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Bruceski posted:For the record that Spec Ops "you can choose to stop playing" is out of context AND said by one guy who was fond of jerking off about how genius his game was. It was in the context of "there's a lot of ways people can respond to this sort of thing, and if someone decided to stop playing I'd consider that a valid response", not an intended "solution". That game was a character descending into some dark places and taking the player along with him, framed as a... I think deconstruction is the right word despite its overuse... of FPS military games that have similar actions but celebrate them. In that respect Bioshock does the same thing, kind of aknowledges the meta-ness of doing stuff just because it's a quest objective, but the second part doesn't stop giving you quest objectives or expecting you to do them despite being "freed".
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Sep 8, 2020 06:57
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NGDBSS posted:The way I like to think of Spec Ops is that it is Walker's story - but it is not your story as a player. I don't know if the writers were deliberately using Bertolt Brecht's distancing effect/Verfremdungseffekt but it's very much present. I hadn't heard of that technique, but I agree after reading it.
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Sep 8, 2020 07:04
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The Ryan part is IMO pretty well done, all things considered. The game is set around lampooning one of the dumbest ideologies out there, Objectivism, and the 'twist' is that you, as the player, have no agency in actually doing the deed of offing Ryan. A man chooses, a slave obeys. No gods, no kings, only man, remember? It is also a critique, of sorts, of FPS games, but (I will put this in spoilers since the LP authors have not played System Shock 2, which I am spoiling here) In System Shock 2, you the player are a hostage of a sociopathic AI who forces you to do whatever she wants, and this is the framing of all the various fetch quests and objectives in the game. The 'twist' of that game even being the 'revelation' that this is the situation, though it is telegraphed well in advance by the virtue of being a sequel to System Shock in the first place, but never mind. The only time the player character gets a choice is at the end sequence, when SHODAN pleads for her life, and the player character just kills her. But it's a cut scene! The player themselves never get to make that choice either way! They're SHODAN's puppet all through the game, and the moral catharsis, if there is one, is not in the hands of the player, beyond reaching the end credits. By blending this with the nonsenses of Objectivism, it creates, especially for its time, a pretty powerful study slash critique of the Skinner box game design paradigm and what that means for game narratives. Obviously this can be seen as bland and banal today, and Tea did pretty much figure it out even before any of the 'reveals' happened, which was fun to watch!, but there's a lot going on here, and I appreciate what the game designers were after.
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Sep 8, 2020 09:19
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So funny story about Atlas, his original voice actor was removed because test audiences sussed that he was up to no good way ahead of time. So they got someone new, who is Irish IRL...playing a guy from Brooklyn, doing an intentionally overblown Irish accent
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Sep 8, 2020 09:29
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Looked that up and yeah the Atlas change made a load of difference:Eurogamer posted:Nobody trusted Atlas, the disembodied voice who acted as both welcoming party and guide to Rapture. One attendee described Atlas, who at the time spoke in a Morgan Freeman-esque Southern drawl, as a "lecherous Colonel Sanders".
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Sep 8, 2020 10:45
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Not having seen any of this game before, I'm pretty impressed with that twist. In particular, giving Atlas an irish accent did a great job of hiding the codephrase. Never saw that one coming. And having it be a bad irish accent even foreshadows that twist. I definitely see the value in having Atlas being a false identity rather than having Fontaine being your handler through the first half, since it lets the audio-logs set him up as a villain without revealing that you're working for one.
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Sep 8, 2020 10:52
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I love how Tea's parallel universes theory accidentally figured out a plot point in another Bioshock game. Or did he play Infinite?NGDBSS posted:The way I like to think of Spec Ops is that it is Walker's story - but it is not your story as a player. I don't know if the writers were deliberately using Bertolt Brecht's distancing effect/Verfremdungseffekt but it's very much present. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Sep 8, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 17:53
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I also feel that explicitly referencing the vita-chambers in an audio log was a mistake. Up to this point, where they are conspicuously absent from all the logs and dialog, its easy to dismiss them as a gameplay contrivance, but now that we know they are a real thing, it just opens a can of worms. Why do Ryan and Fontaine try to kill you with splicers and kazoo bots knowing full well that you will come back from any amount of bullets?
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Sep 8, 2020 21:33
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Ryan is probably unaware as he only gets a good look at Jack before the office scene ( the "you are my greatest disappointment" radio call)
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Sep 8, 2020 21:37
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That's pretty explicit - he goes straight from "I'M GOING TO KILL YOU AND PIN YOU TO MY WALL AS A TROPHY" to "I could never harm you, but you disappoint me so". Which is probably why they explained the Vita-Chambers being coded for Ryan only just before the encounter. They were giving you one more big clue (in case you were stupid or had missed the other ones) needed to help you understand that the Vita-Chambers worked for you because you're actually Andrew Ryan's son.
