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S1 Ep26: Bioshock
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A man... a lighthouse... another man... a podcast. This week!
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Transcript
Introduction to Rapture and Bioshock
00:00:12
Speaker
I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
00:00:32
Speaker
No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone. I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture.
00:01:06
Speaker
you
Influence of Bioshock on Careers
00:01:16
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? It's all right, buddy. How are you doing? I'm doing swell. Doing swell? More like... A swell. Like the ocean. Ah. Yeah. I'm not swell. You know I don't work out. Holy Swolly Molly. Look at that muscles.
00:01:39
Speaker
Oh boy. So I feel like talking about Bioshock today. I also feel like talking about Bioshock. It's probably a good day for it. I think that pretty impactful game in both of our early careers as games journalists. Use the term formative ears. It sounds cool. Oh, formative ears, yeah. The nascent ears.
00:02:02
Speaker
What was that about game journalists? Someday. Someday. We'll look back on this and be like... Guys who play video games talking about video games. He got it right. Hire me Kotaku. Yeah, I don't actually know if I'd want to be a games journalist. I don't want to cut this off now, but I mean, it seems kind of cutthroat.
00:02:24
Speaker
Other people cut in throats, cut through characters, and Bioshock. Bioshock. Which is a game which came out a long time ago, over a decade now.
Revisiting Bioshock: Graphics Then and Now
00:02:35
Speaker
Yeah, it is surprisingly old. Yeah. Because sometimes I go back to re-experience the magic and I'm like, this game looks like trash. Because you get so used to current day graphics and when you computer come around and you're like, oh, I'm used to this.
00:02:50
Speaker
And you go back and it's still a good game. It still has decent graphics for the time, but it's just comparatively very clunky. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those that had, uh, not necessarily super future proof, um, optimizations as far as like mouse usage and things like that. I remember going back to the last time I went back to play this, uh, the menu mouse was like super, super fast. And the game mouse was like really, really slow. And I'm just like, why is it different? This doesn't make any, can we not use one sensitivity?
00:03:20
Speaker
But that all being said, it's still pretty impressive. And I remember that was one of the big selling points when this launched was just how pretty the game looked. Oh, yeah, they did a surprising amount with even that initial loading screen for Bioshock and you have like the water coming off. Oh, yeah.
00:03:44
Speaker
It's the logo, right? Like the city logo. Just like a hard copper. Holy shit, it looks great. They have like rust effects as well. It's like super accelerated rusting. And it's just like, oh, that's awesome. They got the aesthetic nailed down. Which you might have guessed if you know anything about the game is mostly oceanic themed, I'd say.
Bioshock's Oceanic Theme and Mechanics
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's a little bit under the sea. You're right. Little Mermaid spinoff.
00:04:14
Speaker
something like that, but it was a shooter, kind of primarily a shooter with RPG mechanics. Kind of like, I wouldn't say tacked on there, but built into the system.
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you didn't have to just use guns. You also had abilities you could use. Right. The plasmids, your powers. And yeah, you feel like a superhero by the end of it. But going back and playing it now, it's like it's not super, super responsive, like a call of duty or something. You're going to be vaulting over terrain. It could be a trouble. It could be trouble to try to like home in on somebody and take them out. But.
00:04:56
Speaker
Has a lot of mechanics we'll get into, whether we enjoyed them or not. I'm personally looking forward to hacking, obviously, everyone's favorite. Oh my god. Which I didn't even have in the notes, I just wanted to spring it on you. I love that good old series of tubes. Yeah.
00:05:12
Speaker
We were actually just creating the internet, I think. That was basically
Bioshock's Immersive Intro Sequence
00:05:16
Speaker
what that was. But I distinctly remember the intro for this game because I was playing back on my now garbage graphics card and opens and you're in a plane. You've got a message in front of you. And I think this is the only time that the protagonist's name comes into play. He's named Jack.
00:05:37
Speaker
If you miss it there, then you just never see it again. Yeah, it's not that important. There's not a really a whole lot of dialogue with Jack. Yeah, he doesn't. He's not much of a talker. He's a shy guy. He does grunt. You get hit by something, he'll grunt. No good. Doesn't do that. But so it's on the plane and there's a actually this is probably the only time he talks. I'm literally going to contradict myself, but he's talking about how he says
00:06:05
Speaker
My parents always said that I was meant for great things. And you know what? They were right. And then it cuts to black. And you hear the plane going down. You hear the panic. You're just like, oh, geez. Like, what the fuck happened? It's like Bioshock. Terrorism is in me later. You're like, ah. Mom and dad didn't know this when they got me the game. But yeah. So presumably, the plane crashes based on the sound and everything going on.
00:06:35
Speaker
and everything that comes after because you come to consciousness, you're underwater, kind of struggling, you can hear yourself struggling underwater as luggage floats up above you and you see the plane just like pulling itself through the water in front of you.
00:06:56
Speaker
It just kind of like drops to the depths. Yeah, you're just like, ah, well, that's where down is. So that helps you orientate yourself to where up is. To be fair, that might have been just like a really smart design choice on their part. I think it's fair because it's very it is very confusing when they just drop you in there. But you make your way to the surface, which I think happens automatically.
00:07:18
Speaker
I'm pretty sure you can't just stay underwater and drown. You get up to the surface. You hear the sonic bubbles? Yeah. But once you make your way up to the surface, this is basically where the game threw me for a loop and there's essentially an oil fire.
00:07:35
Speaker
out in front of you and like some debris the remnants of the ship are like sinking underneath the the water the ship oh the ship sorry yeah the ship that flies through the air an airship got you some sort of airship it was a blimp you took not a plane yes different game different game um but uh that sinks below the water i'm like great
00:07:57
Speaker
Why isn't anything else happening? You know, you're just sitting here for a while. You're like, he's going to get hypothermia. And then I realized that the game was playable and I wasn't in a cut scene anymore. And my mind was blown. Yeah. It was a really nice touch for the time because it had like the good water effects. Like it was also raining outside and there's fire going on. And you start to work your way to the lighthouse once you're like, oh, I can move. Yeah. And the fire kind of builds in a way where it's
00:08:24
Speaker
kind of guiding you in a linear way towards the only thing in the fucking ocean, which is this singular lighthouse, which is kind of there. Yeah. You're like, all right, well, that's convenient. Yeah, we just go on to the dry land briefly.
00:08:39
Speaker
And the sound design, as well as the graphics, kind of just lend themselves to the atmosphere throughout this entire game. And at this point, I remember seeing the glistening of water on the stones of the lighthouse steps, and your wet footprints as you're making your way up, or footfalls, I should say. Footprints you can't hear.
00:09:04
Speaker
But
Exploring Rapture's Vision and Architecture
00:09:05
Speaker
you walk in that door and you see that first statue a huge glowing statue by glowing but golden Yeah, the lights kind of come on after you've already entered and like the big doors closed behind you. Mm-hmm, and it's not
00:09:18
Speaker
Super lit 420 fan. Yeah, it's very dimly lit but there's enough for like this statue to be kind of embossed upon the wall and it's of this guy's bust. Yeah It's a bust. Yeah
00:09:35
Speaker
It is at an angle, so it's looming over you, right? Yeah, it's not upright. He's looking down on you. And there's text underneath which says, no gods are king, only man. Yep, only man. Only man. Only man.
