Face Off pits two gladiators against each other as they tackle gaming's most perplexing conundrums. This New Year's Eve edition is a chronological throw-down: which decade gave PC gaming the most? Podcast Producer Erik Belsaas says it was the '90s—the origin of modern PC gaming. Executive Editor Evan Lahti insists it was the '00s, with its speedy internet, better PCs, and shinier graphics engines.

Evan: The 1990s had the CD-ROM and the McRib sandwich. The ‘00s had Windows XP and two terrible Star Wars movies. I think the latter birthed better games: the Battlefield series, Crysis, Company of Heroes, BioShock, Dragon Age: Origins, Guild Wars, The Sims, Rome: Total War, Star Wars: KOTOR, and the best Civilization games happened then. What've you got, Erik?

Erik: Lucasarts, id, Ion Storm, Interplay, Blizzard: the iconic names that created franchises that we still discuss today. “RTS,” “FPS,” and “MMO” had no meaning before the pioneers of the '90s came along with some-thing other than sequels and rehashes: Baldur's Gate, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, MechWarrior, Unreal Tournament and every LucasArts adventure game from Sam & Max to Grim Fandango.

Evan: This is going to devolve into who can name-drop more game titles, isn't it?

Erik: Pretty much.

Evan: Cool. In that case, let’s put the best we've got on the page. What are the top three games from your decade? Mine: WoW, Counter-Strike, and Half-Life 2.

Erik: Just three? How about X-COM, Fallout, and The Secret of Monkey Island. Timeless classics that we still play today.

Evan: Is that the best that the decade that gave us the Spice Girls has got, grandpa? The innovations of the '00s will last far longer. Half-Life 2 wasn't just the basis for the way modern action games tell stories, it’s the technological foundation for the most ambitious mods we have today and the preferred canvas for machinima creators. World of Warcraft’s meteoric rise brought PC gaming into popular culture, ruined innumerable marriages, and earned its own South Park episode. Top that.

Erik:Your great games are all parts of established franchises that began in the '90s. For that matter, the original Counter-Strike mod came out in 1999, before Valve turned it into a retail product! Take away the names that began in the '90s, the '00s would've created very little of their own.

Evan: Megabyte for megabyte, I’d rather replay Half-Life 2 than its predecessor. Likewise for Diablo II, Warcraft III, Fallout 3 and other major franchises that began in the '90s but matured in the '00s. I really think that the tech of the '00s (better operating systems, fast internet, faster PCs) produced better gaming experiences. EVE Online couldn't exist in the '90s. Team Fortress 2's dozens of free content updates couldn't have streamed down our wimpy modems—the same goes for 25-man WoW raids or a heavily modded playthrough of Oblivion or Morrowind.

Erik: You've got a short memory. EverQuest allowed 72-man raids. And before Oblivion and Morrowind came Daggerfall, which was amazing and heavily modded. Doom, the father of modding, came out in '93.

Evan: I’ll play your game, Belsaas. Here's my ace: Deus Ex, our most favorite game ever, happened in 2000.

Erik: Deus Ex is a good game...but how about StarCraft? Has any other game absolutely defined its genre or rallied an entire nation behind it like a sport?



Evan: I was worried you’d play the Korea card. What can I counter that with? The 100-million-selling main-stream success of The Sims? The booming popularity of independent gaming? ...Peggle?

Erik: Peggle? Well I’ve got...you know...uh...Carmen Sandiego. Fine. Peggle wins.

Irrational have just posted a video showing the first few minutes of Bioshock Infinite. That's the first minutes of actual campaign footage, not the minutes directly after loading up the game. That trailer would be a parade of splash screens followed by someone meticulously combing through all the option menus to make sure everything was set up properly. No, this has... well, spoilers, obviously. See the trailer below.



Is this the start of a promotional campaign that will systematically run through the entire game in five minute chunks? Unlikely. And yes, in case you're wondering - the reason I'm not talking about what's in the video is because I made it as far as the opening quote before deciding to just wait for the game to come out. Was it good?

BioShock Infinite is incredible, but it isn’t perfect. After reflecting on what I loved, I took a moment to think over what aspects of the game produced a shrug after playing the first three hours on Thursday.

