PixlBit

Hello again, all my Pixies. I haven't put out a blog since the exodus from 1UP began, but today I'm back by popular demand.  You're welcome! Don't take my absence as a lack of love and affection for you, believe me I've heard the cries of my loyal subjects and all your needs will be met. All of your needs, unless they involve Chinese finger traps. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... well you're not going to fool me twice, loyal subjects.

Now, before I begin to discuss Bioshock I'd like to quickly address the great community that's made Pixlbit your home in the past months. Over a year ago when former 1UP bloggers Julian Titus and Jesse Miller were hired to write here I followed them seeing as I'm one of their loyal subjects, and I made myself a home here at Pixlbit. I quickly learned how smart, passionate, involved, and professional the staff is. On an average Pixlday you'd see me dropping walls of text and having great conversations with the writers, especially in the comments sections of the podcasts. However, for a long time the community was very small and I knew these great people deserved a great community. Now, as excellent as I am and as lucky as all of you are to have me around, I'm but one man. One man, of excellence. It takes many excellent Lords and Ladies to fuel a great community. I'm proud to say that you are all the Lords and Ladies of prophecy. You've taken this site to the next level and with you on board, the Pixies will prosper. All of you are so active and fabulous I decided to take a break from blogging, play some games, and wait till the feeling was right before I tried hopping back into the mix. See, I'm capable of being humble, honoring you, and showing you my affection. Yes, my...superior. Affection. temporarily. Eyes forward! Let's talk Bioshock!

I finished Bioshock Infinite yesterday. This was my most anticipated game of the year but I was a bit skeptical of how it might turn out. I'm a big fan of the original Bioshock, but it was mostly because of the writing and environment art. Bioshock 1 was designed intentionally to feel a certain way and have a certain pace of combat, but I didn't enjoy it much. It didn't work well as an action game for me, so when Ken Levine said he wanted Infinite to excel as both a compelling character driven adventure and an action game I wondered how his team would pull it off. After the whole experience was over and I took some time to absorb everything that had happened, I was completely speechless. When the credits were over and I turned the console off, I went and took a shower, got some cantaloupe to snack on, and watched Game of Thrones while I quietly contemplated everything I'd done in Bioshock Infinite, and everything that Ken Levine and Irrational Games had built.

After some introspection and dissection of my experience I realized that Bioshock Infinite exceeded every expectation I had, both critically and as a fan. To be honest I think everybody is accustomed to playing pretty average games. It's not often that amazing games come along that are so complete, well developed, and layered that they leave you speechless. This game isn't something I could sum up with a shoulder shrug, a "meh", a thumbs up, or the old "it's pretty good, get it when it goes on sale". Most of the games out in the market aren't very powerful or compelling as either story driven games or action games, let alone both. Most games are decent these days, some are even good, and very few are excellent. Halo 4 was a pretty decent Halo game, Modern Warfare 3 has rock-solid mechanics and I loved Spec Ops Survival mode, Crysis 2 has a fantastic sandbox and let's me play with the stealth I love, but none of these games have quite the same competence, execution, ambition, and heart that Bioshock Infinite showed me. The game Irrational built has earned the right to be in any FPS discussion, action game discussion, storytelling discussion, and design discussion from here on out right along with other great first-person adventure epics. This game feels like the current poster child for epic single player games, much as Half Life 2 was the poster child for such games for the years prior. In a world where so many people complain about a supposed death of single player experiences and games lacking ambition, voice, and fun ideas, Bioshock Infinite should be a game you want to check out.

Infinite is as much of a well rounded knockout package as you can get. The writing and dialogue that Ken Levine did is spot on, the voice acting, motion capture, animation, sound, and environment art bring Columbia and most importantly, the characters, to life. Ken Levine had a lot of hate and venom thrown his way prior to the launch of this game, including by his own family whom thought Ken's game was an attack on their Tea Party persuasion and religious beliefs. Some people thought this game was going to be a pretentious and offensive attack on Christianity and conservative Americans. A white supremacist website said that "the Jew Ken Levine" was creating a white-people-killing simulator and trying to brainwash you with a liberal, anti-white, anti-religious agenda.

It's sad how off-base they were when you think about those kinds of assumptions some conservatives had, and how it compares to the actual narrative Ken crafted. This game follows in the footsteps of Bioshock by showing you some characters that have very strong philosophies and things go awry. All the religious imagery, the historical racism, and the darker parts of American history are all just backdrops and setting. This game's narrative is all about the characters, and they are layered, compelling, and they all have very human motivations, strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures. If you want a game that's just some liberal David versus conservative Goliath story, this isn't your game at all. This is complex and there are reasons to feel love, compassion, sympathy, empathy, frustration, fear, and disgust for so many of the characters because you see their layers and they feel human. To get to the point, the narrative is well done and it's pretty compelling and dramatic. You will experience beautiful things, dark things, disturbing things, and it's all driven by the believable characters Ken crafted. To create believable characters you can't just make simple one-note, good or evil monsters and heroes. Ken didn't. There's a moment near the end game where they actually got a tear from me. It's the moment where you find out why Lizzy is missing a little part of her pinky finger. To be clear, it's not some torture scene. The scene where you find out the mystery to the missing tip of her pinky is so beautifully executed that all the emotion built up over the course of the game climaxed in that sad distressing moment for me and got a tear out. The narrative you will experience is quite good, but that's not the biggest surprise in Bioshock Infinite.

