's CEO and potential movie villain Strauss Zelnick calling the series "really important" to Take-Two at a recent conference. According to Zelnick, it's so far sold a whopping 25 million units, 11 million of which were BioShock Infinite.
Zelnick has previously referred to this as one of Take-Two's "permanent" franchises, alongside Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Civilization and Borderlands. But things have so far been quiet. No future full-releases have been publicly confirmed for the series - Zelnick notes he has no announcements to make of BioShock's whereabouts. Likewise, Irrational Games are but a memory. Ken Levine is working on something about blocks or something.
]]>Sometime BioShock boss Ken Levine has opened the first tears to his new development dimension. He effectively closed his long-time studio Irrational last year in favour of working on smaller-scale projects, but still within the protective fortress of 2K. At the time he talked about making narrative-led games with more replayability, and while last night's sudden flurry of updates is nothing like a reveal, he has a least given out a few big hints, together with a pledge for more open development than was the case on the spoiler-vulnerable BioShocks. What he's got planned is a open worldish ("but not necessarily outdoors") RPG, sci-fi, PC, probably first-person, chapter-like structure, brand new setting, add "ins" rather than add-ons, and a Passion System. Missus.
]]>Gone Home developers Fullbright have shed a little more light on their so-far cryptic follow-up, Tacoma. The space station-set exploration title is due for release in 2016, but gave away little in its announcement trailer. In a forthcoming interview with RPS, Fullbright's Steve Gaynor revealed that "you can tell from the teaser that it’s in micro-gravity; stuff is floating around. And some of the implications that has for the relationship that the player can have to the space that you’re exploring, that you couldn’t have in a terrestrial setting, is really exciting to us."
]]>The contemporary big-budget FPS has a few different strains: blood-n-guts military settings a la Call of Duty, open-world environments like Far Cry, and high-concept dystopias. Outside of open-world most of these styles were first codified in the 1990s, and FPS games then and now share an enormous amount: primarily a core mechanic of shooting many hundreds of enemies in the face over and over again, as well as crossover in areas like structure, goal-chaining, and narrative delivery. FPS games, in other words, have for a long time been constructed on resilient and proven principles. And many of them come from Looking Glass Studios.
]]>With Irrational 20,000 leagues under and Ken Levine off doing his own, significantly smaller thing at 2K, you might think BioShock dead in the water. You would, however, be wrong. Following on from Levine's original comment that he was leaving the series in 2K's hands, Take-Two Big Daddy Strauss Zelnick has confirmed at a recent analyst conference that the oft-divisive series will carry on and once-thought-dead BioShock 2 developer 2K Marin will do the honors.
]]>Sometimes you want to charge guns, swords, and words a-blazin into a game world and tame the land until Iron Maiden writes a song about you. Other times, you just want to heft your heavy eyelids, sip a light tea, and gently sail through friendly old places made new again. You've got a long day ahead of you, but you don't have to venture out into the cruel sadlands of life just yet. Remember better days. Here, let me help with videos of the original BioShock and Deus Ex: Human Revolution re-realized in Unreal Engine 4. They're quite a sight.
]]>SOMA didn't scare the scuba suit off me, but I did find a creeping sort of potential in its soaked-to-the-bone corridors. Amnesia: The Dark Descent 2 this ain't. Or at least, it's not aiming to be. Currently, it still feels a lot like a slower-paced, less-monster-packed Amnesia in a different (though still very traditionally survival-horror-y) setting, but Frictional creative director Thomas Grip has big plans. I spoke with him about how he hopes to evolve the game, inevitable comparisons to the Big Daddy of gaming's small undersea pond, BioShock, why simple monster AI is better than more sophisticated options, the mundanity of death, and how SOMA's been pretty profoundly influenced by indie mega-hits like Dear Esther and Gone Home.
]]>BioShock Infinite's DLC, BioShock Infinite and BioShock 1 concludes with this second, longer, stealthier half of last November's return to Rapture. It's out now.
You'll hear no politics from me, though by God it's tempting to correlate Burial At Sea Part 2's status as a swansong for two BioShock universes with the recent, shock closure of Irrational. Whatever else there is to both tales, at least this concluding DLC for BioShock Infinite reverses the sense of decline we've seen since the original BioShock. Despite a multitude of sins it does leapfrog both Infinite and its own, irritatingly slight if visually flabbergasting Part 1. It also includes the single most unpleasant - and frankly needless with it - moment I've ever experienced in a videogame.
]]>BioShock could have made a wonderful movie. But realistically it would never been a wonderful movie, even if plans for a Gore Verbinski-helmed adaptation of the Irrational's opus hadn't been abandoned. It could only have been an overload of CGI that sacrificed depth and tone for a visual onslaught. I'm sure of that, and I'm glad the movie didn't happen. But the real reason it didn't is that backers Universal were spooked by the commercial limpness of the Watchmen adaptation, taking it as a sign that there wasn't enough of an audience for an R-rated sci-fi movie at the kind of budget Verbsinki demanded; he then wouldn't agree to a much a lower one. A later attempt at a cheaper movie by 28 Weeks Later director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo was nixed by Ken Levine, who told Eurogamer that "I didn't really see the match there."
The movie did at least make it to concept art stage, a few examples of which have recently emerged, and depict new areas of Rapture planned for the big screen.
]]>Consider this your daily dose of nice. Artist Joey Spiotto, aka Joebot, draws films and videogames as the covers of children's books. His game work includes imagined covers for Half-Life 2 (above, in part), Skyrim, BioShock, Portal, Mass Effect and more.
]]>Bioshock has that one part, the stunning moment that locks the game in the memory forever. I'm talking, of course, about the opening plane crash and the first view of the lighthouse. The descent into Rapture, like the ascent into Columbia, employed tidy, efficient techniques to build a world that was eerie, allusive and oddly attractive. Alec wrote an entire post about that first sight of Rapture. The opening five minutes of Burial At Sea, Bioshock Infinite's narrative DLC, contain a different side of Rapture, as Booker and Elizabeth walk the corridors before the Fall. Spoilers abound, obviously, with the plot's initial direction outlined as the two take in some familiar sights.
]]>He might not have quite the profile of a Levine or Smith, but as a lead designer on Thief 3, particularly of The Cradle level, not to mention the similarly nerve-torturing Fort Frolic map in BioShock, Jordan Thomas is a name just as worth knowing. While being granted more overreaching control of a project resulted in 2K Marin's smart, improved but too safe sequel BioShock 2, followed by a disappearance into the black hole which eventually morphed into The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, Thomas also took on some creative duties late in BioShock Infinite's development. Now he's moving away from franchises into creator-controlled, independent territory, and I am not-entirely-quietly confident that this will mean great things.
]]>Heavy Spoilers, obv.
]]>BioShock: Infinite is a new first-person shooter from Irrational, creators of BioShock, System Shock 2 and SWAT 4. It's set on a flying city in 1912, where racism and religious fundamentalism dictate society. You're up there, wielding guns and magic, to bring someone the girl and wipe away the debt. Here's what I thought, spoiler-free.
]]>Notoriously, infamously broken gaming social network/store/DRM Games For Windows Live appears to be, if not quite yet dead, then at least waiting nervously for a visit from the priest. Few shall mourn its loss. Indeed, I had hoped to never experience again its peculiar, malfunctioning attempts to control my savegames, DLC and freedom to play videogames I already own. Unfortunately for me, yesterday I decided it'd be a jolly good idea to play the excellent, under-promoted BioShock 2 add-on, Minerva's Den. I forgot that it could not be installed via conventional in-game methods or even via Steam. I forgot that I had to go into the very belly of Microsoft's ill-tempered GFWL beast. What followed was a two-hour oddyssey of installations and reinstallations, hidden folder hunting and registry editing. I was so angry, and yet today I feel oddly grateful.
]]>As we all know full well and is entirely obvious, BioShock: Elizabeth is a straightforward damsel in distress with a pretty face and a nice dress, and there's nothing more to her than that. There definitely isn't anything surprising or sinister about her: she will be rescued by the big man with the big gun, the mean nasty boss will fall to his doom and everyone will live happily ever after.
Or maybe there's some massive twist at the heart of the game and she's not what she seems to be at all? Nah.
