'Shock Series Index

Not as rigorous as my later analysis pieces, with currently no screenshot supplementation and very little talking about eg individual enemy types, this is a series of posts primarily touching on Bioshock and System Shock 2, and secondarily touching on System Shock 1 and to a lesser extent Bioshock 2. It was originally intended to also cover the intense awfulness of Bioshock Infinite, but while I have some semi-complete drafts lying around, I'm not sure I'll ever actually get to completing them and publishing them; the game is awful, talking about it is depressing, playing it is antithetical to joy and leaves me feeling like someone succeeded in draining some of my intelligence via how intensely stupid it is and how completely disrespectful of its audience it is.

Regardless, if you want the 'too long; didn't read' version, I think System Shock 1 is a brilliantly-constructed game (Albeit severely hampered by being an old game that lacks many later quality-of-life improvements the industry has standardized), while System Shock 2 and Bioshock 1 are nonsense plots that try -and fail- to recapture System Shock 1's greatness because they have zero understanding of why it did the things it did, what purposes they served, etc. Bioshock 2 is actually a surprisingly good game in its own right, even with inevitably inheriting various of Bioshock 1's problems because it's fundamentally using Bioshock 1 as a base for the engine, the enemies, the setting, etc.

If you want the detailed version of the above conclusions where I talk about how the plots are constructed and all, well, that's what this index is for.

Incidentally, this index came years after the posts themselves first went up, and exists entirely because in those intervening years the posts actually keep getting positive engagement in spite of being a huge pain to actually find and being pretty negative on games the mainstream opinions are extremely positive on. I'd originally intended to just let these posts languish, honestly, but if people keep thinking they're good, I feel I should make them make more accessible. And so here we are.

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Part and parcel of these posts being from early in Vigaroe's life before I got my feet under me, these posts go through the series in a strange order; instead of going chronologically (Whether forwards or backwards), I start with Bioshock 1, move on to Bioshock 2, then jump back to System Shock 2, then back up again to talk more directly about System Shock 1, and would've ultimately done Bioshock Infinite last. This is, admittedly, not too different from the order I experienced the games; just switch System Shocks 1 and 2 and you have the order I encountered the games. It's still a pretty strange order, though.

Bioshock posts

Fractured World. In which I cover one of the core narrative problems with Bioshock 1: that the nature of the world, the nature of the story that takes place there, is handled in an inconsistent manner, where the beginning of the game is mostly telling one story in one setting, and by the end of things Bioshock has switched to telling a completely different story in a very different world, all while it tries to pretend it didn't quietly change its premise on you.

Ayn Rand Was Right!... Hold On. On the kind of level most people pay attention to, Bioshock 1 reads like a criticism of the Objective philosophy. On layers I think matter more, though, it's really quite persistent about presenting Objectivism as a superhumanly perfect philosophy who's only flaw is non-believers ruin it by not believing. It's pretty gross!

The Twist. Bioshock has a Twist; if you've played through it yourself, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. It's also an incredibly dumb, nonsensically handled twist, where the story has to cheat heavily to have the twist hidden from the player, and where once you know about the twist many events make much less sense than before you learned it, which is the exact opposite of what a twist should be doing. This post is laying the situation out in detail.

Incredulous. The narrative problem with Bioshock 1 where I'm most baffled at having never seen another person complain about it, this post covers how Bioshock 1 simply won't let the player even mindlessly sit back and take in the plot, because it insists on regularly pulling the player out of the story with moments that are basically impossible to maintain credulity in the face of.

Little Sisters and Tenenbaum. The system by which the game attempts to pass moral judgment on the player, it fails horribly at this task because thinking about the situation even slightly realistically reveals its dichotomy is false. I also touch on how a specific late-game sequence makes no sense to be happening at all and makes even less sense than that if you actually have cleaved to the game's poorly thought-out notion of being 'good'.

Big Daddies. In which I finally have some nice things to say about Bioshock 1, as the pairing of Little Sistrs and Big Daddies is, as a gameplay experience, genuinely notably good. I still don't understand why Bioshock Infinite made no attempt to bring them back; they're unambiguously Bioshock 1's strongest point.

Personhood in Enemies. I do actually like how Bioshock makes a reasonably competent effort to make your enemies feel like people, albeit people who are insane and hate you on sight, rather than just letting them be relentless robots who feel no pain and no fear and only really exist as Video Game Enemies for the player to murder. It's a rare accomplishment worthy of praise.

Bioshock 2 posts

The First 10 Minutes. A bit of a comparison in how Bioshock 1 and 2 compare in their storytelling ability via the example of their opening moments: Bioshock 1 starts out intriguing very briefly, then becomes boring tedium that makes no sense to be engaging with, whereas Bioshock 2 immediately establishes a bunch of critical information amd does so in an elegant, effective manner. This contrast in their respective openings is pretty representative of how the remainder of their stories plays out, too.

Connectivity. In which I end up talking a lot about Vita Chambers, and more specifically how Bioshock 1 mishandles them about as badly as possible, while Bioshock 2 manages the shocking feat of bringing them back, making them more centrally important to the narrative, and yet less of a problem for the narrative -in spite of performing no retcons or otherwise relatively directly trying to fix why Bioshock 1's Vita Chambers are narratively terrible. This is honestly one of Bioshock 2's most impressive feats, in terms of its narrative design.

