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Koko Ricky

So I played Bioshock: Infinite the other day...

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And yes, like everyone and their uncle has said, it's awesome. I was at a friend's house, so I got only a sampling, but I enjoyed it. But there was a curious feature, which I'm sure is present in other games (possibly other Bioshock games as well), but which is a first for me. If you press the up button on the D-pad (PS3 version), you'll get a convenient, ghostly arrow that materializes on the floor, directing you where to go. If not that, you'll at least receive a statement of the current mission objective. The latter is not really a big deal, but the former was curious. How necessary is it? To be honest, I got lost constantly, having never played it before, so it seemed pretty necessary to me.

But I remember playing Doom and Doom 2, and even Doom 3, without ever needing that feature. Even in Doom 3, with its so-dark-you'll-lose-your-bearings-instantly aesthetics and overuse of backtracking, I don't think I ever resorted to using a walkthrough. Why was I getting lost so much in the new Bioshock? The developers clearly anticipated this, otherwise the feature would have been omitted.

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As someone who beat this game for the first time this month, I can say that I never once had to utilize this function nor did I even know it existed. The design was semi-open with relatively obvious directions to travel in. Seems like it'd be pretty hard to get lost for even a mildly sharp gamer.

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GoatLord said:

But there was a curious feature, which I'm sure is present in other games (possibly other Bioshock games as well), but which is a first for me. If you press the up button on the D-pad (PS3 version), you'll get a convenient, ghostly arrow that materializes on the floor, directing you where to go.

Dead Space 1/2 did something like that too but with a glowing blue line snaking throughout the level, the feature was called breadcrumbs.

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Avoozl said:

Dead Space 1/2 did something like that too but with a glowing blue line snaking throughout the level, the feature was called breadcrumbs.


Yes, and it was better implemented there.

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Infinite was alright but its by far the worst of the 3 Bioshocks, for one the atmosphere is nowhere near as well realised as the semi-horror based setting of the first 2 Bioshocks.
Secondly i personally found Elizabeth to be unbearably annoying at times and wished she was around a lot less than she is.
Finally i really wasn't a fan of its preachiness and the game essentially getting stuck up in its own ass.
Also a side issue but i also didn't like the way the vigors were implemented, in the first 2 games the Plasmids play a huge part in the story and are essentially the reason why everything goes up shit creek but in infinite, their just there for the sake of being there.

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So far, in my opinion, Bioshock Infinite is the best of the Bioshock games. I confess, it's not like I've invested a ton of hours into it, but I really like what they've done with it, and it seems they've fixed some problems I've had. Here's my take on the series as a whole - I love the mechanics, but the controls feel a tad clunky (resulting from a console-first design focus, I'm sure), and sometimes it seems there are major issues with random difficulty spikes.

In the original Bioshock, the difficulty spikes drove me insane. You'd go from plowing through hordes of enemies to suddenly there's a boss and he has insane health, nearly-impossible-to-dodge attacks AND you're out of ammo. Just felt cheap to me. I understand a boss should be tough, but I think there should be at least some comparison between the boss and the enemies you fight leading up to the boss.

The boss fights I've had in Bioshock Infinite seem more to fit the bill, at least the ones I've encountered. They haven't been total pushovers, but they've been a challenge in line with what I've already been dealing with. I expect it's gonna take more hits to take down a boss than the minions - unloading a clip, however, shouldn't feel like I was wasting my time.

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geekmarine said:

In the original Bioshock, the difficulty spikes drove me insane. You'd go from plowing through hordes of enemies to suddenly there's a boss and he has insane health, nearly-impossible-to-dodge attacks AND you're out of ammo. Just felt cheap to me.


I stopped playing the original Bioshock because of this. I wasn't even that far into the game, but I found myself fighting a boss without much ammo, who just kept not dying. Granted, I was on either the hardest or second hardest difficulty setting, but I shot this motherfucker in the face with powerful weapons over and over, only to have him keep lunging at me. Granted, he's a boss, so he ought to be powerful, but when an obviously human(ish) character takes numerous bullets and buckshot directly to the face and just shrugs it off, it only makes me feel challenged in a very superficial way.

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Whoever the mad doctor is. I could see by the meter that I had almost done him in, but the amount of effort it took just made me go, "Nah, fuck this, that's not a reasonable number of HP, even for a boss."

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The mad doctor pissed me off, too. I didn't actually ragequit or anything, but it was the point at which the game stopped being fun for me. I unloaded everything I had on him, ended up having to wrench him to death, and it was just such an incredibly different and un-fun experience from the rest of the game that I just didn't even care anymore - a potentially good game had been ruined by cheap bosses (seriously, have the boss look and act just like everyone else, but with a bajillion health, friggin' lame).

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You'll want to prep for him as much as possible. Search all of the Medical Pavilion for Medkits, money, ammo. Hack any nearby First-Aid Stations, especially the one inside his area, in the flooded zone.

Throw the gas canisters in his area at him with Telekinesis; they do a fair amount of damage and often set him on fire, forcing him to dive in the flooded zone. If he attempts to use the First-Aid Station you hacked, he'll take a good amount of damage from that. Plus, while he's in the water you can hit it with Electrobolt and smash his face in with the Wrench. Using these three tips should help you save ammo, Medkits, Eve and money. You'll need those very soon afterwards.

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I Loved! Bioshock Infinite, I believe it's the best in the series and also one of the Best FPS I've played so far.

The interactivity, the environment and the story are really captivating. The city looks and feels so alive, the gameplay is also good.

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Neat, I'm playing Bioshock for the first time right now. I tried System Shocks 1 and 2 right before this so I guess I'm on some kind of historical expedition. I agree that Steinman's nigh-invulnerability was weird, and I probably shouldn't have started my game on hard, but the menu tells you that hard is for people who've "played a lot of shooters" so I guess that includes me. I think I managed to kill the mad doctor on my first life but the first "Rosie" sent me back to the Vita-Chamber about a dozen times.

Even though I'm playing on hard I've already maxed out almost all of my ammo reserves half way through the second area. And yet, I still feel this uncomfortable, obsessive need to search and scrounge absolutely everything. Maybe the developers don't actually expect you to search every cabinet so I shouldn't play that way, but I don't want to miss any diary entries. Maybe the treasure hunt feels like more of a chore because Bioshock's detailed environments take longer to parse visually than the stark, low-poly System Shock 2. Or, maybe it's just the ammo cap that bothers me. In SS2 I was still enjoying that hoarder's high every time I added to my pile of 200+ shotgun slugs I never used.

I'm also getting sick of the hacking minigame. It's a busywork puzzle, which is appropriate, I guess; when your target market is people who like clicking on heads, genuinely challenging puzzles that interrupt the experience would be unwelcome. The minigame should really just be less ubiquitous and necessary. Cameras should be a trivial one-bullet kill like in SS2, because right now it's usually easier and safer to sneak up and hack them rather than risk setting off the alarm in an extended firefight.

I like how monster research was done in this game compared to SS2, and it could have been even better. Instead of having to take a million generic snapshots of each creature to max out your research damage bonus, the game should give out specific challenges. Get a photo of a big daddy fighting a security bot. Get a photo of a spider splicer on fire. Setting up the right conditions for the perfect shot would feel much more involving and skill-based.

The aesthetics, setting and philosophical pot-shots are brilliant - definitely the reasons to play this game.

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