]]>Matters are rather different for the third BioShock game than they were for the first. While Irrational's original had to grab attention from a machinegun-crazed mass audience, their next one comes with built-in renown, potentially affording the studio more opportunity and freedom to indulge themselves in other aspects of the game. Where BioShock's undersea city of Rapture was, in hindsight, much more of a concept than a functioning place, BioShock Infinite's floating metropolis Columbia seems to be striving harder to have an explicable and finely-sketched society.
Reflecting this is newly-released ebook novella Mind In Revolt, by Irrational's Joe Fielder with assistance from Ken Levine, which could technically be described as a prequel but seems more designed to flesh out the social pressures bubbling under Columbia's utopian surface in the way that the rollercoaster ride of an action videogame might not.
]]>As if we hadn't already heard enough from the man who steers the Irrational Zeppelin through developmental waters, Jim also had a long chat with Ken Levine, the creator of Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite. Read on for thoughts that span the sadness of cholera, the mystery of condiments, the joy of turn-based historical war, and some stuff about a game set in a flying city.
I've marked out some mild spoilers towards the end of the piece. These are non-specific discussions of the plot themes, but you can decide whether to skip.
]]>"This is like your nightmare interview here, huh?"
Nah. This might not be going too well, but I've had worse. Much worse. (The most terrible was probably with an executive at one of the industry's biggest PC game developers a couple of years back, where I had the distinct impression I was interviewing a robot who'd much rather murder me than talk to me).
This half hour with the lead designer of BioShock: Infinite would definitely win a place in my Top 40 Botched Interviews, but it's not up there in shotgun-to-the-head territory yet. The mutual acknowledgement that it's been a misfire does wonders too. Eventually.
]]>Some interviews with prominent figures, as in Polygon's widely-circulated one with BioShock: Infinite lead designer Ken Levine, are held on top of skyscraping Californian hotels. While it's not something I've experienced myself, I can entirely appreciate why this often leads their eventual write-ups to be somewhat defined by awe, be it overt or subtle: a famous figure is encountered in a dramatic setting, the trappings of aspirational luxury around them. Thus, they are inevitably presupposed to be superhumans of a sort, with achievements and a lifestyle far beyond those of mere mortals such as the humble interviewer. This is the tale. Notoriously, this week also saw the outermost extreme of this, in Esquire's absurd interview with/clearly lovelorn ode to the attractive but otherwise apparently unexceptional actor Megan Fox.
I can't ever imagine going as far as Esquire, and I'd hope someone would throw me into the nearest sea if I did, but I do understand why it can happen. The scene is set in such a way that the interviewer is encountering, if not a god, then at least royalty. Even on a more moderate level, I have never conducted an interview in a Californian luxury hotel's roofgarden, and my own interview with Ken Levine last month was no different, but I am nonetheless left thinking about the narrative created in that half hour. What tale could I now tell from just a talk with a guy in a room? Initially, I thought it impossible, or at least redundant, to spin a story out of a short, slightly awkward conversation in a dark little room somewhere in London: this is why Q&As are the standard interview format here. Let's try, though. I want to tell you about what happened in that interview, and how it felt to me, as well as sharing Ken Levine's comments about BioShock: Infinite's characters, pacing and mysteries with you.
]]>Earlier this week, I played around four hours of BioShock: Infinite, which is due for release next March. While this was at a publisher-held event (disclaimer - I ate some free salt and vinegar flavoured Hula Hoops and a small bowl of Moroccan tagine. Alas, I hate aubergine) and I was part of a gaggle of journalists, I was not guided or observed during my playthrough, so I approached it at my own leisure and pack-rat pace.
It has given me much to think upon, a few examples of which I shall share with you below. I will avoid all spoilers as regards to the events of the plot, but please be advised that I do talk in detail about the setting, its population and its backstory as presented by these initial hours of the game.
]]>Yesterday, we brought you Ken Levine's explanation of BioShock: Infinite's 1999 mode. The response was, perhaps inevitably, divided. Here's the second part of my chat with him, in which he anticipates that, as well as addressing the fact he can only offer a biased opinion of his game, the problem with out of context headlines, tennis in BioShock, why SWAT 4 would have been a very different game under his stewardship and, yes, why "if you're a reader on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, you are sophisticated enough to not listen to what Ken Levine says."
