T w e n t y S i d e d
Wherein uncle Cuftbert fights big daddies to free little sisters in order give big brother the mother of all knuckle sandwiches.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
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Okay, I need to know: if Mumbles doesn’t mumble, why IS she called Mumbles?
It is the name given to her by the tribe’s shaman.
Whenever she says “and I’m Mumbles” I keep wanting someone to say “what? say that again?”
Because I’m just that cheesy.
Because that’s what the scout calls the pyro in TF2.
It always warms my heart when a game offers you very powerful options early on. In the first couple levels, you have access to some of the best tonics and plasmids in the game, and later on the scope just broadens to feature alternative playstyles like Wrench Ninja, Mister Moneybags, Marksman with Bees, etc. In fact, the only really dominant thing that you DON’T get in the Medical Pavilion is Damage Research.
Bioshock 2 takes a much more conventional approach. Pretty much anything you buy will start weak and be upgraded to very strong.
Considering the fact that you start Bioshock 2 with a huge drill that can be upgraded from “kills everything” to “kills everything in a room faster than any other weapon you have,” I’d say you start out that game powerful enough.
Indeed, Electro-bolt + Drill eats enemies alive, even the big sisters on the higher difficulty settings.
Although the best benefits from Little Sisters actually comes from saving them, but only eventually.
Killing them is more resources now.
Not really that “eventually”, either. It seemed to be about every 3 little sisters I’d get a massive cache of 200+ ADAM, several first aid kits/EVE hypos (can I just call them health/mana potions?), and a ton of ammo
Reginald Cuftbert, you disappoint.
I guess he was just full. There is plenty of liquor and cake lying around and eating a whole child on top of that… think what that would do to his waistline.
That, and once you add in the material rewards for not eating them, the “merciful” path is more beneficial.
That’s always been the big problem with evil paths for me. I can’t really get into being evil for the sake of it, it has to be something that helps me more than doing the good thing would. Why would I kill a trader and rob his store, when I can use him as a replenishing source of equipment? Plus, if I’m inclined to murder a whole bunch of people and loot their stuff, the bad guys tend to have better stuff and will obligingly attack me first, giving me plausible deniability and good karma for killing them “in self defence”.
People do evil because they think what they’re doing is actually good or because it profits them. Doing it for the lulz just isn’t an interesting motivation, and the good path is usually more exciting, anyway.
I generally have the same feeling when playing most games.
However, certain games have such annoying “good” options/dialogue/etc., that I find myself being “bad” out of contrariness rather than any meaningful motivation.
Mass Effect was a bit like this, where I chose Renegade because I was fed up with people whining at me when I tried to play Paragon.
Ah, but you profit by the pleasant feelings caused by rebelling against the stupidity, don’t you?
I’ve had this in recent playthroughs of Jade Empire. There’s one sidequest where you’re trying to clear the name of someone accused of being a slaver. At one point you need to infiltrate the slave ring, and you can do it with a flat bribe(2000 silver), Charm and Intuition options(1000 or 500 each, not sure which is which), or just use Intimidate for free, but you get Closed Fist points. This is one point where the Open Palm/Closed Fist system does what it’s supposed to and contrast methods rather than morality, though.
Huh, after Reginald’s experiences in Little Lamplight, I did not expect him to not rip a little child’s head of for not particular reason.
I’m also surprised that you guys didn’t comment on the log that basically screamed “Hey, you and Andrew Ryan are family!”
About the Big Daddies. I killed the first couple of them, but then a saw a respawned Big Daddy walking up to one of those sister vents, knocking on it and getting frustrated that no little girl came out of it.
For some reason that frustrated growl got to me, I want “awww’ and didn’t kill any of them.
Reginald already knows that they’re invincible, because they’re definitely younger than 16. No use wasting time to check.
Yeah, I actually think the Big Daddies were at least as sympathetic as the Little Sisters. I mean, Little Sisters are sinister and creepy, and then they turn into Uncanny Valley Adorable Little Girls. But Big Daddies just have this quiet sadness to them, and they have a fairly noble purpose–more noble than Reginald’s, at any rate–and they’re slow and powerful and then you run up and murder them. And nobody ever points out to you that maybe it’s just as bad to murder the Big Daddies as it is to murder the Little Sisters.
A bit late for the party as I was out of town but I’ll add.
That… is an excellent point! It might have been some of the popculture (with the archetype of something huge, hulking and silent protecting someone small and vulnerable) I’ve been exposed to but I find the daddy’s strangely appealing. Despite the fact that little sisters see the angels and all that they’re still a bit on the freaky side, big daddies don’t really do anything that’s outright freaky (gory-yes, freaky-no) and there is a lot of the “aww, he’s helping her go up that tunnel” animations about them. The combination of a huge, not-exactly-smart creature with a small creature gives a lot of people the “awwww” moment ;)
Once you’ve rescued the little sisters and turned them back into humans, can you murder them for “The Lols”, or do take two think killing children without creepy eyes will cause outrage?
I was wondering this too. After they go back to their human form can you kill them? I mean they were immortal before somehow, but not any more right?
In Bioshock, Little Sisters remain invincible even when rescued. Killing them when they were about to drop off a gift for you could create some seriously nasty bugs, I’d imagine.
In Bioshock 2, the strategy for maximum XP is to rescue a Little Sister, follow her around for a little while, and then harvest her. Now THAT’s evil.
You know, Bioshock is censored in Germany. Many wounds aren’t visible, you can’t use Telekinese on corpses, etc., but that’s not so important. What I found interesting is the censorship of Doctor Tenenbaum’s character: In the international version, she is german. As a child, she was captured by russians. She describes the russian experiments and how she interfered because the scientist was doing it wrong.
In the german version, however, she is russian, captured by germans. You know why? Because the USK, the f***ed up morons that censor stuff here in Germany, think that germans should never ever think that someone else than a german could be a villian. Russia won WWII, so we are not allowed to say that they have tried inhuman experiments, not even in a videogame.
I will stop here, before I’m getting too angry at those bloody idiots at the USK. The age rating and censorship is just so broken here.
PS: Just started Free Radical. It’s awesome. I love your style of writing, Shamous.
This is strange. In the version I played she was jewish. She was captured by the Nazis and helped them experiment on other jewish prisoners. I dont think ive even seen a single russian character mentioned anywhere in Bioshock (the family with the Little Sister daughter is czech or polish). Either there are several different versions of Bioshock or you misenterpreted something.
Oh, maybe I misremember something. Didn’t play for ages. But there was something with her nationality that was changed in the german version, I am quite sure about that, I read an article… it was on wikipedia, too… ah damn, my memory is too bad. (Maybe it has something to do with multilanguage versions? I’ve got a normal one – I can turn it on english when I install it, but then I still have everything censored.)
Well, even if I am wrong about Tenenbaum, censorship sucks.
You know what I hate? Not those cosmetic censorship. That’s bad, but there are things far worse. For example, you can’t pick up corpses with telekinesis.
Also, for example, the woman Steinmann is chopping up when you meet him first? She’s already dead in the german version. You cannot see wounds on enemies. They don’t spill as much blood. And that first Big Daddy you see, that rams his drill into the splicer and then pushes him through the window? Looks just stupid without blood.
German censorship in general is quite… no, I won’t swear. For example, that scene in Quake 4 where (SPOILER WARNING.) change you into one of them? Completely cut from the german game.
Oh, and the age ratings are hilarious sometimes! Fable? For everyone over 12. You can chop someones head off and while a little fountain of blood comes out of his body, you can kick the head around. I always get the feeling someone shoved some money into the pants of the censor-guy (just like Josh would shove grenades and mines into someones pants) and said “12, okay?”.
I thought she was German and had been in a German camp (in the non-German version apparently).
Edit: ninja’d. What Someone said; that’s how I read it as well.
wait… Isn’t she put in a german concentration because she’s jewish but gets to stay alive because she lectures a Mengele stand in on scientific rigour? I’m pretty sure this is the case because she mentions that she learned about genetics from the nazi’s attempts to make people blonde.
Making her russian makes no sense though, I mean what russian is named Tenenbaum?
You’d be surprised.
Anyway, I have checked the wiki and she doesnt mention her nationality in any of her audiologs. Maybe the game is being coy about it or maybe she reveals it to you in one of the “live” monologues. The wiki says her place of birth is Germany, but it also mentions that she was indifferent to Holocaust. I guess she is a german jew.
The version I played she was Romanian and helped George Washington Carver experiment on the aliens from Area 51.
