Lives, Lived, Will Live.

A while back, a friend of mine and I started the DLC expansion for a game which we both liked, BioShock Infinite. Some of you would be familiar with this game, and some of you may not have. Personally, this series is one of my long-time favourites, but my favourite in this series has to be the first one, so I’ll be talking about that one first for the most part.

So, coming back to my friend. I had asked him to give me running commentary as he played, hoping to indulge in a bit of nostalgia as I remembered my first playthrough of the game as he spoke about it.

For those curious, the DLC (Downloadable content) is called “Burial At Sea, part 1 and part 2”. It acts as a continuation of the story of the first game, simply titled “BioShock”, as well as an aftermath of BioShock Infinite. It ends up acting as a gateway between the two games once you reach part 2 of the DLC. It seems confusing, but it actually ties the whole story of the series into a neat little ribbon, albeit somewhat of a blood soaked and partially mangled ribbon, I’ll admit.

Like I said, I’d be primarily talking about BioShock (the first game) in this post, but I will be covering the whole series, especially due to the impact on the story because of the DLC.

So, lets begin.

BioShock is a first person shooter game, with role playing elements, developed by Irrational Games (initially named 2K Boston), and 2K Australia. It was released in the 2007-2008 period for Windows, Xbox and the playstation, and on looking at those dates, you notice that this game is at least a decade old.

The setting for BioShock is the 1960. In the real world, around about that time, we had the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA and the invention of the first transistor computer. This lends itself to a large amount of the setting, and vast amounts of this time period is noticeable in the game, from the design of the clothes, to the subtle political nuances found in Rapture.

But what is Rapture, you ask? Almost all of the first two games (BioShock 1 and 2) takes place in the underwater city of Rapture. The brain child of the fictional character, Andrew Ryan (a character based heavily off John Galt from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”), it is masterpiece in its design itself. Resembling a city from the 1950’s to 1960’s, it serves as the birthplace for a utopian society, however the instant you look inside, we notice that nothing is as what it seems.

Dark, damp and mouldy at best, the inside of the city is mostly broken down, with security robots running amok, it looks like the exact opposite to what a utopia is. Despite this, the city looks spectacular, and what one would imagine an underwater city falling into disrepair would seem like.

Even though the game is marketed as a first person shooter game, thanks to its setting, it ends up becoming more like a survival horror game, which works out in its favour. You have rooms which are randomly flooded, debris strewn everywhere, and the overall ambience sets the player on edge from the instant they step foot into the city.

So lets start at the beginning.

NOTE: Andrew Ryan's outlook towards life, is called "Objectivism", an ideology developed by Author, Ayn Rand, describing it in her own words as, "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute"

Whats to like about this game?

PROS:

1.       The visuals. The first thing that most people notice when they start playing the game is the appearance of the City of Rapture. The sheer enormity of it, fleshed out in the style of a 1950’s American city, is something that would have been astounding a decade ago.
When you go inside the city, and see the blend of what the city would have looked like at its peak, and how its fallen to ruin now, you really get immersed into the story.
TEN years later, the visuals still don’t fail to amaze players, both old and new, as they make their way through rapture.

BioShock has been described as “the sign of the coming of age of video games as an artistic medium”. Vox, in 2016, said that BioShock was the first game that showcased that video games could be a work of art in itself. High praise, and one that BioShock has managed to live up to.

In BioShock 2, we revisit the city of Rapture, but we visit all new areas, with focuses being the residential areas, and where the common and the non-wealthy lived their lives. An especially notable segment is where you get to see things through rose coloured glasses, when you play as a Little Sister (read on) briefly. We even get to see the ocean floor on which Rapture is built. 

Splicers to the side, a Little Sister in the front,
and a Big Daddy at the top of the stairs.

2.       The characters. While BioShock IS known for its visuals, there are two fields which are notably more iconic. The character you encounter being the first one. The instant you set foot in Rapture, you’re greeted by someone you cant see, only to see them murdered by someone dropping from the ceiling. The subtitles say just say “splicers”, your main enemies in this game.

Further in, you meet the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies, two character models that have become so entirely synonymous with this series that the mention of “BioShock” has people thinking of this: (insert image)
The development of these characters, both in-game, and in real life is something that is equal parts horrifying and gripping, as well as incredibly well planned and developed.

