BioShock (PC)

Developer:

2K Boston & 2K Australia

|

Release Date:

2007

|

Systems:

PC, Xbox 360, PS3, OS X, iOS

---

This week on Super Adventures I'm playing Irrational Games' System Shock successor BioShock! Well okay they were called 2K Boston (and 2K Australia) at the time, but they changed back right afterwards. Speaking of names, you'd think that if they were going to play around capitalising the S in the middle like that, they'd put some clue in the logo so people would know about it. 'BIOSHOCK', there you go, I even kept it upper case.

I actually had something else written for this paragraph, but then 2K suddenly announced that the first two BioShocks are getting an shiny new release with new models, better textures and directors commentary, and PC owners get the upgrade for free! It's like they waited for the exact moment I started to replay the game so they could ruin all my plans. I was tempted to delay writing this until September and take the next few months off, but then I realised that I'm more curious about whether the original experience still holds up. I'm also curious to learn whether I'm still sick of the game, or if it's been long enough now that I can find the fun again.

BioShock's part of an exclusive club, as it's a game I actually finished once, though I can assure you that you'll be getting no spoilers from me. Well except for the first few hours of the game, I'll be spoiling all of that like crazy, but I'm not even going to hint at any twists it may or may not have. Because I hate it when people do that.

(You can click screenshots to view them in super 720p-o-vision, which was a fairly impressive resolution back in 1960.)

---

If I was playing the original PC version from disc I'd be going on a rant about the draconian DRM right now, with its activation limits, but fortunately I'm playing it from Steam so I don't have to.

Instead I'm jumping straight to the gameplay options screen so I can go into a rant about how those cogs up there would get jammed if they turned show off all these awesome toggle switches it's given me. Don't like tutorial messages, quest arrows, or item highlighting? You can just turn them all off!

Also the 1.1 patch introduced a new option to disable the Vita-Chamber respawn points. By default getting killed means stepping out of the nearest resurrection station with some health and mana restored, at the cost of absolutely nothing. But I'm an old school FPS gamer, so I'm flicking that to 'off'... and relying on quick saves instead. I doubt saving on the console versions is quite so quick though.

Hah, I've played all the shooters mate... on normal difficulty. I'm very average.

I play everything I write up on the default/medium difficulty for the sake of fairness and to judge its level of challenge. Also I'm onto these games; I know they like to crank up the enemy health on hard mode and I'd rather not fight bullet sponges.

The game begins with a pre-rendered intro video, looking out of the eyes of a man called Jack as he sits on a plane, doing his part to fill the cabin with smoke. Well he's got Jack's gift in his hands at least, for all I know he's his dad. I'm not even sure if it's him saying this right now:

"They told me 'Son, you’re special. You were born to do great things.' You know what? They were right."

If that is Jack's own voice, then it's probably the only thing he says all game. Unlike BioShock Infinite hero Booker DeWitt who never shuts up, Jack's pretty much a silent protagonist.

Anyway the plane crashes and I get to watch the fantastic logo tarnish in fast forward. It's as stylish as it is symbolic! Also you can press any button you want, but it won't get off the screen until it's good and ready.

When it's finally done Jack wakes up to find himself sinking with the luggage halfway across the Earth's second largest ocean, and struggles to get back up to where the air is.

The game pulls a cunning trick here, as the intro's entirely unskippable and goes on just long enough for a player to give up pressing buttons and put the controller down for a bit. Or lean away from the mouse and keyboard in my case.

But then you realise that Jack's not going anywhere because all this water, smoke and reflected fire is actually running in real time! Also the fact that the sound cut out was kind of a giveaway that the pre-rendered movie had ended. I'm going to have to look up how to fix this.

HOPEFULLY IRRELEVANT GUIDE TO HOW I FIXED THE SOUND IN WINDOWS 10 ON MY PC.

I got the latest version of the OpenAL drivers and installed them.
I went to C:\Windows\SysWoW64, found wrap_oal.dll and copied it into my BioShock install folder (steamapps\common\bioshock\).
I renamed the file openal32.dll.
I went into the Windows Control Panel sound options and enabled the Stereo Mix device.
Finally I turned EAX on in game.

Of course for all I know it was restarting the game four times over that really fixed it. PC games are capricious.

I'll also be going into the graphics options and switching 'Horizontal FOV Lock' to off. By default the game achieves widescreen by cropping the top and bottom of the frame instead of adding more to the sides, but switching off the FOV lock fixes this.

There, now I can get the whole lighthouse in frame! I couldn't back up any further than this really, because of the ring of flaming aeroplane debris. Also there's an invisible wall preventing me from exploring the open sea.

Poor Jack sounds like he's suffering in this icy water, so I'm going to swim over to that convenient lighthouse and see if anyone's home.

Hey it’s old Andy Ryan's giant normal-mapped head! I know he's called Andrew Ryan because there's a quote by him on a plaque underneath saying “In what country is there a place for people like me?” Also I've played the game before.

BioShock: The Collection screenshot from 2K's blog.

Here's what the revamped remastered rerelease is supposed to look like, in case you're curious. Seems they've changed his face a bit and messed with his suit. I wish I could say it was purely coincidence that I took my screenshot at almost the exact same angle they did, but truth is that I was looking precisely where the game wanted me to look. It's good at tricking me into following its script without realising it.

Well I could loiter around here in this beautiful vestibule for a bit and try to decide whether I think the music playing is from the 20s or the 30s (or maybe the 40s), but I'd rather make my way over to the 'game' part of this tour. Somehow though I get the feeling a lot of my play time is going to be spent getting my shots lined up perfectly. Screenshots I mean, but yeah the other kind too.

Downstairs I found a bathysphere and climbed inside, figuring that the best place to wait for rescue would be somewhere miles underwater. Though my view out of the window was soon obscured by a message from Andrew Ryan's desk, from which he protests against his sweat being harvested by the man in Washington.

Fun facts about Andrew Ryan: his name is based on Objectivist writer Ayn Rand, and he's played by Quark from 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' (aka. Armin Shimerman). Also Andy loves his banners, they're all over Rapture if I recall. He won't spend a penny to help those less fortunate but he'll spend a fortune to promote his ideology. Also on statues of himself.

The screen is soon removed to reveal the incredible city of Rapture that he has constructed at the bottom of the ocean! A paradise where businessmen and artists can do their thing without concern for regulation, morality or sunlight. A secret monument to the most selfish man on Earth.

I know what this is! It's the old Half-Life train intro, except shorter thankfully. This bathysphere seems much too small to ferry people down to a city though. There I've found something unrealistic about BioShock, do I get an award?

A guy called Atlas sees me coming down and asks me to grab the radio so he can chat with me. He's going to be the voice in my ear giving me directions, and he starts by telling me to get out and then go find a crowbar or something.

WELCOME TO RAPTURE.

I picked up a ‘crowbar or something’ like Atlas asked and immediately had to beat a lunatic to death with it. Hey this is a lot like the start of System Shock 2, except with a much faster wrench. It also gets to the combat much faster too.

Jack's a bit sluggish on the side step and he can't block, counter or pull off any special attacks, but he's more than agile enough for me to make short work of this guy without taking a lot of hurt myself.

Now I get to loot his body for neat shit! I don't get a choice of what to take, it's all or nothing, but then I don't have an inventory to fill up either so it's a non-issue. Plus I can also pull a Wolfenstein and eat food off the tables for health. Or even out of the trashcan, why not? I'm sure the stuff these lunatics throw away is just as tasty as regular garbage.

I need to grab everything I can find as my health doesn't regenerate and I don't have a shield. That ordinarily wouldn't be a huge problem, but the city is full of these mutated splicer folks, and they all want to hit me with pipes for whatever reason.

Seems this room's somehow a dead end though as the door controls are locked and sparking. There is a vending machine for me to investigate up the stairs though. I can tell because it won't shut up.

Uh, Jack, what are you doing? Atlas didn't tell you to get a syringe full of glowing red goop out of the vending machine and jab it into your arm, you fruitcake!

Atlas gets on the radio to explain that the stuff in the syringe is rewriting Jack's genetic code, but our hero's a bit out of it right now. He stumbles around a bit with lightning shooting out of his hands, then goes and falls off the balcony, and knocks himself out.

Oh hey guys, thanks for scaring off the splicers for me while I'm still half passed out on the floor.

