{"id":20976,"date":"2013-09-05T16:42:48","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T21:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=20976"},"modified":"2013-09-05T16:43:07","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T21:43:07","slug":"bioshock-ep14-whos-your-daddy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=20976","title":{"rendered":"Bioshock EP14: Who&#8217;s Your Daddy?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/49ViE855Pro\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=49ViE855Pro'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>And so it ends. Again. I guess. After two trips through this game I think we&#8217;re finally going to let this dead horse have some peace. Here is what Josh had to say about this episode <a href=\"?p=9670\" title=\"Spoiler Warning 3&agrave;\u201414: Who&#39;s Your Daddy?\">when it originally went live<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But that&#39;s all water under the bridge now. In retrospect, this season did provide (in my mind, at least) a fairly compelling counterpoint to Bioshock&#39;s overwhelming praise in the larger gaming community. Was it a good game? Sure, I think I can at least give it that. At least it had some fairly surprising twists \u00e2\u20ac&quot; there are a lot of games with gameplay that&#39;s just as bad (or worse) that have no redeeming factors whatsoever. But was it a great game? It seemed like the whole momentum of the game&#39;s story relied on those few twists \u00e2\u20ac&quot; or really just the one \u00e2\u20ac&quot; and after that truly great moment, not only does the whole game spiral sharply downwards in an irrevocable stall, but I never felt any desire to play it again until we decided to do it for this season.<\/p>\n<p>And yet to play devil&#39;s advocate to my own devil&#39;s advocacy, it is worth noting that the unanimous praise was largely aimed at the console version. I&#39;m not sure if the gameplay was significantly better on the 360 or not \u00e2\u20ac&quot; I probably wouldn&#39;t be able to tell, playing shooters with thumbsticks is a skill which endlessly baffles me. But I think I can conclusively say that the PC version of Bioshock, at the very least, fails to live up to its hype. By far<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I think BioShock is a pretty smart game&#8230; <em>for a shooter<\/em>. Which is like being the sexiest Ferengi, or the world&#8217;s tallest midget. <\/p>\n<p>I do wonder what would have happened if they simply ended the game quickly after the confrontation with Ryan. No big boss fight. No long slog.  Maybe a rapid tying up of plot threads and a quick set-piece escape to the surface. I&#8217;d love to jump into that alternate reality and see how the audience responded. Would people fault the game because you didn&#8217;t get to fight the metaphorical mecha-Hitler at the end? Would it have sold worse? Would it have shaken up the genre by challenging the notion that shooters need to end in huge gun battles? <\/p>\n<p>I honestly don&#8217;t know. I would have liked the game a lot better, but given our complaints versus the adoration of the masses, it&#8217;s really doesn&#8217;t matter all that much if the game didn&#8217;t work for us. <\/p>\n<p>Thanks for watching. Again.<\/p>\n<p>And yes, I do plan to update <a href=\"?page_id=16386\">the archives<\/a>. It&#8217;s on my to-do list. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) And so it ends. Again. I guess. After two trips through this game I think we&#8217;re finally going to let this dead horse have some peace. Here is what Josh had to say about this episode when it originally went live:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-20976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-bioshock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}