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Sep 8, 2020 21:58
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Also, as a fairly relevant detail, there is a vita-chamber in Ryan's office but it's disabled.
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Sep 9, 2020 01:28
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Sep 9, 2020 23:00
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So what happened at the end there with that Big Daddy? It looks like it clipped awkwardly with the rest of the environment and was glitched into low health. And was that a dead Little Sister next to it?
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Sep 10, 2020 07:57
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The big daddy was entering the "return little sister to vent" animation just as tea found it for the third round, with the big daddy on super low health. Thus Tea got no little sister for all his effort and ammo.
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Sep 10, 2020 13:33
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Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 13:22
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I find it morbidly hilarious that you looted food items from all three of the poisoned children in that setpiece you blew up.
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Sep 14, 2020 11:00
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Sep 14, 2020 23:02
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Gnoman posted:I find it morbidly hilarious that you looted food items from all three of the poisoned children in that setpiece you blew up. It fits in with Tea's slug looting from the Little Sisters.
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Sep 15, 2020 08:29
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Coming to the underwater city of Rapture while slowly learning about it's history and it's inhabitants and being guided in the unknown of it all by a total stranger whose aims are a complete mystery only to realize it's being ruled by a self-righteous deluded Objectivist megalomaniac like Ryan where it turns out that your helpful guide was even worse than him, I can see what this game was going for with the mystique and ludonarrative angle. But Fontaine's constant villain monologues are ruining all of that and it's disappointing to see this game become a one note story of kill the villain. Sure that was mostly the first half too, yet there was still a whole lot more being offered than running to find the next MacGuffin that will prepare you to be the badass you need to be (or in this case outside of the villain's control) for the inevitable final showdown.
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Sep 15, 2020 10:36
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Episode 29 - Nothing Wrong Here Art will be up shortly. The advance episode won't go up owing to a comedy of errors in recording over the past week, resulting in me having to record two episodes today.
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Sep 16, 2020 23:01
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How are you able to restore your health bar to normal after Fontaine uses his plot powers to shrink it?
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Sep 18, 2020 04:54
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That serum Tea took in the previous video to this last one that made his plasmids go ballistic stopped the code yellow effect and recovered his full life bar.
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Sep 18, 2020 10:08
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Episode 30 - The Cursed Recording Part 1 This was possibly the most ridiculous series of failures in recording I've ever had happen in my entire time LPing anything. So I apologise, you're going to have to deal with me playing through two episodes on my lonesome. I'm very, very sorry about that.
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Sep 18, 2020 23:16
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You could have used telekenesis to get the stuff out of that room you couldn't enter, but none of that looked worth wasting EVE on.
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Sep 19, 2020 02:16
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In the fight outside the clinic the enemy turret was shooting the splicer in the back, and breaking the electric stun.
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Sep 19, 2020 02:46
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Sep 21, 2020 23:48
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Welp, you've made me want to bust out Bioshock again. Thanks. JERK.
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Sep 22, 2020 05:18
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There were several places where cameras and tirrets were not animating righr, not just where you pointed it out. Odd.
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Sep 22, 2020 07:29
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 UnSmith posted:Welp, you've made me want to bust out Bioshock again. Thanks. JERK. We do our best to get people interested in the games we play!
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Sep 23, 2020 23:08
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"They want us to play Bioshock Forever". No, no, that's not right. It's Bioshock Infinite.
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Sep 24, 2020 00:18
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 And with that we're done! Thanks very much for watching everyone. Unlike normal there won't be much of a break before our next LP which is set to be myself running through Metroid Fusion Blind and will hopefully debut on Monday, the 28th of September. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the LP overall and broadly on how you feel Bioshock lands so many years later!
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Sep 26, 2020 00:38
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Natural 20 posted:As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the LP overall and broadly on how you feel Bioshock lands so many years later! I really enjoyed this LP, since mister Tea did figure out the major plot-lines somewhat beforehand and that was a pleasure to watch. I will say that Bioshock 1 is a worth-while game even today, even though it sort of capers off after the golf club incident. As has been discussed all throughout the LP, the game's main point (other than paying homage to System Shock 2) is to ridicule the idea of Rapture, Ryan, and how his ideal society is clearly flawed. Tea has outlined not only the many out-right physical issues with building a utopia under the sea in the 1960's, but also how inane and dumb the founding principles of Rapture were, and also how quick Ryan was to abandon his precious principles when faced with body-horror consumables becoming a business model. Fontaine is a caricature of Andrew Ryan, and Andrew Ryan himself was already a caricature of real-life objectivists like Ayn Rand, if that is even possible, so it's a bit on the nose I suppose. I guess today, when we have so many large title games that are effectively sandboxes, it's not such a huge realization that many games, FPS included, are mechanically constraining the player to just "do objective" over and over again. I still think it's a fun play on the motif, though.