The splicers and the Little Sisters are both after ADAM, the gene-altering ingredient inside the Plasmid syringe Jack just injected into his arm. Fortunately the Sisters only harvest from the dead though, so I'm safe for now.

The Little Sisters are creepy little girls straight out of a horror movie, each guarded by a monster in giant diving suit called a Big Daddy, but they're both just trying to get their jobs done without bothering anyone else. If anyone goes after the Little Sister, her Big Daddy will end them, otherwise they just wander the levels doing their thing. They had fun naming things in this game.

Anyway, I need to use a blast of my new Electro Bolt Plasmid power (lightning magic) to shock the door into opening. So it's like a blue keycard!

But it costs EVE (mana) to use, so it's actually possible to fire off lightning at everything but the lock and burn through all of my spare syringes before getting the door open... except then Atlas just sends more EVE over through the pneumo tube. The developers thought of everything.

Man, I wouldn’t want to be the one who goes out there and changes the neon letters when a new show’s on.

Oh cool, the tail of the plane just chose this exact moment to smash through the tunnel I need to take! That means I could've just rode it down and saved myself all that messing about with gene-altering substances. It can't be safe to wade through sea water while electricity is arcing across your hand.

At first I thought the game hijacked my view and pointed it towards the tail falling down, which would've been terrible, but after reloading the save and coming through again it seems like Jack was just knocked off balance for a second. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to quick save after getting the Plasmid, so I had to sit through that whole syringe-unconsciousness-splicers-Little Sister cutscene again. Bloody unskippable cutscenes.

There’s some environmental storytelling for you. The game takes place in 1960, so either the New Year's party lasted two whole years or it was cut short somehow. This System Shock 2-style audio diary hints towards the latter, as one of the people here ended up bleeding and left without her giant tape machine. I guess recording all your thoughts on audio tapes in public was like the selfie of the time.

I was wondering how well the visuals would stand up, and it definitely looks a lot closer to BioShock Infinite, which came out 6 years later, than System Shock 2, which came out 7 years before. Granted the lack of anti-aliasing isn't doing it any favours, but time can't do much to harm the game because the art design is just so damn solid (and Art Deco as fuck).

The sound design is equally fantastic, though I can hear more enemies than I can see right now and it's creeping me out. Wherever they are they don't sound happy, the way they're yelling and babbling nonsense to themselves.

Oh, I found a ghost in the bathroom! These were in System Shock 2 as well. Maybe even the original System Shock too; I really need to play that at some point.

But forget the phantoms, I've also found flushable toilets! The sign of true video game interactivity since 1996.

Hey I've got a map! The game kind of needs one too, as the levels are more Doom than Modern Warfare, and exploration is encouraged. I'm trying to get all those grey areas filled in, making sure I don't miss any doors along the way so that I don't leave behind any precious supplies. Annoyingly the red arrow shows the room I'm in, not my position inside the room, so it's a little misleading.

Outside of the map I've also I've got a quest arrow at the top of the screen to guide me around. I figured it'd point directly at the objective and leave me to figure out how to get there, but nope it turns to lead me down the correct path the whole way. Useful when I'm done scavenging and I want to get back on track.

I bet he wishes he didn't chase me through the water now. It's his own damn fault, he saw me do it to his friends and he went and jumped in anyway. Plasmids are pretty useful on their own, but they're extra useful when enemies are standing somewhere which amplifies their effect.

Electro Bolt deals damage, stuns the enemy and makes my melee attacks much more powerful, so it's easily my favourite (and only) Plasmid so far. Plus splicers like to move around a lot and can be hard to spot in these gloomy hallways, so lighting them up with bright arcs of electricity always helps.

Thing is, I have to swap between wrench or Electro Bolt, I can't have them both active at once, and there's no quick melee button. This isn't actually as awkward as you'd imagine, as Jack switches between Plasmids and weapons bloody fast, but I'm glad they changed it in the sequels.

MEDICAL PAVILION.

I've found a Circus of Values vending machine! I've also hacked it with a minigame to get better deals, but I'll talk about that later.

This is a post-downfall of society vending machine so it sells essential combat supplies like first aid kits, EVE hypos, ammo and vodka. I'm going to hold off on spending more than half my cash on 6 armour-piercing bullets though. If I'm ever that low on ammo I'll just switch to giving them the 'one-two punch' (electricity to stun, wrench to hit) until I've restocked.

