Crispy Gamer

Outlook 2010: BioShock 2

Submitted by Crispy Gamer Staff on Wed, 01/13/2010 - 11:52
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Bioshock 2
Gus Mastrapa

Gus Mastrapa:
Who would have guessed that gamers would chomp at the proverbial bit to return to an underwater libertarian dystopia? Not me. I liked Bioshock, but didn't fall in love with the game like so many others. I felt like the game was a better-than-average shooter set in one of the most interesting videogame settings ever devised. Thing is, I want to return to Rapture, but I'm not thrilled about the notion of shooting everything that moves when I get there. The fact that BioShock 2 means to deliver online multiplayer just says to me that some decision maker has the entirely wrong idea about what made the original BioShock so appealing -- Rapture and the politics that got it built.

John Teti

John Teti:
The film magazine Premiere used to have a reader Q&A column in its front-of-book section. Once, a reader wrote in to ask critic Glenn Kenny which movies he thought could not possibly be followed up with a sequel. I gave it some thought. "The Graduate"? "To Kill a Mockingbird"? "Patton"? Kenny's answer, though, was that there was no such film: If there were enough commercial motivation, Hollywood would revive any movie and slap a "2" on it. That truth of our creative marketplace is the only reason BioShock 2 exists. The first game systematically dismantled the notion of a player's free will, for Pete's sake. How exactly do you follow that? Even the last quarter of the original BioShock felt neutered by the story's shocking turns. And now they're trying to squeeze a whole second game out of this premise? Damn, it doesn't sound promising. Yet I want so much for BioShock 2 to be somewhere in the neighborhood of its predecessor's greatness that I'm hopeful despite myself.

Our Outlook for the first half of 2010 continues...