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About the Game

Bioshock is a 2007 first person shooter game that was developed by 2K Boston Games. Set in the fictional underwater city of Rapture, Bioshock gained fame and critical acclaim for its immersive environment, responsive gameplay and philosophical underpinnings that weren’t considered common at the time.

Bioshock is widely considered to be one of the most influential games of all time, with many subsequent games taking cues from it in their incorporation of environmental storytelling as well as items such as audio logs to situate a player in the game world.

Over time Bioshock has generated enthusiastic discussion with some people claiming that more than a decade on, it does not hold up to the lofty praise it generated on its release, whilst others vehemently defend the game for having vision beyond its years.

What can be said is that few games can claim to have been studied as deeply as Bioshock and fewer still can claim to have directly influenced so many aspects of popular culture.

About The LP

My best friend and partner in crime Yorkshire Tea will be taking the helm for this video LP. He has never played Bioshock or its sequels and is going in almost as blind as is reasonably possible for a person in 2020.

I will have the pleasure of acting as co-pilot, pointing out interesting areas and hopefully guiding Tea along well enough to keep the LP going at a steady pace.

Art, so the title and episode cards, will be handled by the amazing Bifauxnen.

I personally am most interested in Tea’s reaction to certain ideas in the game around moral choice as well as important narrative shifts through the game in an attempt to answer the question of whether they do, in fact, hold up.

There are more questions and more ideas that I’ll want to explore as Tea plays further into the game, but for now, I think it’s best to get to the matter at hand.

Episodes will release on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 23:00 BST, 18:00 EST.

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I really like that you're looking at all the detail in the ads and such. It's something that's rewarding after playing through as well, since you know more of what those mean in the game's world.

Bioshock might be the only game I bought within a few weeks of its release at full price in the store. I was anticipating it that much, since I loved System Shock (and SS2). Have either of you played those games and can make a comparison?

Blind, huh? You're in for quite a trip.

Tea is right in that details make the game, but details really make this game. I look forward to future episodes!

Yeah, I think Tea's really going to like this purely because he really enjoys environmental storytelling.

I like that the graffiti means two things - Professor Steinman's graffiti reads "Adam denies us an excuse to be anything other than Beautiful!" ie "We can, so we should!" - the graffiti on his posters, likely from his victims simply reads "Adam denies you an excuse!" IE "Yeah, you can, but just because you have the tools doesn't mean you have the right!"

I'm in the camp that Telekinesis is the best plasmid in the game -- you can get by almost the whole game using it as your only weapon. You just need to be throwing heavier objects than tennis rackets. (Bodies, for example.) Although to do that, you'd also want to be hacking every security bot you can, which is a good idea anyway. I'm imagining you found the limit already if you haven't yet realized what it is.

BioEnchanted wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 16, 2020 9:02 am

I like that the graffiti means two things - Professor Steinman's graffiti reads "Adam denies us an excuse to be anything other than Beautiful!" ie "We can, so we should!" - the graffiti on his posters, likely from his victims simply reads "Adam denies you an excuse!" IE "Yeah, you can, but just because you have the tools doesn't mean you have the right!"

I always thought both graffitis (graffities?) were from Steinman; "We can, so we must" sort of deal.

I'd always read the graffiti as being from Steinman as well. "We can so we should," for the first and "We can so you must" being the second. As in like a further and deeper breakdown around the concept, "I have the agency to do whatever I want," to "You must now also do whatever I want."

WRT telekinesis, there's always the fine shooter tradition of Red Means Boom.

This control scheme seems to be, uh... working against Tea pretty hard. It's even making the hacking minigame seem stressful, and that just should not be, this early in the game!

Also, does Bioshock have subtitles? It's a noisy game, dialogue can get a bit buried sometimes.

I don't know if it's ever mentioned in-game, but the book says that Ryan put Rapture underwater out of concern for the "inevitable" nuclear wars on the surface world & the radioactive fallout thereafter.

The real moral choice in Bioshock - deciding to kill or not kill the 'enemies'.