00:09:52
Speaker
vandalized statue there's like a blunt something yeah but uh immediately impactful you know you're in for you're in for a ride quite literally go on the ride yes uh the only thing inside the lighthouse outside of that statue is
00:10:08
Speaker
a ball, which you later learn is a bathysphere, but you get in, you push the lever and it seals and it starts to go underwater slowly. And you start to see like the little metrics of how far down you're going. This many fathoms. Yeah, this many. And you go down to like 18-ish and then you kind of get released from the tube and it starts going on this automatic path. And then a cutscene starts to play, like from the actual projector inside the bathysphere.
00:10:37
Speaker
the game you just get like a little parchment comes down you're like I guess I'll look at this all right school teacher yeah and goes through Andrew Ryan's vision for rapture
00:10:53
Speaker
And his vision, you know, was getting away from the government, getting away from all these external influences, building a city, the only place that he could enrapture. Well, literally making the city of rapture. He could be free from any type of restraint and let other people be free as well. No government, no strict moral code, no religion. Yeah.
00:11:20
Speaker
absolute progress and personal advancement everyone pulling the great chain of progress forward and based off of his accomplishments like when you're arriving at Rapture like this seems pretty good yeah i keep building a whole fucking city underwater you get to see from the bathysphere yeah and it's gigantic they do this uh i want to say flyby but that doesn't count underwater right
00:11:46
Speaker
It's like a float by, uh, where you see like all of the buildings and the structures, these neon signs. And, uh, there was some aquatic life too. There's like a whale, I think like comes across the one of the buildings, which is, I think mainly done for a scale. Yeah. Because the whale is like maybe one or two stories and a lot of these buildings are like 30, 40, 50. Yeah.
00:12:13
Speaker
Now it's absolutely cool and it's well illuminated. There's light all over the place. And nothing inherently seems to be going wrong, necessarily, in your first pass through here.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, first Passover, Rapture. I'm not sure if that was a setup for me to just talk about Jewish things. Let's talk about your past, dude. But it's very impressive. And it opens up just this floodgate of sensation for the rest of the game. You are completely underwater.
00:12:54
Speaker
you've seen the outside of all of these buildings you're going to be in. The scope of the game is defined right at the very beginning and I think that's immensely powerful. It's just like here are all the cards that I'm holding and they just put them out on the table. Enjoy. You know, check the full art.
00:13:12
Speaker
Link in the description. Yeah. Um, yeah, but that is immediately kind of juxtaposed by when your bath sphere arrives and gets rid of any excess water that I was holding onto. And now you're just, the door doesn't open. Yeah. You're just like, all right, it's coming. Guess I'll die. Uh, one of the lights in the room, you enter your charts, like flicker and kind of goes out. And then like, you hear some people kind of milling about. Yeah. And then some person with like a.
00:13:41
Speaker
claw hook, almost like some
Introduction to Key Characters: Atlas, Plasmids, and Splicers
00:13:46
Speaker
type of farming implement for killing people. And they started hitting the bathysphere and kind of like clawing around the edges and it kind of like punctures the bathysphere. The bathysphere kind of rocks back and forth.
00:14:00
Speaker
And you're like, oh fuck. Because you can't do anything. You don't have anything. You're just a guy in a ball. Yeah. Feeling like a fucking hopeless hamster amongst like a kid who's very excitable. The kid trying to get into the hamster ball. How do I get this unlockable hamster? Fry's is inside.
00:14:23
Speaker
And then they just kind of fuck off randomly? They give up, basically. Yeah, and there's a radio in the bathysphere, and someone's like, yo. Would you kindly pick up that radio? So you do, and you're like, new phone who it is. Yeah, right.
00:14:42
Speaker
And basically they explain like, hey, I'm Atlas. Welcome to Rapture. Shit's kind of crazy as you saw. Yeah. But I can help you if we can like meet up. So like, I can give you directions over the radio and kind of fill you in on the world and the environment, what's going on. It's like, I'll get you through this horror game basically, right? Yeah. And you're like, okay, Mr. Guy.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, and he delivers unto you the wrench, the most powerful weapon in the game, or at least the most useful, depending on your build. That's definitely good. Yeah. Freaking good. And he teaches you how to crouch in all the standard movement things.
00:15:26
Speaker
And the one-two punch. Give him the one-two punch. But that's not until after you have drank of the punch, which comes pretty early, I think. And the only way you can drink this punch is if you mainline it. It's literally lightning, right? Not too far into the game, you get your first plasmid. It's like, you gotta power up. This is the only way you're gonna survive.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, and this is the magical abilities we were talking about earlier, where essentially you can harness elemental abilities or other random shit. You know what my favorite element is? Bees. Yeah, that's why I said, as soon as I said other random shit and I saw your eyes light up, like he knows I mean bees.
00:16:09
Speaker
But the first one you get is the shooting lightning, which is useful for hitting an enemy, kind of stunning them. And then you go beam the face of the wrench. And that's the one to pound. And that works pretty effectively. And you can also shock people who are in water. But that just kills them. That just kills them. That ruins your non-lethal place. That's just science.
00:16:32
Speaker
There's as it turns out, there's a lot of water in this game because you're under it. Yeah. And even though we saw like that really gorgeous view outside, based on your kind of initial encounter, you see a lot of things insider kind of run down. Yeah. Things are knocked over, disheveled, complete disarray. There are leaks places. Yeah. So some rather large leaks, as it turns out, just like, hey, wall of water going to hit you with this.
00:17:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's very, very well submerged. But those people who you encountered who attacked the bathysphere are actually splicers, which are people who are essentially mainlining the same drugs as you are. Right. Which is a form of atom, but they've been using it so much where it kind of altered their brain chemistry and drove them crazy. Yeah.
00:17:28
Speaker
And you're like, oh, how many splicers are there? Everybody's splicers. Yes. Like the downfall of Rapture was this in its entirety. Yep. People just kind of went drug crazy and shit blew up. Yeah. Real quick. As it turns out, the genetic engineering leads to a genetic engineering addiction. There's no escaping that. Got to get that Adam.
00:17:55
Speaker
How would I get a genetic engineering degree? I mean that might just be a thing Like that's probably a thing Yeah, the spices are really interesting in this game. They're like they behave erratically. They'll kind of like Yell things like I'm sorry as they're attacking you or like go crazy. Yeah, they have they have a personality, but they seem Confused yeah, some of the times mm-hmm and also their
00:18:24
Speaker
Like semi well dressed. Yeah. It's like everybody went to a cocktail party, did a shit ton of blow. Yeah. And, but now we're like half their clothes are torn off. A lot of times you'll see like, uh,
00:18:37
Speaker
What, are they masquerade masks? Yeah, that's what I was thinking, like a masquerade, yeah. But like half of them will be broken off. Yeah. They'll still be wearing it. They really like their bunny masks in particular. And I think part of the reasoning there is because they are ashamed of what they are. So the face that they show everybody else is just like, oh no, you know, don't look at my face. Don't look at what I've become. Yeah. I'm a bunny. Oh, it's okay. He's so cute.
