8/9/2019 beoshork1

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/beoshork1 1/1

I think a major problem with Bioshock 1, Bioshock Infinite, and System Shock 2 is Ken Levine's evident addiction to shocking twists, and his preference for them over substantially exploring the ideas he presents: instead of creating an interesting story and working out the implications of the central technology of thestory (FTL travel in SS2, plasmids/tonics in BS1 and BSI, underwater living in BS1, antigravity and time/dimension travel in BSI), what he does is come up witha twist-laden thriller plot and use a potentially compelling setting as set dressing for it to play out on.

All three of these games have big twists that are sort-of tied into the setting(AI and space travel in SS2, genetic engineering in BS1, dimensional tears in BSI), but all of them ALSO have major plot holes introduced by their central "gadgets": in SS2, SHODAN wants to somehow "turn the universe into cyberspace" usinga FTL drive (???), and also SHODAN would've had to have travelled at a significant fraction of the speed of light to reach the planet she was discovered on (atthe end of SS1 she's ejected aimlessly, and it's also a miracle that she reached a star system at all, let alone landed on a planet). In BS1, you're a toddler-aged, growth-accelerated baby-man with conspicuous chain links tattooed on your wrists, who miraculously manages to crash a plane RIGHT NEXT to a tiny island with a lighthouse on it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean- an island that is miraculously unknown to the world at large, even though it has an active lighthouseon it. In BSI, in the ending you kill off all the Booker/Comstocks across all the dimensions- but this is a profoundly awful misuse of the multiple universes idea, as it'd just cause an infinite number of other branch universes to sprout up

, each with its own Comstock.

In contrast, BS2 is the only BioShock game not to be written/designed/produced by Ken Levine, and free from his grip, the writers and designers actually got toexplore the world and the ideas in it- so you get to know a Little Sister as anactual character instead of a cute experience boost, you get to see in more detail the implications of splicing, beyond just "splicing makes you a crazy melty-faced jerk!!!", you get more detail as to Lamb's ideology than the caricatured talking-point version of Objectivism Ryan espouses, you get to actually go outside Rapture and move around underwater, and see the slugs and stuff.

(Also, as a side note, SS2 was originally going to be a non-SS game with a plotbased on Heart of Darkness, but on a cargo spaceship; it was turned into a SS ga

me later, for branding reasons, and SHODAN is very obviously shoehorned in- it doesn't make any sense for her to be there, her role could've been filled just as well by the shipboard AI, and the final twist where she's trying to turn the universe into cyberspace is simply a nonsensical excuse to have a boss battle with her.)

So anyway, I think that BS2 is a great game for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that it doesn't have Ken Levine's ham-handed twist-heavy plots stealing the spotlight from the actual ideas and philosophies and characters in the game.