Must be an international thing.
No harvesting? Ladies and gentlemen, Spoiler Warning just Jumped The Shark. I knew it would never be as good without Randy, but you have got to have standards! I guess all the fame and money finally made them become complacent and forget the good old days, the true spirit of Spoiler Warning.
Seriously though, you should harvest one of the little sisters, just to show the evil ending.
Anyway, not much to say about this episode, just a little tip: you can photograph the little sisters to unlock bonus Adam. Of cource you dont really care for Adam, but you can show off more plasmids to the viewers.
The nice part about the super black-and-white morality system: save right before the end. Show the good ending. Now show the evil ending :)
“Posted by Shamus.” Does that mean your eye infection has cleared up?
Not much to say about the episode, except that every time I see Reginald shoot a camera with a shotgun, I always imagine “hack was successful” popping up.
I couldn’t bring myself to hurt the Little Sisters the first time around either, but I never really thought about how the Big Daddies are innocent victims too. I guess because they’re so alien and menacing.
On my second playthrough (which was actually kind of a boring grind, I found), I decided to harvest the first two Little Sisters and get the alternate ending. I was really annoyed later in the game to find they were all afraid of me and calling me the man who hurts them. It also made no sense that Tenenbaum still had them helping me in the end game after that. The choice really could have made a bigger difference to the game than it did.
Also, I really do hate to be this person, but goddamn these videos are hard to watch. It’s not a speed run! Slow down and please stop spastically hopping around the level and twitching the camera back and forth.
I’d guess a large part of that difference is in the fact that Big Daddies act all gruff and hostile towards you, like the way they shove you away if you get too close to their Little Sister, and if you so much as flick a pebble at their armor they become unstoppable insatiable bloodlusted murdering machines. It’s… hard to sympathize with them after that.
During my first (only) playthrough of Bioshock 1, it took me quite a while to figure out the backstory behind the Daddies; and by then, they were already firmly entrenched on my ‘kill these jackholes on sight’ list.
It’s an FPS. With horror elements. That is a perfectly reasonable way of searching the rooms. The hopping is normal defenses. I wouldn’t have noticed either except people keep complaining about it, and even then it doesn’t bother me.
I must be unusual then, because I’m pretty sure I don’t play that way in any FPS ever. It’s also really different when you’re not in the driver’s seat, as someone notes below. Oh well, guess I’ll have to adopt a listening only policy.
I think (given all the bunnyhopping in the Fallout season) Josh is a Quake player. Once you’ve learned how to do that, you can’t not do it.
Really? I always thought Morrowind (I think Daggerfall worked the same but few people I talked to actually played it) was responsible for the bunnyhopping plague as it increased your acrobatics, which let you get to many places and/or gave you shortcuts around some of the game’s intended paths (jumping between Vivec cantons anyone?) and was generally way faster than running.
Well the bunny hopping I don’t do, but only because online it’s a bad move. Most AIs IME have had trouble with it, though. The look style where you move quickly, then focus, then spin? I use that all the time. Probably because my first FPS was Halo and the Flood loves flanking you, as do online players. But it’s a good style, makes it hard to be surprised. Just takes some getting used to and a good reaction time.
Considering how often Josh gets taken by surprise, I’d say he needs more practice. :p
I do it online sometimes to throw off snipers in TF2.
I’d totally buy DLC that included Morgan Freeman, as a narrator, commenter, or otherwise.
i mean, the Unreal Tourney announcer would be so awesome if it was voiced by Morgan Freeman.
M-m-m-MONSTER KILL!
Unstopable!
Man, it’s kinda frustrating seeing you ignore all those enrage opportunities. When I played the game, I only killed about half the enemies myself, the rest would either kill each other, be killed by hacked machines or die trying to fight a big daddy.
BTW if a big daddy is in the area, enrage tends to make the splicers throw themselves at the Big Daddy. So sometimes, I would follow the Big Daddy and enrage any random splicers he came across. Not only did this clear the area on the Big Daddy’s path, it also injured him fairly well and was also fun to watch.
I have to ask now: Why do you guys like to watch spoiler warning? I find it incredibly boring. Star On Chest and Lulzy were interesting because of witty writing, but Spoiler Warning has to completely stand on its own, and since the games that get picked are all but incredibly monotonous and dull, this is kinda hard.
