Bioshock -- the "sequel in spirit" to System Shock 2

And they're full on system crashes too, which is annoying. Save often.

Ok yeah just lost two hours of work, pretty fucking furious.

Been saving progress regularly, am just starting the Siren Alley segment. Is it crashing at random points, i.e. early in the game, or later in the game as the action increases?

Agree with all the reviews so far - not a real departure from the first (yet), but very, very pretty. If it wasn't for the splicers, I'd be moving a bit slower and admiring the design more.

Just got to siren alley also (after a night of retreading) so it was earlier stuff than that. If you want to share my pain it crashed right after grace's apartment and kicked me back to the start of the level.

OUCH. 98% complete.

Forewarned, and fortunate so far.

Slowly working my way through this, and still enjoying the sense of immersion with the design and the audio diaries.

Seems like the Dionysus Park level is a good jump forward in difficulty, or maybe that's just me spazzing & not refreshing the health packs fast enough.

The bug I'm finding annoying is dying while firing the machine gun, respawning, and watching as the gun empties itself on the inside of the container.

Had the game freeze once, in the latter third of Siren Alley, but didn't lose enough gameplay to be sad.

A few other freezes, but now finished and enjoyed. Curious where Bioshock 3 will go.

Being an ammo hoarder, a hacking/looting completist, and using the Arms Race tonic, the last few levels were painful in leaving too many goodies behind.

Off to YouTube later to check out the other two endings. I went the rescue/spare (2 of the 3) route. Doubt I'll replay it to harvest the little sisters, but will keep the game and maybe dive in again to better utilize the research camera and try a few different plasmids, or maybe go the drill-only route. Avoided Decoy entirely, and passed on using some gene tonics.

One improvement would have been post-game or -level stats of plasmid/gene/weapon use.

I just started Dionysus park so I guessing I'm a bit past halfway?

My only complaint might seem like a stupid one (and I'm not even completely on board with this complaint): dying and regenerating at a nearby tube makes Bioshock 1 and 2 super easy. You could kill a big sister without using any ammo or plasmids if you don't mind hitting her with your drill over and over, dying, regenerating and repeat. Anyways I'm choosing not to harvest any little sisters. Hopefully the 3 different ending clips aren't as sucky as the ones in the first game. (I'm gonna watch the other two endings on youtube again)

But in general I have to say that I like Bioshock games because the setting and atmosphere is amazing. The horror is fun and thankfully it hasn't been any "shit my pants" type stuff (I've yet to play a game that scary and I don't know if it would be cool or just annoying). The story is still intriguing so far - mainly the intrigue of the same old theme of science overload turning people into mutants in a cool underwater city. Since someone upthread said they are interested in what Bioshock 3 could bring to the table, I'm hoping that this game starts getting more interesting storywise - not that I'm complaining (I'll always like the underlying theme).

9/10 stars so far. I might change that score after I beat the game, think it was too short (and too easy probably) and feel like there is no replay value until several years down the road when I have forgotten plot stuff.

(I've yet to play a game that scary and I don't know if it would be cool or just annoying).

Have you played FEAR? That fucked me up.

FEAR has some good jump scares. Have FEAR 2 on the 'to play' pile. Can anyone recommend the Fear Files expansion pack? They're cheap, but worth the buy?

The Fatal Frame games get to me, both for atmosphere, the musical stabs, and the ghosts respawning.

Dead Space is pretty intense jump-scare wise, plus its got a good background of dread.

There was a game I got from an abandonware site that was pretty scary. The game was essentially a survival variation of D&D. The game only had pictures and sound.. no animations I believe. You begin at the first level of a dungeon and work your way down through random rooms picking up/searching stuff along the way while hoping to not meet an early death and having to start over again and again (and the gmae was addictive enough to keep starting over and try to win. The problem was that the game would crash at some point even if you are doing good and made it 3 levels down. YOU CAN'T WIN. And I don't think this was intentional but the result of the game never being finished (I think)... which I didn't know until later. Anyways the best scare was when you are looking through the folders and reading about the different characters in the initial selection screen, a demon face or something (gravestone) would pop up if you either spent too long selecting or cycled through the characters too many times. Great stuff. Also the pictures/sounds/music in this game were creepy if I remember correctly. I could try to find it for yall if any of yall are interested

got this together with Oblivion for seventeen quid.

this game is freakin strange.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/i/irrationalgames

First trailer is here!

And it actually looks pretty damn cool- looks like Levine sat out Bioshock 2 to work on what it actually should have been.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3180831

O_O v v excited here

Infinite BioShock! would be an infinitely better title.

