Taaaaake, taaaaake me hooome
By Koworld

You know how you played Deus Ex and you’d been deep into the story and you got to the end and you thought ‘oh. Umm. Okay. I guess that’s that then?’ and so you went back-a-save and played for the alternative ending and you thought ‘whatever’ and so you went back a third time and played the alternative alternative ending? And that ending was as underwhelming as the others? And you thought ‘fair enough, what was I expecting? A shock, a hug and a nice cup of cocoa? And you sit here now and you think ‘Max Payne, that was a dreadfully rubbish ending wasn’t it?’ Half Life ending? What? Half-Life 2? Cock. Far Cry? Where the fuck did that go?

Deus Ex: Turns out the bloke on the top right there got it spot on.

And then you realise: no story-driven FPS has ever ended in a satisfying way. If videogames built around strong narratives are to be taken seriously then surely the basics of storytelling really should apply? A beginning and a middle and an end? Bioshock is a short game, almost revelling in its compactness – that structural choice is just one of the, so very right, decisions made by Irrational. For the first time an FPS feels like it’s driven along at a film-like pace, there’s no filler, no stretching of the game’s narrative backbone. That’s what makes this one so special – the entire experience, beginning, middle and end, is so whole and so satisfying.

Bioshock does many things so very, very well but its absolute achievement is to put story at the centre of the experience. Sure, that story is Ayn Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged but Irrational have happily paid homage to that source material throughout and its one thing to lift an idea but an entirely different one to realise that idea so convincingly.

Christ there’s been some imagination put into this thing, and that investment in thought has been matched by investment in the consistent delivery of that thought – Rapture, the city in which Bioshock exists, is beautiful but it’s also utterly convincing. I can’t remember any game of the 3D generation that has so completely fooled me into believing that it was real. It is as if the solidity of the place and that absolute perfection of the 1950s atmosphere, voices, presentation, neon, wood, rust and furnishings of detail simply do not allow you to see it as pixels.

See! I knew going to the Doctors was the same as choosing to have your throat cut.

The engine on which Rapture runs really isn’t anything extra-special – the sense of place comes not from visuals alone but from narrative, the peerless voice-acting, razor-sharp direction and a story that would work just as well if told in a book (again) or a film. For some, FEDGE magazine especially, Bioshock is a reverse magic-eye poster – stare at the screen too long, block out everything but the mechanics and Bioshock becomes just another dark-hued FPS, and one that doesn’t change much throughout it’s duration. It is easy to see Bioshock as underwhelming if you look only at its components and not at its whole.

I can understand how this happens: throughout FPS history a sense of ‘place’ has been as peripheral as it was in Defender – the tick-list of FPS requirements, minted fresh out of The Fisher-Price Factory of Marketing, hasn’t changed in the 15 years since Doom. We’ve been told to judge an FPS by the ‘graphics’ and the variety of levels and the weapons and ‘x’ gimmick. Bioshock’s gimmick is ‘choice’ and, though it offers up one significant and genuinely difficult choice, ultimately – it’s neither an important nor a substantially story-changing feature. So the gimmick fails. The weapons, though fun and of a terrific variety, are a bit weak in terms of differentiation and aren’t particularly satisfying to use. Nothing special. And wherever you are in Rapture, it still looks and feels like Rapture. So no real variety.

But that’s Rapture’s glory and Irrational’s genius – it all feels the same because it’s supposed to feel the same: this city underneath the sea is one man’s extraordinary, and utterly single-minded, vision. Dapper Andrew Ryan, cad, underwater utopian-thinker and refugee from government oppression, greed and corruption, planned every detail and realised his raffish dream with absolute precision. That we enter the dream at a point when it has turned to nightmare makes it no less consistent – tacking-on a stupid water skidoo section (Half Life 2, I’m looking at you) or throwing in an entirely barking fire-dream sequence (Max Payne, you knob) to tick the boxes on marketing’s ‘success list’ would have destroyed the illusion of reality.

Rapture - Home of the Famous Pep-Bar.

So the fact that Bioshock has sold like hot cakes is all the more gratifying: we punters have made it clear that we want extraordinary adventures with beginnings, middles and ends and we have made it clear that we want the places we visit in our gaming lives to be real. We want to go to Rapture and be somewhere.

For a few days, I was there. I was under the water trying to figure out why the hell I was there – to get to understand the secrets of the place and to find my path back home. I made it, I got home but I miss Rapture. I need to go back. You need to visit too. Let 2K and Irrational sell you a ticket to somewhere real.

Fuck, I’ve not described the game at all yet have I, shit reviewing sorry – but to be honest, to tell you too much about what actually happens would spoil things. I’m pretty sure if the screenshots in this review have got you interested then it’s already a done-deal – suffice it to say: you arrive in confusion, scrap a lot, improve your abilities, unravel the story and encounter the best character-type to have ever been near a screen. Your stay in Rapture is a joyous experience – sure you’re constantly being ripped apart by hostile mutated dancers, scientitians, and over-sized deep-sea divers, and yeah you’ll burn to death, freeze to death and get spanked to death a lot but it doesn’t matter. You will play through with a smile on your face interrupted only by the occasional very effective scare or two. Few videogames experiences have ever come close to this one.

2007

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