re: #55 Romantic Heretic

I recently pulled BioShock Infinite out storage to play again. Apparently this game didn’t do very well in sales. It was quite a disappointment to the publishers.

About twenty minutes into the game I figured out why this was.

Simply put there are a lot of Americans (Canadians and Europeans for that matter) who agree with the villain Zachary Hale Comstock. They agree blacks are lesser people. They agree that Christians should be running things. They agree that ‘the wicked’ should be harried and killed. They agree the working man should be grateful to be fed. Paid is too much to ask.

These people hated that they were the bad guys in the game and so they didn’t buy it.

Free market I guess, but it shows how badly political ideology screws things up these days.

But weren’t there a bunch of people who agreed with everything that Andrew Ryan put forward in the first game?

I disliked parts of Infinite because the final fight decided it was a good time to throw in entirely new mechanics at the player, and have an ending that was intensely interesting and metaphorical… but could have used just a bit more letting us know how the characters actually ended up when all was said and done. I guess that I’m just a bit of a fool like that.

Also gameplay wise, Bioshock 2 got things right where your standard enemy goes down to a headshot from your fully upgraded standard pistol even on the hardest difficulty (leadhead splicer V rivet gun), if more than one headshot is required to kill the standard mook, you are not adding difficulty, you are adding busy work, especially with the new regenerating health.

That was honestly not a good idea all things considered, it feels like it breaks the entire game down into a series of hiding behind cover shoot shoot shoot shoot, out of shield, duck back behind it, Bioshock 2’s combat by comparison felt a bit more fluid….