Last Boss

Okay, now DON’T GO WATCHING THAT VIDEO JUST YET. We’ll get there. That’s the fun stuff.

If you play games at all, you are probably aware of the fact that 2K Boston’s Bioshock, helmed by Ken Levine (released for the XBOX 360 in 2007, and later ported to the PS3 in 2008), is one of the greatest achievements, probably in the history of any race in the known (and unknown) universe. If I had created and directed Bioshock, I would probably be more pleased with myself than if I built an actual Death Star. For those of you not in the know, Bioshock places you, the blank, mute protagonist, in the dystopian city of Rapture, a vast art deco-style metropolis on the the ocean floor where you find refuge after your plane crashes in the mid-Atlantic in the year 1960. Rapture, originally a beacon of hope for the scientists, artists, and great thinkers of the age, built by the industrialist, laissez-faire capitalist Andrew Ryan (which is an almost-anagram on Ayn Rand) upon the basic tenets of Rand’s Objectivist ideology, has since fallen to civil war, riots and complete societal collapse. When you arrive, the only remaining denizens are the mutated splicers, men and women addicted to a newfound form of genetic enhancement via a substance called ADAM found in a rare species of sea slug, and the iconic Big Daddies and Little Sisters, pairings of vast “men” in diving suits with drills for arms that mysteriously guard strange empty-eyed girls as they wander the dark and empty streets sucking raw ADAM out of dead bodies to be reprocessed. What ensued was your long and tireless search through the dark, haunting passages of this slowly collapsing aquatic metropolis for the crazed mastermind behind the project, Andrew Ryan. The atmosphere of this title is still unlike anything else ever seen in gaming, with old honky-tonk tunes echoing through deserted, partially flooded plazas filled with bodies of the dead. It was a fantastic FPS, with a variety of fascinating mechanics and gunplay, which would take another several pages to go into here. But what really set this game apart from similar fare was its discussion of ideas. The slow collapse of the city, knowledge of which is gleaned from the scattered “radio diaries” of NPCs lying around Rapture, told the story of idealism-turned-authoritarianism, and begged the question of where the line is actually drawn between the two. In addition, it set moral choices in front of the player, in the form of giving him the choice of how to handle the Little Sisters once their Big Daddies (each a boss-type encounter in and of themselves) were taken down (the Sisters could either be “saved” for a smaller up-front reward, with no telling if it would ultimately pay off or not, or “harvested”, which was as gruesome as it sounds, for a much greater reward at the cost of killing a small child). And it doesn’t hurt that it ends with a twist that will literally blow your fucking head off. Needless to say, I have an unholy amount of love for this game; as I said, I could go on for another several pages drooling over the mechanics of plasmids, terminal and bot hacking, weapon customization and the wide variety of enemy encounter tactics, but I won’t do so here.

Bioshock was followed up with Bioshock 2 (2010), however this was developed by 2K Marin rather than 2K Boston, and Levine had nothing more than a vague advisory role on the title (we would learn why this was so later in the year; but I’m getting to that), and, while it’s a worthwhile playthrough, it did nothing much at all to innovate, and ultimately felt very “safe”, which was exactly what the original Bioshock wasn’t. It was initially shocking that a sequel was even made, since, as anyone who has played the original knows, the ending (whichever ending you get) has quite the air of finality to it. The game was long delayed, as 2K Marin purportedly had a slew of issues throughout development, and ultimately had to bring in two other developers to assist them in finishing and finalizing the product.

However, Ken Levine’s team, Irrational Games, previously 2K Boston (still a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, publisher and umbrella company also to the famed Rockstar) has finally shown the world what they’ve been working on these past years, reportedly since the wrap of the first Bioshock. Okay, now I’m gonna ask you to watch that video, and watch all of it (I highly recommend going down to the bottom right and throwing it up to 720p). Return to this point when you’re done.

Okay. Take a deep breath. Go get a tissue and wipe the cum off your thigh. I’ll wait. I promise, I’m not going anywhere. I give you, Bioshock Infinite.

Now there’s a fucking lot to say about this. The release date at the moment is just “TBA 2012”, which, realistically, barring any major setbacks, probably means we’re looking at a Q4 holiday release, though I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if it got pushed back into Q1 of the following year (this has actually been a bit of a new trend for the industry, bigger titles getting pushed back into the new year so as not to get drowned in the slew of blockbuster titles and family-targeted third party shovelware the market gets glutted with every holiday season). That being said, with the game so far off, a lot of people are saying this is not actually representative of actual gameplay, but is some sort of on-rails demo they’ve constructed. If you want my opinion, I don’t give half a fuck; if this is even remotely indicative of what we’re gonna see when we actually get our hands on that minty-fresh jewel case, we’re looking at greatest game of all time material. According to a couple interviews with Levine, they’re trying to do something very different here. They’re basically doing to Bioshock something similar to what’s happened to a series like Final Fantasy, where each title, though similar mechanically and thematically, has its own unrelated storyline. This new title’s setting is the city of Columbia, named after the female personification of the United States. Supposedly, it was built to basically be a giant floating World’s Fair, though after its construction was also revealed to be mechanized, almost like a Death Star, according to Levine (see how I just totally brought the blog around full circle without even meaning to? that’s because I’m awesome and my mind works better than I even know it does). The year is 1912, some 48 years prior to the events of the first Bioshock, though it has yet to be revealed whether the two titles even share the same universe (this hopeful blogger has his fingers crossed that the answer is ‘yes, they do!’). Apparently shortly after Columbia’s launch, it’s involved in some sort of international incident (which Levine and Irrational are keeping under wraps) and disappears. Unlike in the original Bioshock, you are not some faceless hero, but rather Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton agent charged with the rescue of one Elizabeth, presumably the young woman seen in this footage. We can also see, in concurrence with what has been reported, that there will be a focus on teamwork between the two throughout the game. We can certainly tell from this footage that very heady ideas are once again being tackled; this time around, specifically, what looks to be nationalism, racism, and, especially, American exceptionalism, an ideology often considered to have first surfaced at the real 1893 World’s Fair. What I love most about this footage is that once again, and it’s obvious from the first second, Levine and the team over at Irrational are not playing it safe; they’re doing something radically different than before, while still keeping it distinctly Bioshock. Instead of returning to a similar dark, murky setting like that of Rapture (which would have been easiest, as these games are usually thought of to have some heavy horror elements), he has done literally the exact opposite, going from the ocean floor to the clouds, from shadows and gloom, to the bright, sunlit cobbled streets of A FUCKING CITY IN THE SKY. THIS SHIT IS FUCKING BEAUTIFUL, MAN. There are so many mind-blowingly fantastic little moments in this footage that they seem almost innumerable, from knocking the dude off the balcony onto the gondola, to blowing the guy away with a shotgun VIA TELEKINESIS, to the storm of crows that immediately follows, to the lightning hurricane teamwork shit, it just goes on and on and on. Story-wise I’m wondering how the special powers will be handled in this installment, because, even if this is in the same universe as Rapture, this is almost 50 years before the events of Bioshock, so plasmids hadn’t been invented yet. But who knows, maybe tonics still existed. Regardless, I think I’ve gone on long enough now, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled for updates on this title, and post any such little gems here.

Last Boss

videogames and corpse paint.

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Immortal - At the Heart of Winter