00:19:05
Speaker
It's just like the Monty Python funny as it turns out. Yeah. Then they bite you to death. Yeah. And they have all kinds of weapons throughout the game. You mentioned the claw, which some of them will use to like move around the ceiling and spider spices, I think they were called. Yeah. They just had like two claws that would climb around and just whatever. And then they'd throw shit at you. Yeah. Like the claws, I think. I don't know if they like generated the claws. I never got that plasmid, but.
00:19:35
Speaker
Um, yeah, you could get, um, an upgrade that allowed you to like harvest their hearts or something like that. It was, it was an organ. It was this, it was a splicer organ. Yeah. Um, I can't even remember what the effect was, but well, well, it's still important to the plot that you become an organ harvester by the end of it. We already did blood dragon. Yeah, that's true.
00:20:02
Speaker
But yeah, those are, those are the, the splicers. Um, there's a whole bunch of different types, but in general, they're kind of the, um, uh, they're, they're your middle of the road kind of enemies. They're there to slow you down a bit, but unless it's like an overwhelming sequence where the game's like throwing the ton of them at you. They're still people. They're susceptible to head injuries, whether it's through a wrench or a bullet. Right. So, but they're people like you. So they're not an insurmountable wall to pass.
00:20:33
Speaker
other enemies in the game are definitely more difficult.
Little Sisters and Big Daddies
00:20:37
Speaker
I'd say namely the big daddies. Oh we gotta talk about the big daddy though. Big daddies, yeah. So when you first see the big daddy, if I'm correct,
00:20:48
Speaker
You kind of are going across this walkway as Atlas is guiding you, and you hear some shit, and he's like, whoa, whoa, just wait a minute. And there's a little sister who's there, and she has her teddy bear and her atom-extracting needle gun, which, gotta put on pause for a sec, and a splicer comes in and knows that she has atom in the syringe. And he wants it, it's his addiction.
00:21:17
Speaker
so he starts like manhandling or getting violent and then you hear like the big daddy roar and fucking just he like he takes his drill and he smashes him into the wall with it he hits him a couple times then he gives him the coup de gras yeah i was gonna say the kool-aid man but i completely blend but yeah he's it's like this giant
00:21:44
Speaker
Golem almost yeah, I think that's probably a good way to put it kind of like a metal It's it's basically the most rudimentary power armor. You could get it's a it's a bathysphere suit is what it is. Yeah. Yeah, like it's Sealed so water pressure won't fuck you up You have this giant kind of like cagey helmet and it has like a lot of light so it looks like multiple eyes a Giant fucking drill arm. Yeah, he's just a very thick boy. Yes
00:22:10
Speaker
remarkably thick. He just breaks through the wall and then he like puts the drill into the guy and then turns the drill on. Yeah. And it was a very visceral moment early on. You're like, oh, this is your shit to avoid. Yes. Like, you know, when they'll kind of like hint monsters in a game, like you'll see in the distance, like, hey, this is Kalamut from Dark Souls. Yeah. Hoping I ever have to fight that shit.
00:22:34
Speaker
It's kind of like that. There's literally a wall between you and the big daddy and the little sister while this is all going on. So it's literally like a viewing experience. You're like, just sit back, eat some popcorn, watch this splicer die. But it serves well to teach you how dangerous big daddies are.
00:22:55
Speaker
And I was listening to some of the commentary about the game recently, and they were like, all right, now that we've shown how ridiculously terrifying the big daddies are, we have to give you some incentive to actually fight them. Every player's gonna avoid them and just stay out of their way unless there's a reason to fight them. Yeah, they will fuck your shit up if you don't know what you're doing. Yes. If you're low on supplies, don't got a lot of ammo,
00:23:21
Speaker
don't have a lot of eve which is the resource to regenerate your uh your plasmid powers excuse me um then yeah they'll just they'll they'll wreck you they'll send you to the nearest uh vital chamber really quickly just basically your respawn point because um
00:23:39
Speaker
This is one of those early games or one of the one of the first I think games that I played that really played around with not forcing you to Restart the level restart. Yeah, you'll just get your respawn point and you'll be down all the supplies that you used But the world itself won't change. Yes. So if you're fighting a big daddy and you got down like half health and
00:24:00
Speaker
But he killed ya. You go back to that vita chamber, but when you come out, he still has half health. He's still in the same spot where you left him. Maybe he got bored of killing you and he's walking around. He's found something else to do. I'm just imagining you emerge from the vita chamber, you've got all your clothes and everything. First thing you do is you just brandish the wrench in charge of anxiety.
00:24:23
Speaker
and this was the zerg rush building off the previous episode imagine just never using health and always just like going down you're like i'm gonna kill you basically just play as a splicer a wrenched splicer that's the protagonist around them with your own dead bodies
00:24:41
Speaker
Oh my gosh. You should elaborate a little more on our little sisters. Taking back the little sisters for a second. They're one of the more interesting mechanics of Bioshock. This is basically the only choice that you really have is how you deal with the little sisters and then how you deal with one other character.
00:25:02
Speaker
But the Little Sisters, there's an incentive, kind of really early on in the game, to fight the Big Daddy that's defending them. Because if you get close to the Little Sisters, they get really protective. They try to get between you and the Little Sister. They threaten you off. If you're too close, they'll straight-up attack you.
00:25:19
Speaker
very very protective and it's because you gain the ability to harvest the little sisters to gain a large amount of Adam or to redeem them to save them for a smaller amount of Adam in the short term but then later they can give you presence yeah of Adam because they're thankful being freed because these little sisters are
00:25:45
Speaker
Imagine like a six year old girl who has like pretty dress like her hair is done in pigtails. She has a teddy in one hand and then a giant fucking like murder syringe in the other. Yeah, which we said was like used to extract Adam from bodies.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah, she's like pale complexion, kind of like yellowish or golden eyes. Yeah, it's like something's up there, like she's possessed. And they all look the same. That's the other thing. All of the little sisters look the same. There's no distinguishing characteristics between them.
00:26:17
Speaker
So it's all very kind of otherworldly and weird. Yeah, it's a little creepy. But the in-universe explanation for this is basically atom is produced by these slugs that they discovered outside. But the problem was, in order to do genetic engineering, make these plasmids and things, they need a lot of this atom.
00:26:37
Speaker
And they're like, hey, we found a way to make these way more efficient. If we just take that slug and we place it inside of a little girl, and then we just let her do her thing, because they can't keep them in a vegetative state or it doesn't work. They just let her do her thing, then it'll produce more atom than it would, like a lot more than it would otherwise.
00:27:02
Speaker
And that's already really freaking weird. Remember how we said before that Rapture was kind of like free of morals and government restrictions and FDA approval? Yeah. Yeah, there's some definite ethics questions involved with this. Yeah. And it only got worse.
00:27:19
Speaker
because what happened is as Rapture began to fall apart and these splicers with these addictions started to emerge they're like hey we can make these girls more efficient if we condition them to see these dead splicers as angels and they'll like ingest the blood from these splicers and process the atom out of them we'll get even more of this like huge money making process and like
00:27:47
Speaker
Controlling Adam in Rapture was a huge amount of power. Yeah, so They turned him into something completely monstrous now for something completely different exactly right little sister Yeah with the whole thing
00:28:03
Speaker
Like we know, I said it was like initially it's utopia. And then obviously it became dystopian because of it was so far in one direction that it kind of just teetered off the edge. But plasmids were seen as like a common convenience. Yeah. It was a way to make life easier. Like, oh, I can snap my fingers. Did I pick up on the mic? Yeah, I think that's the honest pick it up. To like ignite so I can light my gal's cigarette. Exactly. Right.
00:28:32
Speaker
Or maybe you can freeze to make that hot coffee a more room temperature coffee. They had practical applications.
00:28:43
Speaker
It's like, some of them you might have a little more trouble justifying, and maybe they were developed a little more to the aggression. Like bees. You ever been on a date and you just want to unleash an insect swarm? Waiters treating you bad? Bees. No, it's harder to justify some of them, but maybe those were the self-defense plasmids that were created once things started to go crap.
00:29:08
Speaker
A good example of one of those, probably one that I preferred was telekinesis, which was introduced with a tennis ball launcher. Like, chuck him at you one at a time, and you'd get the opportunity to block him with the plasmid. Just kind of like, hold it, suspend in the air, and then if you need to, kind of redirect it. Throw it. Tennis ball.
00:29:29
Speaker
Of course, later there were much better things you could throw, in particular like Molotovs. If an enemy throws one, you're just like, how about now? And back. But yeah, tons of super fun plasmids that can be used in a bunch of different ways. And I had mentioned the cleansing one, the one that can save the little sisters, which is the moral choice of the game, right? You're actually given that by Tenenbaum.
00:29:56
Speaker
Dr. Tenenbaum. Has to be a doctor. Yes. Dr. Darling. Unprescribed plasmids. Exactly, yeah. And basically the way she fits into this is she worked alongside Andrew Ryan in the research for these plasmids and determining like how they should be used, Adam in particular. And she had the idea of using these little girls as the incubators for these slugs that were generating all this Adam.
00:30:26
Speaker
This cold-hearted bitch. I know, right? But change of heart, twist, she starts to see them more and more as little girls. This warm-hearted bitch. Exactly. And decides that she's going to make it her own personal mission to save them. She basically has a breaking point.
00:30:49
Speaker
I remember there was an experience where she saw one of the little girls walking with the big daddy and it just completely all hit her at once. All of these decisions she's made. It's really fucked up. Yes. From what we already said about what's going on with the little sisters, plus...
00:31:07
Speaker
big daddies there's actually there's actually people in those suits yeah but they are again also fucked up and kind of genetically engineered but they have this relationship where the little sister will harvest and the big daddy protects yeah they're always in pairs yep so if you don't see a big daddy it's just like if you see like a bear cub in the wild yeah like the parents around don't fuck with it exactly yeah
00:31:35
Speaker
big daddies don't mess around and they have these like kind of deep roarish like moans and things because their vocal cords have been all messed up by the process that transforms them.
00:31:45
Speaker
And they're also in a suit, too. Yeah. So I'm not sure what the... The Guglin's the echo to it, I think. Yeah. So they kind of have this weird whale-like sound I would almost say they make. But not like the cute way. Yeah, not like that. Angry whale sounds all the time. Yes. But yeah, they'll help the little girls traverse around, put them in these little vents they can use to move from location to location.
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of like their escape route if the splicers are getting uppity. Yeah, they can kind of just go in there and They're the kids like there aren't Splicer children exactly we should probably say Mm-hmm. So the adults can't get into that small hole. Yeah and climb to the vents
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think there's any kids in the game other than the, for gameplay reasons, other than the Little Sisters. But yeah, it also lends credence to the relationship between the Little Sisters and the Big Daddy. So it's dependence that they have conditioned into each other. It's like you see the Big Daddy picking up the Little Sister and putting her in the vent, and you're just like, I'm a monster for having to kill you, you know? But gotta get that Adam. That Adam.
00:32:59
Speaker
Moving on from Little Sisters though, they are core to everything that's going on, but it's a side effect. It's a side effect of what's happening in Rapture and that is it's all falling apart like things have gone to crap as you experience going through this game and everybody that you encounter has broken in some way mentally, I think.
Chaos in Rapture: Ethics and Consequences
00:33:22
Speaker
Obviously the splacers are kind of just I Mean you can just chalk them up to drug addicts essentially. Yeah, but there's lots of other characters throughout the game like Tenenbaum Andrew Ryan and others who aren't Plasma users. Yep, Adam users but like they still have their own reasons for things going to shit and
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah. It's too much happening on a psychological toll for an average person, someone normal to survive what's going on. One such person being Steinman. Yes. He's one of the, I guess, bosses of the game? Mm-hmm.
00:34:01
Speaker
But he's a character you encounter, you kind of enter his area, which is this medical pavilion, and you kind of have some foreshadowing of what this character is like, based on some of the lighting, some of the pictures you see of people. His patients. Yeah, his patients, but the pictures are covered in blood, right?
00:34:23
Speaker
And it's like his thing is a very twisted view of beauty. He strives for this unattainable perfection, but his view of perfection is never attainable. Right.
00:34:38
Speaker
So like throughout the game, there are these audio logs where characters kind of put their thoughts into a memo for anybody else to listen to. A protagonist will come along someday, but it helps you help shape your view of the world of rapture. Right. So with Steinman.
00:34:59
Speaker
He gets these patients, and I think it's initially like a plastic surgeon, but his current day-to-day, modus operandi, is just mutilating people. Yeah. And his thing is like, oh, I'm making them more beautiful, but he's literally just a butcher. Yeah, he's pretty much the butcher. So like you come across him and like you see he has a patient and he's kind of going down with the knife and then it goes black.
00:35:27
Speaker
And then the lights turn back on again. He's not there. Spooky. Magician Butcher didn't sign up for this.
00:35:36
Speaker
His whole area is really creepy. I think you get the shotgun around that too. And I remember the encounter for the shotgun is like, hey, it's here in the middle of basically a spotlight in the room on the shotgun. And you pick it up, and it's just like, hey, darkness. And you get jumped by it. Or actually, no, it doesn't go to darkness. You just start getting jumped from the shadows from the outside by all these splices and stuff.
00:36:00
Speaker
Just the whole area is chasing shadows and encounters and things like that. Meant to make it all spooky and spooky.
00:36:10
Speaker
But then when you actually get to just face them one-on-one, it's a pretty classic shootout. So you just you shoot them a bunch. You basically just put them in like Wolfenstein. It would still be pretty accurate as a boss. He's got like a barrel-fed machine gun. Yeah, you're not wrong there, Jake. He's a Nazi scientist. You could literally have him be a Nazi scientist.
00:36:30
Speaker
Yeah. Of course, his name is Steinman, so he's probably not enough. No, he's not actually. Half the characters in this game are like half Geo, which based on their last name. Yeah, it is true. But yeah, he's the first real boss you fight. This game doesn't have a lot in the way of bosses. They have some tough encounters, but they don't like throw a nobody at you and they're like, that's a boss.
00:36:59
Speaker
No, because it's not it is an FPS but it's more a Medium the story because you want to convey that the character is thrown into this Wildly terrible world, which is very beautiful on the outside, but it's completely rotten on the inside so using weapons and plasmids are your means for survival exactly
00:37:25
Speaker
Yeah, this is what Bioshock built off of in System Shock, which is like, what will you give up to succeed? And that theme, even though Bioshock has plenty of heavy themes about capitalism, it's like,
00:37:42
Speaker
or late-stage capitalism or what a truly free society turns into without any rules and regulations, without ethics. It's also a story of what are you willing to do to accomplish your ends and become more powerful, become stronger. Definitely inject some plasmids is okay in my books.
00:38:08
Speaker
Plasmids are okay, but I mean The game's telling you time and time again. It's like they're addictive Like there's no way you Yeah, you get out of this unless you know you're sitting on the stockpile of all the world's plasmids at the end, right? And making the choices with the little sisters It's like what are you willing to give up to become more powerful? And that's the choice everybody else in rapture is made at this point. Yeah
00:38:34
Speaker
which I like. You're just treading the path after them. And are you gonna tread the exact same path?
00:38:40
Speaker
With the little sisters, when you harvest them, it looks kind of brutal. Like they're lifeless, hostage, kind of like thrown on the ground afterwards. But if you save them, you kind of have this like, in Jesus' name, you kind of like push the demon out of them. Baptized. Yeah, and then they're saved.
00:39:06
Speaker
Yeah, their complexion clears up. They look like a relatively normal, maybe not, maybe still not normal because they all have the same character model still, a little girl, but they say thank you and they'll do a little curtsy thing before.
00:39:22
Speaker
Finding a vent, which is still safety. Quick child, to the vents. Some things never change. At war and vents. But yeah, Steinman is your first, I think, main antagonist there, but he's not your last.
00:39:41
Speaker
You'll encounter other characters that have allied themselves with Andrew Ryan as he holds back the tides of chaos that is rapture. He doesn't want to see his city fall to nothing. He still believes in the philosophy that had him build the city. Even if that means you gotta
00:40:02
Speaker
hang up a couple smugglers and, you know, ban people from having contraband bibles and things like that. Eh, it's a little priceless. Little priceless. Making it better tomorrow.
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah. Another interesting character, kind of on the opposite side of Tenenbaum, where Tenenbaum, Dr. Tenenbaum, got a conscience. She grew to want to save the little sisters. Her, I was going to say comrade, but not really comrade. Associate? Associate, yeah, like associate Dr. Suchong.
00:40:43
Speaker
had no such compunctions. He was perfectly willing to carry on in research. No, he's true science when you think about...
00:40:52
Speaker
Like TV and movies is somebody who's like, I have a goal. I will achieve that goal. And I don't care about people. They're kind of disassociated from society in a way. And it's just, I want the scientific breakthrough that meet. So they'll do like any means to an end. And like you hear a lot of blogs with him just being like, how can we condition this person to do this thing? How can we exploit this here?
00:41:20
Speaker
He's kind of an evil dude. He is completely evil. He's very results-driven, too. And it's kind of like Tenenbaum got this far up the crazy meter, or the Andrew meter, I would say, probably, before she developed a conscience. Xuchang basically sticks around till the end on the crazy train. I don't think you fight him. I don't think you encounter him in the game.
00:41:42
Speaker
No, I think by this point in the game, he's somewhere else, or just not involved. Or dead. There's a lot of dead people in there after, as it turns out. He's not directly involved. Yeah. But it doesn't hold a candle, I think, to the next character here, which is probably the most memorable, other than maybe Andrew. Yeah, he's... I think my favorite character. Yeah.
The Eccentricities of Rapture's Inhabitants
00:42:07
Speaker
Because it's motherfucking Sandra Cohen. Sandra Cohen.
00:42:11
Speaker
Yeah, I'm gonna try and describe him using another famous person, Salvador Dali. So if you is very modeled after that, and he's very kind of crazy art oriented, yeah, where everything he does is to appease his muse.
00:42:30
Speaker
And his idea of art is, similar to Steinman's, very skewed. And he has his unique ways of murdering people and then calling it art. Yeah.
00:42:44
Speaker
But the way his character interacts, he actually has a lot of dialogue with you. And it's not a straight up fight when you encounter him. You kind of go into his theater area. And before he'll allow you to progress through Rapture, through his domain, you kind of have to go with a camera and take
00:43:03
Speaker
Specific art pictures that he requests. Yeah, he actually he completely blocks out your radio. So usually Atlas can guide you through the game gives you some ideas about what you need to do to proceed and Atlas's voice is missing Santa Cohen is all you have
00:43:22
Speaker
I think the intro for Sander Cohen as well is you come across one of his proteges playing a piano and making some mistakes that Sander Cohen is not willing to live with. No, no, no. And then I think the whole piano is rigged with explosives probably. And he just murders the guy. Straight up blows him up. But Sander Cohen definitely has.
00:43:47
Speaker
I'd say the most iconic personality. A lot of deep flair in there. Yeah, he's a showman at heart. Like he has, like he said, flair. He has this flourish to his voice and he has these really calm, quiet moments where he's sanely telling you exactly how you should murder the next person.
00:44:09
Speaker
punctuated by moments of straight mania and sanity. Yeah. Where he's just like, all right, you screwed something up. It's time to die. Yeah, no, there's a you have to go. You mentioned you have to go around, take some pictures of Splicers after you've killed them. Yeah. To like complete his art gallery.
00:44:30
Speaker
Um, and he poses people in plaster and then kills them, I guess, or something. There's certain people like he'll kill and then kind of like cement them. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty macabre. Yeah. He has a, he has a really interesting area though. And you can't just shortcut your way through it. You have to do what he's saying to get out. Um,
00:44:55
Speaker
After you've turned in a couple of those pictures, he'll actually turn on you. You'll say he'll, uh, the reason that he does is because he thinks that you're criticizing him. He's like, you're just like all the other doubters. And, uh, there's some vulgarities in there. Yeah. But ironically, you know, your character doesn't say anything. Exactly. So maybe you're projecting, Sander. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Yeah. You don't really, like you said, you don't have the choice.
00:45:25
Speaker
to not kill these people. You kind of just have to obey what he's saying. Right. And they're all splicers, so it's not like a very tough choice, right? These are all people that you'd find anyways. Yeah, they're pretty much out to kill you anyway. Yeah.
00:45:40
Speaker
Killer be killed man. It's rapture. I'm sure what I had to do. I grew up in rapture South rapture The after you've a he sends a veritable army of splicers at you after he thinks that you're doubting him After you've killed all of them. He's like, oh, I apologize. You got a little out of control there. Yeah
00:46:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think he says his muse is a fickle B word. A fickle bit. Yeah. Jake, if you want the swears, just give the fingers up and that'll be my cue to fill in for you. Yeah, but really interesting character. He calms down after you've wiped out his splicers. He comes down in person to gaze upon the gallery. Yeah. Then he gives you a reward in the form of a tonic, I believe.
00:46:30
Speaker
Tonics are kind of just like passives. Yeah. You can have a clip for I'll be stronger with a wrench. Exactly. Or other perks. It's the reason the wrench is the best weapon is tonics actually. You can kind of stack those tonics to be just wrench guy. Yeah, just for a wrench guy.
