Gamers Month ver. 2 - No gods or kings. Only man.

It's been well over 2 years since I was reminded that there will never be such a thing as a true Utopia and that we need to abandon all hope for one if we are to survive without letting our so-called superiority kill us in practice.

That's pretty much the kind of thing that was going through my head when I first finished Bioshock in December of 2007, just 2 months after it was released. I was trying to pinpoint what single concept in the game really stood out to me and why it had such a profound impact on me, not just from a gamer's perspective, but also a human one. Then I kind of realized that the entire game was just a nearly perfect sum of all its individually and carefully detailed parts. It took a while for it all to sink in but it was really worth it once it all did. It is still, to this day, my favorite first person shooter of all time.

Bioshock is set in the year 1960. You are the sole survivor of a plane crash that lands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and gasping for air and swimming amidst a wall of flames, you reach safety on a tiny island that is home only to a lighthouse. As you make your way inside you are greeted by a massive bust of a gentleman with a banner that reads "No gods or kings. Only man." to the subtle sound of Django Reinhardt's "La Mer" playing in the background and, yeah, you're just already immersed in this world so you better splice strap yourself in and enjoy the ride. While you're doing that, please enjoy a couple of words from our very kind overseer, Andrew Ryan:

I chose Rapture

Once inside the city of Rapture you realize that, for all the promises of an underwater utopia created by the most worthy FOR the most worthy, something down here has gone horribly awry and you are now locked in combat with enemies who basically just run around the city like cold-clocked junkies looking for a fix. It's an utter shame that it's all gone to shit too because the city is just a beautiful, art-deco landscape complete with gardens, theaters, transportation system and jazz clubs. It's a striking presentation and the game engine proves to be able to handle it rather well as this game is just richly layered and textured to near perfection. Built on the Unreal 2.5 graphics engine, textures pop out very nicely, water flows realistically and, if you pop at enemy at close range, you're treated to a spectacular splatter of enemy blood until the streets, sewers and gardens run red. It's incredibly detailed from the velvet ropes dangling from their former posts right down to the phonographs scattered throughout the world playing perfectly-suited music from the 1940's and 1950's. Rusting building framing and disintegrating marble tiles have never looked so beautiful.

You quickly pick up a short-wave radio and speak to man named Atlas who slowly starts feeding you information about what's going on in this dilapidating clusterfuck. The game never takes time out for you to read story logs because the entire story is told either with whomever patches into your radio signal or through audio logs left behind by the former denizens of this place. Because of this device, the game never really stops with cutscenes and you just take in the story without ever having to drop what you're doing or having to sit through a cutscene. You learn that the aforementioned Andrew Ryan attempted to create a perfect civilization using the brightest and most gifted human beings alive and, as all things perfect go, shit just got too real for them when it hit the fan. The vast majority of the citizens are now known as "splicers" and are all after this genetic substance called "ADAM" which can be extracted from other human beings and changes the genetic code of the human being to tweak it and perfect it and these splicers are willing to kill anything for it. The only problem is that the splicers themselves can't extract this material and rely on having to look for these little girls called "Little Sisters" who are the only ones who have the ability to extract ADAM from the bodies of the dead that now litter the city. ADAM is the "leveling" element in the game because you will use this substance to purchase upgrades at vending machines to buy power ups called "plasmids" which allow you to do a myriad of things from shooting lightning bolts from your hands to summoning a swarm of bees to attack an enemy and these power ups can be arranged and customized at "Gene Banks" scattered around the city. You can also find money to buy ammo and weapon upgrades. The whole system is not the most in-depth in a game of this type but it's suitable because it's the combat with these upgrades that's the meat of the game. As you seek out the Little Sisters who carry gargantuan syringes larger than themselves and who have been transformed into these borderline-demonic shells of their former selves, you always realize that they are accompanied by their guardians which are called "Big Daddies". The Big Daddies are pretty much what one would classify as a "boss" in this game since, every bit of skill, power-up and white-knuckle reflex you possess will be needed to take these guys down and catch a Little Sister.

The part where this game breaks from the traditional storytelling formula is that you are now given a moral choice to make when capturing a Little Sister: Do you "Harvest" her to get ADAM thus increasing your potential for power? Or do you save her from her possessed state and return her youthful innocence to her but sacrificing the ability to maximize your ADAM. In creating a moral choice, which affects how the game is played, the difficulty of the game, how you are seen by the Sisters and the Daddies and your own sense of moral responsibility, we have now been fully sucked into a world that we want to either save or destroy. It's no accident that these objects of moral dilemma are little girls either. Developers have acknowledged that they originally wanted to use sea slugs as the ADAM extractors but realized that using a child as opposed to an amorphous blob as an victim of the system seemed like the logical choice to test the moral compass of individuals playing this game. This is perhaps the purest form of interaction in the game and it's what makes Bioshock an adventure that you will find ends far too early even at the 20-hour mark. (And that's if you don't even bother exploring the city looking for every one of the sisters!) As if that wasn't enough, there's a very subtle storytelling tool that vaguely tells the stories of characters you never get to meet in the form of the "Ghost of Rapture". The ghosts, as you come to find out, are really hallucinations that are a side effect of your plasmid splicing but they add yet another layer of an already superlative story as you just kind of feel attached even to THESE characters that are basically the equivalent of footnotes in a novel.

Given that I'm kind of partial to music in games, I feel it's a given that I write a paragraph about the music selection. This game has, quite possibly one of the greatest soundtracks ever committed to a video game. Period-appropriate music selections were meticulously selected to match the atmosphere and mood of the entire game and, at times, are a grim reminder of the former glory that Rapture could have been. Django Reinhardt, Billie Holiday, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, The Ink Spots, Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra all tastefully pepper the musical highlights with a genre-specific-yet-diverse mix of big band jazz, lounge jazz and bebop and always contribute to the atmosphere and, at times, enhance the story. There's a particularly memorable moment in which Billie Holiday's "God Bless The Child" plays in the background as you discover something about your character and your part in the whole tapestry of the underworld that is Rapture and it the entire scene combined with this ever-so-perfect song selection really just sends chills down your spine and really just amazes you that it took a video game to elicit this kind of emotion. It should be noted that the Limited Edition of this game came with the orchestral score written by Gary Schyman.

All of the story is loosely tied into Ayn Rand's classic novel "Atlas Shrugged", which argues that the talented, powerful, strong or gifted in society should not be burdened by the weak and lazy and thus, dystopian models are formed to accommodate these gifted individuals and their talents to strengthen them, and them only. Plot twists, betrayals and self-discovery, along with a very memorable climax which I won't spoil, are all in place and make the exploration that much more flavorful; all to wonderful, wonderful classic jazz sounds and an amazing subtle score.

Long after one has put down the controller and absorbed the entire experience one really just sits in awe of it as a whole. Because whether or not you agree with the philosophies of Andrew Ryan and his plan for a Randyan utopia, this whole experience is one that you don't soon forget; whether you be god, king... or simply man.

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