BioShock

Would you kindly play me game, boyo?

In the late 2000s, I found myself playing a fair few first-person titles on the PlayStation 3. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Battlefield 3, Borderlands, and many more I'm sure. But not BioShock. I never played BioShock.

A spiritual successor of sorts to System Shock, BioShock sees you explore the underwater utopia of Rapture, an art deco inspired city created for dreamers, by dreamers. You'd have to be to build a city underwater.

Obviously, it doesn't stay a utopia for very long, descending into chaos and turning into a place you'd rather not end up, say, if your plane happened to crash into the mid-Atlantic. Whoops.

With three BioShock titles that I've yet to play, I might as well start at the beginning and see what all the fuss is about.

Frustrations

I've got the PC version of BioShock, and dove right in, until I encountered a bug of some description that renders all sound mute after the first cutscene. Not even the menu sliders could fix it, and it was off to the Internet for one of strangest fixes I've come across, but it worked.

With my ears able to hear things now, the subtitles decided it was their turn to stop working, displaying one large chunk of text and then cutting off as the audio continued to play. The darker background that was applied so that you could read them still worked, though, reminding you of what you were missing.

I'm not deaf, by the way. Subtitles are just the greatest video game comfort.

I got as far as the iconic character introduction and called it quits. Not on BioShock as a whole. Just on this version. On my digital travels I'd gotten not only BioShock but BioShock Remastered, an edition that will surely fix my troubles and look nicer to boot.

Shouldn't my brightness be changing with the slider at this point?

It wouldn't be my only irk, but by this point I was resigned to my fate. Not all old games run perfectly. I've struggled before, I'll just have to struggle again. Though, to be fair, 'struggle' is a strong word. I'm just a little miffed, I guess.

Fun Times

BioShock wastes little time in telling you that you're in a different time and place to what you're used to, and I don't mean that in as glaringly obvious a way as saying '1960' in big bold white text as the game begins. No, I mean that in the loading screens and the environmental design. We're transported to another world in BioShock, a world brought to life by Andrew Ryan, a businessman who thinks he and the rest of the 1940s elite deserve their own utopia, away from the likes of government and morality.

We're literally taken then in an old-timey bathysphere, as it's the only route out of this plane crash available to us. We've no choice but to descend... to Rapture.

My reveal is about as annoying as the game's reveal, thanks to the subtitles. You're meant to admire what little view you have out of the window right up until the recording of Andrew Ryan says 'Rapture!' when the rocks clear and the city comes into view. Oooh, aaah, pretty.

But the subtitles are just dollops of text, cut up with no regard for readability, timed to the nearest hour it feels like. Still. Let's not let them get in the way. They're just there for comfort, and for clarity on what I'm supposed to be doing. Let's enjoy Rapture...

... because there's no going back now. It's not a utopia anymore. And I don't think this bathysphere will go back up through the mid-Atlantic with a load of holes in the top.

We're welcomed over the radio by a man named Atlus, presumably to hammer home the fact that Ayn Rand was a clear inspiration for the themes found within BioShock. An Irish fella, he practically winks at us to pick up a crowbar as our first weapon for fending off the nasties that now inhabit this city. The best I can do is a wrench, but it's a mighty solid-looking wrench, that's for sure.

Rapture is a wreck, and you've not much to do but take in your new surroundings and eat out of the bins. BioShock is one of those games where you hoover up items into your inventory without a moment's thought and hope there's no encumberance to worry about. Candy, booze, cigarettes... everything the modern man needs to survive.

Well, almost everything. A tantilising bottle of 'Electro Bolt' glows at us. What is it, you wonder? Oh, nothing. Just something you inject before questionning whether you want your DNA to be rewritten to give you the ability to shoot lightning out of your hands.

Yeah, I probably would have fallen off a balcony and passed out upon injecting myself with electricity too. The locals, including some disfigured goons, a little girl, and a giant stompy robot thing, leave us for dead. Probably for the best, that.

After the briefest of moments, we're right back to exploring Rapture with our new-fangled mutant ability. Is it wise to zap open doors underwater? Probably not, no.