Infinite has been delayed to March 26 to accommodate polish and bug fixing, according to Ken Levine--time that I’m hoping is spent improving the game’s combat, which I was a little underwhelmed by.

https://twitter.com/IGLevine/status/277167941299105792

Vigors

Does a Plasmid by another name maim as sweet? Not so far. Vigors draw on a mana-equivalent called Salt in BioShock Infinite. You should receive this criticism with a grain of that: I’ve only played the first two or three hours of the game, so it’s fully possible that Infinite’s powers get significantly more interesting.

The ones I played with, though, felt sort of interchangeable. Murder of Crows unleashes a cloud of ravens to annoy and root single or multiple enemies. Bucking Bronco is a wave of seismic force that pops up an enemy, rooting and levitating them in the air for you to shoot. Possession takes control of sentry turrets or enemies (who fight on your behalf, then commit suicide after about 60 seconds). And Devil’s Kiss was an area-of-effect fireball projectile.

Part of why I felt let down, I think, is that I see Infinite’s fiction as a unique opportunity for weird, unconventional magic. The spells I slung were familiar variations on the Hypnotize, Enrage, Incinerate, Security Bullseye, Insect Swarm, and Cyclone Trap Plasmids from BioShock. Maybe more importantly, using them didn’t imbue me with the awe I remember experiencing in Rapture. I have high expectations for these powers, but kinetically and in terms of how they’re presented as particle effects, I wasn’t wowed. Strategically, too--in their un-upgraded form most powers had a secondary function to deploy them as a proximity-triggered ground trap by by holding down Mouse 2 to charge them. In the situations I faced, it always felt more natural and effective to me to just cast directly at one or more enemies rather than lay a trap.



Enemies
BioShock’s combat had a messiness to it that I liked. The madness of splicers and the disproportionate agility of Big Daddies contributed a set of enemies that were aggressive, antagonizing, and unsettling. Even when I was knocking these mutants dead, I liked that I never felt completely in control.

Infinite’s baddies in the first three hours are much more human, and fighting them didn’t make me feel that same urgency. On Medium difficulty, I didn’t feel the need to flee, backpedal, or deploy a Vigor in anything but a calm manner. I didn’t die once on this difficulty. This may be a moot complaint--things felt more comfortable on Hard for the 20 minutes I got to play it--but I left hoping to encounter more unnatural foes. The police officers and other Columbia security you fight in the first few hours were ordinary.

A fight we were shown (but didn’t get to play) seemed to have what I wanted, though. In this shootout, Booker used a section of Sky-Line to transition between tiered platforms, pursued by an enormous mechanical man leaping like the Hulk all the while.

The caveat, again: I’ve only played the game’s introduction. But during it, Infinite felt like a less systems-driven game than its grandparent game, and more one where enemies were released into the environment at pre-determined moments. One of my favorite aspects of BioShock was the way its combat operated as an mild ecosystem--Big Daddies and Little Sisters had a mechanical relationship that manifested spontaneously while intersecting with combat between other enemies. I don’t need a Columbian duplicate of this to enjoy Infinite; I’m simply hoping to see more variety in enemy behaviors when I play it again.



One final note: though damage numbers are toggleable, I couldn’t turn off the damage indicator. I'd love to go further and disable the crosshair too. I also couldn’t rebind ironsights to right-click (your Vigor button), though I’d expect that to be changed before release.

Weapon feel
Tom and I agree about this. The ragdoll of the enemies is expressive, but the guns themselves lack a kinetic punch. They’ve probably improved since BioShock 2, but my standard for weapon feedback, recoil, and animations--especially in a single-player-only game--has been raised by games like Metro 2033, Borderlands 2, and Far Cry 3. The arms that I touched fell short of these games. I couldn’t put down the game’s sniper rifle fast enough, which felt ordinary and unsupported by tactile audio. With all this considered, I’d still say I don’t have a negative impression of Infinite’s combat; just a lukewarm one.

It will also be the most ambitious thing Irrational has ever done, according to Ken Levine, BioShock Infinite's creative director.

We sent two intrepid reporters to get the lowdown on Irrational's follow-up to BioShock, this time set aboard Columbia, a floating city inspired by ideas of American exceptionalism circa 1900. Both Tom F and Evan got to sit down and play the game for several hours, and then caught up with Levine for a lengthy chat afterwards - more of which you will be able to read in the January edition of the magazine. But we couldn't resist teasing you with Levine's comments to Tom about how the team reacted to criticism of BioShock's ending - specifically, how that game failed to evolve following its twist.


