April 2nd-April 9th: Beginning to Pauper’s Drop
April 9th-April 16th: Siren Alley to the End
**BY VOTE** April 17th-April 24th: Minerva’s Den DLC
–Everybody plays at different speeds and, presumably, everyone here has lives and other games as well, so a week to get through four stages should be enough. If enough people get to the week’s checkpoint early, and the stragglers are cool with it, we’ll move on.
–Spoilers for the first game are fine (So, Rain Dog, tread lightly in here). You are definitely allowed to speak freely about anything that happens in the currently played section. Anything after, however, if you MUST say something about the rest of the game, spoiler tag it. Im putting everyone on the honor code to not be a douche about the ending if you get there in a speedier manner than everyone else.
–As mentioned above, tackling Minerva’s Den will be put up to the group. But I strongly endorse that decision.
–Above all, TALK ABOUT THE GAME. A lot. Loudly. And often. If you want to live-post through your experiences, I’m even okay with that. Just keep the discussion alive.
Let’s start then. It’s my first time with this game so any speculation on my part is just that. I’m in the middle of Pauper’s Drop now.
Gone is any feeling of ambiguity towards the little sisters. The game goes for the heartstrings immediately with Elleanor. The dilemma between rescue and harvesting is quite moot because of that. To the point where I wonder why it’s even present. You’d have to be quite the psychopath to choose harvest now.
It’s a bit early to comment on what the game goes for thematically. But the game seems a bit more overtly political than the first one. The original’s view of objectivism masked its deeper themes which were mostly comments on player agency in games. But as I said it’s a bit to early now.
Plotwise, Sinclair seems to scream “I’ll stab you in the back eventually” a bit too loudly. But it could be leftovers from the original game.
Dual wielding seems at first as a mechanically sound idea. Instead of setting up almost every encounter in the game like the first one it makes combat a bit more fluid. Though again I’m a bit disappointed with the way enemies come. I’ll have to test it a bit but there was at least a case of one popping out of thin air and one more of a splicer coming out of a dead end I’ve just previously been in. Nothing game breaking but it kind of nullifies any preparations you make, especially in the ADAM gathering sequences.
Nice! I definitely vote for including Minerva’s Den, even as just an optional thing we can throw in for the last week of discussion or whatever.
I’ve played a bit on and off, and I’m enjoying it. I had zero interest in the game when it first came out, mainly because I’d only recently finished the first game and loved it so much, I didn’t want to blur the memory of it with a potentially-inferior sequel.
So far, it’s pretty much what I was expecting story-wise - a side-story that doesn’t really add too much to the original - but it’s great fun to play. The developers at least paid attention to the effect the setpieces had in the original, and turned them up to eleven. While the sheer concentration of Big Moments occasionally throws into sharp relief the relative pedestrianness of the story, and there isn’t an individual setpiece that matches the intro to the first game (Though really, how many games have those?) it’s delivering a solid, fun return to an amazing location. I’m even enjoying the rivet gun, despite some initial misgivings.
So far, so good. I’m up to the amusement park at the moment, so think I still have a ways to go to finish this week’s section, but so far it’s been a nice surprise.
GFWL can go die in a fire. It crashes at least once every session. And I keep waiting for that piece of shit to bug out and ruin my saves. I’ve had PC viruses that I hated less than GFWL.
Oh, and Minerva’s Den is by leaps and bounds the best thing about Bioshock 2.
The weird thing is that I played this a good bit when it came out, with zero problems. GFWL included. Now the only way it’ll start is if I skip logging in to GFWL, but then it won’t allow me to save games.
GFWL wants to patch the game, but it stops halfway through. It’s just a complete clusterfuck.
It’s interesting being a Big Daddy, but I’m not really buying the whole dead for ten years and then a sudden miraculous recovery even in the Bioshock world.