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Sep 26, 2020 05:21
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Since it came up in the discussion, I always saw the good ending of Bioshock as the player going "gently caress this city" and taking all the little sisters away to live normal, hopefully pleasant lives. Hence "They offered you the city, and you refused it." Yeah, Rapture is out there, untold power and wealth, but it isn't the choice you made. That contrasts with the Evil Ending, where it's clear that you took over Rapture.
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Sep 26, 2020 06:08
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Woof, you guys mentioning Ogre Battle. The system that determined character promotion put together with all the secrets there and the requirements to get the best ending put together with how the game can be stingy on how to get anything done...yeah, another example of Matsuno's remarkable skill as a storyteller but even more proof that somebody needs to keep the man far away from the reins when it comes to the gameplay. I didn't play this game but I went into this LP knowing most of the plot twists because I didn't have an Xbox and had no desire to get one to play this game alone so I figured, why not spoil myself rotten? And seeing the game play out in it's entirety for the first time, it's true, the game does sort of lose the plot as soon as it hits you over the head with plot and the Objectivism setting is just secondary. It's window dressing, but at the same time it's cool that someone made a video game about the ridiculous batshit excuse for a philosophy that Ayn Rand poo poo out her rear end and as video gamey as an underwater city with mutants sounds, it actually sounds at home in her generally silly stories with overpowered heroes and caricatured villains. On the other hand, this is very much an in the know sort of thing where if you don't know much about her, you generally won't get it, and that still doesn't matter in the end to enjoying the game, as mentioned before, it's window dressing, and with all the different sorts of nonsense she concocted, if they were willing to go all the way sci-fi with an underwater utopia, they could have easily skewered some of her more ridiculous beliefs, and holy gently caress are those worth looking into. Here's a preview: She lionized a literal serial killer, believed that women were meant by nature to be ruled by men, and that anyone who would go out of their way to help others to the point of their own personal suffering so that others would be better off is a weak willed parasite.
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Sep 26, 2020 06:33
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I'd love to see you do Infinite at some point; most of the division surrounding it is due to the story, though. Gameplay-wise it's a definite improvement.
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Sep 26, 2020 10:50
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Shitenshi posted:Woof, you guys mentioning Ogre Battle. The system that determined character promotion put together with all the secrets there and the requirements to get the best ending put together with how the game can be stingy on how to get anything done...yeah, another example of Matsuno's remarkable skill as a storyteller but even more proof that somebody needs to keep the man far away from the reins when it comes to the gameplay. Ogre battle is happening after Metroid Fusion. I've successfully made what i call 20patch which is a broad rebalance of the game and I've figured out how to change character names so that we can customise our army and name them after goons.
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Sep 26, 2020 17:38
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I'm glad I watched this LP. I'd never actually played Bioshock (or seen it played) before but it's one of those cultural touchstones, I guess. Its meta commentary is a bit dated after free-roamers became the big AAA genre, and it's also undercut by the fact that you are playing exactly the same after being freed in-story as before; you just have a different voice in your ear. My main takeaway, though, is that I can see angels dancing in the sky.
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Sep 26, 2020 17:43
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Bremen posted:That contrasts with the Evil Ending, where it's clear that you took over Rapture. If you take over Rapture, what is there to take over? A failed city with nothing but crazies left? A Kingdom of Nothing
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Sep 27, 2020 01:25
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:If you take over Rapture, what is there to take over? A failed city with nothing but crazies left? A Kingdom of Nothing A kingdom of superpowered crazies you control with pheromones. There's a reason Fontaine wanted it. Natural 20 posted:Ogre battle is happening after Metroid Fusion. I've successfully made what i call 20patch which is a broad rebalance of the game and I've figured out how to change character names so that we can customise our army and name them after goons. Oh wow, I have such nostalgia for Ogre Battle, and was recently playing it on my SNES Classic. I'm really looking forward to see what you do with it and how the balance patch works.
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Sep 27, 2020 06:35
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Bremen posted:A kingdom of superpowered crazies you control with pheromones. There's a reason Fontaine wanted it. And do what with bunch of of superpowered crazies? Become a pirate lord in the middle of the Atlantic? Some logistic issues there
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Sep 27, 2020 08:20
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