Also, I get seasick watching Josh. I’m sure I play shooters at least as frantically, but when you control the mouse, it’s totally different.
We like to watch because its nice to know someone else had to suffer through the same things we did. Plus, they point out some very good flaws most others miss, and they play through games most of us have already played, so we can connect to it better.
Well thats why I enjoy them at least.
I don’t really watch so much as listen.
The images just provide context for the discussion.
For me it’s largely the same thing as with the Mystery Science Theater 3000.
I watch because they pick good games and discuss those games in great detail, going over flaws and positives in ways I hadn’t thought of myself beforehand.
Like the camera, I never found anything odd about it (probably cause I’d just finished Dead Rising before I played this when it was released), but Rutskarn brought up some good points about how much it doesn’t make sense in context or as a gameplay mechanic.
I watch it because I like the intelligent commentary, the jokes, Josh’s zany in-game behavior, and the Rutskarn puns. I must admit, though, that I’m not enjoying this season as much as the Fallout 3 playthrough. It seems like there was a lot more for the crew to comment on in Fallout 3 and the pacing of the game allowed the viewer to absorb both the gameplay and commentary without losing track of one or the other very often. Frankly, by episode 3 I feel like everyone has already said their piece about the game and they seem unwilling to touch on how well/poorly the game relates to that which it purports to satirize.
I dunno though. Maybe I just like it better when they out and out bash a game to smithereens.
Those drill puns were screwed up.
At least is hasn’t pierced the same pun well as the fish puns of yore.
Actually, guys, the bonus plasmid DLC is included in the 1.1 patch for free, along with the “disable vita chambers” option. Not sure about the consoles but I think it’s free there too.
It is free for consoles as well.
The sight of a 1-ADAM plasmid in the menu gives a bad impression. It’s really just a curiosity, as the “free” items have marginal utility but a high hilarity factor. (As Mumbles so aptly pointed out: SONIIIC BOOOOOOOOOM!)
I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard at a spoiler warning until today.
And I quote: Mumbles: “It’s important to note, I hate children with everything… I wish I was barren”.
Mumbles, I think I love you.
Despite similar feelings towards children, I also went for the “good” (but still big daddy murdering) option.
Given that the choice is pretty much binary (although you mention a tonal difference if you don’t kill them all), why didn’t they just fix it after that first choice? Choose to save, and all the rest you save, or choose kill and kill them all.
And finally, I much prefer the tonics and upgrades to the active plasmids. Most of the active ones have little use (or very specific use). I think I mostly just used electroshock and guns.
Not to go all creepy, but yeah. Hate kids. Man.
I´m wondering if this “I hate children!” trend is related to the Lil´ Lamplight incident. Maybe Bethesda´s evil plot to conquer the world is beginning to work.
Good to know the human race is doomed. We’ll leave a note under the mattress for the aliens.
Every day of my life I wish I could make a plasmid out of my perfectly healthy reproductive system and sell it to people.
EDIT: But, then I remember there’s still going to be children in that scenario.
This organisation might interest you:
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/
I keep thinking they should have WW2 style posters, “Your country needs YOU! To use birth control!” or “A condom in time, save nine (months of pregnancy)”.
Oh MAN, this is great. I need to pull this website out the next time someone tries to tell me the world population is going down.
You may also want to consider this one:
http://www.vhemt.org/
While I don’t think the site can be treated with all seriousness they make some good points, and have some fun pics/comics about making children “for the hell of it”.
I’m sorry that you hate children so much. Maybe someone should figure out a way to age people twenty years just after birth. Or would that solve your problem? Why do you hate children, anyway?
At my age, I’m surrounded by people who are having babies or already have a two year old. My once indifference towards them turned into annoyance.
Ooh, in that case your annoyance is justified. I once had to distract four toddlers for three days and it was awful. Never mind!
I’m glad there weren’t any witnesses around, but I think I did one of those snorting laughs when I heard this. (“SNRRPFFHAHAHAAA…!”)
Also, this episode Mumbles shined. She’s been a little quiet the previous episodes, and now she’s finally settling in, saying at least as many stupid/fun/awesome things as the guys. Huzzah!