Ammo can be scarce and I can only carry a small amount for each weapon, so I'm encouraged to switch weapons often and scavenge for cash and bullets. Fortunately I can bring out all my guns at once and they have multiple ammo types, so that helps offset the fact I can only hold 48 regular handgun rounds. Get a bag Jack.

Fortunately headshots are an instant kill! Well they were anyway. Not only do tougher splicer types turn up, but the rest of them level up and get far more health as the game progresses. Fortunately Jack's apparently spared from their descent into insanity as he splices his own genes to keep up... the way he injected himself at the start he was clearly nuts to begin with.

Man it's hard enough to see enemies at it is without this screen filter coming on every time I take the slightest bit of damage. A leadhead splicer pops up with a gun and before I can react everything's gone to sparkles. Wait, they're not even on screen right now, I'm being attacked from the right side!

Oh whatever, I'll just let my hacked turret and security drone handle them this time.

Uh, did they get them? I can't even tell with all the smoke. I could really do with a Plasmid that makes enemies stand out a bit more.

To take over turrets and security bots I just have to zap them and hack them (another use for Electro Bolt), same with security cameras. I like that getting seen by cameras isn't actually a massive problem though, as the alarm shutdown panels can be bribed. Plus the alarm triggers security bots, and I can hack them, so it can actually work to my benefit.

Awesome, I've just found myself a way to unblock frozen passages by melting the ice with fire from my hand. So it's basically the red keycard then, to go along with my Electro Bolt that opens electronically sealed doors.

Annoyingly I can only carry the two Plasmids right now, so if I find a third I'm going to have to keep one of them in my pocket for the time being. Until I reach a Gene Bank machine and get the opportunity to swap them around again.

These little tutorial cartoons I get after picking up a Plasmid really remind me of the Fallout games. In fact the whole game has a bit of a Fallout vault feel to it, as I'm piecing together the collapse of an isolated society that was technically advanced but culturally stuck in the 50s. Having music from the Ink Spots helps.

There's a downside to accumulating Plasmids though: cycling through them is just a little more awkward than it needs to be. Same with my guns, as I have to change from Plasmid to weapons mode before I can cycle through my arsenal. It's an annoying extra step that keeps tripping me up in fights as I get the buttons confused, try to activate Electro Bolt and accidentally end up pulling out a wrench instead.


LOTS OF VIOLENCE AND SCAVENGING LATER.

I have to give the people of Rapture credit, ADAM might be driving them all insane but at least they're putting the effort into their madness; it couldn't have been easy for Dr. Steinman to get his victims hanging off the ceiling like that.

The audio diaries I found along the way told the story of how the guy got bored of creating perfect faces and decided he'd rather be the Picasso of plastic surgery instead. I'm only here because I need a key from him, but I can't get in there until the story-appropriate time. The game likes to put its few NPCs with personalities behind a door or window to prevent me from kicking off hostilities (or getting my ass kicked) until the scene or conversation is done. Well they talk at me anyway; Jack never says anything himself.

Oh good, he just shattered the window with machine gun fire while trying to hit me. I'm going to have to step inside and do something about that.

I had ammo once, and then this boss fight happened. It doesn't help that the asshole keeps healing himself to full health with the machine on the wall down here!

At least the guns don't break in this, unlike System Shock 2, though I've been doing more damage using telekinesis to throw exploding gas canisters at him. I figured I'd wound him, get him to run over to the machine, and then electrify the water! But he's standing next to the machine so he just heals to full strength again, while I'm running out of EVE and ammo.

It's a shame I can't just hack the bloody machine... oh duh, I can!

Hah, I hacked the other machine as well you smart ass! Death by sabotaged health station. Now I've got his key and I can go... wherever it is Atlas is asking me to go now.

I used up so much ammo in that boss fight that the game's going to be putting messages on screen telling me I'm 'low on ammo but wealthy, go visit an ammo machine'. I can turn them off but to be honest I think I need the pestering. I tend to be stingy with my money, so it's nice to hear the game reassure me that I can spend some of my cash on bullets. Especially as my wallet's only big enough for $500, max.

I'm starting to think my 'New Year's party never ended' theory wasn't so far off the mark, seeing how some splicers are still wearing their masquerade ball outfits and masks. The party just spilled out into the corridors at some point, and when you're drunk off ADAM you tend to go a bit murdery.

Also damn there's a lot of these home-made swivel chair turrets in this game, way more than I remembered. Which means there's a lot of hacking too. My favourite turrets are the ones that lob bombs, because those jokers usually manage to blow me up whether they’re on my side or not!

Fortunately on this difficulty a hit like that won't kill Jack outright; it'll just knock him down to 1 hit point so that the second hit kills him outright.

I've run across an unguarded Little Sister, along with the scientist who created them! Though Dr. Tenenbaum's pulling a G-Man, watching me from up on a balcony where I can't reach her.

Atlas is on the radio too and the two of them are arguing either side of the choice I have to make. I can either restore their humanity or harvest their ADAM. Atlas is pretty insistent that I do the practical thing, and get the ADAM to make myself strong enough to survive and help him rescue his family, while Tenenbaum would rather I didn't murder an innocent girl for my own benefit.

Saving Atlas's family is a noble goal, but I'm not going to kill one kid just so I can rescue another kid, so this is basically a choice between buying into Ryan's philosophy of self interest above else, or turning against the ideology of Rapture and being altruistic. Atlas was nice enough to leave this up to me to decide, so I let the girl go and Tenenbaum assured me that my decency will be rewarded.

And that's the trouble with this moral choice, as it relies on the uncertainty of whether you can get by without the ADAM. Once it's revealed you get a comparable reward for doing the right thing, the choice becomes 'bad ending yes/no?' And yet the game keeps giving you the same choice every single time you meet a new Little Sister! This isn't like Undertale, which continually makes an effort to make you question yourself and stray from your chosen path, so the decision becomes redundant.

ADAM is basically a second currency used for purchasing upgrades from a vending machine, but I've already shown off a shop screen so I took a screenshot of the Gene Bank instead. When I find one of these machines I get a chance to switch around the Plasmids and Tonics I've found and bought into the tiny number of slots I've unlocked.

Tonics are my character upgrading passive boosts, and I've got three sets of them to enhance my physical stats, my engineering skills and my combat abilities. BioShock's a little streamlined compared to System Shock 2, but it's not an entirely unsophisticated shooter. I can make decisions like whether I want cheaper prices or slower hacking time limits, faster movement or temporary invisibility etc. The major difference is that I'm not stuck with my choices for too long, as the Gene Bank machines let me respec my build any time I come across one.

Hey look what I found!

It's possible to hack most combination locks to skip the detective work and get right to the loot, but there's no shortcuts to opening this first one. Unless you've ever played a game by former Looking Glass Studios employees (like System Shock 2 or Deus Ex), then you can just enter 0451 and collect your ammo, EVE and one-use automatic hack tool! Handy for more challenging hacks.

I found the code on my way out, written next to a despondent splicer crying over a coffin. Turns out there was only ammo inside the box though, because splicers are freaking nutso.

Speaking of crazy, I decided it'd be a great idea to take on a Big Daddy to rescue his Sister and now I have no EVE hypos left. This particular model likes to stop the floor to stun me and charge at me drill first, and he's bloody fast. I keep walking into furniture as I'm backing away and end up getting eviscerated.

There's a noise when I reach low health and it even tells me on screen, but somehow it's still not enough feedback when I'm in the middle of a fight. I keep panicking and using up too many first aid kits because I'm too focused on the giant angry monster chasing me to glance at the tiny gauge in the top left corner.

YES! I FINALLY GOT YOU, YOU BASTARD! Wait, no no, don't cry little girl, I had to kill him to save you!

I really hate fighting Big Daddies, and not because I had to face this guy like four times over before I was able to beat him. I hate it because out of all the victims in this shitty city they're among the most selfless. Their only purpose is to guard children and perform maintenance work, I don't want to hurt them! Plus once they're down their Little Sister comes over and starts crying, asking "What's wrong with you Mr. B?" It's not what you want.

There's usually 2 or 3 Little Sisters in each area, so that's how many Big Daddies I need to kill to rescue them. It's so sad to see the remaining Big Daddies lumbering around, knocking on the vents to summon a Little Sister to guard, only to find there's none coming and stomp off alone.

Ah, this is what I was waiting for.

