Tea Leaves

It is a disturbing and compelling image. The young man is wearing his school uniform and a slim pair of headphones. He reaches into a pocket with his right hand and pulls out a gun. He flourishes, twirls the gun, and points it at his own temple. There’s a sharp report as he fires, and a fountain of glittering shards spray out of the other side of his head.

It is a compelling and disturbing image. In the course of a game of Persona 3, it is an image that will assault you thousands upon thousands of times.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is a game that exploits this transgressive – and powerful – image to the fullest extent. There are complex in-game explanation as to why the teenagers in the game are not really blowing their brains out, but those are post-facto explanations. Fundamentally, the game was developed as an excuse to use this provocative image.

That Persona 3 is a Japanese game makes the suicide theme all the more disturbing. Japan has had an alarmingly high suicide rate for some time, and it has been increasing dramatically lately, especially among children. One could try to view Persona as a meaningful commentary on this situation, but that reading isn’t reasonably sustained by the game’s narrative or leitmotif. It feels to me at best crudely insensitive, and at worst a cynical attempt to profit from the phenomenon. Persona 3 is troubling not only because of the subject matter, but because of its reimagining of suicide as a heroic act. The game’s introductory video, for example, makes it seem downright romantic:

The Shin Megami Tensei (literally translated: “True Reincarnation of the Goddess” or “True Goddess Metempsychosis”) games have always been transgressive and edgy. It’s not clear that this game’s suicide theme is substantially more grim than the themes of previous outings (”You turn into a demon and destroy the world,”) or indeed of other games. What is different is the riveting nature of the game’s central image.

In the US market the game has an “M” (”mature”) rating, giving the publisher plausible deniability in the event of lawsuits. Despite that, the game is aimed firmly at high school children. Without going into too much detail about the game mechanics, the parts of the game that don’t involve shooting yourself in the head involve becoming popular at high school. This portion of the game plays like any number of Japanese games in the “dating sim” genre. I view this as another indication of the target audience of the game: teenagers. The game also has a brutally punishing save system where you have to slog ahead for a long period of time in order to reach a save point. Only people without responsibility – kids – can tolerate such broken save systems. So this is a game labeled as being for adults which is really intended for children. The world already believes that all videogames are for kids. We don’t need this sort of mislabeling helping the idea along.

Some may argue with my assertion that the game is intended for the teenage market. But the alternative hypothesis is that Atlus believes there is a huge desire in the 18-24 demographic for a game where players get to pretend to go back to high school and be popular. That, if true, is disturbing on a completely different axis.

The game is liberally larded with Jungian jargon, retrofitted into Japanese pop culture giant robot sensibilities. (This is a fairly common occurrence when East meets West; think of it as the inverse of Edward Said’s conception of Orientalism. Western cultural notions are often appropriated for anime for exotic flavor, e.g., Christianity is often used whenever a plot calls for a gothic milieu.)

In game terms, the protagonists fight (given-as-evil) “shadows” through a power called “persona”. When battling a shadow, the characters may take out a gun and shoot themselves in the head (extinguishing the ego?), thus summoning a masked spirit, or “persona”, who then whacks the shadow on the head a few times, or burns it, or freezes it, what have you. I’m only a few hours in, so I don’t know how the game’s plot will play out. In purely Jungian terms, the objective of the game is a bit perverse. One would properly describe the persona according to Jung as an outward-facing construct, while the shadow is a part of the self that exerts control subtly, albeit pervasively. Interactions with one’s shadow can be complex, but most would say that trying to simply overpower it by whacking it over the head will more likely lead to constant unhappiness, rather than self-discovery.

Persona 3 Hentai

Self-discovery, though, seems less a concern of Persona 3 than does style. Teenagers have already grabbed on to Persona 3’s irresistable combination of high school angst, OCD collectability and guns with both hands: you can already find Persona 3 hentai (mildly or deeply pornographic comics) all over the net. I suppose I should be glad that the sexism in the game itself, while present, is not quite as bad as it could be.