It is wise to zap enemies, though, stunning them in their tracks long enough for you to switch hands and wallop them across the head with your wrench. You don't appear to be able to hold both hands up at use the same time, like in Oblivion, for example, and switching between them has you pressing the attack button twice, effectively, once to switch hands, and then to make use of them.

So I guess the best way to venture around this place is with a bit of caution, rather than trusting you'll be able to react quick enough to get out of a sticky situation unscathed. Though on the Easy mode I'm on, there are an awful lot of Med Kits and EVE syringes to refil my electricity bar. They're everywhere. I can't even carry them all.

It's not long before Atlus informs me that Electro Bolt is a Plasmid, a scientific discovery that only came about because of the freedom Rapture gave its wealthy, intelligent, inhabitants. Unfortunately, those very plasmids would lead everyone to go nuts, resulting in the city we see today.

And what a grimy, bloody, arty place it is. The look of BioShock is like nothing much else, especially in video games. We've seen underwater worlds and dystopian cities, we've seen zombie-like humanoids and huge puddles of blood, but BioShock stands out as it's own old-timey looking thing. You could argue that it's a little similar to Fallout 3 in places, in terms of some of its styling choices, but that's not a bad thing.

If the art deco isn't the first thing you think of when you imagine BioShock, then the stars of the show probably are. The Little Sisters and their Big Daddy.

Oh, you'll not that the subtitle background is the bit that doesn't work probably in the Remastered version. I guess I can learn to overlook minor issues in video games...

Anyway, the big bad Big Daddy, not afraid to utterly wreck you at the merest hint of doing something to a Little Sister, serves as a threat to you on your travels. They'll be seen in the distance in some places, and much closer in others, and your actions will have an impact on whether that huge drill is pointed towards you or not.

But for now, we've got other things to take care of. Atlus is rather vocal about meeting up and saving his family. I guess I've got nothing else to do but survive. He seems helpful.

Also helpful are physics. Electricity and water don't mix, and enemies standing in conveniently placed puddles can be conveniently dispatched with a single attack. You don't even need to whack them afterwards. They're down for the count and you can loot the corpses for dollar bills and bullets. There's not much to loot, really. Everything, be in someones pocket or a filling cabinet or a trashcan seems to contain money, ammo, or health/plasmid restorers. I guess it keeps thing simple.

Neptune's Bounty, our meeting place, is on lockdown and defended by a flamethrowing turret, so its time to explore plan B: The Medical Wing.

Further Frustrations

The map takes a short while to load when you press the button, and when it appeared I almost wished I didn't ask for it. It doesn't look the most helpful, even with arrows and icons and objective stars. Exploring BioShock felt easier to do with the floatinn objective marker arrow and my own sense of spatial awareness. Had I been here before? No. Let's explore it.

It's not an open world, but it's not corridored off, either - at least not obviously. Visual hints as to where you are heading are often bright neon signposts, so it's not like you can get too lost on your way.

You can hack defensive systems by completing a strange little tube puzzle mini game, and that gave me a drone with a machine gun that came in handy for clearing a path through an area for me. It wasn't perfect, but it was something. It allowed me to hoover up all the audio logs and try to work out the backstory of Rapture.

Ah, the audio logs. Was BioShock one of the first games to drop a load of them into the game for players to listen to at their own leisure? I get the impression it was, because they're everywhere, and actually listening to them can be a chore sometimes.

You pick them up with a press of the A button like you pick everything else up, but then you press and hold A to listen to them. Miss that opportunity and you'll have to dig through the menus to find the recordings, and miss that opportunity you may well do, because if there's anything remotely close to that recording - say, the desk you nabbed it from - the A button will desperately try to open it, or pick it up, or scoff it, instead of playing the audio recording.

Minor quibble? Indeed. However, these audio recordings are rich in content for those of you trying to piece together just what kind of a place Rapture is. It's one thing to hear Atlus say that plasmids are the cause of the problems, and quite another to hear that people down here got plastic surgery at the hands of a maniac doctor in search of perfection at whatever the cost - the doctor, that is, not the patient. The patient was wooed by the doctor, coerced into becoming his next model.

