When
was the last time that I spent the vast majority of three nights and two days
straight playing through a game, then almost immediately restarting it a
getting halfway through before I had some pesky responsibilities force me to
lay off for a day? Not since the glory
days of gaming when I was blessed with more free time, and Half-Life 2 came
out. In fact, I would need to step back
a few years to the release of Portal 2 since I so eagerly threw my time and
undivided attention at a game. Smart,
unique games of quality are just too rare.
Maybe Valve raised the bar too high, or companies have found that depth,
plot and intelligence aren’t necessary to sell millions of copies if a game
looks good and you can blow things up. I
was prepared to curl up like a halo and die of boredom on the battlefield,
while the gears of the god of war performed black ops around my mass
ineffectively. Then, a righteous hand
reached out and pulled me from the murky depths of apathy and showed me the
light. I was elevated above the mire and
into the heavens. And lo, my inner gamer was reborn. Praise be to the savior, BioShock Infinite be
thy name.
Sweet Jesus, this game was conceived
immaculately. It allows the player to
quite literally ascend above many of the overdone sins committed by most big
ticket games. I once was mute, but now
can speak: That’s right! In BSI you
actually play as a character with a name, mysterious backstory, and personality,
as opposed to a silent, faceless surrogate. Mysterious Booker DeWitt, Wounded
Knee veteran and grizzled gun for hire, rises into the heavens to find a
mysterious girl in order to resolve a mysterious debt. But first, he must accept a baptism that is
in no way a metaphor. The good reverend
gets a bit overzealous with the waters of life, however; but thank God, Booker
rises again in a veritable Garden of Eden.
Ok, you get it, there’s some religious imagery going on here. He finds
himself in a floating 1912 city that never was or could have been, straw hats and
anachronism as far as the eye can see!
It’s fucking gorgeous. The
wholesome folk that walk the streets worship the founder of floating city of
Colombia, Zachary Comstock, as well as the founding fathers Washington,
Jefferson, and Franklin. Apparently is Comstock
a prophet, in addition to being such a fervent religious zealot, racist,
warmonger, and believer in the founding fathers that he was too American for
America. He led his followers into the
sky and gave a red, white, and blue middle finger to the America that wasn’t
American enough.
So
Booker sets out in the city made of fuzzy sunshine and angel farts (Beware
Doctor Who fans, this place is littered with angel statues. It somewhat ruins
the otherwise picturesque aesthetic if you suffer from PBTSD – Post Blink
Traumatic Stress Disorder). He takes in some typical 1912 sights: like robotic
horses and freely dispensed potions called Vigors that allow him to levitate
people and possess machinery. Now that
everything is lovely, it is necessary for shit to go down, because plots don’t
get interesting until shit goes down. It
seems Booker’s arrival was foreseen; and Comstock has made sure to plaster
Booker’s tell-tale brand on his hand all over the place warning everyone to be
vigilant for the False Shepherd. It is
difficult to keep a low profile when everyone is convinced that you are evil
incarnate. It isn’t long before Booker
is made and he fucks things up, because everyone thought he was going to fuck
things up, so they attacked him which forced him to fuck things up (Thank you, Yahtzee http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7105-BioShock-Infinite). After
some guards show up DeWitt turns into Teddy Roosevelt. The fun, shiny paradise that was Colombia quickly
turns into a fun, shiny war zone. It’s
incredibly refreshing to have some time-tested gun violence in a setting that
isn’t all broken walls and dirty streets, this alone would warrant at least a
partial nod of approval from me, but the fun hasn’t even started yet.
Columbia’s
free-floating buildings are interconnected by a rail system, a piece of
infrastructure that someone looked at, and then asked “Can, can I ride
that?” Yes you can, nameless genius, yes
you can. Certain divisions of law
enforcement have been issued hand-held magnetic hook devices that allow them to
jump on to freight hooks and slide across the sky lines. Since that idea itself wasn’t quite insane
enough, whoever was in charge said “Fuck it, add more hooks, sharpen them, and
then add a motor so they spin.” And
thus, the world’s first and only mode of unnecessarily dangerous personal
travel/horribly brutal and impractical murder device was invented. Naturally, the first thing Booker the heretic
does is commandeer one of these devices, because why go to a steampunk cloud
city if you aren’t going to glide through the air during battles like a zeppelin
pirate? Did I mention there are
zeppelins? Of course there are zeppelins;
this game is steampunk as fuck! I doubt
my ability to express in words how exhilarating it is to jump aboard a
zeppelin, destroy its engine and dive into the cloudy abyss, watching my own
reenactment of the Hindenburg whilst sliding at break-neck speed down a
skyrail. And yes, the first time that
happened I said “Oh the humanity!”. Do
you judge me? Fuck you, I’m a zeppelin pirate!