Persona 3 is problematic commercial art. To be blunt, if I lived with a depressed teenager (aka “any teenager”), I would do everything in my power to prevent him or her from even learning of Persona 3’s very existence. That such an exercise would be futile is beside the point.

Difficult, challenging, or transgressive art is not something to be reviled. Just because I am troubled by the game’s central image is no reason to denigrate it. But whether the game’s creators intended it as challenging art or merely the cheap exploitation of grief is not a tangential question. It is the central question. I can admire love as an abstract ideal, and still be repulsed by the 30 year old man who gropes at a high school student. I admire the boldness and stark power of Persona 3’s visuals, but see behind those visuals a carelessly groping hand.

A hand that doesn’t care who it hurts on its way to your wallet.

For today some short items that I never found the energy to turn into one of my normal-length wank-fests. These sit, like un-played games, on the pile for a while, and then I decide to just give up.

Mio Kitchen and Wine Bar

This is a new restaurant in Aspinwall that you should try. The chef used to work at Veritas in New York. Prices are high for Pittsburgh but for once the entrees are as good as the starters. I can’t comment on the wine list, I know nothing about wine. We’ve only been once so I can’t provide specific menu recommendations, but everything we had was good and everything we saw looked good. My only complaint was that the room is molded in the “if it’s really dark, the food will taste better” design style.

Coteaux du Languedoc

As I wrote in one of my Paris articles, we got a wine from this region of France at one of our fancier dinners on the last trip. I have so far been unsuccessful in finding anything like that wine in the humble state of PA. If anyone can help me, I would find a way to compensate you.

Halo Day

Tomorrow is Halo Day. I plan to have fun playing the game, and I suspect the game will be the foundation on which the Xbox 360 will stand for the next few years. I have been observing the collective orgasm that is standing in for “reviews” of the game. This will inevitably lead to the backlash against the game, where PC elitists call it a dumbed down shooter for console ‘tards and self-absorbed Left-Bank pseudo-intellectuals call it a cartoon kiddy game compared to the artistic pinnacle that was Bioshock because ya know, Halo doesn’t take place under water and doesn’t make fun of Ayn Rand.

I think that all of this misses the point. Halo 3 will be a grand old time, because Bungie is good at making Halo games. But we should not be deluded into thinking that this is some important cultural event. It’s just a good excuse to sit down with some pizza, shoot some aliens and save the god damned planet. This is what I plan to do.

On the other hand, to the bitter crack-babies who want all their games to do “more”, it should be pointed out that all Halo needs to do is be Halo. It doesn’t need to be HaloShock or Half-Halo 2, Episode 5, Max Payne Returns to City 17. People who pine for Bungie to go in a new direction with this game sound to me like people who want EA to make Madden into a pure management simulation rugby game or something. Going in a new direction is not the point here. Giving me a shiny new Halo game is the point. I like Halo, and I like it to sit on its own, over there being Halo. Doing anything radically differently would be like making a Mario game where you can’t jump. OK?

The only real question is why they allowed the 360 to ship without this game.

High end food stores in Ohio

We visited out friends in Akron again recently. I have a question. How is it that the density of froo-froo high end food stores in the Akron/Cleveland/Columbus triangle is so high? I count something like six or eight stores in the immediate area, whereas here in Pittsburgh we have Whole Foods and a couple of small independents that aren’t really that good (sorry). Why?

7-11 Vignette

I pulled in on my bike yesterday afternoon to get a Gatorade. In the parking lot is a woman sitting in her running Hummer H3 talking to her daughters and someone else, giving directions. The engine is running, the AC is on, the whole shebang. She probably burned several ounces of gas just sitting there while I got my drink. Then her daughter dribbled a bit of her bottled water on her hand to rinse it off. I have done this in the past. From over by the H3 I hear “We do not buy water to pour it on the ground.” Clearly people need a sense of perspective.

Klavons

You should go here and get a milk shake. Really. Just go.