00:46:47
Speaker
That's pretty accurate. What do you have in his one hand? Nothing. Oh, thank God. What's the other hand? Wrench. Oh, fuck. It's like, doesn't it suck how most people have footsteps and you can detect them by that? What if they just didn't have footsteps at all? What if he's going to sneak up on you with a wrench? It'll hit you with the wrench and cause a burst of lightning and then still life. Yeah. Wrench. Wrench build. Best build, didn't I? Anyways, it gives you a tonic. Yeah. And then if you're like anybody else,
00:47:16
Speaker
You try and shoot him at this point, and he just kind of laughs and like teleports away. Like you don't actually hit him, you kind of just... It's a piece. And I think you can chase him down and fight him. I think you can do it as a boss fight because there's a large chest there. It was next to the tonic. It's locked. It's like Sander Cohen's muse or something like that.
00:47:40
Speaker
But I only think I fought him the first time, my first playthrough. I don't think I did it subsequent, because this is just such a great character. And the game doesn't give you a lot of choices, so something like that is... it's nice.
00:47:53
Speaker
But as soon as he sees that art gallery, he drops this like blocker. So Atlas can talk to you on the radio and is like, hey, you know. Where you been? What's going on? Yeah, it's like, where have you been? It's like, would you kind of make your way down to the bathysphere to keep this going? Sandra Cohen lets you go and you can progress into the end game, which is where it all starts to fall apart and fall together.
00:48:21
Speaker
So Atlas, up until this point, has kind of been guiding you through Rapture, trying to help himself and his family get out of Rapture, and also to take down Andrew Ryan. So events happened earlier where
00:48:36
Speaker
Atlas's family dies when you try and go to save them. And he's like, fuck that Andrew Ryan, we gotta straight murder him. So you're on the way to straight murder him because he's this corrupt dictator and he's fucking things up. Look at the city, right? Look at what's come from Andrew Ryan's. Yeah, his leadership and direction has taken the whole city down. So you eventually work your way there.
00:49:03
Speaker
And you kind of like drop in through the ceiling and the Andrew Ryan study, very, very ninja. Yeah. And he's just there playing, you know, like that single hole golf and rich people have just in the office. Yeah. It's, I think it's only in TV and movies that that exists. That's what he's doing. He's just kind of living his best life. And as you approach him, he says, would you kindly stop? Yeah.
00:49:33
Speaker
And you do. W doesn't do anything anymore. At this point, you can't really control anything. It kind of goes into a cutscene, but you basically find out that your character has to do anything that somebody says. If it's prefaced by, would you kindly? Yeah.
00:49:54
Speaker
Which is a pretty big twist, because you've been hearing it the whole game. Even when you first pick up the radio, I said, would you kindly pick up the radio? And you're like, yeah, I'll play the game.
The Twist: Atlas, Fontaine, and Player Agency
00:50:07
Speaker
They hit you with all the flashbacks. Yeah. So basically, this is where shit gets a little weird.
00:50:16
Speaker
You were born two years ago. You are the genetic offspring of Andrew Ryan, which allowed you to get an interruption in the first place. But because of that implanted training in you for the Would You Kindly and other things. Conditioning. The conditioning.
00:50:36
Speaker
you took down that plane at that exact moment in time, exactly about Rapture, so you could come back in. Yeah. And essentially you've been manipulated up into this point kind of against Andrew Ryan. And he knows this. Yeah. And he knows about the conditioning, which is why I said, would you kindly stop? Yeah. And he kind of goes up to you.
00:50:59
Speaker
And he's talking to you and kind of showing he has power over you by saying, would you kindly do this? Yeah, Neil, things like that. Gets you on the ground, have you run. Just completely takes away all of your initiative as a player. Yeah. All your agency. You have no power. You have no control. This is literally his domain.
00:51:21
Speaker
Yeah, and it's basically at this moment that my brain exploded the first time I played through this. Yeah. Because I did not see the twist coming at all. There's no way you would. Like you've been guided through and like you hear things, you see things like this is normal because it's for the game. Yeah.
00:51:40
Speaker
Atlas saying would you kindly is his turn of phrase right is being polite mm-hmm it's just the way he talks yeah and then it's it's not uncommon for a game like in the it's this I mean even a modern game to have this kind of format you just accept all of the mechanics the fact that it's relatively linear they have some areas you can explore but for the most part the story's linear um that's just out of necessity for the game but no
00:52:06
Speaker
developers actually incorporated that into the very motivation of your character. And which is nuts. The story. Yeah, it was insane. Absolutely blew my mind. Also, as it turns out, Andrew Ryan's because after demonstrating the extent of his power over you, he gives you a phrase. He tells you that a man chooses and a slave obeys, which is still just goosebumps. Yeah.
00:52:34
Speaker
It's one of the iconic lines from Bioshock, and it's just the epiphanizing of, a man makes his own decisions, a slave just follows orders and does what he's told. Yeah. Implying that you've been a slave the entire time. Exactly. And even now, you are his slave, you can't really make your own actions because of the mental conditioning.
00:52:57
Speaker
And to fully demonstrate that, Andrew Ryan in his magnanimous way, plus also I'm sure some other factors.
00:53:10
Speaker
gives you his golf club that he was putting with yeah he said would you kindly beat me with this golf ball club yeah so you hit him with it yeah and it's impactful yeah there's there's like recoil to the swings every single hit and you see like his kind of
00:53:29
Speaker
send me broken and bloody face. He just got concussed. Oh, yeah. And he gets up. He says a man chooses slave obeys. His voice is a little more broken this time. Right. Because his face is a little more broken. And he says, Would you kindly? He keeps repeating it. Yeah. And for you get progressively worse. Oh, yeah.
00:53:49
Speaker
to the point where he's choking for breath and then you do the final swing and he's dead. You break off the end of the golf club in his skull. It's pretty gruesome. And in some ways it's made more gruesome by the fact that you the player have no control over it.
00:54:06
Speaker
Like games make choices more impactful or consequences more impactful by giving you choice. And this one, it's made more impactful because they take it away from you because you realize you never had a choice. That you're watching this play out and you're just following the parameters that were laid before you.
00:54:29
Speaker
So naturally, it's just like, well, I don't know where we go from here. And this is where our buddy Atlas comes back in. Except he's not.
00:54:41
Speaker
He kind of quickly tells you, it's like quick, Ryan's dead, grab his key card and essentially go turn off. There's like a Ryan's control of the city. Yeah. Cause he's had it locked down cause he's paranoid of people trying to kill him, et cetera. And so you go and do that cause you're like, the fuck else am I going to do? Right.
00:55:01
Speaker
Think he says would you would you kindly to I think for that final action? So you just I mean you the player have control again. Yeah, but yeah doesn't exactly and Then Atlas's voice changes from like a friendly Irishman
00:55:20
Speaker
I'd like a 1920s New York mobster, revealing that he is in fact Frank Fontaine, a famous smuggler and a poser of Andrew Ryan.
00:55:35
Speaker
He's just an all-around mobster kind of bad dude. Yeah, he's the dissident to Andrew Ryan's utopia. He's providing people what they want as opposed to what Andrew thinks what they need. Bibles, like weapons, drugs. He's trying to like shoehorn in on the atom exchange. Yeah. He's a businessman. He's a businessman. Businessman.