Beyond that, you have the main antagonists: Andrew Ryan (the creator of Rapture), and Frank Fontaine. Ryan is easily one of the more complex characters you see in this game, and if you pay attention to your surroundings, you learn more about him, as well as the creation and development of Rapture.
He is such a powerful character, with a compelling back story, with a great deal of emphasis on how he became what he was. He is the reason for the infamous “A man chooses, A slave obeys” quote.
And on the other side of the antagonist coin, you have Frank Fontaine. While he isn’t as impressive as Ryan, he is still a force to be reckoned with in his own right. Fontaine got his status from getting others to do his work for him, much like Ryan did, however, instead of doing it through more legitimate ways, he chose the underground path, stopping at almost nothing to get his end goal: control over Rapture.

And that’s where we come in: The Main Character. Known only as Jack, the person we play as is a silent protagonist, who’s face is never seen in ANY material, in ANY of the games. His origin story, is easily one of the biggest themes of the later part of the game.
 The protagonist of the second game, A Big Daddy, known simply as Subject Delta, is equally interesting, especially his origin story. While in the second game, you look for the little sister you’ve bonded to, the background elements of the story is essentially the back story of the main character.

3.       The Story, and Choices.
In today’s day, we have games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, where every single choice we make as a character affects the overarching game. But games like this was released either last year, with few games from previous years having this level of freedom in making our choices count.
There have been games which preceded BioShock that had multiple endings depending on some choice made, but those were usually restricted to the choices made at the very end of the game. With BioShock, we were allowed to be the “bad guy” from the very beginning. In BioShock 2, the choices made more of a difference than before, as each choice made changed parts of the narrative altogether, including when we let a character from earlier live instead of killing them. The choice mattered for the overall experience of the game as we progressed through it.
Now, BioShock is known for its story, more than anything else, and its plot twist element revolving around the phrase, “Would You Kindly?” has been called one of the strongest narrative elements of recent games. This phrase is important for more than the sake of a plot twist however, in that it subverts the expectation that the player had ANY control over the events of the game.
It seems somewhat contradictory, especially since I mentioned that choices mattered, but you should also keep in mind, that only some instances in the narration have choices while the others are essentially set in stone. It’ll make a lot more sense when you play the game and progress to the point that you meet Andrew Ryan in-game.
Again, drawing attention to the fact that this was TEN years ago, BioShock played a much more important role in games, and influenced media and culture with its amazing and strong narration.

4.       This last one, is my personal favourite.  The Music.

For me, the experience of playing BioShock was somewhat troubling, since I went from the wide open spaces of Infinite and Columbia, to the closed off spaces in Rapture, and not the other way around, and the effect was claustrophobic.
However, it wasn’t the visuals alone that helped me get to that level of immersed in the game. It was the music.
In the game, we have a character called Sander Cohen, a poet, composer, sculptor and playwright of Rapture. He became a leading figure of art in Rapture, but unfortunately, during the descent of Rapture into chaos, so too did Cohen descend into insanity, brutality and apathy. You can see his “work” around parts of Rapture, in the form of Splicers who have been covered with plaster, “immortalised” in a sense, for the spirit of his art.
The music video provided above is Cohen's Theme (Sorry, alignment issue for some reason)
There are many other instances like this, where the musical theme helps in the immersion of the player, most notably the quick moving and high pitched violin noises heard during combat, which heightens the tension as combat begins or continues, as seen here:

You learn more about the world that the player is in, through Audio diaries, some of them utterly heart breaking, such as one by a mother, who's looking for her child, whom she sees has been turned into a Little Sister. This adds a massive level of immersion to the world around you, and you can listen to these recordings by the residents of Rapture as you progress through the city, without it disrupting the flow of the game.

Most games tend to have expositional dumps in some of the cutscenes, and others tend to over flood info by having it given to the player as snippets of texts available that one can collect.
With this, it adds more realism to the world at hand, and allows the player to sympathise with a lot of the characters we come across in the game, including those in the origins of the main characters.

Of Course, there are things that I’m not entirely happy about either.