This excellent web site cataloging and reviewing Japanese malt whiskies is making me want to try some. But the only Japanese whisky carried by the PLCB is Suntory “Yamazaki” 12 year, and it’s an SLO. Does anyone from a more civilized state want to help me obtain a wider variety to sample?

I was walking around in my local Borders a couple of months ago just after they rearranged the Music and DVD section. My eyes scanned through the shelves of DVDs, and I realized something that was at once horrible and amazing. There, on the shelves, was most of the history of broadcast television archived in little boxes of silver disks. You could get anything, almost no show was too obscure or too low quality to miss the cut. All of this is made possible by the digital encoding of the content. With enough storage, you can capture anything in bits and then instead of being available only at the whim of the content producer, you can watch it anywhere.

Of course, storage is a tricky problem. For most of my lifetime, the cost of storage made it impractical to manipulate large amounts of video in an affordable computer. But things change. 25 years ago 1GB of storage took up a 8 by 20 foot collection of rack mount disk drives in a machine room somewhere at CMU. Today, I can easily lose a chip holding 1GB of storage in a pile of lint in my pockets. When DVDs were introduced, the amount of storage (4GB) that each disk represented was much larger than what you carried with you in a typical computer. These days, a single DVD is a tiny fraction of what you find walking around in a cheap laptop.

Given this, it’s not hard to imagine a future where a single computer, or at least a single external disk drive will be able to hold all the music and video that you might ever listen to and watch. In fact, you could probably store all the music and video ever produced without that much trouble.

Essentially infinite storage also leads to other obvious ideas. For example, many of us like to keep journals and diaries. Others record their experiences with still or video cameras. Since disk isn’t really infinite, these records are usually fairly selective. But, you might ask, why be selective? The New Yorker recently published a profile of one Gordon Bell, who has been thinking about this very question. The article is an interesting look at an interesting person, but I found the conclusions to be disturbing.

The article correctly points out that a complete archive of everything brings up tricky questions of privacy and civil liberties. They also correctly realize that a raw archive of everything we see will never be that interesting. Therefore, they avoid the naive notion that if you strap a microphone and video camera to your person and record everything you see, the result will be like your own personal episode of Seinfeld. You might hope that your life archive would be an entertaining series of little stories full of humor, or drama or deep insights into the human condition. This, of course, ignores the essential fact that almost all of our lives are a banal exercise in tedium. The reason television stories are interesting is that all the boring stuff has been edited out by the filmmaker. The full archive of everything lacks this editor.

Of course, maybe you could build a computer system to find the interesting stuff for you. This is where I think the article goes wrong. There is this quote:

Similarly, Bell and Gemmell would like software that organized the contents of the archive into movies—something, at least, to compress and shape it, to summarize its parts. “Auto-storytelling,” Gemmell calls it. “My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, ‘Go blog it,’ so that my mother can see it. I don’t have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images.”

Personally, I find this vision horrifying. It’s good that the article picked photography as an example, because it’s easy to use photography to explain why I hate this idea so much.

Photography, more than any other artisitic endeavor, is at its core an exercise in selectivity. You look at a subject, you choose how to frame the subject in the picture to capture what you find interesting about it. You wait until the context is just right. You hit the button. Later, you look through all the pictures and filter them again. This time, you are picking out the ones that “worked”, meaning that the picture actually captured what you originally visualized when you were shooting. The resulting set of “select” images (even the jargon of the field emphasizes selectivity) are the ones that you personally feel are the strongest pictures.

All of this selection is important. Not only does it serve to ensure that you don’t show your weak pictures to people, it is also at the core of photographic style. Style can best be defined as systematically capturing pictures that you like. Part of cultivating your own personality in your pictures is to be able to pick the best ones out of the pile and make people pay more attention to them. In other words, the selectivity is at the heart of photographic style.

Now, imagine that the machine is making these choices for you. Why would you want that? I think that the key thing that makes important memories important is that I picked them to be important. I want to sift through my life on my own. I want to look at it all and pick out what I think is interesting by myself and then synthesize it into some story that I can go share with the world. Outsourcing this to a machine is tantamount to calling down the robot holocaust and replacing all the people on earth with little a collection of machine learning robots. No thanks.

