I'm only ever a few years behind

[trinityvixen]

I've just played and am re-playing on the hardest difficulty, BioShock. It's easy to compliment the game on just about every front. It has a fantastic setting that is even more fantastically realized. The story is interesting, told in piecemeal by the man on your radio and the audio diaries left behind by others. There's the famous twist near the end, which is amazing and kind of heartbreaking all the same.

(It's stupid to say it, but, after reaching said twist, I...missed Atlas. I know, I know, he never existed. That's why the reveal is so freakish and creepy. But at the same time, it's like losing a friend. And the goading done by Fontaine afterwards seems almost fake. He's so different, you can't even find them all that similar. Poor Atlas!)

But one thing I have noticed that is worth mentioning is the gameplay scales up beautifully. There is a nearly perfect correlation with your improved ability to kill shit up with said shit's increasing imperviousness to your abilities. As you get better, so do the enemies, but they never get so much better and you never get so much better that the fight is boring.

That, awesomely, also translates to when you scale up the general game difficulty. Playing on a harder mode actually requires broad shifts in the way you play the game, as opposed to just making enemies impossible to kill or having them outnumber you by larger margins. I played through at first on easy, and that was the sort of gaming where you could just walk up to people and smack them once and they were dead. On hard, you have to work out how to engage them, sneak up on them, corner them in rooms where you have mechanical assistance. I'm replaying the game immediately after my first play through and I'm not bored because it feels like I'm playing an entirely different game. That is good design!

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Wait until the Bioshock 2 gather sections--those are full of strategy. It plays very well to the part of me whose favorite TF2 class is Engineer, as I stand in the corner and watch 3 hacked robots, 2 turrets, and a series of trap rivets and spears take out all the splicers without my help :)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I like a good old-fashioned fight, myself, but there is something about being able to set up traps and execute them that is so appealing...