I’d like to elaborate on Rustkarn’s (I think) analogy about the little sisters. It’s more like the creepy guy will give you 70 bucks for saving the little sister now, then another 80 bucks later. Saving little sister’s causes them to leave you small gifts, and these gifts contain bonus adam in addition to other trinkets. The adam in these gifts is quite a lot, so you actually end up getting more adam for rescuing little sisters then if you harvest them. So there really is no justification for harvesting other than instant gratification. Saving the Little Sisters is not a hard choice, it’s the logical one. I find it much harder to think of any reason not to save them.
EDIT: Which I see that you commented on. I knew I should have watched the whole video before commenting, but I this part of the game annoyed me so much I couldn’t resist commenting on it right away/
The whole “moral choice” system seems especially hollow after Atlas’s adamant insistence that you MUST harvest the Little Sisters in order to survive. Then the player doesn’t harvest them and does fine. The game essentially tries to set up a life-boat scenario on dry land! It seems to me that the only way the moral choice system is at all interesting is the first time you play the game and only because you don’t really know what’s going to happen yet. And if it’s true that harvesting just one Little Sister gives you the Bad ending, then that means the game is wagging its finger at you because you believed it.
You actually do get more Adam from harvesting (see below post) but it’s not that big a deal. Again, this is something the sequel improved upon, by making rescues carry a time penalty of having to protect the Little Sister.
Sorry, I just got to ask.
How’s it kraken?
Exquiditely, I presume.
As for the moral choice stuff: it’s true, they basically castrated all choice and consequence by not only clearly marking one GOOD and one EVIL, but also by providing better rewards for the GOOD option. You do get slightly less ADAM if you go the GOOD route, but you also get exclusive tonics etc. to improve your character, which are often very powerful, and you get the ending that doesn’t make you out to be a total asshole. Frankly, all you do lose out on is a few ADAM you can spend on redundant powers (there’s no prerequisites for the improved powers, i.e. don’t need Electro Bolt 2 to get 3), and it amounts to about one health or EVE upgrade by the end of the game, which is so insignificant at that point that the extra GOOD powers are far more useful.
Of course, all games with choice and consequence run into the issue of rewarding the player. You can try to give different rewards, but if you give a vastly inferior reward for one path over another, then it gets players to make decisions based on meta-game knowledge rather than any moral impulses. The best thing to do would have been to either give equal rewards with different story consequences, or to present the choice as one which is by nature GOOD or EVIL, and then give GOOD or EVIL (but equal) rewards based on that. Think Dark Side vs. Light Side powers in KotOR – both are effective and more or less have the same effects, but they’re aesthetically different and validate choices the player makes, even if you discount the different story paths the game has. I dunno, maybe you could get a healing power that would recharge your health from water if you’re good, whereas if you’re evil it comes from corpses… or say, stealth with non-lethal takedowns versus stealth with lethal and bloody attacks. Note that I would probably prefer story consequences to wholly aesthetic ones (maybe a relatively inconsequential side character lives or dies based on your actions), but both are valid approaches.
I guess there’s always the issue of how long can you put off the consequences of an action before it’s meaningless, too. In the case of BioShock, the GOOD rewards are postponed, at best, a half an hour compared to the EVIL ones. If the immediate benefit really boiled down to something, it’d make going the EVIL route at least a bit more tempting (i.e. I know there’s a hard boss fight coming, do I become an asshole and take the crazy-good power, or tough it out but take the
moral high road?), but as it stands, there’s just nothing at all. While waiting for the endgame would be way too much, you can’t tell me that I will be severely gimped for my choice and then not follow through. That just makes me feel like a sucker if I did take the high-reward, low-moral direction.
I played through the entire game about three times, one of those times just to see if being a jerk had any impact. There was almost none whatsoever except for the ending, and a few modified dialogue lines here and there. The direction of the story didn’t change. My allies and enemies didn’t change, they just thought I was a bit of a dick for killing children. My ability as a character in the game world did not change. There wasn’t even an emotional consequence to the choice I made, because immediately after I made it, I realised that nobody in the game cared. Deus Ex showed that you could make emotionally-significant but largely inconsequential choices, and those choices are still compelling today even in a largely linear game. BioShock doesn’t even try to make me emotionally involved. Rather than presenting me with a complex problem and no easy answer, it presents me with a generic GOOD vs. EVIL decision, and even goes as far as to tell me which is the right one to make. This is not good game design, and I’m utterly confused at how little people have learned in the 15 years since System Shock 2 was released.