Today I met my friend Kilolo at the newly-opened “Oh Yeah Ice Cream & Coffee,” on Highland Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood. While perusing their offerings, I noticed they had something they claimed was “Guinness Ice Cream (Adults Only)”. Skeptical as I always am, I asked for a taste.

And it was good.

I didn’t have a camera. I didn’t have a mic. But I had my MacBook Pro, with its built-in iSight camera. I grabbed it and started recording.

I liked the atmosphere and the approach of the place (even if — sorry fellas — I won’t be mixing hemp fiber into my ice cream for breakfast any time soon). Oh Yeah! is clearly trying to do something a little different. I’ll be curious to see if their marketing push to convince people that ice cream is an awesome breakfast food will pan out. But in the meantime, they’re open from early in the morning until late at night, 7 days a week. They even keep somewhat late Sunday hours, which is almost unheard of in Pittsburgh.

The ice cream, it should be noted, isn’t made there. It comes from several sources, including local ice creamery Dave & Andy’s, as well as an excellent source in Ohio. As the owner began singing the praises to me (part unpasteurized milk, Amish cream) my mind began to wander. How do they make Guinness ice cream? Am I corrupting the innocent Amish who are being forced to handle alcohol? I eventually decided that the likely hypothesis was that the Guinness ice cream was being made only by youths in the midst of their rumspringa, and thus was ethically OK.

In the video, I diss the vegan ice cream (”ku fu”) on general principles, but it wasn’t actually half bad. I just have an idiom to maintain.

This summary of the place, written a day after they opened, is another interesting perspective on Oh Yeah! as well. Give it a read.

I don’t recall when I watched The Fifth Element for the first time. However, I distinctly recall that I didn’t think it was that great. Over the years, however, my wife and I happened to catch the movie from time to time on HBO or whatever, and a funny thing happened. After watching the film the equivalent of five or six times, suddenly it became the one of the best films ever made. Repetition made it better.

I pondered this phenomenon after buying the Blu-Ray edition of the movie for the PS3 and enjoying it all over again. We sat through all of our favorite moments again, and they were all just as fun, but at a higher resolution. The reason, in my mind, that the movie is great is not because of the dialog, the plot, or, in particular, the characters. What is great about the film is that it establishes a pleasing rhythm in your brain, and doesn’t let go of it until the movie is over. The main technique that Besson uses to establish the feel of the film is through editing, dialog, and music. He cleverly interleaves multiple shots from multiple locations during expository dialog to keep you from getting bored. He also takes multiple pages from the MTV school of hyperactive jump cutting to make the action sequences into violent little dance numbers from a music video. I really like this.

Finally, there is the irresistable scene where Bruce Willis gets cold cocked by Ian Holm. This shot is brilliant on so many levels that I don’t have room in one post to go over it all. You have to watch it for yourself.

Another one of my favorite “rhythm” movies is Ocean’s Eleven. Again, this is no masterpiece of storytelling and deep characterization, but from the very opening scene of the movie, the beat of the awesome David Holmes soundtrack and the nonchalant gait of George Clooney melt together into a kind of uber-coolness that you can’t help but enjoy. After that, the movie just flows effortlessly over your eyeballs at just the right pace, with just the right beats. How many movies have a shot of a guy riding up an escalator that you can’t take your eyes off of?

Coincidentally, right after watching these two films again, I picked up a game that I have played repeatedly, and played it again. I refer to Resident Evil 4 on the Wii. Yet again, this game sucked me in and made me run from one end of that damn island to the other and not rest until the zombies were dead. Also coincidentally, I found that what I enjoy in RE4 is that the game sets up and maintains a rhythm that is comforting and enjoyable to return to. When you get good at RE4, you realize that the way to survive the mob is alternate your shooting with your moving so that you can keep everything visible and far enough away that you have the time and visual range you need to target the next few zombies. The best fights have a sort of blam!, shuffle shuffle, blam! meter to them that is not entirely unlike the pleasing dance beats of the O11 soundtrack.

