While waiting impatiently for something else to download over the weekend, I booted up BioShock 1 for the first time in years, curious to see how it held up a half-decade on. I’d forgotten how remarkable and how magnetic its first few minutes are: whatever else you want to accuse the game of, the work it does in so quickly and so assuredly building a world and a mountain of intrigue around it is something we see all too little of. The vast majority of mainstream games open with enough dry exposition to choke a rhino, but this grabs your total attention with a bare minimum of talk, a steady flow of unpredictable spectacle and a spinetingling cocktail of awe and anxiety. Irrational are, I think, right to leave Rapture behind – but, for no particular reason other than ‘why not?’, let’s remember just why they built it in the first place. (more…)

Curse our limited-length titles! For this post should really be called something like ‘Irrational co-founder and now Blue Manchu boss Jon Chey talks more about his splendid-sounding new PC boardgame/ CCG/ MMO mash-up Card Hunter, how to make free-to-play non-horrible, what he thinks the future might be for immersive sims in the vein of System Shock and his thoughts on his former studio’s controversial XCOM remake’. Doesn’t bloomin’ fit though, does it? Oh well. You’ll find all that stuff out for yourself simply by reading on: tons of interesting comments in here, and I’m particularly excited by the thought towards the end that a coming wave of mid-budget simulational shooters might be on the cards, and far more likely to take big creative risks than their glossier triple-A peers… (Oh, and if you missed the more Card Hunter-centric first part of this interview, looky here). >

(more…)

Timing-wise, the long-in-development Bioshock prequel novel couldn’t have landed at a worse time. Remember Rapture? That’s right. It’s the place that was so awesome, before we were blown away by Columbia a few weeks ago. In the mood to return? There’s the rub…

(more…)

Those of us who didn’t spend the best part of a week legging it around a giant convention centre earlier this month could only swoon at the resulting tall tales of BioShock: Infinite’s newly-announced reality-rift feature, known as Tears. Now we get our own crack in space-time to peer through, as Ken Levine talks about (and demonstrates) companion character Elizabeth’s ability to introduce elements from other realities into the player’s game-world.

The upcoming third BioShock game intends to fix an oft-made criticism of the Rapture-set original games, according to Timothy Gerritsen, Director of Development at Irrational Games.

The Executive Producer on Bioshock Infinite admitted to RPS in an interview published today that, in the first Bioshock, “we failed in giving you a sense of that city underwater.”
(more…)

Well, obviously pretty much everyone’s fighting you> – it is a first-person shooter, after all. But there’s also inter-factional conflict in 2012′s Skyoshock, as one Mr K. Levine reveals below. What on earth could make the denizens of a rebel, militaristic, ultranationalist city in the sky turn against each other? Oh, riiiiiight. Also: time travel.
(more…)

Only a shortie for Ken & chums’ latest, but it’s pretty confident proof that we’re not in Rapture anymore, Andrew. Rocket-spewing zeppelins, anti-gravity powers, gruesome splatting via sky-crates and, at the end, a hint of how large the environments may be. Also, it really plays up the fact that this is a buddy game – but not exactly a buddy comedy. (more…)

The 2K way of late appears to be announcing impossibly ambitious and exciting-sounding games then going deathly silent for months (with the notable exception of Duke Nukem Forever, which has been very, very noisy since its comeback announcement). So it’s grand to see BioShock: Infinite start its promotional gears turning again, ahead of what will hopefully be a grand old infosplosion at E3. Following a revamp of the game’s website, we’ve got four new screenshots to stare at and make desperate, fannish guesses about. Hope you don’t like horses, because I’m about to show you a picture of a dead one.
(more…)

Good news, everyone. I’d given up absolutely all hope of this ever happening, and yet it has. The final DLC for Bioshock 2, Minerva’s Den, was a smart vignette full of nods to System Shock and the history of computing, not to mention being a welcome opportunity to approach the fascinating, doomed society of Rapture from a perspective other than its increasingly fantastical main narrative. This standalone tale of a calculating rogue AI seemed tailor-made for PC gamers… only PC gamers never got it. So it’s with fairly delighted surprise that we discover it’s finally, finally due out on PC almost a year after its console version.
(more…)