Not to imply that you didn't have to make a very difficult decision there to not kill small children who can apparently live semi-normally if you remove the symbiote.

Tea, I love you, but reload your dang guns

Also hold down the bumpers to bring up the weapon/plasmid selection wheel, so you don't have to manually toggle between all of them to get to whatever you're going for.

I don't think Tea will ever get used to reloading his guns.

It probably is harder to see at this point for those who haven't played it, but it's true, the game isn't really as political as it seems. It's about games.

You're starting to see just how useful TK can be. Also good when you spot something in some difficult-to-reach spot and don't want to walk out to it. That was about the skill's only use in System Shock 2, so it's nice to see how much better it is here.

It works easier on the melee Big Daddies since their movement is going be Directly At You, but if you want a use for prox mines, pop a few on the ground between you and a Big Daddy real quick right before pissing him off.

I'm trying very hard to encourage Tea to do that. But there are so many things to encourage doing!

Shoving that barrel back up the stairs was sublime

The plasmids really give you a good variety of things to do, and it's one of the things I'm glad you can show off.

I've played this barely hacking any turrets/cameras, and it can be much more of a stealth game. Although there's still a lot of big fights with the Big Daddie; it just paces the combat differently when you play like that.

okay, "what the hell will Tea do next when hacking" is increasingly taking over my reasons for following this.

With regards to engaging with the game in a Blind LP format, I appreciate that you two always try to keep pacing in mind, and while that can cause some slight rushing here and there, I don't feel like it was a significant source of some of the earlier friction. Instead, I suspect it came mostly from the "as blind as reasonably possible for 2020" part. More precisely, I ask: what were Tea's expectations of Bioshock as a shooter on entry? Because Bioshock is, or at least tries to be, of a specific type, that asks for a certain mode of mechanical engagement (something... broader than just a playstyle), which Tea does seems to be settling into more and more.
(also the controls definitely still seem a bit troublesome, but, ah, it is what it is)

I'm actually unsure on what Tea expected in terms of the shooting in Bioshock. He describes it early on as basically being Timesplitters to him, which is a game we both love, but if I remember I'll ask him ahead of the next recording.

haha, at the end of this episode you're arriving at around about the same point I was trying to start leading towards with my last question: Bioshock is a shooter, yes, but it is of the immersive sim type. A bunch of systems humming along on their own and sometimes interfacing with each other, until the player comes along and throws a wrench into the works in a variety of ways. I believe that this one piece of information, and no more, dramatically changes player expectations and therefore initial approach to the game, compared to going into Bioshock only knowing that it is a shooter (to be fair, most of it does still just amount to Walk Around, Shoot Mans - how successful Bioshock is at being an immersive sim is a different conversation). Knowing that Bioshock is an immersive sim - or perhaps not even knowing that term and only knowing that Bioshock sought to occupy the same kind of territory as System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex, as was the case for me back in the day - predisposes one to be on the watch for the various systems and their interface points, and to experiment with how one interacts with those systems.

So, since it appears you're far in enough that nothing new would be revealed by it, my question for Tea then becomes: if this one additional piece of information about the nature of Bioshock (it being an immersive sim) had been present as he entered the game, in what ways does he think it would have altered his expectations, initial approach, and initial impressions of the game?

Art will be up shortly!

I will be sure to ask Tea that in our next session.

Alright I am getting really tempted to reinstall and stick with the invisibility because the amount of no-selling it's doing is wonderful

It really does allow for a varied style of gameplay, and encourages you to switch it up with the way resources are parceled out. You can be a stealthy melee killer with a wrench build, a hacker with a little army to accompany them, or just go around blowing stuff up.

The machine sounds like it says "¡Bienvenido al Ammo Bandito!" (should be bandido for proper Spanish, though).

I feel like butchering the Spanish is in keeping with Rapture's theme.

There'll be a short delay on the next few episodes due to Covid concerns. Our recording day got nixed because Tea's dad had Covid symptoms and he was awaiting test results. (He's fine)