And I'll gladly stack up those Tetris blocks for hours on end. Nobody plays Angry Birds just to resolve the story. It's not like anybody really cares why those stupid birds are so angry at the pigs. We marveled at their technology-even as primitive as games like Wolfenstein 3D now look-and found their basic "find key, open door, shoot bad guys" gameplay cathartic. Most old games were a celebration of the purely mechanical. Nonetheless, I think there has been an evolution and maturation of games, with stories becoming more important to major game titles. LucasArts' various SCUMM titles, for example, had strong narratives more than twenty years ago. Pure gameplayīioShock Infinite is not the first or only game to try to tell a compelling story, of course. Had I truly played a "game" in the fullest sense of the word, or had I watched a movie-like meditation on violence and America sprinkled with some less-than-innovative interactive ultraviolence thrown in to break up the narrative? As I've reflected on the game for the past few weeks, I increasingly lean toward the latter-and I've concluded that it's a weakness in the game's design. I binged.īut as with so many binges, I felt dissatisfied afterward. We're drawn into a binge play session just as we might be drawn into binging on a DVD box set. Instead, we want to press forward and find out what happens next. The whole point of the game is to find out the answers to those questions, and that means playing it for the story.īecause of this, we don't want to just dip into the game, get a few hours of generic play time, and then do something else. What it has is an interesting universe (a probabilistic multiverse in which you can leap between timelines), at least one compelling character (the mysterious Elizabeth who you're sent to rescue/kidnap/protect), and a bunch of unanswered questions. BioShock Infinite doesn't really have these set pieces. You play Call of Duty to see the next spectacular special-effects-laden set piece lifted from one Hollywood blockbuster or another. While many first-person shooters have a story that's incidental at best, either because it's barely developed and irrelevant (see early titles such as Doom and Quake) or because it's badly written and still irrelevant (see the Call of Duty series), that's not the case with BioShock Infinite. I left some doors locked, and I didn't find all the codes, but I did fully experience the game's main draw: its story. It took about 11 hours (on normal difficulty), though I didn't "complete" the game in the sense of finding all the secrets it contains. As is my unhealthy obsession, I waited impatiently for BioShock Infinite to unlock on Steam-then I played the game through in a single sitting.
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