00:56:03
Speaker
And Andrew actually makes the mistake, Andrew Ryan makes the mistake of letting Fontaine build his business for a while because he sees it as free agency. He sees it as pulling the chain, trying to better himself, reach his peak, and then he realizes that he's going to have the chain pulled out from under him or around him.
00:56:23
Speaker
Yeah, because Frank Fontaine very quickly wants more and more and he wants to essentially seize control of Rapture from Ryan.
00:56:33
Speaker
And you help him get it. Good job. Great work, protagonist. Jack. Yeah, it's accelerated two years of life up into fulfilling this man's ambition. And then he tells you to die. He's like, would you kindly go get stepped on by a big daddy?
00:56:58
Speaker
And basically, I think at some point he commands your heart to stop or something like that, some ridiculous conditioning thing that would kill you. And you're thankfully saved by a tenon bomb. She finds you, the little sisters find you. And her bearing on you, this is basically where some of the choices break down a little bit. She's perfectly friendly with you if you save the little sisters, which is basically the only way I play.
00:57:23
Speaker
Because I know the rewards are roughly equivalent after you count in the gifts, but She also saves you if you're a bad guy because she's just like
00:57:33
Speaker
Like you're basically the chance of us. Yeah. And she also knows about your conditioning and sees you as you didn't willingly do all this stuff. Right. It's like Fontaine's been in control of you. It's like somebody's been like pushing cocaine down your throat and then like telling it to go like murder people on the street. And that's kind of what your character has been to this point.
00:57:57
Speaker
And she helps you escape the conditioning. So the next time Fontaine actually realizes that you're there and tries to get you to kill yourself or for your heart to stop, you resist the conditioning and you can continue on and you're just like, oh, okay.
00:58:14
Speaker
Like good doctors, you know, been messing around in your head, I see. And that starts the acceleration to the end game. You need to reach where Fontaine is. For this final boss fight, you undergo like a process to get the parts of a big daddy, enter the suit, have the voice modulation. Yeah, you had to get the pheromones too. You essentially wanted to become a big daddy.
00:58:44
Speaker
Yeah, you have to undergo the full transformation to become the Big Daddy so you can get a little sister to instinctively trust you, follow the pheromones and help you through a door that Fontaine's locked. It's kind of like a plot door. It is actually. Yeah, but it is really cool to get all the pieces and then you actually get to play as a Big Daddy for a bit.
00:59:09
Speaker
And it's really cool, because like we said before, it's built up as this huge thing, this huge opposition, this wall. Yeah. Which you fight a couple of them, and now you get to be this powerhouse. It's kind of that power creep throughout the game.
00:59:24
Speaker
And you get to kill the Splicers with the drill. Yeah. Yeah, they're like they realized that that gameplay was really good So like what if we just made a game of this we make a game of this But that's not this one That finally culminates once the doors open with the boss fight with Fontaine reached him at the end. He is the most Adam dupe guy imaginable Yes, a veritable giant
00:59:53
Speaker
of muscle. So Fontaine had actually avoided using Adam up until the end of the game. But basically the fact that things were starting to go out of control caused him to panic. And he's like, we're going to start using this stuff. So it's kind of just a, a very quick power spike. Yeah. So he just dosed himself hard. Oh yeah. Cause I'm sure he's like a normal guy like you, but now he's like,
01:00:18
Speaker
a jacked god yeah absolutely gigantic and uh he has like so
01:00:27
Speaker
for the boss fight, for the final boss fight. Most people don't regard this as the best part of the game. But the mechanic is, he essentially has these vials of Adam that he uses to recharge his health. You have to do a bunch of damage to him. He'll go back, try to heal. You can like, I think you can stab him or something when he's trying to recharge. There's some sort of interruption mechanic. Doesn't matter that much. It's really not the key part of the game.
01:00:55
Speaker
Because you kind of just go around very FPS style, facing him for a little bit, which is not.
01:01:03
Speaker
with the theme of the game. Yeah. But it's how they want to end it. So you actually got to like do something. Yeah. I suppose just having kind of Peter off. Like you can use your grenade launcher with all its mods and proximity mines and your chemical flamethrower and all these other things that you've built up to this. You can use the arsenal at the end, but it's not like those never seem like the very the strengths of the game. It didn't seem like the reason to play Bioshock was for. Yeah, you're not running and gun. Yeah.
01:01:34
Speaker
Also, wrench build is really bad against this guy, so naturally I'm gonna hate this. But after you've depleted all of his Adam reserves, you finally got him on the ground. He just gets freakin' swarmed by little sisters in a cutscene.
01:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, who all just go and stab him with the needles. Yeah. Because they know who he
Final Confrontation and Conclusion
01:01:58
Speaker
is. He was involved in all the little sister actions going on in the conditioning. Maybe you have a little bit of those pheromones left or something. Or they are just told by ten about him to help you out. Swarm him. Unleash the swarm.
01:02:18
Speaker
So anyways, yeah, little subs are a zerg. They take him down. They're not actually taking them. Little zerglings. Take him down, he gets stabbed a bunch, dies, and then they have the key to the city, basically. In the literal sense, it's the override key that just unlocks everything. And they, this is when it changes, right? This is where you actually have some different endings.
01:02:45
Speaker
Yeah. So if you were saving all the little sisters, you kind of go back to the service and you live out like a normal healthy, happy, healthy life. Kathy. Kathy. You live out, you outlive Kathy. But when you die and you're of old age, all those little sisters you saved are kind of like there with you and like hold your hand as you die. Yeah. Um, but if you were a Dick and constantly killing the little sisters,
01:03:13
Speaker
You probably weren't the nicest guy to begin with, so you kind of activate raptures, missiles, and stashed arsenal. You take control of nuclear submarines as they pass by the lighthouse. You're just like, these are mine now. I own these.
01:03:35
Speaker
there's also a little touch in the cutscene where like they start to like hand the key to you and you either just grab it out of their hand if you're evil because you know red color evil choices thing um or you like gently place it back in their hand and they're just like really happy it's completely disparate ending cutscenes and they they go hard on the the camp kind of for the happy ending like all of their the
01:03:59
Speaker
when we've aged, you probably aged really quickly because they seem relatively young when you're dying of old age. I mean, also you were born two years ago when you were an adult man, so I can only imagine. Yeah. Might slow down a little bit because they are all apparently married. They've all got wedding rings on and stuff like that. Yeah. And I just thought that was hilarious. It's a very happy ending, like, both side and all. So the first time I actually saw this, I was like, they didn't all marry you, though.
01:04:27
Speaker
When I grew up, I want to marry my daddy. What? Yeah, I was like, OK, that's probably not what I necessarily want. Yeah. And so they're completely, I don't like when games extrapolate based off of one choice, whether your character is good or evil. Yeah. So I didn't like those things because you're like, maybe I want more Adam, so I'll like eat two little sisters. But that doesn't mean I want a nuclear submarine. Exactly.
01:04:56
Speaker
It wasn't something that's kind of like, hey, if you go this way, you might lean into something. Yeah. That being said, despite the weaker ending, I'd say overall.
