BioShock

No one. Copyright Infringement!=Theft.

Just the thought that Bioshock is in development is exciting. Playing through F.E.A.R. reminds me of the “tell a story through old voice mails” that began with the original System Shock.

And speaking of Irrational - anyone know what ever happened to The Lost? IIRC it was supposed to be an early PS2 title, but it seemed to have gotten stuck in development hell (a bit ironic considering the game’s setting).

Heard their was a dispute with Crave Entertainment. Whatever the cast The Lost seems to be lost.

There is an Ayn Rand quote, from Atlas Shrugged, featuring prominently in the GI article. I hope that’s just standard Game Informer idiocy and not anything to do with the game.

If an Ayn Rand quote is their “standard” level of idiocy, that’s a pretty generous comment. Considering that most gamers these days couldn’t spell “Ayn” if you spotted them two vowels.

Ayn Rand is very dumb! And y is only sometimes a vowel! I’m not sure if it is a vowel there! Possibly!

It’s a Randite! RUN!

Btw, Bioshock looks incredible.

I wonder how many can pronounce her name…

Look at you, slacker, a pathetic collectivist of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you steal my properties. How can you challenge a perfect moral egoist?

Enter that room, insect, and I will stop the engine of the world!

I met a Randite once, I think. Some girl I was talking to online and thinking of dating. If you dared to disagree that nothing but no-holds-barred, pure laissez faire capitalism was the way to go. If you thought ANY restrictions on the free market were necessary… You were evil.

It was pretty much like talking to a Christian whackjob, except way worse.

I thankfully have never met a free-market extremist in real life, but they’ve spread all over the internet like a plague. They’ve easily claimed more ruined internet discussions than Nazi’s, Trotskyites, and Stalinists combined.

Back to the game, here is a breif summary I saw on ttlg.com which in turn was taken from GA’s forums:

BioShock

  • Core gameplay centered on player choice and customization
  • Game takes place in the early 60s
  • Dev’s main goal is total immersion in the story
  • you wake up in the ocean surrounded by debris and your first goal is survival
  • something about creatures in the ocean discovered by scientists
  • “We’re creating a world for to be in. What you do is up to you, and you have to live with your choices.”
  • One of your skills is agility and it makes you run faster
  • most upgrades will affect weapons
  • you can create weapons and items
  • you can hack stuff by being an engineer
  • A walkthrough is useless - you take the game where you want it to go (Sounds really open ended)
  • bioShock holds many mysteries
  • Xbox 360 and PC - O N L Y

Forgive the strange writing - its not mine or the original poster’s apparently

UPDATE: The Ayn Rand quote actually has to do with the plot of the game, although I don’t understand why spoilers like that needed to be included in a preview.

I finally got my Game Informer yesterday, and I have to say – this sounds really exciting. I think the Atlus Shrugged-derived concept is interesting and presents a great opportunity to really flex the artists’ muscles with some quasi-realistic historical environments. Even if the technological conceit that the upgrade system is based on is a little silly, the resulting design sounds flexible and interesting.

We all know about the dangers of buying into previews, but I think I have officially bought this one. I really hope that the guys at Irrational are able to pull off what this article described.

I’m a little bummed they said the 360 version is coming out before the PC one, though.

Biological “enginering” really works in real life right now. The next strawberry you eat will most likely contain genes from fish. The plasmid design is extremely plausible, and carries with it some of the same risks and moral issues in the game as it does today.

If the game is half as good as Deus Ex or System Shock 2 it gets my purchase.

What I was referring to, in particular, is the sea slug that “for every cell it consumes and destroys, it secretes a fluid containing raw stem cells.”

I guess I’m out of my element, but that sounds like it’s probably dumb to me. Doesn’t matter for the game, of course.

Hey it sounds like you can kill a little kid! Eat that fable.

No Bioshock for Germany

That list is omitting the one thing that really made me excited more than anything else - the new AI system. I forget what it’s called, “symbiotic AI” or something, but I can never get enough of AI experimentation, so I’m very curious to see how this plays out.

I am wary of following into the Morrowind trap for anticipating this one, but it looks really great, and could just be the killer app I have been waiting for (until 2007) for the 360.

The entire game is premised essentially on what the developers consider the logical outcome (+sci fi) of Ayn Rand’s dream of a utopia of doers, in this case a literal form of the Atlantis in Atlas Shrugged. It’s all in the article, but I suppose one has to have actual familiarity with her writings as opposed to a vague understanding of innuendo about her writing to grasp that.

I have to admit I did a double take when I saw it, and I checked the byline to see if Alan Greenspan was suddenly writing their game reviews. I don’t really see how that can be considered standard idiocy for the gaming press or video games generally, a world where bastardized Greek myths and half assed body snatcher plots still pass as original and deep. Don’t get me wrong; I love those games too, and probably will still be playing God of War and RE4 for some time. But I don’t see how attempting to integrate a little real world epistemology into a game is a bad thing…I think those touches are what pushed Psychonauts from good to great.

More power to them if they can integrate that with shit that sells, like moral choices that mean something, not (to paraphrase the developers) do I shoot them with the machine gun or the flame thrower, but rather if the key to great power is trapped in mutant children, am I going to be the kind of guy who risks the wrath of their protectors to farm it out of their dead bodies? Or maybe that stuff doiesn’t sell, but it seems to me that gamers search for shades of gray and real ethical dilemmas in modern games, and all too often
are only offered good Jedi/bad Sith. Which, again, is a fine type of game I enjoy, but I’d like to see more of gray.

further digression:
And I don’t think hostility to Ayn Rand precludes enjoying the game, either. It appears to be taking the way of life she promoted (which true believers always defend with “it’s never been tried so how do you know it doesn’t work?”) and following its logical consequences, which are pretty much what you’d expect if you shoved a bunch of alpha males in a bubble with infinite resources on hand.

The difference is that Christian fundamentalists have a much lower recovery rate, whereas objectivism contains the seeds of its own destruction to anyone that thinks it through.

I didn’t read the article. Just glanced at one of the scanned pages momentarily and only looked at the big words.

Am I pissing you off somehow, LK? If I’m doing something bad, I’d like to know straight up so I can correct it. PM me and maybe we can work it out.

My…bad, I guess? I assumed you’d read the article since you saw the quote. I was just surprised that you would cite that as an example of run of the mill gaming hype, when it struck me as the very opposite and made the article a must read if only to figure out what the hell it was doing there. You just had the misfortune of being first in the line of fire to me responding in kind to those of you mischaracterizing Ayn Rand’s objectivism as something simple and stupid, which is just par for the course for the typical false premise that forms the foundation of many of the problems that arise in the P&R forum: an assumption that disagreement with your own beliefs is the logical equivalent of stupid because you are surrounded by people that agree with you.

Insane, wrong, and callous, sure…dumb is just a term that does not apply.

Am I pissing you off somehow, LK? If I’m doing something bad, I’d like to know straight up so I can correct it. PM me and maybe we can work it out.

Nothing of the sort. PM it is.

As for the topic, I am sorry if I am sidetracking it. It’s almost like “Ayn Rand does videogames” should have been a topic in P&R apart from one focused generally on the game’s features and such. I don’t mean for this to turn into a referendum on Ayn Rand per se, but rather I was reading a generally hostility to the inclusion of her philosophy as the basis of a game. This seems ridiculous when it lends itself so perfectly to the creation of tragedy and conflict, as well as ambiguous moral choices rife with controversy. I mean, just think of the opportunities for satire that her writing style offers a creative journal planter in a game…Fallout’s 50’s schtick might well have found a worthy competitor.