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Saturday 12 January, 2008
Gamelog #2
GAMEPLAY
After playing for awhile longer and encountering the Little Sisters in BioShock, my high opinion of this game began to deteriorate. You essentially have to "harvest" the Little Sisters to gain a larger life meter. If you choose not to harvest the Little Sisters, it will be very difficult for you to survive in the next levels.
The Little Sisters are LITTLE GIRLS...young girls, probably no older than 4 or 5 years-old. When you reach the part of the game in which you choose whether to harvest or save the girl, the Little Sister runs away from you, panting and shaking in fear. You back her up into a corner and she helplessly grapples the wall for survival. I am disturbed by this graphic image and by the fact that the game designers at 2K thought it would be an interesting "game" to decide whether or not to kill a helpless young girl.
I chose to save the little sister, which made Jack pick her up and heal her. If you chose to harvest her, I imagine that the screen would zoom in on you killing her. I found this to be disturbing. Yes, I know that this is part of the gaming world and that BioShock is rated mature for a reason, but does that make it ok for killing children to be part of a video game? I was really disappointed with this aspect of the game. I was also greatly disappointed with the fact that if you chose to do the morally sound thing, future levels are significantly more difficult for you to pass.
Yes, BioShock has a great story line and interesting form of gameplay. I like the concept of the plasmids. The concept of throwing fire, using telekinesis, and shooting electrical surges from your hands is very thrilling - however from a conceptual perspective, I believe the killing little girls part to be too extreme. I think the game designers took it a little too far here. This interrupted the game flow for me and I had to pause and think about what I would do - this almost made me want to stop playing.
DESIGN
I initially thought BioShock was a fantastic game and that the design was great, but some of my opinions changed after I found out about harvesting the Little Sisters. However, BioShock is still innovative in some aspects, such as the plasmids and their functions.
I personally find the ability to control fire and electricity and move objects with your mind to be quite fantastic. I think that this was a brilliant design because it allows you to strategize and use your environment in different ways to pass obstacles. You could definitely replay BioShock again and play it in an entirely different way and discover new things every time. I greatly enjoy this part of the game and I think it is genius.
One element that I do not like about the design of this game is the Vita Chamber. This chamber makes the loss of life almost entirely irrelevant. In fact, the loss of life might be entirely beneficial to the player...almost to where you want to die on purpose. The Vita Chamber revives you and provides you with significantly more life and significantly more Eve. It also gives you a bit of ammo. This makes the game relatively easy to progress through when playing on medium difficulty.
I think that the Vita Chamber should not have been designed to renew ammo, life, and special powers. This makes the game too easy and it also decreases the cost of life. Suddenly the players don't really care if they die or not. I think that the way to revive life should have been designed to where the player has some significant loss of progress when he or she dies. I have heard many gamers say that when playing BioShock, if they die they just turn the console off to avoid the advantageous Vita Chamber. I find this to be extremely annoying and I think it is a big mistake on the game designer's part.
Overall, I believe BioShock to be a very innovative way of presenting a first person shooter - however, I would have liked to seen it done more tastefully and not quite so shockingly violent.
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