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lol my last Bioshock Infinite autosave is from April 11, 2013
truly a game with a lasting impact on me
lol right this game opens with a fictional epigraph from one of the game's characters. that's usually...not a great sign. and it wasn't here!
oh my god and the first scene is the character quoted doing a who's on first bit with her brother (iirc) about rowing.
I am actually looking forward to this moment. Really it's the first like, four hours where the game appears to have the promise you'd expect from "murdering the sky Confederacy" that are both the best and the most disappointing. https://twitter.com/vault13guy/status/1271209710264422407
lol i played this game so long ago i'm getting the "congrats for finishing the opening" achievement for the first time, because they hadn't been added yet when i beat it
it's incredible how willing they are to use every single trapping of Great Awakening evangelical Christianity...except for the cross itself. such cowards
I guess the explanation is that Comstock is a Joseph Smith figure that's ~perverting the religion~ but the game's incredible focus on baptism sort of undercuts that
the big-ticket item here of course is that they're using explicit Nazi shit to characterize a faction that will be Both Sides'd in 6 hours, but the shin-deep water in the church right as you arrive and the basin at the base of the lighthouse? Baptism imagery, baby
still looks pretty for a 2013 game
subtitles for this game spell it "Judgement Day." demerit. don't care if it's an accepted spelling now through brute linguistic force
upsetting to discover that i still have a genuine aesthetically-pleased response to impracticably large recording devices with 30 second audiologs that sound like an entire pumpworks to start and stop
oh. right. forgot what game this was. I should have just waited for a character to turn to the camera and explain the theme
JUST IN CASE. YOU DIDN'T GET IT.
with dead eyes, Booker DeWitt shoves a hot dog, baguette, and cheese wheel into his mouth, and continues raiding every shop in Columbia for stray silver coins
my kingdom for an M3 Carl Gustaf
this is the first instance of the barbershop quartet that sings licensed pop songs showing up. this time it's Beach Boys -- God Only Knows
this was the craziest, realest shit in 2013 when it came out. difficult to explain how stupid we were back then
still can't believe they named the villain of this game cumsock
that joke was gonna happen, figured i'd get it out of the way
some games wear their twists well; some are really grating when you replay them because the twists are just mugging for the camera the entire time. KOTOR II is one of the former; KOTOR is one of the latter. I think every Bioshock is one of the latter as well, Infinite especially
back later
there's only one model face for young white boys in this game so far as I've seen, which is probably asset crunch but gives a very eerie second flavor given how adjacent Columbia's concepts are to eugenics/Boys from Brazil stuff
the concept of vigors didn't make much sense for a racist, eugenicist purity cult based on evangelical Christianity before and they're not shaping up to make much sense this time through either
(they're this game's plasmids)
so much scene setting but it's mostly well done. kind of wild remembering how startling it was to see white supremacy this in the open in a video game world in 2013. this feels tame now, and far sleeker aesthetically than the real Nazis managed
the woman getting all het up about how why do we need FOUR flavors of ice cream when we already have vanilla is definitely a case of pushing a bit beyond its limit, however
time to see how this setpiece sits in 2020
still hits like a brick on the turn, still immediately neuters itself with a false choice.
