{"id":2654,"date":"2011-02-03T17:25:14","date_gmt":"2011-02-03T23:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=2654"},"modified":"2011-02-03T17:25:14","modified_gmt":"2011-02-03T23:25:14","slug":"bioshock-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=2654","title":{"rendered":"BioShock 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. 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\u00a0never\u00a0bothered to get the plasmid that lets you freeze people into ice\u00a0sculptures, I played its unimaginatively-named sequel, BioShock 2<\/a>, to completion. It seems overly harsh to\u00a0proceed\u00a0by saying that “unimaginative” was a convenient\u00a0choice\u00a0of 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]”<\/p>\n

If, like me, you accept my brain’s premise there, the really<\/em> 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<\/a> that I assume the main point of BioShock 2 was apologia.[2]\u00a0“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.<\/p>\n

[1] Insofar as, y’know, of course<\/em> he did, that was the whole point of it being a sequel.
\n[2] There is every chance that this is a real word, and a slightly lessened but still\u00a0significant\u00a0chance that I’ve just used it correctly.
\n[3] And therefore firmly in the territory of spoilers. See the ROT13 comment I’ll leave by tomorrow for more detail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0never\u00a0bothered to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[378,30,1251],"class_list":["post-2654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-first-person-shooter","tag-horror","tag-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}