BioShock (PS3)

PS3 owners: Fourteen months later, here's your chance to kiss a Big Daddy.
10/21/2008 6:24 PM | 1 Comments | Page 2 of 3

You're guided through the game by the calming voice of Atlas, who communicates with you via a two-way radio. Atlas speaks in an Irish brogue, and asks you to help locate "me wife and child."

OK, pal, you think. Sure. I can do that for you.

If all this sounds like a slightly more cerebral version of DOOM's go-there-and-shoot-that plot, you'd be right ... and wrong. There are certainly moments in BioShock that echo the granddad of all first-person shooters. But those moments are far outnumbered by plenty of unconventional twists.

Like DOOM, you get your standard-issue first-person shooter arsenal -- shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher, etc. -- but you also get the chance to do a little plasmid splicing of your own. After only a few levels, you're able to send lightning shooting from the fingertips of your left hand, shoot flames, and pick up and toss items via telekinesis. In later levels, you'll be able to launch swarms of bees (yes, bees) and even freeze enemies solid with ice.

You'll spend most of the game getting into scrapes with splicers, but every now and then you'll have to square off with a Big Daddy, hulking beasts wearing what looks to be a diving suit straight out of a Jules Verne novel. A Big Daddy's job is to protect Little Sisters, zombie-like little girls who sap a substance called Adam from corpses scattered about Rapture.

The Big Daddy and Little Sister won't bother you, as long as you don't bother them. But provoke either one of them -- which the game makes clear you absolutely need to do at a certain point -- and trust me, there is a shit-ton of hell to pay.

My first Big Daddy fight, to put it mildly, did not go well. There was much running, much hiding and more than a little dying. I was attacked with a kind of balls-out viciousness unlike anything I had seen before. It was like being mauled by a pit bull on steroids. The big bastard just would not let up.

After limping my way through my first few Big Daddy battles, I got wise: I set traps for him; left a trail of landmines for him to follow; arranged turrets and attack bots to swarm him; and basically, very carefully, I learned how to orchestrate his demise.

Taking down a Daddy always left me with a moral dilemma: What to do with the now-defenseless Little Sister? BioShock gave me two options: Rescue or Harvest. Rescue results in turning her back into a nice, normal, sweet little girl again, but getting only a small amount of Adam for your troubles. Harvest means getting much more Adam, but -- that's right -- killing the girl in the process.

Yes, BioShock continues the relatively new trend of asking gamers to make ethical and/or moral choices, and then forces them to live with the consequences. Being the big, liberal, tree-kissing sap that I am, I was completely and utterly helpless when it came time to choose. Translation: "Harvest" was never really an option for me.

The Big Daddy battles function as non-traditional boss battles in the game (though there is one all-too-traditional, and terribly disappointing, boss battle very late in the game). Beyond that, whether the Big Daddy is angry and doing everything in his power to take you out, or, after having lost a Little Sister, lumbering about the level, looking lonely and bereft, these hulking creatures clearly are the spiritual heart and soul of BioShock. (Not to mention that the Big Daddy achieved almost instantaneous icon status, and, to my mind, is now as indelible a character among the videogame community as, say, Pac-Man and Mario.)