BioShock (PS3)

Every once in a while, a work of fiction comes along at precisely the right moment to change your life. Initially it might not be fully apparent just how thoroughly the changes have been wrought, but as months melt into years, and years coalesce into decades, time provides us with the perspective to spot the fulcrum moments in our lives, and we’re able to see exactly where the levers of choice or chance either bunted us ever-so-gently down the third-base line, or swatted us clear out of the park.

The first of two bases-clearing events occurred for me in May of 1988 when I read the novel Watchers, by Dean Koontz. The fact that the story held my adolescent attention long into several nights, along with altering the very long-term course of my life, is a testament not only to the book itself, but to Koontz’s overarching philosophy that people – specifically our people, those closest to us – matter more than anything. The unification of the fractured, the sanctity of the home and of family and friends, and the refusal to countenance any evil which would threaten these things are, to this day, constant themes throughout his work, and it was these worthwhile Romantic ideals put forth in fiction that shaped much of who I am.

The second of these life-altering events was playing BioShock.

Released on the 360 and the PC in August of last year, BioShock garnered much-deserved critical and commercial acclaim, selling well enough across both platforms to earn an upcoming sequel and a port to the PS3. It also rocketed to the nebulous top of my personal Best Games in the Universe list, taking up company with other gems like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Dark Cloud 2, Jedi Knight, and Morrowind. Now, with the PS3 port, I’ve had a chance to revisit the city of Rapture, and I’ve discovered that it’s as captivating as ever.

If you haven’t played BioShock, and can do so on either the PS3 or the 360, consider that the 360 version looks marginally better, and that PS3 users will be forced to endure the traditional fifteen-minute install time in exchange for the privilege of waiting fourteen months for muddier graphics. On the other hand, the PS3 version seems devoid of the texture filling problems that mildly afflicted the 360 version, so it’s probably a wash; neither game looks bad by any stretch, and the controls and audio are tight in each.

Where BioShock soars is not only with its action, but in the scope of its story. While most games courageously attempt to spin large, must-save-the-world tales that are designed to raise the stakes and thereby render the player’s actions much more meaningful, BioShock keeps the scope narrow, focusing instead on the player’s survival and the choices he makes along the way. This, coupled with the close underwater setting, gives the game a sense of compelling, urgent intimacy that’s conspicuously absent from ninety-nine percent of everything else on the shelves.

No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

It is ultimately BioShock’s demand for moral choice that raises its stakes high enough to compliment its narrow scope; it takes the very real, concrete concept of individual survival and attaches an abstraction of morality (save the Little Sisters, harvest them, or leave them alone) in order to determine the means by which you survive, yet most games accomplish the inverse – they take the abstract concept of saving the entire world (generically high stakes), and attach the concrete concept of the end always justifying the means, resulting in a hollow, ultimately meaningless experience: In these games it is not your philosophy or values being reflected and reinforced as you play, but the developer’s. Who wants to sit through forty hours of someone else’s values being foisted upon them, especially when said values consist solely of relativistic sermonizing on the evils of capital punishment?

Look around for a few years and you’ll eventually come to the conclusion that most people suffer from a chronic case of cause-and-effect cranialrectalitis; that is, they have their heads firmly up their asses when it comes to determining which came first, the monkfish or the bouillabaisse. There seems to be an especially maddening trend these days to so closely equate any sort of personal sacrifice with “good” that the line of cause and effect has been blurred beyond legibility, to the point that most meatheads assume an immutable relationship between the two. It is now largely assumed that the most “good” can be accomplished by greater and greater sacrifice, indeed that any brand of virtue demands sacrifice. Teach a man to fish, and you’re just another industrialist with an agenda, but give him your fish, and by golly your halo’s in the mail, motherfucker.

The same principle is evident when it comes to the determination of morality in games like BioShock and, more recently, Fallout 3. BioShock’s system of morality never makes the demand for self-sacrifice, while Fallout 3 stridently assumes player sacrifice as if by right, simply in order to become what is considered “good” within the context of the game. I can forgive Fallout this shortcoming (and it is a shortcoming, possibly out of only two or three), because of its cataclysmic awesomeness, but by the end of the main quest I’d grown a bit tired of its altruistic tendencies. BioShock, like its conceptual forefather System Shock 2, never inverts the causal relationship between sacrifice and virtue, never assumes that the former is not merely sometimes an effect of the latter, but that it is the cause itself. And this is, as those dandy juvenile intraspecies gastronomists said, a Good Thing.

The extent to which BioShock laid the foundation for change in my life goes beyond the game itself, in that it prompted me to investigate other things which have had nothing less than terrain-altering effects on the way that I see the world, and the way that I navigate it. I’ll not go into detail, because the specifics are not for anyone else to accept, reject, or even consider; I’ll simply offer that BioShock need not become a catalyst for change in your own life in order for you to bask in its abject righteousness. If killer style, heady action, and a creamy dollop of corneal confection are what you look for in a game, than look no further than 2K’s brilliant sub-oceanic shooter.

Fallout 3 (PS3, 360)

Growing up in the seventies had its ups and downs. One of the serious downs was the music; you couldn’t throw a white man’s afro in any direction from 1975 to 1982 without hitting some mustachioed, polyester- suited goober of male sensitivity crooning about his father the band leader or holding someone by the firelight as a means to score some poon. For all I know, the touchy-feely bearded douchebag angle could have landed more tail than Boeing, but any man who’s willing to turn himself into a pussy in order to get laid deserves any and all social afflictions that befall his libidinous appendage.

