By now, you've seen the excellent 15 minutes of Bioshock Infinite. There's no need to beat around the bush; it looks stunning, and you know it. After all, Rapture was such a hauntingly unique experience. Why would Columbia fail to be? Well, look beyond the Bioshock title and there's surprisingly little to connect the two worlds. What's different to the frightening shadows of Rapture in this new, floating dystopia?

While Rapture was a sodden, dank and murky-blue mess of rust, Columbia is unmistakably beautiful. Classic American architecture gently baked in soft sunlight, surrounded by clear blue skies; you wouldn't expect Infinite to be scary. But rather than mysterious shadows and sudden sounds, Bioshock Infinite takes a new direction; the frightful nature of Columbia comes from the fact there's blood in the streets, dead bodies piling up, and all in what looks to be a perfect holiday resort. That juxtaposition - combined with the explicit, in-your-face fear from the crazed Vox Populi - create an entirely new mood for Bioshock; Columbia was built to fanfare and celebration, rather than pieced together underground. Now, the dream is going wrong before your very eyes.

The original Bioshock was a solitary game. Fleeting accompaniment from friendly robots couldn't do much to stave off the heavy weight of loneliness; the sole survivor of a plane crash, you creep in the shadows as a lone wolf, with only the dulcet Irish tones of Atlus to guide you. It created tension, an eerie atmosphere, and meant you immediately formed a strong bond with your only friend. Which is why it hurt so much when he betrayed you.


Infinite is the polar opposite. Elizabeth is a constant companion, able to both shout out help and magic up some cover whilst in combat. Booker himself spouts more than a few lines of dialogue, acting as a narrator whilst also channelling the feelings and opinions of the player, be that "let's help the horse" or "LEMME SHOOT IT IN THE EYE". The increased human interaction in all forms, from saving distressed postmen to staring down a Vox Populi henchman, means Columbia feels more alive and vibrant, but even more terrifying to most; a crazy lady sweeping up leaves next to a burning building is a far more haunting image than a Splicer in a dark corridor.

Combat in Bioshock was always chaotic and messy. Even with the many steps forward in Bioshock 2, allowing you to handle both guns and plasmids, you'd spray your Tommy Gun fire all over the room and lay down a constant stream of zaps in the hope of pinning the agile Splicers. Enemies took quite a bit of damage, and thus needed a good beating in order to put to rest for good.

Maybe it's the thin air up in Columbia, but these enemies are far more susceptible to lead. The gunplay is now more tactical and finely-tuned; headshots produce grim blobs of brain matter, while a single shotgun blast is enough to send someone flying. Plasmids also seem to have undergone a silent overhaul; in the past, electricity and fire flew freely around the battlefield. Now, plasmids are sparingly used to great effect, and Elizabeth can alter the environment to your advantage. The Murder of Crows is thrown into a crowd as a distraction for a quick escape, alongside a new ability that seems to lift the Vox Populi and leave them hanging in the air for an easy headshot.


Do you want to save some slightly creepy little girls, or shoot them right in their ugly little faces? That was pretty much the only choice you had in Bioshock, and you had to make it about fifteen times over. If you'd chosen one way, you'd probably choose that same way throughout the whole game, unless you wanted to forgo a happy/evil ending and an achievement or two. As far as choices in games go, it was bog-standard.

Put an animal out of its misery, or attempt to save it? Stop an innocent man getting lynched, or let fate play out? Do you want some cover, more weapons, or a quick escape while being attacked? Every minute, it seems, you have a decision to make in Infinite, whether it be minor or major. The effect of this is not only a unique experience that allows you more space for personal play, but also distracts from a clear good/bad ending or rewards. Infinite wants you to make quick decisions that truly reflect how you want to play.

Why was Just Cause 2 an absolute pleasure to jump in to? Was it the outrageous destruction, the mental physics or the beautiful tropical setting? Those certainly helped, but the key reason for the smile on your face was the fact that it was so easy to get around. You zip from mountain to valley in a matter of seconds, blissfully free-falling as you go. It's just fun.


Columbia's big. And it's sprawling. And it's so beautiful you want to see as much of it as possible. The new Skylines allow for rapid movement in between towering American architecture, giving combat a sense a scale not usually seen, least of all in linear FPSs.

Do the meanacing streets of Bioshock Infinite make your blood run cold, or would you rather be stuck under the sea? Put your comments below and make sure to follow our Twitter for all the latest.

Labels: 2011, 360, Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite, Microsoft Windows, PC, PlayStation 3, PS3, Xbox 360

How do you make a story about shooting people interesting? Whilst video games have long been nearly synonymous with violence, they’ve never been as synonymous with shooting a gun as they are today. Games are often pixelated representations of conflict at its boiling point: they take place at a moment that has already exhausted every method of resolution not including the death of other human beings. Where is the room for a story in a conflict that’s always at its breaking point?