]]>Late last week, Irrational announced 1999 mode for BioShock: Infinite - an attempt to recapture the sense of binding decisions, permanent consequences and hard-as-nails challenge that we perhaps associate with a lost era of gaming. In this first of a two-part interview, I nattered to avuncular Irrational bossman Ken Levine about why they came up with 1999 Mode, what it entails, why it's a very different prospect to simply a 'hard' difficulty setting, why he doesn't want non-hardcore gamers playing that mode, and whether or not it's a reaction to disappointment about BioShock from System Shock fans.
]]>While waiting impatiently for something else to download over the weekend, I booted up BioShock 1 for the first time in years, curious to see how it held up a half-decade on. I'd forgotten how remarkable and how magnetic its first few minutes are: whatever else you want to accuse the game of, the work it does in so quickly and so assuredly building a world and a mountain of intrigue around it is something we see all too little of. The vast majority of mainstream games open with enough dry exposition to choke a rhino, but this grabs your total attention with a bare minimum of talk, a steady flow of unpredictable spectacle and a spinetingling cocktail of awe and anxiety. Irrational are, I think, right to leave Rapture behind - but, for no particular reason other than 'why not?', let's remember just why they built it in the first place.
]]>When a Bioshock Infinite video arrives in my lap, which is how I demand delivery of all gaming news, I do not expect it to feature actual human beings speaking at me. Ziplines and plummeting are gravely missing from this video. Although it does contain game footage, it's mainly Ken Levine talking about the world he's creating, which he sees as but one of the game's main characters.
There's a focus on actual people characters, with the voice actors behind Booker and Elizabeth also featured, breaking the rule that they, being the opposite of Victorian infants, should be heard and not seen. Now, in my mind's eye, Booker Dewitt will always look like Troy Baker, whose name should immediately be attached to Syndicate's antagonist.
]]>Curse our limited-length titles! For this post should really be called something like 'Irrational co-founder and now Blue Manchu boss Jon Chey talks more about his splendid-sounding new PC boardgame/ CCG/ MMO mash-up Card Hunter, how to make free-to-play non-horrible, what he thinks the future might be for immersive sims in the vein of System Shock and his thoughts on his former studio's controversial XCOM remake'. Doesn't bloomin' fit though, does it? Oh well. You'll find all that stuff out for yourself simply by reading on: tons of interesting comments in here, and I'm particularly excited by the thought towards the end that a coming wave of mid-budget simulational shooters might be on the cards, and far more likely to take big creative risks than their glossier triple-A peers... (Oh, and if you missed the more Card Hunter-centric first part of this interview, looky here).
]]>Timing-wise, the long-in-development Bioshock prequel novel couldn't have landed at a worse one. Remember Rapture? That's right. It's the place that was so awesome, before we were blown away by Columbia a few weeks ago. In the mood to return? There's the rub...
]]>Those of us who didn't spend the best part of a week legging it around a giant convention centre earlier this month could only swoon at the resulting tall tales of BioShock: Infinite's newly-announced reality-rift feature, known as Tears. Now we get our own crack in space-time to peer through, as Ken Levine talks about (and demonstrates) companion character Elizabeth's ability to introduce elements from other realities into the player's game-world.
]]>The upcoming third BioShock game intends to fix an oft-made criticism of the Rapture-set original games, according to Timothy Gerritsen, Director of Development at Irrational Games.
The Executive Producer on Bioshock Infinite admitted to RPS in an interview published today that, in the first Bioshock, "we failed in giving you a sense of that city underwater."
]]>Well, obviously pretty much everyone's fighting you - it is a first-person shooter, after all. But there's also inter-factional conflict in 2012's Skyoshock, as one Mr K. Levine reveals below. What on earth could make the denizens of a rebel, militaristic, ultranationalist city in the sky turn against each other? Oh, riiiiiight. Also: time travel.
]]>Only a shortie for Ken & chums' latest, but it's pretty confident proof that we're not in Rapture anymore, Andrew. Rocket-spewing zeppelins, anti-gravity powers, gruesome splatting via sky-crates and, at the end, a hint of how large the environments may be. Also, it really plays up the fact that this is a buddy game - but not exactly a buddy comedy.
