Tag Archives: philosophy

BioShock 2

1 Reply

It’s been rather a long time since I finished a game, though thankfully not as long as it’s been since I finished BioShock. All the same, definitely too long. But over the past few weeks and culminating in an enforced snow day on Tuesday, which is slightly ironic when you consider that I never bothered to get the plasmid that lets you freeze people into ice sculptures, I played its unimaginatively-named sequel, BioShock 2, to completion. It seems overly harsh to proceed by saying that “unimaginative” was a convenient choice of word since it can serve double duty by also describing the gameplay, which has a few cosmetic changes but nothing especially new. Honest, yes, but harsh; and I think that feeling of harshness stems from the part of my brain saying, “well, it’s a sequel, of course the game play is the same. That would be like complaining that Halloween II had a tall guy in a mask who went on a murderous rampage while trying to schedule a family reunion![1]”

If, like me, you accept my brain’s premise there, the really important question is, how does the game rate on the basis of plot and theme? And the answer to that is a little complicated. BioShock, as you may remember, was unapologetically cruel to the objectivist philosophy described by Ayn Rand. Or, depending on your perspective, it was compellingly accurate about the end results of objectivism run amok. BioShock 2 seems on the surface to be written as apologism for that cruelty. At least, the simultaneously cartoonish and ham-fisted portrayal of Sophia Lamb as Andrew Ryan’s philosophical nemesis reminded me so much of the strawmen used by Terry Goodkind throughout his Sword of Truth series that I assume the main point of BioShock 2 was apologia.[2] “That doesn’t sound complicated at all,” you are no doubt thinking. And you’d be right, except that there are moments of real brilliance (mostly in the end game[3]) that shine through that muck and leave me considering aspects of both the original and this game all over again in that light. So, yeah. Complicated.

[1] Insofar as, y’know, of course he did, that was the whole point of it being a sequel.
[2] There is every chance that this is a real word, and a slightly lessened but still significant chance that I’ve just used it correctly.
[3] And therefore firmly in the territory of spoilers. See the ROT13 comment I’ll leave by tomorrow for more detail.

BioShock

3 Replies

It only took me, what, 8 months to finish BioShock? 10? And yet, that puts me well ahead of any number of games that I still intend to finish, much less the ones I’ve long given up on. At any rate, it was well worth it. On top of fantastically fluid gameplay that allows for practically any tactics you can imagine, the enemies vary from simplistic to extremely challenging but without the penalty of being unable to proceed because of constant death-resets. It may not be my favorite gameplay, but it’s easily in the top ten.

Where BioShock shines, though, is in the storyline. I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged (though I intend to retry someday), so I can’t tell you exactly how stood on their head Rand’s theories are, but I can certainly tell that she would be entitled to quite a lot of energy generated by her grave-spinning corpse, were she ever to see it in play. The premise is simple: while on a trans-Atlantic flight in 1959, your plane crashes near the entrance to an underwater city commissioned in the mid 1940s by suspiciously-initialed industrialist Andrew Ryan, who built Rapture to escape from the communists, governments, and religions that wanted to steal his money and ideas. The sole survivor of the crash, you naturally enter the city as it’s the only place to find shelter from the elements. Before you can draw a breath to admire the fantastic art deco architecture, you’re plunged into the middle of Rapture’s civil war between Ryan and newcomer Atlas, who seems to be a rallying point for the people but now only wants to escape with his wife and children. And everyone you meet is infected with plasmids that give them strange biological powers, such as the ability to shoot fire and lightning from their fingertips. (Plus, they’re infected with Randian libertarian philosophy, and half of them appear to be undead; hooray for Objectivist zombies!) And then, things start to get mysterious.

So, much as I loved Portal, this game here? Best game I’ve played not merely in 2007, but probably in most of the decade. I cannot realistically praise it enough. I know I’m late to the party here, but if you haven’t played it yet? It’s on the “must” list, I promise. It’s even forgiving to people who do not play first-person shooters.