AMAAAZING Bioshock Cosplay At Aquarium [Geekologie]

The gameplay shows the firepower; the cinematics show a suspense factor to match. And pay attention to the final title card. Of course it’d behoove you to check back here on Thursday, because when an embargo breaks, we fix it!

Siren Alley Trailer [GameTrailers]

Five more days of pumpkin-loving left, Kotaku. Get ‘em done!

Despite the fact that the two giant puppets were part of France’s Royal de Luxe street theatre company performance entitled “The Berlin Reunion”, gamers can be forgiven if they thought a bit of Bioshock had come to life.

Many more wondrous pictures of the event can be found at Big Picture.

The Berlin Reunion [Big Picture at The Boston Globe, thanks Parker]

Ashley Davis’ dramatic reading of BioShock the Bedtime Story is compelling and moving, but ultimately serves only to underscore on terrible fact: no one reads me bedtime stories anymore. Forget live sex webcams. I want to start up a bedtime story live webcam service so no one has to spend another night falling asleep without story time.

I say that as a 23-year-old user and consumer of Mac products, too. It’s no fault of Feral, they can only buy the rights to games and then build the ports, a necessarily reactive process that takes a long time start to finish. But this announcement is grimace-inducing to the core Mac gaming community, all six of us, utterly forsaken by Cupertino. Every time I go into an Apple Store and see people perusing the games section, I stare at them the way one stares at a freshman earnestly debating the quad preacher.

Where was I? Oh yeah, BioShock, for the Mac, October 7. It’s $US49.95 in North America, £34.99 in the UK, €39.95 in Europe.

BioShock Hitting Mac Next Month [VG247]

Knights of the Old Republic was a four-star achievement in role playing games, but I do agree with Richard Naik at GameCritics. The choices you faced—even in the dialogue—lacked a lot of subtlety as to what they said about your character. It might have been a lot to ask of a game at the time, but you were still presented with a binary good/evil character, and games still have not evolved much more into shades of grey since then.

Naik brings inFamous, KOTOR, BioShock Mass Effect and Fallout 3, all of them acclaimed games, in for some criticism. The choices in inFamous were simply about power acquisition, he argues. Mass Effect let you be either a paragon of virtue or a belligerent jerk. And he even says the choice outcomes in BioShock “barely change the game at all,” although I disagree with that. Fallout 3 is the most open ended, but it leaves Naik wondering when, or if, a game will allow true open-ended decision making, and then react to that. Or has one already?

Decisions, Decisions [GameCritics, Sept. 16, 2009.]

The original Knights of the Old Republic is, as of the time of this writing, my favourite product of the Star Wars franchise. And its choice system generally serves the game well, but even a well-done implementation of choices such as this still leaves a somewhat odd aftertaste. To go down the evil path I have to make many choices throughout the game that lead me to the dark side, eventually leading to me becoming a cold, cruel, and calculating Sith Lord. But here’s the thing-would such an intelligent Sith Lord (as dictated by the game) really waste his/her time with senseless acts of brutality such as common mugging? I would imagine that an up-and-coming Sith Lord would try to use his victims to their fullest extent, then dispose of them when they no longer had value. Instead I found myself being a run-of-the-mill asshole, and that somehow led to me conquering the galaxy. The moral extremes of sainthood and belligerent sadism were extremely stark and awkward despite the quality of the story, leaving me to wonder how the ideal choice system would actually work.

Mass Effect (which has been getting lots of discussion time on this site lately) does a better job here, but the problem of moral extremes is still evident. Most of the time the evil choice is represented by a simple act of aggression instead of a more subtle cruelty or self-serving action. Now to be fair, such acts are more believably associated with the character of Commander Shepard rather than my character in Knights of the Old Republic. However, the basic problem still exists-I can’t be the scoundrel with a golden heart, only a universally loved hero. I can’t be the insidious mastermind, only an arrogant bully. While Mass Effect does present a better moral middle ground than many of its ilk, that path is largely dull and uninteresting. In order to access more conversation options I have to go towards one extreme or the other, meaning I have no real reason to toe the line in the middle. So now that we have an area between the two extremes, what next?

[...]Where does the evolution of player choices go from here? Someday I’d like to see a game where I can make virtually any choice in any situation within the bounds of the game world’s reason, and be rewarded or punished appropriately for it. Am I being too greedy? Is this impossible with currently existing technology?
- Richard Naik

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears every Saturday. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

You’re going to need plenty of cardboard, foam and a working drill—yes, that Big Daddy drill spins—plus you’re going to need to start, well, right about now. Krix’s D.I.Y. Big Daddy took him a good seven weeks to build, but that includes things like built-in fans, the aforementioned spinning drill arm and a serious attention to detail.

I imagine you could probably knock out something in six weeks, six and a half, tops, using his method.

Big Daddy (BioShock) [Volpin Props via Make]

Schyman is a great catch on EA’s part. His score to BioShock managed to subtly capture the conflict of the utopian society gone wrong in such a way that you barely even noticed there was music at times—it just melded with the experience, becoming part of the game. Hopefully he’ll be able to do the same with Dante. He certainly seems to have enjoyed himself at least.

“Scoring Dante’s Inferno was one of the most interesting and challenging projects I have ever tackled,” said Garry Schyman. “Literally being asked to score hell was fantastic especially once I saw the surrealistically frightening world that Visceral Games had developed. I thought long and hard about every piece of music I wrote to create something new, surprising and fitting. It has turned out to be one of the most creative experiences in my career.”

Sure beats my idea of having the entire game accompanied by Meatloaf tunes.