01:05:10
Speaker
The game was amazing. Yeah. Holy fucking shit. It was one of the first games where after I played it. No, it's actually the first game after I played it. I was like, whoa, I didn't know games could be like this that impactful. And it has impacted me so much that I.
01:05:28
Speaker
Everybody else I'll buy a shock who knows me like I talked about it not all the time great But like I have right now shocked tattoo. Yeah, I have he just showed the tattoo just for the record Jake hasn't seen it yet But it's of the rapture light it's on my arm for the record and I have like 15 to 20 things of
01:05:51
Speaker
Bioshock related merchandise or memorabilia or art I've commissioned from Jenny. So it is very impactful to me and I've held on to it for a while. I think we'll continue to do so. Yeah.
01:06:08
Speaker
I can attest that Dave has all of the merch, all of the Bioshock merch. He's holding that IP afloat and funding all of the developers on his own. And I appreciate Bioshock for being a continuation of System Shock, for pushing the boundary for, they had a relatively small team and they focused in and they made a game really awesome.
01:06:35
Speaker
They could have branched out in a lot of like crazy ways, but they made a small game feel huge. Oh my God. Yeah. And I said the game play is fairly linear. Yeah. Which you don't see as much nowadays, but they, they made it work. Yeah. So hard.
01:06:51
Speaker
And a big part of that is like just the different ways you could play the game. Like you could just run and gun it through a lot of it using incinerate as your primary, like plasma and just- Light them on fire and then you shoot them while they're on fire. Yeah. The one-two punch. That's actually like the three-four punch you put in. Or you could take it slow. I like to play these games a lot slower. We mentioned the hacking minigame, we're going to come back to it. That's one of the ways you can take it slow. Yeah.
01:07:20
Speaker
You essentially have some fluid going through tubes and you kind of reveal tiles and kind of switch pieces around so you can make a flow from where it starts to the end gate. Yeah. So it'll be like, oh, I'm unlocked. Cool. Yeah. You got to form the pipe before the fluid like hits as much progress as you've made or you might hit like an alarm block or something. If you didn't like plan your route correctly and that could
01:07:45
Speaker
Have enemy robots show up. They're like helicopter looking things. It's pretty funny actually How do you describe those it's like if because it has a helicopter that was shittier black tied to like I Think an office chair
01:08:06
Speaker
had a little copter and like a turret. They're pretty janky. And they sound and look janky too. Yeah, they got like whirling sounds and peeps and stuff. But you could hit it with some lightning, take it out of the air, run up and then hack that. Now you've got like a little RoboBuddy, a little fly around and get work done.
01:08:25
Speaker
Or you can hack the cameras, and they will then detect other people as enemies. So splicers are like, oh. And then it'll activate the security systems around there. Exactly. And be like, get them. That'll pull automatically friendly robots in to help you. So some of this planning could make some of the harder encounters take a much smaller resource tool on you. They had other really cool plasmids, like decoy.
01:08:51
Speaker
What you could it would this is like basically the only time I think you saw your character and The the game but you would see he did like looking about furtively it was kind of like holographic for him and enemies would like to shoot at him and try to hit him and things like that, but He's just a hologram basically
01:09:08
Speaker
Um, or my personal favorite, which was, um, hypnotized big daddy. You could only get that if you were saving the little sisters. They would give it to you in a gift package, but it allows you to just be like, Hey, big daddy, usually you help little sisters, but I'm going to throw this, like, it's like an organic orb thing, like a blue. It's a goop. It's a goop. I think goop's the right way to put it.
01:09:32
Speaker
um throw it at the big daddy and it's just like little sisters i don't care about them we're gonna follow you and like the little sister you essentially become the little sister he's like we are friends yeah at which point the little sister kind of like freaks out and runs to a vent like she tries to get get to safety because she doesn't know what's going on since big dad is just like why but uh yeah having him follow you around and protect you in fights pretty good
01:09:59
Speaker
Pretty good. Yeah. Like I said, it's kind of like the power cap is big daddy's. Yeah. Getting shit done. Oh yeah. I would always almost go more of a gun route. Because you can upgrade your guns throughout the game. And you can also like buy ammo if you're not finding it off bodies. Right. By going to the circus of value. The circus of value.
01:10:27
Speaker
That's something that you can't, you have to mention it when you talk about Bioshock because one of those spins on it, it's like a little flare personality that everybody remembers. Come back when you have some money, buddy. Oh man. Yeah, it's a good time. It was a long time ago. We played that. Just talking about it takes me back.
01:10:53
Speaker
Thankfully, it was very successful. It's almost like they made four or five games out of it. They continued the series. It was a pretty big hit on consoles and PC, which was really good. I haven't even got remastered recently. The remaster is available on Steam.
01:11:16
Speaker
I don't know if you automatically get it if you already had the game, but I know I didn't think you do. I didn't realize I had it, so I think that's the case. Then I went and looked at it, like, to prep for this, saw it in my Steam library, and I was like, oh, OK, we'll install that one. But yeah, it's also just it gets insanely cheap. Like, Steam will throw it up for, like, five bucks. Like, every week they put, like, the entire collection up for, like, five bucks. Yeah. That's something silly. It's pretty crazy.
01:11:45
Speaker
The second one was probably less popular with fans, but they really brought it back for Infinite. Maybe someday we'll cover that one. I would definitely like to in the future, as I have much merchandise in memorabilia in that way. It's a good game to experience. I mean, we've clearly covered most of the first one.
01:12:08
Speaker
Yeah. I think going back and playing through it and living through it again, going back to those, I don't know, probably college years at this point. Oh yeah. Maybe even like start of college or before. It's kind of old now. Jake, we're kind of old now. Yeah, that's kind of true.
01:12:29
Speaker
But the game's insanely good. I know we spoiled some stuff here. We didn't get all of it. But we kind of spoiled some of the major key things. But even so, it's worth checking out and getting your own perspective on it first person. Or if you're nostalgic like us and you've already played the game.
01:12:52
Speaker
play it again and talk to us about it. Cause I for one am a Bioshock slut. Yep. It is. It is true. I can confirm, but I'd like to thank everybody for joining us for another episode of soapstone. Um, as always, you can contact us, uh, at Gmail at soapstone podcast at gmail.com. Or if you like the podcast, you can like us on Facebook, facebook.com slash soapstone podcast.
01:13:22
Speaker
And we would be happy to hear from you. We always are excited, as Dave mentioned, to discuss the episodes, things we talked about, and your own impressions of the games that we cover. It's always fun. It doesn't happen a whole lot, but you know.
01:13:37
Speaker
Try to stay positive. That's what makes it special, no joke. That one person's like, cool. Cool, yeah. Oh my gosh, yeah. Gonna ride this high for you. All right, well, I'm gonna head out, so have a good night, and we'll see you in the next one. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. Have a good night. Somewhere beyond the sea, somewhere waiting for me.
01:14:07
Speaker
My lover stands on golden sand and watches the ships that go sailing somewhere. The undersea, she's there watching for me. If I could fly like birds on high,
01:14:32
Speaker
Feeling straight to her arms, I'd go sailing. It's far beyond the star, it's near beyond the moon. I know beyond the doubt, my heart will leave me there soon.
01:15:01
Speaker
Then the shore will kiss just as before. Happy will be beyond the sea. And never again I'll go sailing.