Reading through these comments much later (and hugely enjoying Bioshock Spoiler Warning now I’ve played the game). I entirely agree with the comments about good and evil being poorly implemented.
I was wondering if it would have worked better to have the moral choice being merely “do you try to attack the Big Daddies at all”? I.e. the ‘good’ path is to let the Big Daddies and Little Sisters go about their business… the ‘evil’ path is to go the trouble of killing the Big Daddy and then harvest the Sister. That’d fit in with attacking a peaceful creature unprovoked (i.e. it’s an evil action, not a morally-neutral one as it is in the game as it is).
This ep reminded of a discussion ya had in the last one…or first one…regarding the repeated bad guy dialog or skillfull lack thereof. While I hafta agree for the most part, there IS one bit of dialog that was repeated ad nauseum throughout the entire game and that was the male spider slicer – or ‘Jesus Freak’ as I called him – and that damn hymm he would stop singing.
Jesus love you this you know, cause the bible tells ya so? Well my wrench loves you more. GIVE IT A KISS!
I always turn off the Vita-Chambers when I play, because of how utterly ridiculous it is that it restores your health & your EVE, but not your enemies’ health (though I do understand that you need to have them on for the LP).
Also, here is Andrew Ryan’s Patented Effortless Game-Breaking Big Daddy Arse-Kicking Method: get the Security Bullseye Plasmid in Neptune’s Bounty, then either wait until he walks under a camera, or set off an alarm yourself (at a camera, or hack a nearby machine and deliberately hit an alarm tile), then hit the Big Daddy with Security Bullseye; back around a corner and wait for the bots to get him: 60 seconds later, no more Mr Bubbles.
As well, you guys need to make up new rules for the drinking game.
I’ve already suggested taking a shot everytime a scary moment happens that isn’t so scary because everybody’s talking and Josh knew it was coming so he was prepared to whack them before they even attacked.
The only problem with this is that there are at least 5-8 per video, so it’s maybe a little too effective at getting people wasted.
Just to clear this up:
If you rescue a little sister, you get 80 adam. If you harvest one, you get 160. Every 3 little sisters that you rescue gives you a teddy bear gift with 200 adam. So 3×180 = 540, vs 3 x 80 + 200 = 440, or about 100 adam less per 3 sisters rescued.
When you rescue them, you get additional goodies though, like $$, speciality ammo and film rolls, as well as special tonics, so in the end it’s better to rescue them, and perhaps only harvest the first 2 or 3 when adam is more scarce.
Also, I think the camera research thing, while cheesey, is more interesting than SS2’s research. In SS2 all you did was pick up unknown body parts, and then you had to run around the ship getting elements from labs to research them. Frequently they put the elements you needed in annoying places, and in one case you didn’t get a required element until very late in the game to research one body part. One you had the body part, the research would just tick away by itself in the background, and eventually it’d complete and you’d get a bonus – pretty arbitrary and also not really how ‘research’ happens in real life at all. You also needed a research skill of a certain level to be able to research more powerful things, which was essentially a cybermodule sink.
Forcing you to take photos is a bit more interactive, especially because you get graded on the clarity/closeness of the shot, as well as bonuses like taking photos of several splicers at once. So you could take a risk to run up right into a splicers face and take a photo and get better points for it, or hang back in the shadows and take more photos. Note that big daddies and little sisters can also have photos taken, and they also count for the multiple subjects bonus, so whenever you’re near a BD/LS and there’s splicers around, it pays to take out your camera.
Also there are a few tonics that you can get from taking photos when you get to the really high research levels, including probably the most powerful one in the game, which is camouflage. Effectively it works like cloak when you’re standing still, and can get you out of some sticky situations – if you’re running from a big daddy or security bot, you can turn a corner and stand still, you’ll camouflage and the enemy will go right past you. You can also use it to ambush them.
Still prefer Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle’s method. Take a picture, then combine it with a few other pictures in a non-destructive manner, get an invention recipe, then make that invention. Hell, most of the times the photos made sense.
It added so much replay value beyond a simple level up system. And was such a time sink I found myself taking pictures for fun at times to see what came up.
