Friday 22 June 2007

Bioshock made me wet my pants

Bioshock is looking like a fantastic gene splicing/Art Deco crumbling/ dystopian romp. Set in a city established at the end of WWII for society’s elite to pursue their own questionable endeavours. You only need to watch five minutes of Big Brother (the TV series not 1984) to know that people living in a confined space tend to start cracking skulls and feasting on the goo inside unless the powers that be step in.



Sadly for the citizens of Rapture it’s the city’s founder and a leading scientist who kicks the ruckus off over a substance more valuable than insulin to a cake addict. Adam: stem cells purer than the finest grade A Columbian is the Oil of Olay to Rapture’s metro sexual inhabitants.


You crash land a decade or so later to find the algae has well and truly hit the propeller. Apart from getting your head around attacking little girls (little sisters) who carry Adam they’ve recently sucked out of dead bodies. (I promise this isn’t a pedophile’s/ necrophilic’s wet dream.DID.YOU.SEE.WHAT.I.DID.THERE?!). Various other moral choices will no doubt smack you about like so many bible wielding preachers, leading to different game endings.

I wet my pants (apart from taking a bullet in Nam) because BioShock boasts ‘emergent game play’ which will hopefully mean you can interact with just about anything. Pulling your virtual nob out and placing in on a window to see if any fish are attracted would definitely be a gaming first. Fish nicely leads me on to ecology, AI ecology even, allowing the player, that’s you, to observe how each person/creature/machine in the world interacts and pit them against each other for your own personal gain. It’s a bit like middle management.

Bioshock looks to piss all over water world when it’s released in August later this summer.

No comments: