Learn something every day.

And what other games can say that?

Answer: Only American McGee’s Bad Day LA.

Damn that un-unseeable image.

With the exception of Lamb, who I just found smug and annoying, I think the basic structure holds together reasonably well. The first game was much, much more fractured – the business with the sub near the start, the unconvincing way that Fontaine brings Jack to the city in the first place, the completely sealed off mini-storylines in places like Fort Frolic… it relied on the atmosphere to hold it together, but when you looked back on it, it was a bit of a mess. A brilliant idea, a glorious setting, I love Bioshock to pieces, but ultimately pretty incoherent. Even the mind control element is pretty comprehensively broken by the way that the game doesn’t change even slightly once you’re freed of it, and even then, Fontaine never really uses it. I did a video shortly after it came out, showing the scene where Atlas demands you give him control of Rapture, which is just Jack standing there for centuries, followed by a shot of a gravestone reading “Died Telling Ken Levine To Suck It”. (Not subtle, but I know from my server logs that some folks at Irrational liked it)

Bioshock 2 clearly shares the ‘design poured onto an awesome location’ design style, but its vignettes connect up far better, it doesn’t rely as much on gimmicks to sell its plot points, and it does a much better job at selling most of its locations as places that could actually have worked. In the first game for instance, there’s no way that Arcadia could actually have been the Centre Parcs of Rapture – it’s far too small. Bioshock 2 makes much better use of its space – even if it’s still cramped, areas like Pauper’s Drop and Siren Alley convey the illusion of civilisation. Likewise, in the chaotic world of Bioshock 1, there’s no way the Splicer society could have survived, which gets dealt with by adding the Family, and scenes like the church or the talk with Grace that show that there is some semblence of culture down here when everyone’s not trying to rip out the interloper’s throat.

It does have problems. A lot of them. It’s very confused over exactly who is part of the Family and who are just regular Splicers, or if there’s even any difference. Tenenbaum just vanishing after her cameo appearance is really stupid. Sofia Lamb is a cretin. But overall, while it’s both less arty and less inspiring as a story than Bioshock’s initial tale of how Rapture fell and the factions that tore it up, I’d say it actually holds together much better as a plot. It definitely helps though if you can think of Eleanor as the main character rather than Subject Delta – at heart, it’s her story, not yours, in much the same way as the first game was about Rapture and its collapse much more than Jack’s brainwashed adventures in the ruins.

The thing that always impressed me about the first BioShock is the clean and simple commentary it gave on your role as a player – most of the time blindly doing things in games because you’re told to (and because you’re playing a game, ofcourse). You can only make such a point once and you have to have such a grand point to make in the first place, but that’s why the first BioShock will always tower over BioShock 2 for me. (I acknowledge this is rather unfair – like I said, I never expected BS2 to have a bit of meta-commentary in it, then again, I never saw BioShock as a franchise.)

The one real thing I have against BS2 is that the storytelling is awfully muddled and downright clumsy, at times. It generally feels like a game thought up by someone completely enamored of the first game, breathlessly trying to emulate it but without having the real skills to hit the same depths.

Gonna look at this after I played it. From what I read about Bioshock 2 so far I’m going to like this more than the first part, at least gameplay wise.