One of the the definite ups was that, unlike our parents, we were largely spared routine visits from the looming specter of nuclear annihilation. We had no Nikita Khrushchev, no blinking, beeping Sputnik under which we shuddered in collective, jingoistic paranoia. We had no Cuban missile crisis to push us to the overt brink of Armageddon; we had Jimmy Carter pussyfooting around the Ayatollah, and Luke Skywalker – not the toughest of role models either way, but there was no radiation poisoning, either. Had Carter been in the White House in October of 1962, there’d still be Soviet missiles in Cuba, but lots of poor Cubans would have gotten new houses, so it all might have worked out anyway.

Our closest brush with The End came on a night that virtually no one knows about; on September 26th, 1983, a Soviet Air Defense Forces satellite early warning network indicated that several missiles had been launched by the US against the Soviet Union. If Colonel Stanislav Petrov – a man who used logic and objective reasoning to determine that the warning had been caused by malfunctioning equipment – had adhered to the standard Soviet protocol of notifying the Air Defense command about any impending attacks, chances are the backdrop of Fallout 3 would have become a stark, irradiated reality, and I’d be writing this review on a cave wall. Or worse, a TI99/4A. Shudder.

Bethesda’s biggest gaffe in developing Fallout 3 was including the 3 in the title; not because it diminishes the game in any way, but because it has led to a tidal wave of Internet geek-fuck backwash about how Fallout 3 is not as good as the first two Fallout games because it lacks the “humor” and the turn-based tedium of its forebears. I suppose that there were people who missed the hand-crank on their Model T when the first key-start engines were produced, too, so those gaming trilobites pining away for the interaction mechanics o’ yore might be afforded some slack, there, if only out of pity. What cannot be forgiven, or even sanctioned by way of validation, is the notion that Fallout 3 is boring.

Any game that offers as many colorful solutions to its mind-bending number of quests – including the straightforward, “blow their heads clean off as eyeballs fly in multiple directions” approach, the “stealth your ass off” method, and the “let’s talk about it ’cause we’re all just good folks at heart” plan – can be considered anything but boring. If tossing frag grenades at six-foot-long scorpions while a Super Mutant Behemoth whales on you with a board full of rusty nails until you turn around and hit him with your Fat Man mini-nuke (complete with attendant mini-mushroom cloud) is your definition of boring, you’ve led a harrowing life indeed, at which point might I suggest some heavy-duty, $300-an-hour therapy, ’cause…damn.

I just think it's a little pricey for a unique fixer-upper

Any game that requires you to think just a little bit about where your next thrill is coming from is bound to garner some criticism from the Duplo crowd (you know, those insipid dolts who need a big, fat-crayoned arrow hanging in the air to show them where to go next, else they lose interest). Fallout 3 does exactly the opposite; it relies on the player to push the narrative forward, to find situations that require skill and a shred of forethought in order to survive, and it does so while consistently keeping the player’s in-game references within – wait for it – the game itself. It never interrupts the play with cutscenes or scripted enemy intros (Doom 3, Gears of War, fuck you too), nor does it wrest control from the player in order to focus attention on something deemed too important to risk missing, but not important enough to work seamlessly into the gameplay. (“Yes, we’re going to show you this door now, so please stop playing so that we might show you this door, which may or may not be a door which you must use at some point in the near future, so please be on the lookout for this door.”)

What bothers the aforementioned Duplos is that Fallout 3 requires you to make your own fun; you can’t simply stand around and wait for shit to happen. It will not pull you by the nostrils through level after tiresome level of single-path, measured progress, so chances are if you’re a numb, boring twat yourself, you’ll find Fallout 3 equally boring. If you’re fond of finding your own way, whether through life or through your entertainment (the distinction is academic, really), Fallout 3 will appeal to you on that level.

If you’re not a fan of bleak, post-apocalyptic settings, give this bad boy a wide berth, ’cause it’s as visually depressing as a church potluck-slash-bingo night. Though technically proficient, the subject matter itself is, by necessity, very gray and very brown and could very well entice even the perkiest of perky bastards to seek succor from a suicide hotline. The audio offers convincing acting, perversely satisfying weapon and splatter effects, and a majestic-yet-unobtrusive score by Inon Zur. Also featured in the audio are several period songs by Bob Crosby, Tex Beneke, Billie Holiday, Roy Brown, The Ink Spots, Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters, and Cole Porter, each of which ladles oodles of atmosphere atop an already atmosphere-rich experience.

Also, if you happen to be one of those attention deficit-afflicted, Xbox Live-addicted teabagging doucheknobs who can’t tie your shoes without first getting three or four friends to come help you, you’ll also want to pass this one up. Fallout 3 is, at heart, a role-playing game; the action – such as it is – is often thoughtful and precise, which means that the Gears crowd will likely be put off by all the requisite thinking.

Like Bethesda’s previous masterpieces, Oblivion and Morrowind, Fallout 3 offers the opportunity to play your way in a unique setting rife with danger, intrigue, and some seriously freaky shit. If you’re not afraid of forging your own path through a game that brings player expression and individual choice to the mainstream, you’d be crazier than a shithouse mole rat not to give Fallout 3 a try.