Fuck me, this looks good. Never did get round to trying Bioshock 2. Perhaps I shouldn't bother now?

I have Bioshock and Bioshock 2 still sat in their wrappers. I'll try and get to them both before the new Irrational Games project comes out...

You got like 16 months.. you can do it.

skyoshock

ok, so i had never played the first bioshock, and i borrowed it from a friend on friday and got obsessed. i'm past the big reveal moment, somewhere in the apartments. is it weird that my main weapon at this point in the game is still the wrench? for the first couple of hours i had plenty of ammo for everything, but ever since ammo has seemed really scarce. i also don't think i'm very good at this, so i'm all about the forgiving save and resurrection systems. and i get the impression that i'm alone in kind of loving the hacking mini-game, at least when i get a decent start on it.

proudest moment was hypnotizing one big daddy to fight another big daddy, and swooping in at the last second with a single grenade to finish things off.

Hacking was fun for me, as my timing coordination seemed suited for it, and I'm all about completist goodie collecting.games, not so much.

Bioshock Infinite's initial teaser was both brilliant and vertigo-inducing. Looking forward to that one.

I mean, it's Pipe Dream, how much can you hate it? The only problem is that it just got a little tiresome towards the end, but I still enjoyed it.

yes, pipe dream! i knew i had played a game very similar to it as a kid, couldn't think of the name.

btw i think i'm nearing the end, just got the big daddy suit. i haven't harvested any of the little sisters, but is there any benefit to going back and saving the ones i may have missed (besides completism)?

Popcap also did a nice clone of PD called Rocket Mania a few years ago, though it got totally overshadowed by Bejeweled and the like

I think there's a slight ending change if you saved all of them vs. some of them. However, if you harvested even one, you automatically get the "bad" ending, IIRC.

I like you guys but I don't share-my-credit-card-info like you guys.

Wrongggg thread.

would make the minigames more challenging if you had to enter a pin number

done, i backtracked to the wharfs for the last two little sisters and then got the "good" ending (pretty anticlimactic, honestly).

bioshock 2 is rad

PS3 version of Bioshock 1 is deffo less smooth than the 360 version. Annoying that you have to choose between quality textures and smooth framerate.

360 textures look plenty good enough. I finally finished Bioshock 2 a few days ago. I found myself wishing I could play longer with my final set up

I got Bioshock 2 for cheap recently - missed out on the first one because my PC then was nowhere close to being up to it. I have reached the flooded park level, and so far this has been amazing, the best game I have ever played I think. The whole scenario is so sad & laden with pathos - the beautiful art deco sity all in ruins, with the sea coming in everywhere, views out of the windows showing broken monorails, some of the tower blocks with lights still on, some dark, stuff like that - obviously not long before the whole place is going to get reclaimed by the sea. The splicers' overheard conversations are sad & pathetic, even the noises the little helicopter bots make when they're damaged ramp up the ;_; The idea of the place, neon-lit Manhattan under the sea, w/the blocks connected by monorails and bathyspheres is so charming that I really wish it actually existed (BUT THE PARASITE SAYS NOOOooo) and I totally believe in it when I'm playing it and forget about the actual practicalities of it like where do they get the fresh air from, why are there no non-splicer residents apart from the plot characters etc.

I described the scenario to a friend of mine and he said it remiinded him of JG Ballard, which I guess it does, like "High Rise" or "Running Wild" - the first big room you encounter in Bioshock 2 contains a drained swimming pool, I wonder if that's some kind of tribute.

Will def. pick up the first game.

Best bit so far has been when one of the levels gets flooded and when you go back through the water-filled streets, and there's this huge shark swimming above you, taht was def WOAH.

Started playing this again.

I can't start playing it again! I got the multiplayer mode working (which is not very good - very clunky in its execution) and now the single player mode is fucked. Or maybe Windows live is fucked, either way, I can't tell but it leads to the game locking up. I tried reinstalling it, no good. Luckily I'd (just) finished it.

Pro: the maps - plenty of interesting things to explore, all of the locations make "sense" by which I guess I mean they appear to be there for a reason & are not just random rooms. I completed the objectives in the Pauper's Drop section, went scouting round for pickups and found that I had only explored half of the map. The whole concept of the place is quite charming.

The music is very good and is deployed well throughout the game.

The splicer's spiel was v effective, especially when they were all sad, like complaining that their house was in ruins and their furniture had been made into firewood, or they were lonely or whatever.

There were some very striking/memorable bits incl the shark swimming through the streets as above, the big sister smashing in the windows of the banqueting hall, seeing Rapture through the eyes of the little sister.