The biggest surprise about Bioshock Infinite is how fantastically it works as an action game and an FPS. This may be the most fun I've had in any game of this type, all generation long. I keep throwing around the term action game, and it's because the combat isn't quite like anything you'd expect in a typical shooter this generation. The game nails the typical shooter mechanics really well. The guns all feel, look, and sound great. There's low enough input latency to make the game feel slick and responsive, and all the weapon effects allow the guns to feel like they have punch. You'll find all the usual short, medium, and long range weapons as well as heavy weapons and you can upgrade them all like you could in previous Bioshock games. But it's the addition of both the skyline mechanic and Elizabeth's ability to open up tears that make Bioshock's combat sandbox and level design so much fun.

Skylines are rails that you can find in most of the combat spaces. Most combat is fought outdoors with access to skylines, but there's a bit of indoor fighting as well to mix it up. You look at the lines, a green arrow will appear on the rail and, relative to whatever perspective you're looking at them from, show you which direction you will start to travel once you jump on. You press the button prompt, Booker runs and leaps into the sky, latches on and starts to fly through the air on the skyline. It would've been very easy to screw this mechanic up and make it feel janky, slow, and obstructive. They nailed it. It's very fluid and fast, and once you get on a rail you can slow down your speed, increase your speed, shoot at people, do a quick 180 degree turn to change direction, leap off the line and onto ground, and even leap off the rail and land on enemies. I can't put into words how fantastic it feels to fly around the big encounter spaces at a moments notice.

The "tears" refers to Elizabeth's ability to open up rifts in space-time and bring in useful things like a special weapon, a skyhook to leap up to, a wall for cover to hide behind, an automated turret, a puddle below your enemies so you can use an electrocution Vigor and fry them, or just simply medical kits to heal yourself. In every combat space you'll find various different types of tears that could be relevant to the situation.

Firefights are so action packed and dynamic that all in a matter of moments you could be surrounded by enemies in some low ground dueling with shotguns and about to die, then you leap onto a nearby skyline, fly to a high balcony on the other side of the sandbox, ask Lizzy to open up a tear where you'll find a sniper. Then you spend a few moments sniping the people on the low ground who were about to kill you. Then a Fireman enemy type shows up on a rooftop not far from your balcony and begins firebombing you with grenades. You use your Possession Vigor on him and he becomes your ally for a short time dealing heavy damage on your foes while you use the opportunity to get away from him. Eventually Possession will wear off and he will be dangerous again so either kill him or run! So you use the skyline to fly away from all the action and to a building where you can hide, maybe find health, and reload. Then Lizzy cries out to you, suddenly a giant Handyman has come into the sandbox and screws your whole day up and bends the whole sandbox to his will.

I'm a huge fan of the Big Daddies from Bioshock and how fierce they were, but the new Handymen from Bioshock Infinite are even more terrifying. Handymen are sad people that were once human and are now half-man, half-machine, and are exploited, treated as products, and used as tools by the engineers, tycoons, and rich of Columbia to build and maintain the city it would seem. The Handymen are extremely large, very fast, they jump around the whole map like gorillas, and they will beat you to death as quick as one too. Not only are they terrifying enemies, but I felt a tremendous sadness and empathy for them. They aren't mindless machines, they were once people, and now in their Handyman form they suffer greatly. There's nothing more haunting and thought provoking than being in a wild battle, your adrenaline is flowing, you hop up onto a skyline and the Handyman electrifies it and knocks you off, you're fighting for your life, and all the while the Handyman is crying out to you and saying things like, "STOP THIS! PLEASE! WHY ARE YOU DOING ALL OF THIS!"

There's some moments in the game where, if you you're paying attention, you can learn about a certain Handyman, you learn his name, you learn of his wife, and you get to listen to a Voxophone (an audio recording) that his wife left next to his body as a farewell. That moment I came across his body, saw what people had done to him, how disgracefully they were treating him, and listened to his wife tell him how much she loved him and that now they can finally be whole again in Heaven and she can have her real husband back, it really hit me in the heart. Irrational has a knack for creating memorable heavy enemies that are not only terrifying and distorted yet human and heart wrenching.

I never do reviews, this is my first, and possibly my last. I just really needed to document my experience and share it, I thought doing it via a review was a decent way of accomplishing that. I don't do scores either, I'm pretentious like that. If you enjoy first person games of any kind you should try Bioshock Infinite. If you don't like these types of games try it anyways and see if it can change your mind. If you like a good story or great action, or both, try it out. I expected this game be pretty good, but I was impressed by how good it ended up being, on all fronts. The world is strikingly beautiful, colorful, and creative with some steam punk influence. The themes are dark and influenced by some of the sadder and more disgraceful moments of American history. The narrative and characters are mature and layered. And finally, the combat and action is possibly the most satisfying I've played this generation. Ken and his team made quite an experience for you to go on, all you have to do is grab your skyhook and leap onto the skyline.