]]>The 2K way of late appears to be announcing impossibly ambitious and exciting-sounding games then going deathly silent for months (with the notable exception of Duke Nukem Forever, which has been very, very noisy since its comeback announcement). So it's grand to see BioShock: Infinite start its promotional gears turning again, ahead of what will hopefully be a grand old infosplosion at E3. Following a revamp of the game's website, we've got four new screenshots to stare at and make desperate, fannish guesses about. Hope you don't like horses, because I'm about to show you a picture of a dead one.
]]>Good news, everyone. I'd given up absolutely all hope of this ever happening, and yet it has. The final DLC for Bioshock 2, Minerva's Den, was a smart vignette full of nods to System Shock and the history of computing, not to mention being a welcome opportunity to approach the fascinating, doomed society of Rapture from a perspective other than its increasingly fantastical main narrative. This standalone tale of a calculating rogue AI seemed tailor-made for PC gamers... only PC gamers never got it. So it's with fairly delighted surprise that we discover it's finally, finally due out on PC almost a year after its console version.
]]>[This was originally printed in a slightly different form at the Escapist in 2007. Post-Bioshock 1 and 2, it struck me as a good time to return to what was on Jordan Thomas' mind back then - especially the sections which foreshadow Fort Frolic. And with the darkness obsessed Amnesia due within a week, turning our mind on what lurks in the gaming's dark also struck me as worthwhile]
Light is, as far as fundamental issues in game design goes, an opaque topic for most gamers. In modern 3D engines, it's something you simply can't have a level without – or, at least, one which doesn't involve a lot of bumping into walls. It's something that effects mood and functionality, so acting as a supporting pillar for both the artistic and mechanistic elements of game design. But when implementing it, what is a designer really thinking about? To shed a little light on the matter, I talked to Jordan Thomas, best known as co-designer of the Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows and has been recently been working on a little game called Bioshock.
]]>That's the studio formerly known as 2K Boston formerly known as Irrational to you. As in Ken Levine's original-name-reclaiming bunch: the developers who made System Shock 2, SWAT 4, Tribes Vengeance, Freedom Force - and, of course, Bioshock the first.
And there's that Pandora's box opened. The important news, though, is that Irrational are finally taking the lid of whatever their new project is next week. Several years in the making, massively mysterious: whatever it is, whatever it's like, it's bound to be a big old chat-magnet.
]]>Jordan Thomas first came to our attention with Thief: Deadly Shadows where he co-designed the Cradle with Randy Smith. Next he was on Bioshock, with his fingerprints over all Fort Frolic. Then, he stepped up to Creative Director at 2k Marin with Bioshock 2. He's highly verbal, scarily optimistic and wants to talk to you about the Immersive Sim as an Anti-genre, the death of seriousness and the growth of snark, Thomas Moore Utopian fiction and what Ion Storm Austin were considering doing with Deus Ex 3...
]]>The Steam summer sale thingamy is continuing to offer some ludicrously good prices, as it happens. I've just spotted some for which there's only six hours left, which should fill in some vital gaps on your virtual shelf. There's Thief: Deadly Shadows for £2.09, BioShock for £3.49, and Titan Quest Gold for £2.49. There's also Dragon Age, about 80 hours of game, for £11.99.
I can't get over Thief 3 for barely more than £2. This is one of those games that come 2014 we'll be writing ten year retrospectives about. If you never did, you absolutely must right now. Just for the heck of it, I've pasted my review of the game from 2004 for PC Format.
]]>Irrational's blog takes great joys in pulling out various bits and bobs from the cupboards and doing a show-and-tell. Latest is the original early-00s Bioshock Pitch. They're serializing it across several entries but you can follow the first eight pages here. And it's nifty stuff, in noting what remained (a lot, conceptually) and what changed (almost everything, in terms of specific execution). This stuff is always fascinating. And while we're on the topic, you've read Planescape's Vision Statement, yes? More developers should totally release this stuff. It's absolute treasure.
]]>We usually steer clear of the arts and crafts region of bloggery, but I'll make an exception for the link Dartt just forwarded to me: How to make a Big Daddy costume in a whole bunch of fairly complicated steps. Amazing, ridiculous stuff. Compare and contrast with 2007's costumes...