Most games that I have finished more than once, or played obsessively for some period of time, have this nature. Madden, Counterstrike, Halo, and most recently Bioshock. The rhythm was hard to find in Bioshock, but near the end of my first time through I finally discovered the Zen of the Wrench. Bioshock also has some set pieces that are set to swingy music that give the whole experience a sociopathic edge. You wouldn’t think that would hold up to repitition, but the wrench is fun.

I find this experience with repitition in gaming interesting. The conventional wisdom is that games create “replay” value by providing a lot of variety and avoiding repetition, but my experience is just the opposite. The best games provide enjoyable repetition. Repetition makes them better, and makes you want to play them more.

Of course, the flip side of this are the games that provide frustrating or boring repetition. Sometimes the the game is too hard so you have the wonderful experience of simply failing over and over and over again. That’s never fun. Sometimes the game is just annoying and boring, so you are annoyed or bored for ten hours, which is no fun. The single player parts of the Ubisoft tactical shooters are notoriously annoying and repetitive for me. Finally, there are the games that do nothing horribly wrong, but they do nothing really right either. For me, Far Cry on the Xbox was like this. I slogged through it, but the mechanics just never clicked.

It’s hard to say that there is any objective difference between a great game and one that is just repetitive. I suppose if I understood that I’d design the games rather than just playing them on my couch. In practice though, it generally doesn’t take that long for the game to make its impression on me. If things click and I can find a pleasing rhythm in the game, I’ll usually pick it up again tomorrow, and the next day, until I’m done. More often than not though, this doesn’t happen. And unlike The Fifth Element you can’t sit through a game five or six times to discover that you really liked it all along. These games go back on the shelf, and generally become the eternal queue of unfinished business. We all have one. Now it’s clear that it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

“Baker Street is a game of logic and deduction,” says the web site, modestly. It is more than that, though. Baker Street is a life-destroying timesink of addiction and pure puzzle-solving pleasure.

I rave about Everett Kaser’s games about once a year, and it’s about time for this year’s installment. Kaser makes essentially two types of games: logic and deduction games (where you are given a set of clues and from them must deduce each position in the board), and a bunch of other games that I don’t play. In the deduction class are his classic Sherlock (which by my reckoning I’ve been playing since the early 1990s), Dinner with Moriarty, Honeycomb Hotel, Watson’s Map, and now Baker Street.

Baker Street includes the best aspects of Honeycomb Hotel – deducing the positions of walls and paths as well as tiles – without the irritating “what ifs” – guessing long chains of possible solutions to find the right one. The frazzled layouts of Watson’s Map are eschewed here for a more regular grid pattern. Despite this, Baker Street manages to be more challenging than Watson, while simultaneously feeling like a much fairer game. In Watson I was constantly making errors because my eyes played tricks on me. When I screw up in Baker Street, I can blame nothing other than my own brain.

Martin Van Buren

The twist in Baker street is that on the harder levels it is impossible to fill in the tiles without simultaneously making progress on the walls and paths. Once you exhaust the obvious clues, it takes effort to winnow down the possibilities such that you realize that there is only one possible set of positions where Fat Sort-Of Hercule Poirot Looking Guy is three steps away from Stupid Blue Hat. (By the way, beware discussing Kaser games with other aficionados. You’ll quickly discover that the difference in nomenclature will convince you that the other players are all crazy. How could they possibly call that one guy anything other than Martin Van Buren?)

Kaser games are, regrettably, only available for Windows. They play fine under Parallels, and Kaser has a long explanation about how he was tired of Microsoft jerking him around so he wrote his own VM and all you have to do to port his games is to port his VM to your platform. I wish he’d port his games to Mac OS X so that I didn’t have to run them under emulation. Seriously, Everett: there are fewer of us, but we buy a lot of games. Give us a shot.