Who is this Lamb character? She seems to be a cross between a communist and a religious leader (Is that basically the definition of a cult?). Anyway she wasn’t mentioned at all in the first game and she should have been if she was such a big player in the beginning of Rapture.
It also seems that she is being setup to be the main villain, but will the game pull twist like the first and make her an ally at the end?
I loved the big sister encounter ending with the ocean being dropped on my head. At first I thought I didn’t kill the big sister quick enough and was going to find myself back in the nearest Vita Chamber; then the game suddenly reminds me that a Big Daddy is a basically a guy in a diving suit and I’m still alive. It almost made me feel superhuman.
So far I’m favoring the drill and the rivet gun. Just got the macine gun, but I don’t like how inaccurate it is.
I love how simple hacking is in this. It is so much faster than playing pipedream whenever you want to take over a security bot.
So, jumping back into this. I havent played the game since a few weeks after it came out and even then, didn;'t get terribly far. I also wasn’t able to cram another Bioshock 1 runthrough in first, so really, I’ve been away from Rapture for years now.
So, going back into it after this long feels great. It’s a little disconcerting that a Big Daddy is this light on his feet, or how exactly he’s cramming twinkies and booze into his helmet, but, I’m running with it. Lamb taking a different part of the ideological spectrum than Ryan should make for some fascinating moments, but I share the sentiment that I have to wonder why she wasn’t a bigger deal in Bioshock 1 if she was able to garner this much of a following in this game where people are making little butterfly shrines for her and whatnot.
Still, the gameplay remains sound, and the water effects are spectacular this time around, even more so than 1. It’s also another case where I need to find the score, like, NOW. The violin melody that plays upon reaching the Welcome To Rapture sign underwater is goosebump inducing.
Not that big a fan of the handoff of in-ear radio narrative from Tenenbaum to Sinclair, who sounds like Ewan McGregor’s Philip Morris voice, but we’ll see how that pans out.
Finished with Pauper’s Drop. I’ll stop for the week.
So far, I have to say that it really doesn’t grab me. It’s way less scary than the original for one. The wail of a Big Daddy would actually send me into “quicksave very other step” paranoia but in this I’m pretty much nonchalant about them. The Big Sisters are more difficult but annoyingly, not rewardingly, so. Now that I’m done with the week’s progress I might repeat some combat parts to test if my suspicions about the how the game has enemies appear are correct. Also, choosing to play it on the medium difficulty level was a mistake. The game seems very easy. Splicers are trivial unless multiple ones jump me from behind and with this Fire Storm tonic I got, even that is much less of a problem.
Originally Posted by stelios
Also, choosing to play it on the medium difficulty level was a mistake. The game seems very easy. Splicers are trivial unless multiple ones jump me from behind and with this Fire Storm tonic I got, even that is much less of a problem.
Yeah I agree. I’m not as far as you, but the first big daddy I encountered was a pushover. By contrast, I was terrified of them for a while in the first game, and the first one I encountered totally ripped me to shreds. That said, I’m keeping my game on medium because… Please tell me this is not how I’ll be harvesting Adam for the whole game. Protecting a helpless NPC missions are among my least favorite things ever, and if I die, I come back with less ammo and health but she has to start the slow process all over again. And I tend to die. It’s not fun, at all. I mean I realize I’m a big daddy and everything, but there has got to be another way.
Right now I see zero improvement over the first one in any way. Graphically I’d even say it’s a bit worse. A hacked sentry following me around moves like a bad stop motion movie, same with dying splicers at times. Enemies seem to blatantly spawn, as opposed to them seeming like they were just wandering around in the first game(which is one of the things I LOVED about Bioshock).
I actually prefer the hacking in the first game. Right now hacking is super easy, but if it’s going to get faster or more difficult as I assume it will, I can see myself hating it. I was never good at the back and forth meters with powerful hits for sports games and such. If it’s never going to get more tricky, then it’s overly simple.
I sound way too negative on it, but I did just finish the first one not so long ago, and towards the end I was finding that game very repetitive. It’s still a solid game underneath, and combat and exploring is still fun.
