Icons of Gaming #1: No Gods Or Kings

This is the screenshot that sold me on BioShock.

BioShock has a lot of memorable imagery - the Big Daddy, the player's hand dispensing lightning, the art deco interiors, and the excellent sound scheme that pervades the entire game. But "no gods or kings" is what made me sit up and pay attention.

This banner hangs over an early entrance hall in the game - above the main elevator, from memory - and in addition to establishing the game's visual style, lighting scheme and dark tone, it tells you that this will be a game about something. BioShock might not be the deepest philosophical exploration in gaming history but it's not for lack of genuine effort, and the objectivist foundations of the city of Rapture are a big part of what elevates BioShock above the pack.

Long before I played the game I saw this screenshot, and once I'd seen it, I knew I had to find out who had hung that banner and what it meant.

What are the images that have attracted you to games - for better or for worse?

Gaming News In Brief

A few bits and pieces:

* The Bioshock movie, to be directed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean), is still in the works with John Logan (The Aviator) writing the screenplay, but don't hold your breath for it - the anticipated release date is 2012, to coincide with a possible Bioshock 3. (Bioshock 2 is making its way to shelves in third-quarter 2009.) (Read more)

* SoulCalibur IV will feature The Secret Apprentice (the protagonist of the upcoming Star Wars: Force Unleashed) as a playable character, alongside Yoda on the XBox 360 and Darth Vader on the PS3. (Read more)

* Developer Goichi Suda (No More Heroes, killer7) is working on something called "Project S", which is apparently a resurrection of Hideo Kojima's Snatcher franchise. Actually, that news dates back to April but the awesome keeps it fresh. The first part of the program is, for some reason, a radio drama (not a game), but if we're lucky a re-release of the original game might feature somewhere. Snatcher has previously only seen store shelves in PAL regions in the form of a Mega-CD game in 1994; the US had it slightly better with PlayStation and Saturn versions. (Read more)

* The Sci-Fi Channel says they're running some kind of TV show / MMO hybrid in the near future, with the actions of the one affecting the other and vice versa. It sounds a lot like what NBC tried (rather ham-fistedly) with its Heroes ARG, but I remain hopeful that this won't be the embarassing debacle that it sounds like. (Read more)

The Darkness

The Darkness is an amazing game, and if the core gameplay were as brilliant as the attention to detail that surrounds it this would be one of the best games ever made.

For those not in the know, The Darkness started life in comics, appearing in Witchblade and soon expanding into its own title. This adaptation draws from the comics, but re-arranges key elements and removes the supernatural antagonists in favour of a gritty mafia-focused setting. No knowledge of the source material is necessary to enjoy the gaming fun.

You play Jackie Estacado, hitman for the Franchetti Family. You have been targeted for death by your psychotic Uncle Paulie, but on your 21st birthday you discover The Darkness, a powerful demonic force that makes you nigh-on unstoppable. You're soon drawn into a vicious mob war, simultaneously trying to protect your loved ones and fighting against the corrupting influence of The Darkness.

That all translates into an exceptional first person shooter.

The game alternates between the dirty streets and subways of New York City, and the hellish Great War-themed world of The Darkness. In each location you'll progress the overarching tale of your battle against Paulie Franchetti, but you'll also acquire side-quests, most of which are tightly tied to the main plot. You can revisit areas at will, which gives the game a kind of open-world feeling, and the story often re-uses the same locations with new enemies. Rather than feeling cheap, this successfully makes the game world seem more real and vibrant.

The graphics are stunning. On the XBox 360 this is one of the best-looking games around. Character models are expressive and make eye contact, with lips synched to their speech and a wide range of body language that supports their personality and dialogue. Not since Half-Life 2 have NPCs been so believable.

A huge amount of work has gone into the backgrounds, including a massive quantity of specially-commissioned graffiti from active graffiti artists. Posters and advertisments strewn across walls are not only believable but also very rarely repeat; most poster decals are unique to their location.

The attention to visual detail is not just in the art. The Darkness contains several embedded movies, including the full version of To Kill A Mockingbird. These can be watched on in-game TVs, along with Popeye cartoons and several music videos. They're pretty low-resolution, but still, they're entire movies.

The game uses short cinematics as loading screens. As the game loads each level you're treated to Jackie Estacado commenting on the new area, reminiscing on the backstory, recapping the plot so far, or just playing with his guns. That may not sound special, but it goes a long way to giving the entire production a cinematic feel. Late in the game as you revisit levels to mop up the sidequests you'll start getting frustrated at occasionally seeing loading screens repeat, but on the whole it's an excellent stylistic touch.

The writing in The Darkness is top-notch. The game tells a coherent, well-paced and satisfying story, with a few surprising twists and turns thrown in. The dialogue is amazing; the game delivers non-stop Italian-American speech without ever becoming cliched or clunky. Each and every character will feel like a real person naturally speaking what's on their mind. There's a lot of swearing, but here it serves only to further underline the reality of the characters.