Tom F: The most common complaint I hear about Bioshock is that after the Andrew Ryan moment it wasn’t as interesting. Do you agree with that?

Ken Levine: Yeah.

What did you learn from it?

KL: I would say that the ending of the game is the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done in our careers as a company. It is either going to be something incredibly wonderful or people are going to burn down our office. We are very aware of that, we want to make sure this experience was the reason you say the end was very meaningful. So I can’t tell whether people will like it or not, I can tell you it is absolutely different to anything you’ve seen in a videogame.


That's quite a promise, no?

Read Tom's initial spoiler-free impressions of the game, or Evan's lengthier analysis.

I spent about two and a half hours with BioShock: Infinite yesterday during a press event in Los Angeles. Infinite already feels like something really special, mostly on the merits of its presentation and creativity. Inside, I’ve expounded on five things I really liked.

Go read Tom’s spoiler-free preview for more thoughts on the same demo, and check out a list of things I didn’t love.

Graphical performance
I’ll get this bit of reassurance out of the way: Infinite ran perfectly. Our demo PCs were admittedly above average: an AMD FX-8120 (an octo-core CPU) and a single card in the AMD Radeon 7900 series (I didn’t have time to verify which one), alongside 16GB RAM on Windows 7. With that considered, I didn’t experience any hiccups, frame rate dips, no texture pop-in, or crashes.

Digging into the settings menu, here’s what was adjustable:

Anti-aliasing
Texture detail
Dynamic shadows
Post-processing quality
Light shafts
Ambient occlusion
Object detail
V-sync
FOV (a slider, with no listed value)
UI margins
Toggleable highlighting of “searchable” or “important” objects
 
An Irrational developer told me that Infinite is running on DirectX 10, but that it does take advantage of some DX11 features.

Themes
With its fiction, Infinite lays bare the worst of American history: racism, sexism, class warfare, secessionism, and the dangers of nationalism. But masterfully, it expresses these concepts without being heavy-handed. Walking Columbia, citizens’ deeply-entrenched racism is immediately evident through the comments they’ll make as you pass, but many of these are innocuous and pleasantly normal, too: I saw kids playing "finger guns" across a stairway, muttering kid-made shooting noises as they did. I also stumbled into the hidden home of abolitionists--in their living room sat a printing press for publishing posters that encouraged racial equality. What I played of Infinite avoided caricature or any kind of elbow-in-the-ribs parody, which I appreciated.

Beyond that, the game’s tableau of intellectually-challenging themes pervade its presentation. Even in the first hour, Infinite felt like it had struck a conversation with me about American history and different ideologies, an experience that still feels preciously unique to the franchise.


The world
BioShock’s willingness to throw handcrafted assets at you is unparalleled. Irrational devotes an inordinate amount of effort to creating elegant 2D posters, detailed 3D models for ordinary objects and authentic music (Mozart’s Rex Tremendae Requiem appears at one point to great effect). The time they invest in creating this content creates guilt when you don’t stop to look at it, so much of it is treated as disposable ephemera, used only for a single key scene or key moment.

I stopped for a half-minute to examine the realistic glean of an oil painting portrait, whose brushstrokes were cast in all different directions--the paint itself seemed to have depth or tessellation on its surface. At least half a dozen Kinetoscope machines scattered across Columbia offered brief, silent propaganda films (with titles like "The Word of the Prophet," "Father Comstock's Gift of Prophecy," and Solving The Irish Problem"). Health-restoring edibles seemed uncountable: hot dogs, bananas, boxed corn flakes, oranges, soda, coffee, and various alcohols.

To avoid spoiling anything, I won’t touch on specific areas of the world too much, but I particularly liked the way an early segment introduces weapons and Vigors (more on them in What I Don’t Love)--it’s effortless and entertaining. You stumble into an idyllic, xenophobic carnival in Columbia, and can step (right) up to fire a shotgun or carbine against laterally-moving cardboard cutouts of the Vox Populi. The "Cast out the Devil" game in this area takes place in a makeshift living room, where you have to aim the Bucking Bronco Vigor (a seismic wave that pops enemies up) at a devil while avoiding a cardboard facsimile of a woman holding a baby. Hilarious. Tiered prizes are awarded for your performance in all these micro-games.

Weapon appearance is also great: Booker’s pistol is a Mauser’s cousin of a magazine-fed handgun cast in scuffed, textured steel.


Freedom

Remember that home of pro-equality abolitionists I mentioned? During this section, Columbia’s police are chasing you as you flee through the city. You enter the house during a small lull in the pursuit, but as you do you hear the 1912 fuzz rapping at the front door, They want in. The house’s owners reassure you--they’re not going to give you up.

In my second playthrough of this moment, I did the dumbest thing I could: I tried shooting one of the moral, innocent civilians whose home I’d intruded on. You’re not at all prompted to do this, and your weapon actually lowers if you look at them, but I wanted to see how Infinite would respond. When I did, the character died and the police stormed in, sparking a firefight right in the living room. This isn’t a sure event: when I initially played it, I didn’t shoot them and snuck out a rear exit to confront those police in the street. I tested a similar scenario during a visit to a mansion belonging to the Order of the Raven--civilians on the bottom floor will fight you if you shoot one of them, but will leave you alone completely if you don’t. These incidental, small discoveries are a great sign to me; it’s encouraging that Infinite reacts when I do something dumb and impulsive.


Executions
After about 40 minutes in, Booker has a magnetic pinwheel-grappling hook attached attached to his left hand, a device used to slide on Columbia’s Sky Lines--airborne transit rails that connect the city. This tool is also your constant melee weapon, and you see it used to deal executions against basic enemies. They’re brutal. The curved, smooth metal fins of the weapon might turn a police officer’s head clean. One animation roughly simulates what it’d be like to kill a man with a motorized egg-whisk through his larynx. I’m not crazy that you’re invulnerable during these executions, though.


Tune in tomorrow for a pile of things I didn’t enjoy about BioShock Infinite, and look forward to a larger preview of the game in both print editions PC Gamer.

I’ll get this bit of reassurance out of the way: Infinite runs perfectly. Our demo PCs were admittedly above average: an AMD FX-8120 (an octo-core CPU) and a single card in the AMD Radeon 7900 series (I didn't have time to verify which one), alongside 16GB RAM on Windows 7. With that considered, I didn't experience any hiccups, frame rate dips, no texture pop-in, or crashes.

Digging into the settings menu, here’s what was adjustable...

Anti-aliasing
Texture detail
Dynamic shadows
Post-processing quality
Light shafts
Ambient occlusion
Object detail
V-sync
FOV (a slider, with no listed value)
UI margins
Toggleable highlighting of “searchable” or “important” objects

An Irrational developer told me that Infinite is running on DirectX 10, but that it does take advantage of some DX11 features.

Reassuring stuff - if only every dev gave the PC as much love.

I've just played the first five hours of BioShock Infinite, and I've come away with the same dazed feeling I got after I first played Half-Life 2. It's a sensory overload: a relentless series of staggering sights, astonishing events, and more story and detail and mysteries than I could possibly absorb.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but not this.

I'll be writing up my full impressions, and my interview with creative director Ken Levine, for the next issue of PC Gamer UK. Evan's also been playing it, and will bring you a longer and slightly more spoilery exploration of the things he liked most about the demo later today. For now, let me give you an overview of the main stuff I wanted to know before I played.



What do you actually do?

It's very, very story driven. Remember washing up at a lighthouse and discovering Rapture for yourself in BioShock 1? BioShock Infinite's equivalent of that lasts an hour. When the fighting finally does break out, it's frantic and chaotic and recognisably BioShock. But then you're straight back to being led through extraordinary new places by the story. There's time to explore, and masses to see, but it never settled into a formula in the time I played: you're always being put in completely new situations.



Does it feel like a BioShock game?

At first, yes: you're quietly exploring a strange new place and finding clues to the story of what happened here in evidence scattered around, from graffitti to audio diaries. But then you find people. Not enemies, just people. At some point you start to encounter more hostiles, but it never switches entirely to you vs the world: each new area of the floating city starts out with civilians neutral to you.

