BIOSHOCK
Good Ol’ Bioshock is a game that always had a special place in my FPS-genre
hating heart. While my head suffers in nauseating motion sickness, the game had
always somehow propelled me into finishing its 10-15 hours of story. This is
fully demonstrated in the first portion of the game, which the demo successfully
portrays with its eerie and well-made introduction. Right off the bat, the game
introduces the player in a cinematic, which for gaming standards in 2007 it was
rather groundbreaking. The narration of the main character, the emotion he
delivered with just a few lines prepared the player for an epic journey.
What was an eerie start is then followed by a series of unfortunate events
for the protagonist. The protagonist survived the crash (surprise surprise) and
was thrown into the middle of an ocean that looks more like a graveyard of
broken airplanes. With no additional waiting or hand-holding, the player is
then allowed to swim around the ocean. Everyone at some point had probably been
stung by a hot utensil once in their life, so with the firewall blocking the
protagonist’s path, the player most likely will swim around the fire into the
direction which the game wants the player to go. The use of a landmark also
helped the player plenty, as the massive tower extruding from the ground in the
middle of the ocean is screaming to the player to go visit this location so the
game can begin.
Once inside the building, the player is greeted by an uncommon soundtrack
and architecture in video gaming: A theme so vintage, it would inflict a
different effect on two kinds of players: Nostalgia for elder generation of gamers
and a mysterious world for the younger generation of gamers. Bioshock’s
timeline is a theme not visited quite often in video gaming. The moment the
music plays, gamers know that they are not playing a buff army guy trying to
save America from foreign terrorists or the other cliché alien invasion. They
will know, that this is not ‘that kind of game’.
The demo was done in a way that the lighting, soundtrack, and architecture
invites the player to an epic story unlike others. Not only that, the lack of
hand-holding more common in recent video games is also gone. You are on your
own, and you are to use your wit to survive. The fact that it taught many
players on how to play, introduce them to a unique world of amazing architecture,
and as it invites them to an epic story by use of very little to no narratives
is truly a golden move in the gaming industry.
http://img09.deviantart.net/d0bc/i/2011/320/5/b/bioshock_big_daddy_by_archiesnow-d4gf3v3.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment