So, Bioshock. First, a bit of background. Bioshock was described as "the spiritual successor to System Shock 2" which was, in my opinion at least, one of the best games in the world ever. SS2 was genuinely fun, scary and challenging all without being too cheesy or difficult. There were a couple of times in SS2 where I jumped away from the keyboard while playing it, so grossy engaged in the game I'd been when a monster suddenly popped up. Roughly the same people worked on and designed Bioshock, so my expectations for the game were high, set slightly higher by the 10/10 reviews it got from almost everywhere.

 

So, I bought Bioshock about 2 weeks ago and have been playing it on and off for the last week and a half. And that's the first clue something isn't totally right with the game - it isn't engrossing enough to keep me playing for much longer than an hour at a time. It's partially due to how monotonous it is, roughly the same monsters, attacking in roughly the same way in roughly the same scenery over and over and over again. It isn't that entertaining. And the atmosphere hasn't been built up as well as it had been in SS2. Occasionally you do walk into an area where you start to get "into it" and become engaged with the game, but then something happens that ruins it all, like an unoriginal monster coming out a predictable spot. This happened relatively early on with me when wandering though the Medical Pavillion in the game I walked around a corner where I could see the shadow of the thing that was about to attack me. The lights went off, the shadow disappeared - I was momentarily worried about my character's fate. And then I walked back around the corner and saw the blatantly obvious door that the thing was about to come out of. Aimed, door opened, fired, thing dead. A couple of minutes of atmosphere ruined because the monster died in one predictable shot. In other places the atmosphere is ruined because you basically can't lose at this game. Even if you die, you get re-incarnated with all of your weapons/ammo and plenty of everything else you need. Which led me in one part of the game to continuously walk back into the same battle very slowly killing things that were managing to kill me slightly quicker. It's surprising I died at all considering how many health packs, ammo packs and other things are lying around in the game....

 

I don't know what's up with the AI either. It feels like the sort of game where changing the difficuly level just increases/decreases the number of bad guys, something that is never good in a game (it's the only annoying part of the original Halo in my view).

 

To sum up the rest, allow me to link to this review by Zero Punctuation. I totally agree with pretty much everything he says, which in summary is the following -

Seriously? A few months of barely anything and then 3 posts in 24 hours? What's up with me?

 

Might as well continue it and do another post later with a review of Bioshock. We'll see if I get time.

Actually, while I'm online I might as well quicky mention my annoyance with Spaces. It's bloody difficult to delete comments. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if Spaces had a decent comment filter to get rid of basic spam. Go back to pretty much any of my posts over the last year and you'll now find comment spam that's been added over the last couple of weeks by bots. And because it's so many comments to so many posts, I'll never have enough time to remove it all. It took me ages the first time I had to do it, over a year ago. The bots disappeared for a while, but now it seems like they're back. With a vengance.

 

On a related note, did Spaces get somehow worse? I know I haven't been posting much recently (averaging about once a month) but it took me a while to work out how to edit the last post for spelling mistakes. And the front page is beginning to look like crap. Did the Spaces team go the way of the Windows Ultimate Extras team? Ooh, are they the same people but with different online profiles?

 

Really wish I could tag someone like Mike Torres and get them working on improvements to basic functionality... Meh, the link'll have to do.

Why the hell am I dreaming so much recently? That's the second one in 2 days, except this one woke me up for some reason. Or the milkman going past outside woke me up (does he have to be so early?)

 

Anyway, what I really wanted to say was that for the first time in 7 months and 3 days, I miss Aber. I felt like I had to write that down now (5am, I woke up at 4), cause by 9am I won't be missing it anymore. Expect a post in 6 hours or so saying "What the hell?"

This article from CNet is interesting, stating that a number of US States would like to increase the restrictions on Microsoft that resulted from it's monopoly court cases a few years ago. The paragraph I find particularly telling is below...

Read that last sentence again. "The absence of meaningful erosion in Windows' marketshare is still problematic". That says to me that even if Microsoft are all dealing legally now, these people won't be happy unless Windows' marketshare drops. What do they want MS to do? Advertise for Apple and Linux instead?