When you find the girl you're here for, Elizabeth, she changes the mood even further from BioShock's. She's with you at all times, as far as I played, and she's both talkative and central to the plot.



What's the combat like?

Very much like BioShock: gun in one hand, spell in the other. The big difference is the spaces you do it in: fighting in a city of floating buildings means a lot of big, open areas with rooftops, balconies and drifting blimps at different heights. Sky rails snake through these spaces, twisting like rollercoaster tracks, and you can leap on and off these any time: they're magnetised, so your skyhook thingy can pull you up to them from quite far away. Racing around these, launching yourself off to new vantage points or directly onto enemies, gives combat a much more acrobatic and fast-changing feel.

The spells - Vigors - are very much like BioShock 2's: turn people to your side, set them on fire, fling them into the air, cover them in crows (previously bees). They're all good. The guns are less exciting: marginally more satisfying than BioShock's, but still not particularly fun to use by themselves.



What's the best thing about it?

Definitely the place. A city floating in the clouds is a cool thing, and we already knew that, but I wasn't at all prepared for how striking and fresh each new bit of it would be. Temples awash with holy water, gold light and gospel music. City streets fogged with cloud, kids playing and townsfolk chatting, all just silhouettes in the water vapour. Dark mansions, banquet halls of rotting food, crows pecking at everything.

All of it's packed with clues and traces of the story, and the story is bizarre, complicated and fascinating. Can't wait to explore more of it.

It's out March 26th. My full preview will be in our issue out in the UK on January 17th.

BioShock Infinite's turbulent journey toward its February 26 release has incurred staff departures and release delays as Irrational ensures the completeness of Columbia's sweeping set pieces. But one thing Columbia won't include is now very clear: taking to Twitter last weekend (via Kotaku), Irrational co-founder Ken Levine triple-killed any possibility of multiplayer modes accompanying BioShock: Infinite's story.

RT @tnaygc: @iglevine what do you think about Infinite's Multi? will it damage the story?---No MP in Infinite.— Ken Levine (@IGLevine) November 26, 2012

RT @wolverine11111: @iglevine Does that mean nope it won't or nope you can't clear that issue up?--No multi.— Ken Levine (@IGLevine) November 25, 2012

RT @tha_don_101: @iglevine can you clear up whether or not Bioshock Infinite will have multiplayer modes?---Nope.— Ken Levine (@IGLevine) November 25, 2012

Levine previously toyed with including multiplayer in Infinite as far back as 2010, stating any sort of multiplayer modes would need just as much draw as the single-player's experimental elements. "It's not like people won't buy the game if it doesn't have a world-changing multiplayer element," he said. "Unless you're Call of Duty, unless you're Halo, unless you've got something new to say like Left 4 Dead, people are not going to care, so why do it?"

In celebration of its gaming client setting forth from beta, GameFly asks everyone if they would kindly enjoy a free download of 2K's atmospheric FPS. Because, really, when was the last time you issued a swarm of angry bees from your hands into a sealogged half-mutant inside the leaking bulkheads of a dystopian underwater city?

You'll need a (free) GameFly account, and you'll have to nab the game from the store's standard checkout process—don't sweat the credit card requirement; you won't get charged a single cent. You'll also need the GameFly client, so factor that into your consideration to take the plunge into the briny depths.

Head over to BioShock's digital shelf space on GameFly if you're keen on giving the Great Chain a yank once more.

This article first appeared in issue 241 of PC Gamer UK.

I first played Action Forms’ icebound horror shooter for a review in another magazine – and I can’t say I got it right. Nothing I said was exactly wrong, either, checking off the repetitious rooms of glum-looking bulkheads, the imprecise melee combat and eventual descent into gormless, clumsy gunfire. And yet, three years later, I still find myself thinking about this game and occasionally shivering. For all the monotony of its spaces, for all the trite jump scares, its atmosphere is deeply, enduringly freakish and, above all else, cold.

“BioShock on Ice” is the easy-reach slogan and, budget and execution aside, it’s not such a bad fit. Both games have a protagonist of unknown purpose rediscover an isolated civilisation, left to stew in its madness for decades. BioShock’s is Rapture, the city under the sea, where grand ideals have gone horribly awry; Cryostasis takes place on a Russian ship, the North Wind, paralysed by the vanity of its captain, the rancour of his subordinates and no small amount of ice. Twenty years have passed and its crew have starved and frozen or worse, and the player finds himself stumbling through the frigid bowels of this derelict vessel, slowly piecing together the ship’s fateful last days.