]]>This news is spreading rapidly over the net. It seems that the PS3 is good for something other than playing your Blu-Ray discs. News For Gamers have completed the PS3 version of Bioshock, to discover a fifteen second teaser for the second game. It's apparently called Bioshock 2: The Sea Of Dreams and you'll find images from it beneath the cut. EDIT: Also, thanks to the comment-threaders, video. Go watch!
]]>Kieron's currently out at the Develop conference for us, so expect exciting missives soon. Or, more likely, incoherent booze-addled rambling about Kenickie. So, while he struggles manfully to work out what a wireless internet is, we can instead harken to reports from elsewhere in gamingdom. Specifically Videogaming247's coverage of Ken Levine's bravely-named "BioShock and Awe: Immersing the Gamer in an Alternate World Without Drowning Out the Gameplay" lecture and some quotable interview gobbets they tickled out of him afterwards. Tempestuous Mount Bioshock never quite goes dormant, it seems.
]]>Gosh, all that hoo-hah about Bioshock's limited number of installations and activation process seems like a long time ago, but I suspect it's still an open wound for some folk. A vocal portion of Bioshock's players were angry - "Ken Levine personally kicked my girlfriend to death" angry. Will they be any less angry now 2K's lightened its infamously ruthless DRM (as promised many moons ago)?
]]>University of Connecticut Associate Professor of classical studies Roger Travis has started a blog comparing videogames to the classic tales of the ancient world. His latest post, "The profundity of Halo and Bioshock (and the Iliad)", puts our favourite first person shooters up there with the greats of Ancient Greece.
]]>Who cares whether BioShock 2 will be any good without Levine at the helm, BioShock 3 has been announced! Gamespot spoke to Take-Two's chairman, Strauss Zelnick, who suggested that the third game in the series would be released to coincide with Gore Verbinki's film of the original story.
]]>Oh yes - Rapture for real will be quite the sight to behold.
Oh no - It's to be directed and produced by Gore 'Pirates of the Caribbean' Verbinski. Well, the first film was loads of fun, but even discounting those sequels, high seas hi-jinks seems an unusual pedigree for undersea rumination upon the nature of man. But hey, both have water and zombies.
]]>Developed by 2K Marin, a recently-formed internal studio staffed by some of the original BioShock team - but not Ken Levine [Actually, yes, Ken Levine will be involved in some fashion, even if only a figurehead role - Kotaku-fuelled edit]. Released late next year. That is all.
]]>To be honest, I've nothing else to add to Walker and Alec's opposing yet illuminating pieces. Just the urge to form a triad of Ken Levine Eyes grew unbearable. Forgive me.
]]>Sometimes, we like to race. Today, John won, throwing up his thoughts on Ken Levine's recent post-mortem natterings about Bioshock's narrative before I could lay my oafish mitts to a keyboard.
After literally seconds of consideration, I've decided to do so anyway, as a) John's kindly gotten the hard labour of summary and quotation out of the way for me and b) I've got some slightly different feelings about what Levine's said/is maybe trying to say/perhaps failed to say. This isn't at all a rebuttal to John's piece, though there are inescapable elements of point-counterpoint.
Apologies, by the way, if we've gone a little September 2007 today: Bioshock's one of those games that never quite goes away.
]]>The man confuses me. It comes down to this.
When Ken Levine was interviewed by Kotaku's Brian Crecente earlier this month, he explained to the site's editor,
"I underestimated, way underestimated, the impact the story was going to have on people. I didn't realize it would change people's perspective on what to expect from gameplay. I didn't think they became that invested in what was going on. You have this great mystery of your own identity and once it is solved the story is over. I think it was a miscalculation on my part."
So why did Levine announce in his GDC speech,
"The bad news for storytellers is that nobody cares about your stupid story."
]]>Just before Christmas, Eurogamer got me to travel up to Disney's London headquarters to interview Warren Spector. The resulting piece covered all the big matters of the day - Deus Ex 3, Portal's awesomeness and how when his new game is finally announced he'd be "vilified". But there was a hell of a lot more. Starting with polite small-talk, and extend outwards to take in his admiration and identification with Walt Disney, being "Tech's Bad Boy", how best to approach The Icons, putting his money where his mouth is, Being In a videogame, the importance of teaching videogames, creating an oral history of games, what it's like to be a 52-year old designer and JRPGs about Chopin.
The one thing we didn't ask him why he decided to hook up with this Mickey-Mouse outfit...
]]>Actual game may vary - i.e. not look like our crappy mocked-up screenshot.
Sorta. It may not be Bioshock 2, but a new Bioshock title is indeed on the way - for mobile phones (they're like PCs, but tiny and with fewer buttons).
Side-scrolling platformer? Ooh, probably. Either that or just an extended version of the Pipemania-inspired hacking mini-game. No actual details yet, but maybe, just maybe, we do live in a world where a 256 colour, 128x128, four-button cellphone game that includes shocking twists, discussion upon the nature of self and references to Ayn Rand could actually happen.
]]>Now, I was planning on doing this at some point in our Advent games, but Tom over at EG and I were talking about the backlash against Bioshock. He wondered if I had anything to say, and waved some of that fat EG dollar. And lo - I did. 4000 words worth. I may keep my sanity by not reading the EG comments thread - as I noted in the piece...
]]>I would love to go and replay Bioshock right now. No really, I would. But I'm too busy washing my hair/doing my Adam returns/experiencing new narratives that don't involve painstakingly collecting conveniently abandoned cassette recorders that I've heard once already.
But if I did have the time, I would totally play Bioshock with its long-delayed patch.
]]>Bioshock's very much back in the news at the moment. And goodness, what a lot of people seem to hate it all of a sudden, if folk in our comments threads are to be believed. You big sillies.
Would being able to play it with new Plasmids help? What about in proper widescreen? Or, and I suspect this will be the clincher, what about with those controversial insta-respawn Vita Chambers turned off?
]]>Jonathan 'Braid' Blow has posted a recording and illustrative slide show from his talk at the Montreal Games Summit. It's stirring stuff. Blow attacks World of Warcraft, describing the grind of leveling and the reward system inherent in that as "lying to the players", and even suggests that designers should be ashamed of exploiting illusory level-based mechanics. He argues that games are, like film and literature, becoming a powerful medium in which creators will be able to make choices they can be ashamed of. He wonders whether games as they are currently executed could lead to a "societal problem". Gasps and nervous laughter rises from the audience as Blow delivers his ideas, an audience which reportedly included uncomfortable-looking reps from Blizzard. (Blow argues that some game rewards are like drugs, while others are more like food. Good and bad. But we at RPS love both food and drugs equally, so we were a little confused about what he meant.)
]]>"A good chunk of the BioShock team did not want to work with Ken [Levine] ever again, and 2K definitely understood the sentiment and let them set up a new studio so that they can make Bioshock 2, leaving Ken with Project X. A good chunk of the other senior 2K Boston people who were sick of Ken but didn't move to San Francisco ended up scattering to other AAA developers instead. In Quincy, they're essentially rebuilding a team from almost scratch again."
So claims generally reliable industry insider Surfer Girl, based on her own insider tip-off. 'Project X', incidentally, is the upcoming X-COM remake, a game I'm personally desperate to hear more details of. But the Bioshock stuff's depressing if true.
]]>I seem to recall that one or two people were slightly unhappy with the anti-piracy measures on Bioshock. There was no big deal about it, was there? Of course there bloody was. Folk don't take kindly to being told they can install something they've just paid real Earth money for a limited number of times. Now that the shouting's died down, Gamespot's reporting on a recent talk by 2K Au... 2k Austra... 2K Arrrrgh, no, can't do it, sorry - Irrational's Martin Slater about the controversial measures.
"We achieved our goals. We were uncracked for 13 whole days. We were happy with it. But we just got slammed. Everybody hated us for it. It was unbelievable... You can't afford to be cracked. As soon as you're gone, you're gone, and your sales drop astronomically if you've got a day one crack."
I agree and sympathise with him - those torrent sites are very busy these days, and I really can't believe it's not hurting developers - but I did feel Bioshock's measures were far too stringent. If you crossover from protecting your game into insulting the guys who have keenly thrown their money at you, frankly you've gone too far. Seems Irrational are somewhat on the same page: "I don't think we'll do exactly the same thing again, but we'll do something close."
So it is going to happen again.
]]>Still-Irrational-To-Us' Ken Levine has been talking to America's Games For Windows about possible downloadable content for Bioshock. 1UP have only lobbed up a couple of teaser quotes. Here's the big one...
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