At first look, I’m inclined to be impressed by the new Bioshock Infinite trailer. There’s a lot of glitz and twists on the idea of aligning crosshairs, shooting and killing people. There are new mechanics to bring objects into existence from other dimensions, new guns to shoot at people, rollercoaster expressways to ride and riots to start. Technologically, these things have never existed in a video game before. We’ve been able to shoot people in the face for years now, but we’ve never been able to do it in a floating city, and we’ve never done it so fancifully in such a way.

That construction is what made me ultimately not care about the original Bioshock, a game about shooting people with flourishes that made it feel different. It too was full of things that, technologically, we hadn’t done before either. There were audio logs to listen to, plasmids to toy with, and an underwater city to explore. Bioshock’s uniqueness as a shooter came from its narrative twists, its commentary on utopian society, its Randian roots. So in the end, the most memorable and lasting parts of the original Bioshock were not all the ways you could kill people, but the atmosphere of its underwater city, Rapture, and the story surrounding your trawl through it.

I suspect Bioshock Infinite will work in much the same way, and that’s disappointing. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where I feel disappointed whenever I’m given a gun in video games. It's not as interesting to shoot people as the amount of shooting in video games would suggest. When a video game hands you a gun, it’s likely the developers’ conceit that it’s hard to entertain you and tell a story at the same time. How much easier would it be to instead let you just shoot everything in sight?

Surely, there's a way, but the problems are rife and deeply ingrained. For instance, telling a story about a character with a gun creates a discrepancy between the character depicted in a game’s cutscenes, and the character you paint during gameplay. This problem is infamous in the Uncharted series: Nathan Drake, a supposed everyman, who - in cutscenes - can love a woman, speak Latin and decipher hundred year-old treasure maps, is reduced to a murderous war machine in gameplay. For such an everyman, Drake has a lot of blood on his hands.

Why is it that, in video games, the most emotionally embracing and impactful moments happen only in non-interactive cutscenes? One of the best parts of the original Bioshock was its lack of cutscenes, creating a world that was immersive sheerly because it never took you out of it. What excites me the most about Bioshock Infinite is, like its predecessor, its tinges of ideas more interesting than merely shooting people, and the prospect that I may actually participate in them. Watching this trailer sparks some hope that perhaps Infinite can do something to end that disconnect between the character in cutscenes and the character in gameplay. Maybe I can do more than just kill.

My favourite part of this new trailer for Infinite is the part where Elizabeth comes across a dying horse. As she consoles the horse and discovers that she may be able to heal it, you’re given the choice to euthanise it. “He’s in pain,” says Elizabeth. “Not for long,” says Booker, the player’s character, as he cocks his pistol. I have killed a horse before in a video game - it happened fecklessly countless times in Red Dead Redemption - but I’ve never been put into an environment that encouraged much thought about killing one, nor given the choice to do it in front of someone pretty and naive, someone who cared about the animal in a way I thought foolish.



For that moment, Bioshock Infinite isn’t a game about shooting things with a narrative that surrounds it. In games where it is your primary task to shoot, the story will always play second fiddle to the task of killing. The player's mind will always be overflowing with the mental intricacies of the mechanics leading up to a kill, thinking more about cover, bullet drop, ammo management and enemy position than they ever will about plot crescendos, foreshadowing, characterisation or any other basic tenet of storytelling.

How wonderful, then, to have a moment in a shooter where the mechanic may still involve aiming a gun, but yet feel more than the standard face-off between me and the faceless enemy NPCs, managing my ammo or super powers, or even the basic task of aligning a reticule over a bad guy’s face. Instead, it’s something much more simple: a conflict about my capacity to care irrationally for an animal for the sake of another person, someone I might be beginning to care about. In that instance, Bioshock’s core gameplay of pulling the trigger becomes the narrative, rather than just being the bait that tugs you towards the it. For a moment, shooting actually tells a story.

Unfortunately, that instance takes up perhaps twenty seconds of the trailer. The other fourteen minutes are the more technologically-impressive displays of the ways in which Irrational Games have succeeded in making that basic task of killing other people more entertaining. By letting players move anywhere within a battlefield by way of the Skyline, the rollercoaster track that connects the city, killing people becomes a much more entertaining and dynamic affair.

Battlefields with open spaces aren’t new, but the scale and traversal mechanics of this one seem to be. It’s dazzling to think of the code behind such a presentation, something that can render a whole lively world while a player, an agent of chaos, rushes through it on his or her whims; a gigantic world responding to your every movement. It’s all on a scale larger and more explosive than we’ve seen before.

But time is not kind to that which impresses through scale. We will always be able to create a larger scale for ourselves, one that outdoes our previous efforts in every way. If we set out to create the largest, most technically-impressive world, that can handle thousands of computations at a single moment, it’ll be outdone by our next, bigger, technical feat, which handles millions of computations in moments shorter.