The little sisters thing is very well done, quite twisted and creepy which adds majorly to the atmosphere of the game. I noticed quite late on that the spiel they come out with is related to what you're doing. If you stand around and do nothing for a while they complain of being bored, when you electrocute ppl in the water they say things like "look daddy, they're dancing!" Uh.

Con: combat was very clunky I thought. The idea of having the plasmid attack on the LMB and the gun on the RMB is good, but IDK, it didn't seem to work too well for me, the aim, especially on the guns seems really crap, both in single player and multiplayer. I never really found it anything other than frustrating, especially as there seems to be nothing conceptually wrong with the weapons etc. I compare this w/UT2K4, which is smooth and fast, and rewards practice.

For all that I really liked the maps, the location, the idea of this place, after a while it was like the gaps began to show a bit, and it became evident that there wasn't quite as much there as there seemed at first. I started wondering, who looks after the infrastructure of this place, when everyone there is a deranged, gun-toting mutant? Surely there must be other normal ppl there, apart from the key characters? Where does the food come from, who tops up the vending machines, where does the air come from? etc etc. There seemed to be a small number of different types of splicer, and seeing the same ones over and over again throughout the game chipped away at the suspension of disbelief.

The voice acting as not very good, for some reason the female characters seemed especially bad, and this got worse during the last level when holy shit the game got super-verbose with Elanor and Doctor Lamb blabbing away non-stop. SHUT UP ALREADY.

I hate games that have online activation! I still have all my Quake discs from 15 years ago. I still play them from time to time. Maybe I'll want to play through this again (if I can get it working) How do I know that it'll activate in 10 years or w/e? Why can't I install it on a not-online computer? I paid for the fucking disk! It's annoying.

Oh, I liked the little helicopter robots too, they were cute. I felt sorry for them when they got all busted up, and you could hear the motor cutting in and out. I had a tonic where you could fix them up, but I lost it ;_;

I would totally go and visit Rapture if it existed, and was not full of deranged maniacs. I could do w/o the Randist bollocks too I guess.

I hate games that have online activation! I still have all my Quake discs from 15 years ago. I still play them from time to time. Maybe I'll want to play through this again (if I can get it working) How do I know that it'll activate in 10 years or w/e? Why can't I install it on a not-online computer? I paid for the fucking disk! It's annoying.

I have a solution.

These games seem pretty buggy? Bio 2 is still fucked and will not run. When it was running is did crash quite often. I bought Bioshock the other day, installed it, it plays the cutscene on the plane and the shadowed "Bioshock" title OK, then the sound cuts out up till the point when the bathyscape arrives in Rapture, then it sticks and won't go any further. I have no clue how to resolve either of these issues. Not very impressive, I'm glad I bought the budget reissue of the game, & didn't pay full price for it!

Your PC sounds borked.

i started playing Bioshock a couple months ago. i liked the way it started, but grew tired of it after a few hours. i decided i'd quit and go back to it after playing SS and SS2, both of which I'd never played. so I'm playing the first System Shock right now - it's solid but very awkward to control. i can see why Doom 2 was more popular at the time. SHODAN's a great villain though.

Your PC sounds borked.

― Most women do not like atheism.(8)(9)(10)

My PC is fine. I found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOvDXxKDQFk

...which fixed it! It's a bug.

I liked the opening cutscene on the plane with all the passengers smoking and the cabin lights shining thru the fug of ciggy smoke. I remember using public transport in the 1980s before smoking was banned and it was often just like that.

The first Bioshock is an incredible game, and that opening sequence really sets the scene. The whole moment when the plane explodes around you, and then you find the tower, walk in, the lights go on and a giant Andrew Ryan is glowering at you. Just perfect in every way.

Bioshock 2 is nowhere near as good, but it's still enjoyable and the narrative elements are well done. I got right to the very last level and the sodding disc died (there's a whole saga I recounted in the 360 thread). Going to have the disc fixed today.

so I'm playing the first System Shock right now - it's solid but very awkward to control.

i think this was by the guys (Looking Glass) who did the ultima underworld games, which were similarly adventurous and revolutionary and way ahead of their time while being kind of a drag to play. (the UU games, at least the first one, control pretty similarly to system shock.)

system shock 2 is one of the most incredible games ever made for about 4/5ths of its playtime. or 3/4ths, depending on how forgiving you are. also hope you are not afraid of spiders.

http://i.imgur.com/ii1ac.jpg

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2011/07/08/bioshock-infinite-e3-demo-video-watch-all-20-minutes-now/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPMiqDqkWn8

did that new one ever come out and was it good?