it then scrambles to distract you from the two-step by giving you a loving slow-mo gory melee kill on some cops. protesting a little bit too much
this feels a lot better on KBM than it does on controller, where it's floaty, awkward, and weird; a lot of progress has been made in the last half-decade tuning the console/controller shooter experience to feel good
pretty much. you don't even clonk a guy with the ball https://twitter.com/motowncatscrown/status/1271687151839739906
getting through the first combat sections and the Mauser broomhandle just has bad gunfeel. The vigors/plasmids are rote. The gameplay is as I remember it so far: workmanlike; forgettable
i understand why Infinite had to have more than the previous bioshock entries -- they'd already done two games that dwelled on the insane fake city of ideology exclusively -- but man "Columbia as Confederate-fascist Outer Heaven" is so much more interesting than the quantum shit
actually it was more ambitious than I give it credit for there -- it wasn't Confederate, it laid claim to being the True America, slavery and all
the quantum shit would also be better if it quipped less, and if the Elizabeth stuff was less psychosexually weird than it is
or, frankly, more psychosexually weird than it is. the Elizabeth stuff I remember least fondly
ok the joke with the civilian who says "It's alright, I'm not like the rest! I'm a progressive!" and then just stands there doing absolutely nothing to help you at all is still pretty good
lol the first time you meet black people in the underground railroad-ish segment they have no lines and are completely uninteractable. p-zombies
have to say that if I didn't know this whole thing was going to disappear up its own ass around the 6 hour mark and be arguing that maybe Columbia was right around the 8 hour mark, I'd be impressed by its audacity in 2020 too
ah right, the very confused midnight-blue robed not-Klan that besmirches the noble raven
the idea of a mystery cult based entirely around Abraham Lincoln being Satan whose name you can never speak aloud is pretty good, I must admit
especially since you murder them all
enough for tonight. this game does not respect alt+f4; another demerit
back on this. I've keyed on why this and I presume every Bioshock game before this feels simplistic and annoying to play now: Arkane Studios has taken the gameplay mechanics of these sorts of games to new heights with Prey and Dishonored. This just feels simple now
after playing Dishonored and Prey and getting into the attention to detail they put into their level design, it really doesn't feel great to play a game in that tradition where the "exploration" is usually "there's two paths; one leads forward, the other's a dead end with coins"
the game gets creepy about Elizabeth well before you meet her. Here's a quantum entanglement field that, when Booker throws a switch, will add or remove period blood from a white cloth labelled "Menarche," which means "first instance of menstruation."
it's in a series of three with her childhood teddy bear and a book of poetry.
doing this again. this is two doors past the previous screencap. yes that's a naked 16 year old tactically positioned to not show "nudity." yes we're eventually supposed to scratch our chins and see the humanity of the people running this facility, in the face of abolition
in fact two of the people who run this place have, if i'm not mistaken, been relentlessly monkeycheese quipping their way through the first half of this game
elizabeth is obviously in her dressing room the first time we see her, but at least she's fully clothed for it
the proportions on elizabeth are just slightly more cartoony than on everyone else in the game. eyes a bit too big, limbs and waist a bit too slender. it's like someone parachuted a disney princess into the model set
from the get-go the game intends to ruthlessly emotionally manipulate you re: this character, and that design is the real opening salvo
lol I forgot that the first portal she opens shows Revenge of the Jedi playing at a theater in France. Most of the pop culture stuff in this game qualifies for "decent bit" status, though I recall that the end product is very half-baked
lmao the stupid meaningless fucking bird/cage key
the first songbird setpiece is still good so long as you don't troll it by standing in one place forever as the music pounds
it's not just the design on Elizabeth -- she's easily the most expressive character in the game, especially in the face. again it feels like someone was taking notes on e.g. Belle and Ariel
more eye movements, more mouth quirks, etc
the bit at the timestamp here where Elizabeth is resuscitating/talking to Booker really highlights this
well I understand why they made some changes https://twitter.com/swolecialism/status/1272413453177757696
I can respect fidelity to a bit but you really need a singing animal or two to complete the feel
the calliope cover of Girls Just Want to Have Fun is still good
now, does the game still deploy the calliope cover of Girls Just Want to Have Fun while the plot girl is running around, having fun, like I'm some kind of idiot? Yes. But maybe it is correct to do so since, after all, I am still playing this game in 2020
excuse me elizabeth before we can proceed i must search all of these trashcans for food
"She tells you that the bird is beautiful and that the cage is somber, but ultimately she'll be happy with whichever one you pick. Regardless of if you choose the bird or cage, the gameplay won't be affected in any capacity."
and don't think I've forgotten that there's an extended sequence coming up where Booker plays an acoustic guitar for an underage girl like this is a state college frat party
there's a lot of exceptionally vicious racism in this game (no n-words, ofc) but what there aren't are like...basically any non-white characters. we'll meet daisy in a bit, but she's a cartoon meant to convince us the vox populi are also bad. also lol at the name "vox populi"
the way this game engages with white supremacy in the main -- during the GOOD parts before universe jumping -- is to hand you an audiolog of zach comstock saying blacks should aspire to be dogs and then wait for you to shake your head in disapproval
the ambush in the air tram station is also still good, though forced
that's enough of this for now though
actually one thing I noticed tonight that I didn't before is how...aggressively...they push COLORED AND IRISH sections in this first part of the game. Almost like they're backdooring in our old, completely ahistorical friend Irish Slavery