The original Super Mario Bros is one of the greatest games of all time, and perhaps the greatest to this day. It hasn’t endured that honour because it is technically impressive. Super Mario Bros was the dictionary for the ideas we reach for and expect out of games today: scaling difficulty, left-to-right platforming, moving from world to world, boss fights, and - most importantly - the princess in the castle. The idea of a journey towards an eventual end goal was not something we’d had before in video games, and we are now better for having learned that structure.

In the same way that Mario became remembered for its language of video games, I suspect Bioshock Infinite won’t be remembered for its language of killing people. For the most part, we are no better for the additions Irrational have made to our lexicon of murder. We can now kill people on rollercoaster tracks and use inter-dimensional ammo and shoot crows at people, but none of these are as interesting as deciding on a single pull of the trigger to end an animal’s life.

In all likelihood, Bioshock Infinite will not be a great game. It will be a good, mechanically-sound game that will, at the end of the day, be about shooting things, and there will be a story that happens around you and passes you by. You will spend most of your time killing things in Infinite, and there is nothing wrong with that. We have always been killing people in video games, and we will probably continue to kill people for the rest of video games’ existence. But maybe someday we’ll find a way to kill that's imbued with things that actually matter to us. I like to think that day will come - perhaps it can start with killing a horse.

Labels: 2011, 2K Games, Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite, Feature, Irrational Games, Parker Scott Mortensen

May is drawing to a close, and here at GGTL, summer is beating at our doors with Mjolnir-esque intensity. Three sweet months of R&R are imminent, but, being gamers, we don’t want to waste our leisure time in the ordinary, boring travel spots, and neither should you. As such, we’ve assembled a list of five video game vacation destinations for you to visit instead of the usual, yearly trip to Bristol.

1: Crocodile Isle – Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (Virtual Console – 800 Wii Points)

A good, balanced vacation boasts a wide variety of activities to partake in. Crocodile Island offers a whole host of things to do across six distinct locations. History buffs will enjoy touring the island’s authentic Kremling galleon, as well as one of Crocodile Isle’s many historic castles (be careful of any low ceilings). Thrill seekers can visit the local amusement park, Krazy Kremland, or the haunted manor in Gloomy Gulch (still genuinely haunted!). Steadfast adventurers can explore Crocodile Isle’s natural volcano setting, or discover the deep jungle antics of the Lost World. Forget the factories and mine shafts of previous vacations—Crocodile Isle is the spot you’ll really go ape over.

2: Paradise City – Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box (PSN, Steam – $19.99)

Motor enthusiasts looking for a summer getaway won’t find a better spot than Paradise City. Leisurely cruise through the bustling streets, stopping by the stadium for a Wildcats game, or check out the Naval Yard for a bit of sight-seeing. Unwind by driving through Paradise City’s many hills and mountains, or stop by Silver Lake for a restful soak. There’s even a tropical island destination right across the suspension bridge! The best way to take in the sights? An aerial view, of course — courtesy of Paradise City’s many jumps and ramps.

3: Rapture – BioShock (Xbox Live Games on Demand, Steam - $19.99)

Forget a condo by the ocean — how about a condo in the ocean? For those who want to spend their holiday in peace and quiet, the ocean floor city of Rapture offers a quality, 1950s art deco style that’s sure to please even the most jaded art fan. Enjoy Rapture’s many gambling and hotel districts, and gaze in awe at the sub-Pacific setting. Management has let things go a little in the past few years, but it’s not like the place can just fall apart overnight, right?

4: Uncharted Micronesian island – Far Cry (Steam - $9.99)

Palm tree, blue skies, cool ocean breeze, gently crashing surf, the sound of bullets whizzing by your head — Far Cry’s small archipelago truly has everything for a relaxing vacation. You’ll never gain a better appreciation for the island’s lovely foliage than as you stalk through it, desperately avoiding your enemy’s line of sight. Drink in the sights from one the island’s many vistas, then give that mercenary who’s in your sights a permanent vacation of his own. How about a nice ride on a jet-ski ride downriver? Just make sure to watch out for any incoming rockets! After vacationing to Far Cry’s tiny, mercenary-run island, you’ll wonder why you never went sooner.

5: Treasure Trove Cove – Banjo-Kazooie (Xbox Live Arcade - 1200 Microsoft Points)

Ahoy there! If your ideal vacation has you combing the depths for buried treasure, look no further than Treasure Trove Cove. Sail with Captain Blubber, captain of the Salty Hippo and all-around crybaby, as he searches for sunken booty, but be sure to watch out for sharks. Dance a jaunty beat to the island’s steel drum rhythms as you roam the beach collecting shells — some may be bigger than others! For something a bit more scenic, visit the island’s lighthouse and gaze at the unfortunately-low draw distance of the environment. It’s a pirate’s life in Treasure Trove Cove, so prepare to have your timbers shivered like nobody’s business.

Any gaming spot you’re booking with your travel agent this year? Sound off in the comments! The summer’s young, and there’s plenty of time for even more travel...

Labels: 2011, Andrew Testerman, Banjo-Kazooie, Bioshock, Burnout Paradise, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, Far Cry