CONS: 

1)      The remasters.
In September 2016, the original two games were remastered with better textures, lighting and a general face lift, and released to the world, along with their DLCs, and BioShock Infinite (not receiving any remastering, since it was still quite recent in terms of visuals), and IT’S DLCs. Not complaining about this part.
The part that I AM complaining about is this: The games, for the most part, are available for PC players only on Steam. The game gets through the opening cutscenes of the two remastered games, and takes its sweet time giving control to the players.
Problem? In BioShock 1, it means that the player has already drowned in the plane crash since he stayed underwater for too long, and in BioShock 2, the game basically just quits without any notification in random instances.
These are supposed to be the remastered games, not the originals.
Even high end PCs are having issues regarding this, and two years later, the issue still has not been fixed.

2)      The Gameplay mechanics.As mentioned above, I've played this game after I played BioShock Infinite, and the mechanics of that game were an evolution of this one. Unlike with Infinite, and even BioShock 2, in this game, you are never wielding a weapon, as well as a plasmid at the same time, so things like combinations are a bit more difficult to pull off. There also isnt a lot of maneuverability in Rapture, and you have to move only in the paths prescribed to you. It isnt a massive issue, but due to the order in which I played the games, it is remarkably noticeable. 

A few things to mention as I close this. 

This first game has a lot of its influence from Ayn Rand's books, specifically, "Atlas Shrugged". Andrew Ryan is based off John Galt, and a lot of the events mirror the events from the book at their most basic level. The whole philosophy of Ryan, as mentioned in the image here, is based off Rand's own personal belief. 

Ryan's origins mirror that of Rand's as well: they were both born in Russia and emigrated to America after their home country adopted a communist regime, and both believed in the philosophy of objectivism. 

There are a lot of other topics which are covered in the game, heavy topics, which dont make it to the foreground of the narrative, but are ever present in the very framework of Rapture, a lot of it based on the works of Ayn Rand (Andrew Ryan is an anagram of "We R Ayn Rand")

There are a lot of easter eggs which would be fun to go through, but maybe not right now. 

There are other characters not mentioned, because their role in the game is that of developing parts of Rapture, such as Dr. Yi Suchong, who made the plasmids, the big daddies and little sisters, and those I have not mentioned as they play their roles more in the background than the ones mentioned above.

It is recommended that the player try and find all the audio diaries, as this will uncover a much greater narration, than what you play through, the story of Rapture as a whole. You get to events in the story that happen before the entry of the player, the New Year's Party of 1959, which marked the beginning of the downfall of Rapture, being the most important and notable one. 

All in all, I’ve loved this series since I started playing it with BioShock Infinite, after my surgery, and getting into the rest of the series has been an utter delight.
Hopefully new players also find the series as fun as I have, and have their own takes on lore, events and characters.

This game has survived will into the future, having lasted 10 years, not as an eyesore or someone's nostalgia trip, but as a classic, one which still influences the gaming world and the culture of game design as a whole. 

In my next post (hopefully... these things tend to take a lot of time, and things usually come up in between), I'll be talking about BioShock Infinite, as well as the DLC my friend was playing. 

Let me know what you think please. :) 

On the write up, and on the game series. 

Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

On February 15th, 2019, the world was introduced to a TV show on Netflix, called "The Umbrella Academy".
Based on the comics of the same name, created by Gerard Way (Yes, THAT Gerard Way) and Gabriel Ba (the name has a ' on top of the "a", but I cant seem to put it in. Apologies), the show is about a family of 7 children with a very dysfunctional family.

The story starts off with the birth of 43 children, who were all born on the same day, to women who were never pregnant before that single day. A wealthy entrepreneur and well known scientist, known as Sir Reginald Hargreeves, came and purchased 7 of the 43, and began the Umbrella Academy, raising the children and hone their powers, to Save the World.

The children were given numbers, and as such, to the outside world, this is what they were known as. Number 7, Vanya Hargreeves never really showed any signs of powers when she was little, so she wasn't ever seen by the public. The rest of them showcase various powers, some of which grow as the series progresses.

The first part of the story starts off when their father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves dies, and the siblings (having been estranged for the past few years) have come back for his funeral.

The show follows the general plan of a super-hero story, but with elements in it that make it seem far more realistic than its comic book counterpart.
The characters are properly fleshed out, and we get to see how these characters have developed. As the viewer, we get to see the present time events, as they happen, but then we also get glimpses into the pasts of the Hargreeves children.