The revelation Cryostasis reaches may be garbled, but the initial mystery is just as effective as BioShock’s. And though the frozen cabins and engine rooms have none of Rapture’s grandeur, they are charged with a similar elemental threat. The ocean is slowly drowning and reclaiming BioShock’s shattered submarine city, but here on the North Wind the ice has already done its work – and there is something stirringly awesome and implacably malevolent about the way that natural force has consumed the vessel.



The task here isn’t just survival, but resurrection: finding the means to get parts of the ship whirring back into life. As they do so, the fronds of ice that emboss every surface recede and streak into liquid. Icicles drop from their perches to shatter on the floor. Doors loosen and mechanisms thaw out, enabling your passage from one sequence of claustrophobic rooms to the next.

Heat is health here, and your life depends on huddling beside anything that may momentarily raise your temperature – even, rather fancifully, a lightbulb. But the dial measuring your body heat soon drops, making prolonged sorties between heat sources tense. While there are only a few opportunities to freeze to death by misadventure, it’s soon apparent that there are other things on board – things that once were the ship’s crew. Now they are white-eyed horrors, beards matted with frost, which lurch from the shadows at any given opportunity, hissing and wailing. You can’t help but panic – the sludgy melee system recreates the sort of exhausted, ineffectual combat you might expect from someone padded out like a seal-skin Michelin Man.

Cryostasis deploys these shocks with gruelling regularity, but not without skill. One exhausting sequence sees you navigate a flooded engine room in a dinghy, nervously flitting its single spotlight around the dark, silent interior. The inevitable happens, but is no less horrid for it: a sudden eruption rocks the boat as a dead man claws his way in, unseeing eyes and face split wide open like an angler fish.



One of the game’s oddest gimmicks is that you are occasionally required to travel back in time, using the bodies of dead sailors to relive their last moments, cast in the grainy saturation of old film stock. If you can avert their death, you can alter the ship in the present, and progress. It’s only an option at prescribed moments, and the means of survival are often clumsily handled, but there’s a potent dramatic irony in knowing the man’s fate and then working to avoid it.

Sudden, fleeting visions of the past also allow the designers to deploy jump-scares wherever they please, resulting in a constant sense of vulnerability. Additionally, it’s the means of delivering backstory: you get to watch crewmen desperately reinforce a bulkhead as the water pours in, or eavesdrop on the arguments between the ship’s commanding officers.

It’s effective writing, even if the voice-acting is halting and hokey. On the prow of the ship, the captain dismisses the advice of his subordinate – an ambitious young officer who wants the captaincy for himself. As the officer lays out his case for avoiding an ice floe, the Captain folds the data printout he’s been given into an origami boat before pressing it into the younger man’s hand, brusquely suggesting that this may be a more fitting command for the officer’s skills.



Interspersed with the plight of the ship is another story, revealed through illustrated papers the player occasionally discovers. It’s a retelling of Maxim Gorky’s fairytale The Flaming Heart of Danko – a parable of demented leadership that echoes the crew’s own failing trust in their captain, and his increasingly reckless attempts to recover it.

The appearance of these pieces of paper isn’t given any explanation, beyond their obvious symbolism, and it’s far from the only thing to lack satisfying resolution. How the player is able to straddle time remains a mystery, and there’s no attempt to suggest how the dead crew can come back to life or why they are so intent on your demise. The later enemies – hulking sentries with shoulder-mounted spot-lights and tommy-guns apparently welded to their forearms – clearly have no place in this story, and although the North Wind’s fate is neatly concluded, much of the game remains bafflingly incongruous.

Though it ultimately unravels, Cryostasis offers a powerful, rare kind of horror, eschewing hysterical demonic imagery in favour of a more earthy, unsettling folkloric parable. Men are cursed by their own hubris, and annihilated by the merciless, malevolent ice. Playing it now, the game’s chill still cuts through hot water bottles, fingerless mittens and thermal underwear. While the rest of the game crumbles and falls away like an ice sheet, its frozen centre remains perfectly preserved.