Brain Candy

A Tale of Two Cities


A few of you, if you are gamers, may remember a title called 'Bioshock' that came out in 2007, though I didn't get around to it until 2009. It could have been the delay in my playing it that stopped me from enjoying it, or it could have been that all of the hype and awards it received made me think it to be something that it simply was not.

FROM THIS POINT ON, I WILL PROCEED TO SPOIL THE FUCK OUT OF BIOSHOCK ONE AND TWO, BY THE WAY.

Bioshock was lauded and hailed as one of the finest games to have ever been released, a masterpiece in story and gameplay with the most emergent playstyles of any FPS game to ever grace this earth, ever. It won Game of the Year and scored near-perfect on every site it was reviewed on. My first exposure to Bioshock was non-gameplay render of the thing. Maybe you remember: some guy tries to take a little girl, gets drilled in the tummy by a diving suit monster, and then throws bees at swimsuit man's face.

Needless to say, I was intrigued.

Now, I don't know why I took so long to get around to it, but I didn't like what I played. The controls were twitchy and inaccurate, as if the guns were an afterthought to the exploration. I could deal with that, to an extent, but the actual structure of the game is what turned me off. Every quest in that game is a fetch quest. "Would you kindly pick up this bee honey? Would you kindly construct a rocket? Would you kindly take some pictures?"

At the halfway point, it's revealed that you are a clone engineered to respond to "Would you kindly", which is a bomb-ass twist and it's extremely clever, forcing you to re-examine how you play the game. Unfortunately, the 'big bad' is killed in a cutscene, and then your friend basically says, "OOH I'M ACTUALLY THE BAD GUY MWAHAHAHA" and then you get a secret code to give yourself free will.

Now, this poses two problems. One, now that your 'friend' is the big bad, what's to hate? The game did an amazing job of making you really care about Atlas and his campaign against Andrew Ryan, so you find yourself very challenged to really start to hate him. Two, now that the "Would you kindly" trigger is taken away from your character, you have absolutely zero reason to keep playing. The entire story was driven by "Would you kindly" and the fact that you had literally no choice in the matter, but now you're expected to suddenly hate your BFF and continue without your trigger word? It was a poor choice in the story, and I had to slug through what I consider to be one of my top five worst gaming moments.

It's truly a shame, considering that the city and history of Rapture is so beautifully and artfully captured. Without nothing other than one single look, in the first five minutes of the game, you know that Rapture was a once-prosperous secret city that went to shit. The cardinal rule of writing is "Show, don't tell" and Bioshock is the only game that could have had me simply wander around and really want to experience it.

A Little Sister with her Big Daddy
(Original Picture)

That brings us to Bioshock 2. Some people call it a hasty cash-in to make a quick buck on the Game of the Year, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong. Businesses exist to make money, whatever that takes, but I wouldn't call it hasty. It's clear that a lot of thought and love went into this project, but it was inevitable that the magic of first laying eyes upon the desecrated city of Rapture wouldn't be captured again. Instead, we're treated to something very different: playing as a Big Daddy, originally something that you sought to destroy in Bioshock 2's predecessor.

Subject Delta, you're called. A free-thinking prototype Big Daddy, capable of making your own decisions . As opposed to being a nameless man thrust into Rapture, you now play as someone who was a resident from the beginning. As you progress, you meet people who know exactly who you are, people who have different opinions on you. One of the more unique things of being a Big Daddy, aside from the suit and Rivet Gun, is being able to adopt Little Sisters and protect them.

In Bioshock 1, your exposure of Little Sisters was limited to the five seconds before you fought a Big Daddy and then purifying them (or ripping a slug from their insides and killing them). As Subject Delta, Little Sisters take to you for care and protection, giving the Save/Kill choice some real emotional meaning, rather than acting as an arbitrary Good/Evil karma choice. As you move and explore with Little Sisters, they react to things you do, and it really hits you to have a Little Sister demonstrate just how fucked up Rapture truly is.

I remember the exact moment that I realized how horrific the city is: I had electrocuted an enemy and then beat him to death with my drill. As his corpse lie twitching on the floor, my Little Sister exclaimed, "Look daddy! He's dancing, he's dancing!"

This young girl, who could not possibly be older than six, with no concept of life or death, of sadness or of right and wrong. To her, seeing people mauled, shot and burned to death was part of life, and then her duty was to extract the blood from corpses and give Big Daddies ADAM, a mutagen. People told you how wrong this was in the first Bioshock, but seeing it firsthand, taking part in this twisted ritual, gives you insight that you simply did not have before.

While Bioshock introduced us to the Utopian-turned-dystopian society, and gave us a history of what caused the wondrous city to fall, Bioshock 2 acts as a more personal epilogue; the story of one man, cast out and exiled by all of Rapture, trying to find his original Little Sister and doing whatever it takes to get her back.

Bioshock 2 is a far more emotional experience than its predecessor, undermined by the very fact that its setting is so beautiful in its destruction. Subject Delta's quest for Elenore is one of sacrifice and dehumanization of a thinking mind, but also one that is too often overlooked in favour of what's going on outside of Delta's mind, rather than what is happening to Delta.