This is the game's hacking minigame, and this is what it looks like when I had no chance from the start. I have to reveal pipe segments by clicking the the hidden tiles, then swap them around to make a chain going to the exit pipe. But this time the hidden tiles around the exit were hiding three overload tiles, meaning I can't get through to complete the circuit and I'm going to end up taking damage when the timer runs out.

It's funny, I remembered BioShock having a bit of hacking in it, but in truth the game's basically a Pipe Mania clone interrupted by short bursts of first person shooting. There is so many things to hack in this game, and unlike System Shock 2 it's free, so there's no good reason to ever pass up an opportunity to rewire something. Unless you want to pay full price at vending machines, dodge active security cameras, leave safes locked and waste ammo blowing up turrets that is.

ARCADIA.

This seems like the perfect time my new research camera and get myself some permanent damage upgrades! I won't score much for Big Daddy on the floor I spent ages killing, because he's dead, but those other Big Daddies that just stomped around the corner out of nowhere will score me massive points, especially with the security drones in the frame.

I'm not going to take a photo though, I'm going to run away whimpering because I just accidentally pissed off two Big Daddies and set off the alarm, and I've got no ammo left, and holy shit I'm so fucked right now. At least they won't try to take the Little Sister away while I'm cowering in a vent.

Okay what else haven't I mentioned yet? There's crafting, weapon upgrades, I think some of the guns can set traps. But I've got to stop writing about the game somewhere, so I'll stop... here.


CONCLUSION

---

If there's one thing that surprised me about BioShock this time around, it's how much it reminded me of Alien: Isolation. The two games are set in fantastically rendered isolated fallen cities, both ridiculously atmospheric and filled with security systems to hack, and crafting components to loot. It's a horror game that likes to mess with the lights and shadows to set up scripted scares, with the music playing along. But in this you have to fight to survive, and the monster stalking you throughout the game is enemy health inflation. BioShock's definitely a first person shooter at its core, with some RPG elements and a bit of survival horror in the mix (in that it's dark, creepy and it wouldn't give me all the bullets I wanted). So it's a lot like System Shock 2, actually.

It'd be nice if I could list all the ways it improves on or falls short of its spiritual predecessor, but truth is I never got anywhere in the System Shocks and it's been so long now that I don't remember why. I'm thinking the slow wrench, awkward UI and the guns constantly falling apart were probably all factors though. BioShock's a friendlier experience, which isn't ideal if you're after desperation and terror, but it sure works a lot better for me. The game's not quite as slick and streamlined as its own successor BioShock Infinite though, and the combat isn't quite as satisfying for me. But Infinite also streamlined away my beloved map and quick saves, and that wasn't very satisfying either. So nyah!

One thing I can definitely compare to System Shock 2 is the story, but that'd spoil both games so I won't. They sure have their similarities though, enough for them to detract from BioShock's otherwise interesting narrative. The game's designed so that as you're scavenging in side rooms you're also piecing together the mysteries of Rapture and how a community built upon self-interest with no regulation or morality was brought down by selfish immoral people. And sea slugs. I'm not sure it makes sense that one minute long audio clips explaining the backstory are scattered around everywhere, but it makes a lot more sense than making me flick through someone's diary for half an hour so I'm fine with it. Also the voice acting and writing is great, so if I can't meet the characters directly (because they're mostly dead and the character models aren't fantastic) I'll take the next best thing.

But I remember that when I first finished the game I found a problem with the dramatic climax, which is that the game keeps going for hours afterwards. Sure it's still building to a final confrontation, but on my first playthrough I was ready to be done with the game long before it was done with me. Rapture's a work of art, but there's only so much ocean and Art Deco I can take before it all gets a bit samey, and I have no interest in ever fighting that last boss again.

On the other hand, you can fire bees and lightning out of your hand, so my complaints are invalid. The game was awesome back when it came out and it still is, even without the upcoming makeover. It just hasn't completely won me over.

You can download the BioShock artbook for free at the bottom of this page: Cult of Rapture! It claims you can get the Orchestral Score too, but all I got from the link was "The requested URL was not found on this server.".

---

Thank for reading all or some of those words! You're welcome to leave some of your own in the comments box. Plus if you were to share my site's existence with other people that wouldn't be so bad, I guess.