Zeppelin. Pirate. This is one of
the aspects that really set BSI apart from other games I’ve played recently;
the steampunk aspect is a functioning and incredibly fun part of the gameplay
rather than just an aesthetic choice. Did
I mention that you get to be a zeppelin pirate? When enemies storm out of a
building, rather than sighing and preparing myself for a long round of
hide-shoot-run-hide-shoot-hide-shoot, I would bellow “Let’s do this!” and take
to the rails, raining fire and flying off to punt mo’ fo’s off ledges.
The
other aspect that prevents BSI from being a standard FPS are the aforementioned
Vigors. Fairly shortly after violence
ensues, Booker is confronted by a “fireman” this type of fireman is a crazy guy
in an iron diving suit that SETS fires. Once this problem is taken care of, Booker
gains this ability, because when a mutated mad man that tried to incinerate you
drops a mysterious potion in a naked-devil-lady-shaped bottle, you drink that
shit without hesitation. (Side note, the
bottles that contain the eight Vigors are all incredibly well-designed and
gorgeous. A skilled glass blower that
could make those could make many nerds part with a large sum of money. Someone get on this.) So when you find yourself in a fight that is
sadly devoid of skylines, you can at least forego the cover-based shoot-out by
levitating, electrocuting, possessing, throwing, burning and ramming enemies,
or any combination thereof. Additionally,
you can call a murder (+ 2 to wordplay) of crows to peck at enemies for a brief
and ineffective amount of time, woo. Walky,
fighty, walky, fight. You find the girl,
Elizabeth, of course in a giant fucking angel statue (Don't look away, don't blink). I think I’ve already put this
down a few times already, but this one is the realest deal as far as gameplay
and plot. This is the one that blows other
games off the zeppelin. Elizabeth is the best NPC in any game I’ve played,
easily. This claim can be summed up
easily for gamers by invoking the two least liked words in all of gaming: BSI is essentially one big ESCORT MISSION
(listen closely as thousands of gamers who didn’t even read that just now
scream “FUCK THAT!”). Trying to traverse
an area with a lump of idiotic dead weight that offers little to no help and is
constantly making you fail by failing to stay alive. Escort missions as a matter of convention are
at best annoying, at worst make you want to cyber-punch game developers through
the internet (for worst, see Resident Evil 4).
But
no more is this the case! Not only is Elizabeth not a useless meat sack that
you have to preserve, she is the main character in the game, often responsible
for keeping the player alive as a point of role reversal. She is a partner, not a task. She is Booker’s intellectual superior, and in
some ways stronger than he is or will ever be.
She asks insightful and important questions while Booker’s dialogue sticks
closer to what is probably going on in the head of a lot of dumb gamers,
grumbling about getting to the next checkpoint and not caring about the
beautiful minutia all around (which will seem so much more significant later). Elizabeth is a perfect foil for our
protagonist, as well as being a veritable instruction manual on how to play the
game properly. She stops and takes in
her surroundings, points out secrets and finds money that you otherwise might
miss, a constant reminder to not just blunder to the next objective. You will miss so much that will help to
further immerse you in this world and its people if you make it a point to
observe everything around you, and piece together plot points via context clues
and finding recording of characters inner thoughts. Not only will she find cover and not die or
get taken in combat, she will toss you ammo, and health, usually when you need
it the most, an actual life-saver. Her
character model, movements, dialogue and character arc are all but perfection,
and do wonders to actually develop a relationship with the player. This only serves to make the plot better,
because we actually care what happens.
Engaging an audience, what a concept!
Let the semi-coherent rambling end for now by simply stating that
serious gaming is not dead, it is very much alive in the excellence that is
Bioshock Infinite. Spoiler-ridden discussion coming later...
No comments:
Post a Comment