You can download a free demo of Baker Street here. The full game costs less than 20 bucks. It may be the best $20 you spend all year.

I picked up Madden a couple of weeks ago, and actually had time to play about half of a franchise season before Bioshock hit and the quest for achievements consumed me. This year’s iteration improved many aspects of the gameplay, but was also annoying in many of the same ways as last year. The user interface problems persist: the play calling screens are a crime against usability studies. The game insists on using time consuming in game displays to indicate simple things like if the field goal was good or not. Replays dance and jitter while the players on the field sometimes teleport around. The radio announcer guy is still mildly retarded.

On the other hand, the football actually plays pretty well. Running the ball is not an exercise in frustration, as the player with the ball actually moves when you push the stick rather than sliding around like his feet are stuck in invisible quicksand. They fixed the interface for calling hot routes and other audibles at the line of scrimmage, which is good. All in all, it almost feels like playing Madden on the PS2, but without the jaggies.

But there were a few problems. First, the simulation engine generates a seemingly ludicrous number of turnovers. Second, playing the Patriots this year, it seemed like whenever I got into a hole I could just heave a long pass to Randy Moss who would then run past or jump over three guys and score a touchdown. I thought that this was not that believeable. I was ready to send put the game into the Ebay queue.

Then I watched the opening week of the NFL this week. I watched the Browns cough up the ball every time someone sneezed near them. Wow, just like Madden. Then I watched the highlights of the Patriots game, and every time the Patriots felt like moving the ball, they would just heave another long pass to Randy Moss, who spent the whole afternoon running past, around and over the Jets secondary.

Maybe I’ll keep the game after all.

I’m experimenting with trying to make these videos generally shorter, quicker, and tighter. Any comments would be appreciated.

I have to send the nice HD camera back to Sony soon, so expect a drop in video quality if I go back to plain old miniDV.

What is it with these stickers that come stuck on the boxes of CD, DVD, video game and other media disks? I notice nothing in the damn box. The box is full of nothing but the disk and various flyers and advertisments begging me to buy other shitty movies that happen to be made by the same company that just pissed me off by putting this sticker on the box so I can’t open the god damned item to watch the movie or play the game. Why are retailers such clueless, mean-spirited bastards?

Continuing my discussion of booze-related videos, here’s a review of Grand Marnier’s latest monstrosity, “Navan”:

You can find a higher-resolution version of that on .mac. Marvel in the HDness of being able to count the number of hairs on my chin! Or something.

I was skeptical about Bioshock. I remember watching some demo reel that Irrational had put out on the game. While the demo footage panned over a claustrophobic and chronically damp interior setting, the voice of Ken Levine spoke over the film, declaring that in this game they wanted to redefine the shooter, and provide the player with a combination of visceral action and and a deep web of possible tactics. This kind of talk always makes me skeptical.

The critical reaction to Bioshock would also make you skeptical. For the most part the game has been hailed as an instant classic, a brilliant tour de force, a fantastic combination of killer gameplay and compelling narrative. Of course, there are the inevitable nay-sayers who think the game is a crippled version of System Shock 2, dumbed down for the masses. I don’t think either of these extremes is true. But I do think Bioshock is excellent. While the game is not without flaws, none of them diminish my admiration of game’s polish and craftsmanship.

I have already praised the pacing of the beginning of the game. This praise holds up for most of the rest of the game, with a couple of notable exceptions that I will complain about later. The presentation of the narrative was also interesting. I like how the short audio diaries were juxtaposed against the plot arc of the overall game. The diaries and the radio communication do a better job of fleshing out the various characters and their back-stories. They do this while cleverly avoiding the problem of doing believable character animation for extended periods of time, and so you don’t have the problem that you had in Oblivion, where you had to constantly talk to deformed humanoid robots to find out how to find the next plot point. In fact, my main complaint about the presentation of the game is that the character models and animation were particularly weak. In addition, the animation, spoken audio, and subtitles were constantly out of sync.