Oh goodie - I’m still in time to join in on this proper. I should be starting this tonight or tomorrow and then I’ve got the Easter break to get some more time done with it.
Although everyone here has probably already gone there, I thought I might link my own Bioshock Thread to this one in an act of chud symbiosis; much like a Little Sister reaching out to her Big Daddy…
Yeah I agree. I’m not as far as you, but the first big daddy I encountered was a pushover. By contrast, I was terrified of them for a while in the first game, and the first one I encountered totally ripped me to shreds. That said, I’m keeping my game on medium because… Please tell me this is not how I’ll be harvesting Adam for the whole game. Protecting a helpless NPC missions are among my least favorite things ever, and if I die, I come back with less ammo and health but she has to start the slow process all over again. And I tend to die. It’s not fun, at all. I mean I realize I’m a big daddy and everything, but there has got to be another way.
Right now I see zero improvement over the first one in any way. Graphically I’d even say it’s a bit worse. A hacked sentry following me around moves like a bad stop motion movie, same with dying splicers at times. Enemies seem to blatantly spawn, as opposed to them seeming like they were just wandering around in the first game(which is one of the things I LOVED about Bioshock).
I actually prefer the hacking in the first game. Right now hacking is super easy, but if it’s going to get faster or more difficult as I assume it will, I can see myself hating it. I was never good at the back and forth meters with powerful hits for sports games and such. If it’s never going to get more tricky, then it’s overly simple.
I sound way too negative on it, but I did just finish the first one not so long ago, and towards the end I was finding that game very repetitive. It’s still a solid game underneath, and combat and exploring is still fun.
The further I’m playing, the more I realize not playing Bioshock 1 after so long has helped me enjoy this thing a lot more. It’s coming off more like the 2010 to Bioshock’s 2001 rather than the Fly II to The Fly.
I’m looking into it as we speak. Gotta be a way around this nonsense.
Well, it turns out I had to delete all of my Bioshock 2 savegames for it to work. So I’m back at ground zero, like most of you here. I only had a couple of hours in the game, and hadn’t played it since 2010, so I guess it’s no big deal. The game also patched up to 1.5something, and I had enough MS points on my account to get Minerva’s Den. So I’ll dive into this tonight, and try to keep up with everyone.
The further I’m playing, the more I realize not playing Bioshock 1 after so long has helped me enjoy this thing a lot more. It’s coming off more like the 2010 to Bioshock’s 2001 rather than the Fly II to The Fly.
Exactly my feeling on it. The game is pretty much what I expected when it first came out - solid, but without the spark that made the original such a wonderful experience. The story is, from what I can see so far, nowhere near as good and riddled with lazy sequel tropes. However, the gameplay is fantastic and on that basis alone is worthy as a diversion back into Rapture. I hadn’t long finished the original when B2 came out, and I think that if I’d played it then I’d have hated it. With a couple of years inbetween, however, it’s much more enjoyable.
The 2001/2010 comparison is a pretty good one, I think - an unneccesary sequel that adds nothing to the original, lacks the inspiration of the original but is pretty entertaining in its own right. Though now I’ll be forced to lament the lack of Roy Scheider in this game as I play through it.
Seriously, I’ve played a little over an hour and am having a ball. The underwater sequences have been brilliant. Sure there’s soem sequelitis in there - but it’s a sequel. Maybe I just had my expectations suitably tempered by you guys, but yeah - still great fun.
AProudest moment: unlocking the Unbreakable trophy by shocking a Big Sister to death in a pool of water with literally zero ammo left. She didn’t land a single shot on me. I felt like fucking Thor.
The flashlight sequence through the hallways of the Sinclair hotel rival any creepiness of the first game. Drake’s Deception failed to grab me, Skyrim left me cold, yet this trip through Rapture is absolutely enthralling me. Nice choice, gents.