If the audio doesn't tell you that, you're left to work it out from the environmental detail. The blood on the walls. The messages written in that blood. You know, details that I regularly miss...

Further Fun Times

Skipping through, you've missed me chase down this mad doctor who has a key to where we need to go, but our path to him is blocked by rubble that we have to move with the Telekinesis plasmid. To get that, however, another path is blocked by a giant wall of ice for which we need the Incinerate plasmid to melt. We need to become a fire starter. I guess this corridor under the 'Eternal Flame' sign is our next objective...

Burn, baby, burn. Like elecricity and water, fire and oil make for an environmental hazard for you to exploit, though don't be an idiot like me by standing in the oil when you set fire to it, yeah?

Plasmid in hand, literally, it's time to backtrack and uncover a new area full of people to wrench and plasmids to pick up. You won't see any screenshots of it, because the action generally happens quite quick, and I spend most of the game looking at the floor where all the items usually are. That's where the rubbish bins and the dead enemies and their pockets are, at least.

You might think clearing an obstacle with Telekinesis is as simple as lifting said obstacle out of the way, but no. Instead, we've got to goad an enemy into lobbing a grenade at us, catching the grenade with our telekinetic abilities, and hurling it into our obstacle to clear the way through to the crazy doctor and the key we need for wherever it is we're going - if I'm honest, I'm just following the objective marker here.

For good measure, I practice throwing grenades back, too.

This doctor is rather theatrical, and quite definitely bonkers. He also catches us oogling at the events unfolding through the window and starts shooting at us. We're in a boss fight!

We've sadly only got two plasmids to choose from at this point, so I have electro bolts and telekinesis on my left hand. What I have in my right hand, however, is an arsenal of firearms from my travels. A pistol, tommy gun, and how about a shotgun?

Oh. That was quick. Three blasts with a shotgun and he's down. I can nab the key I need from his corpse and be on my merry way to the next objective marker. Wherever that leads.

I was kinda on autopilot here, just going through the motions needed to make progress. I wasn't really taking anything in or exploring my surroundings outside of noticing something that could be picked up and running to it.

I was, to use a not, not fully immersing myself in BioShock.

And so I decided to find a nice place to call time on my first(ish) experience with it, which was just around the corner and came in the form of one of the main themese of BioShock: do you help the Little Sisters because they were once innocent little girls, or do you tear the ADAM out of their souls to fuel your plasmid consumption.

One choice leads to being assaulted by a Big Daddy, so choose wisely...

Final Word

I dipped at least a foot into the waters of BioShock, surely? Of the three games, I've not actually seen much of the first two, so I remaind largely unspoilt by plot events. Andrew Ryan is a dick, 'Would you kindly' is awfully suggestive, and I'm struggling to find a third thing to say to show that I know just a little bit about BioShock. Everyone and everything can only carry three items, apart from you?

For what is regarded as a stellar series of video games, albeit a series that isn't without issue, I don't quite know why I never bothered to play or even watch it. Was it the style or the setting that put me off? Did I just not care about the fates of Little Sisters? I don't really know.

It's a little disappointing that the original incarnations of this game don't quite work. Even patches to fix the Xbox 360 version resulted in more problems for some players, but I'm in possession of Remastered editions for both BioShock and BioShock 2, so there's really no reason not to see what they're about.

I don't think they'll leap over anything else to become my new favourite such-and-such. From what I've played so far, it's certainly a decent gaming experience, but I haven't yet be floored by it. It doesn't have to floor me, a good game is still a good game, and BioShock is a good game worth looking at.

Wait, is BioShock 2 on this 1001 list? Oh. It is. So yeah, I guess I'll definitely be checking them out some more.

Fun Facts

To prompt one developer into completing his work, the default message for descriptions of objects you can look at in-game was "Paul Hellquist did not do his Job", a message that, while not present in the original release, can actually be found somewhere in the Remastered version.

BioShock, developed by 2K Boston, 2K Australia, first released in 2007.

Versions played: BioShock, PC, 2007.

BioShock Remastered, PC, 2016.