When the team of the Umbrella Academy reminisce, we see how things were when they were children, and still going out and saving the world as a team. When we get to see Number 5 (only known as "The Boy") and his memories of HIS past, we get to see the future.

The story starts off a little slowly, introducing the characters, one by one, but doing so in a way that isnt expositional. The main elements of the tale, begins with the resurgence of the missing Number 5, a time traveller, who had disappeared for about 17 years, due to a miscalculated time-jump into the future. There he discovers that the world has ended and that he was the only person still alive.
Staying in the post apocalyptic world till he turns 58, he keeps trying to get back till he succeeds eventually. However, due to some potential miscalculation, his body reverts back to that of a 15 year old boy, the state when he first made the time jump.

On coming back, we, as the viewers are told that the world is about to end in exactly seven days, and that number 5 is on the case. And this is where the MAIN part of the story begins.

Anything further than this is best enjoyed by watching the episodes themselves.


One thing I noticed in this series, is how the team interacts with each other. Its so obvious that they're siblings, that makes you wonder why more shows dont show familial interactions more accurately like this. Just those moments of "Attaboy" when people use their powers in more fun ways, as a way to encourage their siblings, and the number of small and petty fights between them in the middle of a high tension situation.
Klaus, Number 4, the one who can talk to dead people, is easily one of the best things to come out of this show, for who he is as a person, and what development he goes through. Some of the best lines in this shows come from this man alone.

The direction is amazing, as we are able to move seamlessly from one scene to another without wondering how we got there. We have smooth transitions between the past/present/future timelines, all the while, seeing it how the team sees it in their heads. The CGI is perfectly on point, and at no point during the whole season do you question the existence of the Butler, Pogo.

The show does end on a cliffhanger, but it's par for the course considering:
1) It's a super hero show, and nothing will ever end peacefully on a super hero show without foreshadowing things for future seasons. (Looking at you, Flash)
2) In today's day and age, we have things like unnecessary cancellations of good tv shows that the public doesnt want to stop watching, such as Brooklyn 99, and Lucifer, and things that are utterly pointless and boring keep going on and on, well past their "best by" date. Stuff like this is what is needed to keep networks from unjustly cancelling shows which shouldn't be cancelled (such as Deception)

It has been renewed for a second season, and most people who have seen the show are looking forward to it.



Unfortunately, while doing some amount of research into this show, I also managed to read the comics that this show is based on, and my feelings on the source material is that of dismay.
Not because the source is bad or something, but that it does tend to have bleaker outcomes than what the the TV adaptation shows. The characters are a bit more untethered, and are designed to fit more of a stereotype, than actual characters.
The first volume of the comics is called "Apocalypse Suite", and the second is called "Dallas". You notice that when you read the two volumes, that there are changes in the stories, such as appearances of certain characters from the second volume, since the show is mostly based on the first alone.

This is to say that the show's creators do take some liberties in not strictly following the comic book's storyline.
For one thing, we dont really ever see the previous villains that the Umbrella Academy faced when they were children (which I feel is for the better). We also see more about the relationships between the children as they grew up with the flashbacks, which aren't seen as in detail in the comics.
There are characters missing of course, such as their butler, and most of the plot of the first volume of the comics has been changed, again for the better.
I feel that retconning the story, or rather, making it as an adaption, rather than a strict following of the comic storyline was a wise move, as it now has potential for a less bleak outcome of the whole event.

Overall, it's a brilliant show, and a must watch.
Personally, I found that the events of the first episode move a little too slowly regarding introducing the characters, but others found it alright. Others also had a problem wherein the latter half of the season moved a little too slowly regarding the plot, to their liking. There were a couple of red herrings thrown in for good measure, but I feel that its more indicative of changes in the timeline, thanks to the efforts of Number 5, than negligence or bad writing.

I'll write a more in-depth review of this series once more people have seen it, since the show only came out on Netflix on the 15th of Feb this year, and its not even half a month in.

Till then,
I recommend that you pick up this series as quickly as possible.

From left to right: Vanya (Number 7), Number 5, Michael (Number 4), Allison (Number 3), Diego (Number 2) and Luther (Number 1). Ben (Number 6), is not here, and you'll need to see the tv story, or read the comics to find out why.

(Yes, that's how they look like in the comics)

Cheers,
Ryan.