Everything I've mentioned so far will absolutely blow you away about The Darkness. This is a game that was significantly delayed from its original release date, and it's very hard to say the extra time was not well spent. Quality just oozes from every pore.

Unfortunately, actually playing the game is not quite so brilliant. It's not bad, just... average. For all its fantastic production values this is still a game about shooting people in the head with guns. The guns in question aren't very satisfying, largely consisting of pistols, a shotgun, a rifle, and some hugely inaccurate and underwhelming automatic weapons.

It's a fairly hard game. I started out on normal difficulty and had to quickly switch to easy. At the start of the game Jackie can really only take one or two pistol shots before dropping. Later, the power of The Darkness significantly ups his resilience, but typically you'll still only have a couple of seconds between being at full health and being dead.

The Darkness itself is problematic. Your "Darkness power" is measured by a "Darkness meter", which doesn't appear on screen. There's often no good way of gauging whether you're fully stocked or almost empty. When you're "displaying" The Darkness, your Darkness meter soaks damage for you. When the meter's empty you take the damage normally, and usually die as a result.

You can also use a variety of Darkness powers, such as impaling objects and enemies on a "demon arm", firing a pair of powerful "darkness guns", or summoning a black hole to crush groups of opponents. These powers use the same darkness meter as the damage shield, so if you take a couple of gunshots you'll find that not only are you nearly dead but your powers are offline, too.

You can recharge the meter by standing in shadows. Conversely, standing in direct light drains the meter. That's problematic, though. It appears that every person in New York City leaves every electric light they can find switched on, all the time, even when they're not in the room. You'll want to painstakingly obliterate every lamp and light bulb you see, which uses a lot of time and pistol ammo. Later on some of the better Darkness powers make eliminating light sources easier. All the way through, though, this necessity to create darkness is irritating and badly damages the pace of the game. The developers would have been better served to keep light sources only in certain key areas, and make destroying them an aspect of individual scenarios.

Also, for a game revolving around light and darkness, darkness is handled poorly. While you're using your powers, you have a certain amount of night vision which makes it easy and comfortable to see when the lights are out. Unfortunately, the game mixes this in with "ambient light" - you'll often find places where there is light which is purely "artistic", not deriving from any source and not interrupting your Darkness powers. Outdoor areas are particularly guilty of this, being blanketed in neon signs and moonlight that you simply can't do anything about. It takes some time to get a feel for which lights can be destroyed and which can't.

Lastly, while the levels are an artistic triumph, they're a gameplay disaster. The geography has no real flow - there's no natural sense of where to go next, and key doorways and passages are often hard to find. Nothing here is as bad as the level monstrosities found in Halo but it's still an unfortunate bump in the gaming experience.

All those gripes aside, this is a top-class game, and one that its creators should be proud of. If you've been looking for a first-person-shooter that breaks the mould, or even a game with strong narrative to tide you over until the next Half-Life, this is exactly what you've been seeking.

Bioshock - Ryan's Rapture

While we're on the subject of a potential Bioshock movie, Roslyn H has drawn my attention to Ryan's Rapture. It's a group of fans who are attempting to make an animated short telling the tale of the creation of Rapture. Check out the trailer.

Bioshock Movie In Development

Universal Pictures and 2K Games have entered an agreement to produce a movie based on Bioshock. At this stage the writer is mooted as John Logan (Gladiator, Sweeney Todd), with Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Carribean) tapped to direct.

Obviously there's no release date being talked yet, and if you recall back to the anticlimactic tale of the Peter Jackson Halo movie you should be aware there's a lot of water between "entered an agreement" and "in cinemas".

Bioshock is last year's award winning first-person-shooter which told the tale of Rapture, an underwater objectivist dystopia, and of a mysterious stranger who washes up at its gates. It was developed partly in Australia.

Story via Gamasutra.

Bioshock

When Bioshock was released, it promised three things: a mixture of RPG and FPS elements, the ability for players to solve situations in a variety of different ways, and meaningful moral choices which influence the story.

They were probably getting confused and talking about Mass Effect, because Bioshock doesn't so much fail to deliver those promises as it does lock them in a cupboard for 14 years and beat them occasionally with a shovel. Nevertheless, it's still a hell of a game.

For those of you who've had your fingers in your ears for going on six months now, Bioshock tells the story of Rapture - an Ayn Rand-inspired objectivist dystopia located, of all places, at the bottom of the sea. The player takes the role of an interloper who is drawn into Rapture's madness when his plane crashes in the nearby ocean.

Admittedly underwater objectivist dystopias aren't exactly a concept that's been run into the ground, but philosophical speculation aside you'll find that the game plays like pretty much every other FPS since the dawn of time. You'll basically be running through a variety of corridors and large rooms, collecting power-ups, and pumping ammo into everything that moves.