I have no complaints about the rest of the presentation though. Rapture is as atmospheric a game setting as I have ever witnessed. It is dark, cramped, creepy, claustrophobic and surreal. Vending machines with clown heads play circus music or scream in Spanish as they sell you ammunition. Huge neon signs illuminate the decrepit rotting shell of the city while water streams in from almost everywhere. The areas are great to just stare at, which is a bonus because the game rewards thorough exploration in various ways:

1. You have to do a lot of digging to find enough ammo if you tend to just blast away.

2. You can reprogram the various security devices in the city (cameras, turrets, and the flying bots) to fight for you rather than against you.

3. There are usually inanimate objects lying around that you can use effectively in a fire-fight (water, oil, drums of various kinds).

The integration of the environment into the combat is where I find my true joy in Bioshock. The game pays off handsomely when you can scope out the next area, carefully set a series of traps for the enemies you know are just around the corner and then sit back and relax while the traps trigger and the city does your killing for you. Although much of the pre-release rhetoric harped on the goal of creating a “kick-ass shooter”, I don’t think Bioshock plays that well if you limit yourself to straightforward combat. The game rewards you for taking a more tactical approach to the combat and combining the tools that it gives you in creative ways. This is normally not my thing. I like to figure out how to blast through a game with one or two different weapons. But Bioshock is different. Where in other games stealth and environmental traps are just cheap prefunctory gimmicks, in Bioshock they are actually effective. Where other games only give you a few weapons that are fun, Bioshock gives few dozen abilities and weapons to mix and match. By the later parts of the game, I found that I had actually used three or four different styles of combat to get through, which is rare for me. The strongest compliment that I can give the game is that it made me play outside of my normal style.

I will mostly repeat what peterb said about the narrative. While the plot arc itself is pretty standard stuff, it is for the most part superbly executed. Where the game suffers is in dealing with the standard problem of providing 15 to 20 hours of gameplay in a narrative that can’t support it. The result is that while the story tells you that you must hurry with all your might to the next plot point, the game shuffles you back and forth across the map in a series of seemingly endless collection quests. The fact that the areas are hard to navigate and the map UI is hard to read just means you also spend a lot of time lost. Finally, as you stumble around trying to find your way, what I will call the “ambient” combat constantly gets in your way. It seems like every time you come back to an area there is a new enemy waiting for you. This just slows you down even more. This can lead to a frustrating sense of fatigue. I found myself rushing through levels and missing important items because I became impatient for the plot to move forward.

Happily, a couple of well-produced Big Events serve to pick up your enthusiasm just when you are ready to give up for good. That, and the fact that you can become ludicrously powerful make up for the fact that the the later areas are just not as interesting. In the end, the tedium of collecting N copies of item M wears off quickly, and you are left to ponder the implications of what you have just played through. The fact that the game makes you think about it at all after finishing the final boss is something of an achievement, I think.

Some people have complained that the final boss is prefunctory and boring. I think easy final bosses are a fine thing and should be encouraged. Others have complained about the vita-chambers, claiming that they “break” the game by removing any penalties for player death. This is especially offensive to the “I play games for the challenge” crowd. To this I say that two of the best games ever, Planescape and Lego Star Wars also work this way, and I don’t see what the problem is. I thought that the vita-chambers were a great mulligan. They let me make small screwups without requiring me to go back and replay a whole area. Yes, you can abuse them. But it’s just as easy to not abuse them, so what’s the problem?

Finally, as it turned out, playing on Medium was not too hard. It just took a while to figure out what the game wanted me to be doing, and adapt my style. I even replayed some of the early areas on Hard, and it’s not that bad.

Bioshock is as good a game as I have played since the “Golden Year” of 2004/2005. It gets a huge number of things just right, and does very little wrong. I even like the achievements in this game, and that never happens. I have to go check out that crazy “high school kids blow their heads off with guns to summon spirits” RPG now, but I’m pretty sure I’ll make another run through Rapture fairly soon. If nothing else, I have to get that last stupid achievement before Pete does.