August 31, 2007
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A few words on some new games
I can't help but wonder if the people who subscribed to me actually read what I write in their digests. I know they're not coming to the site. My amount of footprints have dwindled down to... my own. Which is sad really. Ah well. This is more for me than anything else.
Anyway, onto other things.
Bioshock. Is. Teh. Win.
I don't think I can put it in better words. At first I felt disappointed that they weren't continuing the System Shock storyline. I almost didn't want to play it when I read the initial articles about it. But then I started seeing screenshots and videos, and then I knew that I had to play the game, but I felt that I would still be unhappy with it because it didn't continue where System Shock 2 left off.
I was wrong. Dead wrong.
Even with the lack of SHODAN, this game is simply too awesome for words. This is like going from Morrowind to Oblivion in terms of graphics and gameplay. Yes, everything is a bit more simplified, but that doesn't cut from the experience of the game at all. The graphics are simply beautiful. 1950's era art and music is everywhere in this game. It's like you've gone into a time-capsule... gone horribly wrong. And then you mix in the Plasmids and Gene-Tonics and you've got one helluva game. Plasmids are genetic modifications to your body which allow you to do different things, like hurl lightning bolts or set things on fire. You get Plasmids by getting a substance called ADAM, which everyone wants.
The game starts out with a plane crash, that you, obviously, survive. As you swim to the surface, you see this building sticking up out of the water. There are some stairs to climb which lead to an open door. Since there's nowhere else to go, you'd might as well explore a bit right? Exploring the inside of the building you see a giant statue of a man, who you will find out is named Andrew Ryan, and a big bathysphere. When you go into the bathysphere, you are taken 18 fathoms deep, and you see an introduction video by Andrew Ryan, telling the virtues of this underwater city he calls Rapture. He made Rapture to get away from capitalism and communism and all the other political and economic woes of the surface world. It seemed like a good idea. But something has gone terribly wrong. As soon as the bathysphere lands, it's attacked (don't worry, you're safe) by what's called a Splicer. It runs off and then you're told to pick up a nearby radio, and you are contacted by an irishman named Atlas. He fills you in on everything that's going on here and the adventure begins.
There are a whole bunch of enemies. There are your basic Splicers, people who have done so much genetic modifications to themselves that they've become dependant on ADAM and will kill to get their next fix. Splicers come in three different flavors: thuggish (they run around and hit things), leadhead (they have guns), and spider (they crawl on the ceilings). And if you've got any psychology background then you'll definitely love the splicers. Then you've got the security bots: turrets, flying bots, and cameras. And then there's the beast on the cover of the game, Big Daddy. Big Daddy is a hulking brute who protects the Little Sisters. The Little Sisters run around and collect ADAM from corpses. If you kill a Big Daddy, you can get the ADAM from the Little Sister, but you have a choice. You can harvest her, which gives you a lot of ADAM, but she won't survive the process, or you can rescue her, which gives you half of what you would normally get, but she survives and becomes a normal little girl again. It's up to you.
All in all, Bioshock is a freaking awesome game. Go buy it. Go buy it now. Why are you still reading this? You should have gone out to buy it last week when I first mentioned it.
Are you still here?
Fine then. On to something else then.
Metroid Prime 3 Corruption.
Oh my freaking gawd! If anyone tells you that Corruption is just a cleaned up copy of the other Prime games, you need to smack 'em upside their idiot heads. This is not just a Prime revamp. This is a completely new game. The interface is new, the enemies are new, the worlds you visit are new, and you actually interact with other characters. And they actually talk, yes there are voiceovers and they're good! This game puts the Wii remote to very good use. The switches in this game are not all like what was in the other Prime games. You don't just scan them and they work. There are switches that you have to grab, pull, twist, and push back in. And there are other switches that are primers that you have to pump. And they make new use of the grapple beam too! In fact the grapple beam has been split into two separate items, the beam and the lasso. You use the Nunchuk to activate the lasso to pull things off of walls and enemies, and use the beam to swing from grapple points. Oh, and then there's the Phazon injection system, which lets you go into hypermode at any time, at the cost of 100 energy points (one whole energy tank), but there is a risk of overload.
As it was in Hunters, you get to interact with other bounty hunters, and each one has their own voiceover and personality and special ability. They really went to great lengths to make this game something good. It's worth it to buy this game.
I have only one complaint about it. It's murder on my trigger finger.
After playing it for awhile, I think I might have a clue as to the origins of Mother Brain. In the game you find out that the Pirates had introduced a virus into the Aurora network (there are hundreds of these things). Well, they didn't give a timeline for that, so it could be assumed that that had happened prior to Zero Mission, and the Pirates had taken the initially infected Aurora (which probably would have been one of the earlier Aurura's) and then repurposed it to be the Mother Brain, and while Samus was on Zebes for the first time and during her trip to the planets in Prime, Prime 2, and Hunters, the Federation was working to vaccinate and cure the rest of the Aurora network. They don't mention a lost node, but that would be something that would be kept under wraps, or that it doesn't need to be said since by the time Prime 3 comes around, she'd already destroyed Mother Brain for the first time. It sounds plausible enough to me.
That is all.