The game's biggest gameplay weaknesses are where it strays from the normal FPS formula. For instance, you can "hack" most anything electrical in the game to make it work for you, including vending machines, security cameras, and killer attack robots. This basically involves playing an irritating version of Pipe Dream, where you're rerouting a device's internal plumbing (!) while nearby enemies patiently wait for news of your success or otherwise. It's pretty stupid and it badly breaks up the game pacing, especially as you're going to feel compelled by the nature of the game to hack most everything you see. Later you'll be purchasing expensive autohack tools just to avoid interacting with the silly timewaster.

The game also includes a mechanism where you can take photographs of enemies for "research" purposes - take enough photos of a given type of enemy and you'll get a (often totally unrelated) power-up. You have to put away your normal weapon to get out your camera, so you'll regularly be sitting there fiddling with the shutter while crazed mutants are bearing down on you with murderous intent. The interface is a little less awkward than the photographic bits of Dead Rising, but the minigame as a whole is correspondingly shallower and mostly just irritating.

As a result of the above two distractions, you're likely to take a lot of totally unnecessary damage from enemies, which will bring into sharp focus another of the game's flaws - the enemies aren't actually very scary. Even on the hardest setting most foes don't have a lot of grunt to them. Moreover, if you die, you'll be reconstituted at a nearby "Vita-Chamber" free of charge with a full health bar and all the kit you were carrying when you kicked the bucket. Nearby enemies retain damage you did to them, so you can just charge back out and pick up where you left off, ad nauseum. This at first seems like a progressive approach to making a game that players of all skills can enjoy, but in practice it does nearly terminal damage to your suspension of disbelief. It's no coincidence that the recently released patch for Bioshock includes an option allowing you to disable Vita-Chambers.

One of the game's most memorable features is its use of plasmids and tonics. Plasmids are special genetic enhancements which work like magic spells, allowing you to throw lightning or fire from your hands or use telekinesis or, for some reason, summon a swarm of bees. They sound great but the majority of them are either useless or redundant so you'll probably complete about 90% of the game using only 10% of the plasmids. For example, being able to freeze someone solid sounds great in principle, but the lightning power stuns enemies for about the same duration and is extra effective against machines, so there's really no good reason to ever pull out the freeze effect. That's all compounded by the fact that you can only equip a handful of these plasmids at once, so there's little incentive to experiment with new tactics.

You also get tonics, which are your standard passive power ups. Again, you can only equip a limited number but in practice the list of things you have equipped will be longer than what's on the sidelines, and as with the plasmids, there's a fairly high ratio of things you just won't get any benefit from.

Bioshock originally promised that you could solve situations in a number of ways. You could use overwhelming firepower, stealth, creative use of plasmids, hacked electrical appliances, or the nearby environment to overcome any particular situation. That's great, but in practice you'll actually just use all of the above at once, all the time. Except stealth, which, as with most every game ever, is boring, poorly implemented, and unhelpful.

You may have heard about the "moral choices" in Bioshock. This boils down to what you do about the Little Sisters. These are little girls, brainwashed and mutated to become ghoulish revenants who collect ADAM, the genetic lifeblood of Rapture. Each Little Sister is defended by a Big Daddy (the pressure-suit wearing monstrosities that appear on the game's promotional material) and after a reasonably tough fight you'll get the chance to "deal with" the Little Sister. You can "harvest" her, which kills her but gives you a huge dose of ADAM (which you can use later to buy plasmids and tonics), or you can "rescue her", which removes the genetic damage to her and leaves her alive, but gives you less ADAM.

It ultimately doesn't really matter which you choose. If you rescue Little Sisters, they'll occasionally give you presents of tonics and plasmids, which mostly offset the lost ADAM. The game plays out exactly the same way, and at the end of the game you get one of two brutally short and highly lame "endings" which depend on whether you rescued the Sisters or harvested them. In this regard YouTube, as always, is your friend.

The above criticisms aside, Bioshock is still an amazing game. The graphics are both artistically and technically excellent. Voice acting is generally outstanding, and the characters usually have something to say that's worth listening to. The world of Rapture is deeply atmospheric, and well realised through a large amount of backstory. Plus there's a lot of bonus points to be awarded just for trying to intelligently criticise Atlas Shrugged in the context of a first-person shooter. The core gameplay is well implemented, satisfying, and rarely repetitive, and the story is engaging, well told, and of a high quality all round.

It's worth mentioning that I've played both the PC and 360 versions of Bioshock and I have to say that if you have the choice you should probably go with the 360 one. On any but the highest end machines, PC performance is spotty, and on two separate systems I've seen it repeatedly crash at inconvenient times. By contrast, the 360 has absolutely no stability issues, loses little in the way of graphical fidelity, provides easy and intuitive control via the gamepad, and as a bonus you can earn Achievements while playing.

If you have any sort of liking for first-person shooters then Bioshock should be on your must-play list. It's almost certainly about to garner all sorts of Game of the Year awards and come out in some kind of cheap "platinum" edition so keep your eyes peeled because this is an experience you absolutely shouldn't miss.