It takes something like 250 hours to reach 100 percent completion in DC2, and that’s without massive obvious time sinks like dodging 100 lightning bolts in a row ala Final Fantasy 10. That’s almost all from CORE GAMEPLAY ELEMENTS. Add in that it is actually rewarding to do the minigames at times, and often actually fun.
This, along with the SMT series, are probably the only JRPGs you will ever see me complement.
I think the issue isn’t so much the gameplay mechanic as it is the fact that it makes no damn sense. They try to justify it as a camera capable of “analysing genetic material”, which is probably more than impossible than anything else in Rapture. At least given that System Shock 2 is a futuristic game, you can justify it by saying “oh, it’s future tech”. And, while not that engaging from a gameplay perspective, it does fit much better into the role-playing nature of the game, and gives a nice reward for players who are willing to forsake immediate benefit.
The best part is its ability to turn enemy grenades into duds after you’ve taken enough pictures of them. There is only one conclusion: The camera is Mr. Mxyzptlk.
The sequel’s implementation makes much more sense – a video camera with bonuses for exposing the enemy to as many status effects as possible, which would at least be educational the first time. (Although having to do it 8 times still strains credulity.)
Do it again, stupid! The more you have to perform a menial task, the more fun it is. Didn’t you know?
I loved natural camoflage! I made sure to do the Houdini research asap my second time through. First playthrough, I forgot about the camera for most of the game. It indeed makes no sense in context; and when does Jack develope the photos?
Thank you for the clarification. Unfortunately, there’s a small error in your math. Since the evil route gives you 160 Adam from little sisters, the total Adam from three little sisters (for the evil path) is 3 x 160 = 480. If you’re good three little sisters provides 3 x 80 = 240, plus a gift of 200, which makes 440 Adam for every three little sisters.
So the difference is even more paltry. 40 Adam for every three little sisters. When you add in the fact the gift includes other bonuses as well (including some pretty sweet plasmids) and good is clearly the superior choice.
Which makes the whole “moral choice” part of the game even more stupid.
Oops, thanks. I used 180×3 for the bad one for some reason.
(Oops, I should have read this thread with more care. Nevermind).
“Enrage! Don’t be a pussy!”
Ladies and gentlemen, Mumbles has arrived!
So… did that Big Daddie you were shooting at just wander off? Or did it bug out and disappear? I’d think the former, since you were shooting at it from a ways away its programming might have made it retreat if it couldn’t find a way to get close to you.
Maybe it got so scared by the unreacheable attacker that it ran away and found a piece of scenery to hide under. Fear can make people do impossible things. Or maybe it crawled into the little sister´s ventilation shaft.
My theory is that it died offscreen at some point(maybe it had a sliver of health and a sploicer finished it) and it just blends in so well with the scenery that nobody could see it.
After I watched this, I am officialy in love with mumbles.
By the way, Bioshock has iron sights. I didn’t know until five minutes ago.
Hooray, I contributed!
Also: It has ironsights? No way. Now I’ll have to re-watch the video to catch that (did he use it there?). That would have made the terrible shooting mechanics slightly less terrible if I knew about it.
Nah, they didn’t use it in the video. I just accidentally used the zoom (Z) key on a gun besides the crossbow and found out.
(Chalk one more up on the “You guys made me play the game again” list.) ;)
Wow… Josh treats those cameras waaay differently to what I did.
My method:
I would usually stumble into a cameras vision, and it’d go BLERPBLERPBLERP and I’d be like “Crapshitfuck” trying to stumble away and hide so the alarm wouldn’t go off and send the Murderous Flying Robots Of Doom. Then slooowly peeking around the corner, I would sprint towards the camera and hack it.
Josh’s method:
Run screaming towards the cameras with a shotgun in his hands and blast it to next wednesday.
I guess I could argue I was “conserving ammo” or something.
The best thing you can do in the game (ie, on par with the Chinese Stealth Suit in Fallout 3) is research the Houdini Splicer till you get the chameleon perk… er, plasmid. This makes you invisible if you stand still for a few seconds and no one has seen you already.
Cameras are stupid easy to hack; research becomes even easier because you can just park yourself behind some baddie and click away; wrench attacks become God attacks.
Am I the only one who harvested little sisters until the point where I got to the orphanage and then stopped harvesting them. I just assumed they were crazy automatons who just happened to look cute.