Eleanor. One reason I really like Bioshock 2 is that it takes the trope of Rescue The Girl and then doesn't simply reduce said girl to a helpless waif who can't do anything on her own. She does need the player's help, but where a lot of Rescue The Girl plots end up with this feeling like the girl isn't so much 'trapped' as 'too lazy to try to escape', Bioshock 2 ends up feeling like a cooperative effort with Eleanor. It's a pleasant surprise, especially for a sequel to Bioshock 1.

Choice and Parenthood. Like Bioshock 1, how you respond to Little Sisters in Bioshock 2 factors into the ending you get... but where Bioshock 1 decides a man willing to Harvest even 2 Little Sisters is a complete monster who'd nuke the world (???) for no clear reason, Bioshock 2 instead makes a point about how children watch their parents and try to learn from their example. (It helps that Bioshock 2 adds another axis to 'what affects the ending')

Flaws. Alas, Bioshock 2 is not perfect, however massive an improvement over Bioshock 1 it might be. That said, most of its flaws are relatively minor and focused on narrow elements of gameplay and/or on 'feel'.

System Shock 2 posts

Hybrid Lack of Vigor. I contextualize why I covered Bioshock 1 before System Shock 2, explain how the world had made System Shock 2 sound like an amazing game I personally would love in part to contextualize that my negativity on the game isn't by virtue of going in with low expectations (Not that I ever explicitly say so in the post itself), and then get into how multiple elements of the game are trying to hybridize RPG design with FPS design and arriving at a design that would be vastly improved by simply cutting out the RPG elements and leaving it as a reasonably straightforward FPS.

Gameplay Arc. In which I talk about how the RPG mechanics theoretically create replayability opportunities by virtue of 'play through the game again, but with a different build' potentially producing an interestingly different experience... but unfortunately the game experiemce has a clear progression no matter your build that limits the ability for different builds to be meaningfully different experiences. The sad thing is the arc in question is actually unusual for an FPS and moderately interesting of an experience; I'd be praising it if, again, System Shock 2 had been an FPS with none of these RPG elements tacked on.

Aligned Priorities. In which I talk about another reason why different builds don't produce meaningfully different experiences: because the game constructs itself so the way you respond to a given threat is essentially the same no matter your build. There's a couple qualifiers, and to be fair a melee build really is very different from other builds, but you mostly have the same basic response to a given threat regardless of build, even if technically the details are different.

Double-dipping. System Shock 2 has a lot of cases of two mechanics individually working to push toward the same outcome, such that both being present is just kind of pointless. This post is for walking through that issue.

Psi Gameplay. Your space wizard mechanics are poorly-considered. I'm not terribly harsh on this as this is a type of mechanic the industry has always struggled with; you can't just steal and refine a functional model if everybody around you is also making terrible models instead of functional models. It's still one more way System Shock 2 isn't actually notably impressive, though.

OS Upgrades. A mechanic I thought sounded really cool, and then I actually played the game and discovered it's horribly-balanced such that it's mostly 'pick the good options and ignore the terrible options'.

Class Issues. As part of its half-baked RPG elements, System Shock 2 directs you to pick a 'class' and then customize yourself a bit beyond that, akin to picking a class in Dungeons and Dragons and then customizinf the details a bit. As with all of System Shock 2's other RPG-isms, this is poorly-handled and largely hurts the game. It also involves an 'immersive' tutorial that is wildly misleading on how key elements of the game will turn out to actually work.

OSA and The Many. This is where I turn attention away from System Shock 2's many gameplay problems and focus on its even more severe narrative problems. This post is specifically about the deeply baffling decision to make the primary antagonist perform secret infiltration via psychic control (Which is reasonable on its own) alongside explicitly filling the setting with psychic secret police who literally monitor people's thoughts. (So how did they completely miss the psychic infiltration?) The starting point is baffling, and the details go out of their way to shoot down any way for the player to fill in with things so they manage to make sense anyway.

XERXES. I sort of like the idea of a SHODAN parallel in the mould of XERXES, but the details are layers of bizarre and non-functional.

SHODAN and Cyber Modules. SHODAN is mishandled by System Shock 2 on basically every level imaginable. This post also touches on how deeply opposed System Shock 2 is to System Shock 1 on a key philosophical level, which frankly is probably a big part of why System Shock 2's plot is riddled with the flaws it has, and the details are worryingly consistent with how Bioshock 1 superficially critivizes Objectivism as a philosophy while on significant layers exhorting it as a supetior philosophy for superior people. Also this post technically spoils a major twist of the game, but part of how System Shock 2's plot is shoddily contructed is it spoils said twist itself immediately.

What Could Have Been. It's amazing how much System Shock 2 would be improved by having the player be a loyal cyborg minion of SHODAN's. There's very few changes that would be required to switch to this, too! Alas.

Audio Logs. In which I discuss how audio logs in System Shock 1 performed several bits of key utility and generally were constructed to plausibly be things real humans in the setting made, whereas audio logs in System Shock 2 no longer serve any important game design function (Their functions have been achieved elsewhere) and the logs themselves are unbelievable nonsense no human being would actually create in-universe and they actually destroy any ability to be sympathetic to the lazy, self-destructive morons they are in fact trying to generate sympathy towards. I also briefly touch on how Bioshock 1 replicates the System Shock 2 problems in marginally less egregious form.

Something I didn't touch on in the post itself is that my impression is that System Shock 2 and Bioshock 1 are the primary reason audio logs entered mainstream popularity in FPSes and whatnot. I suspect this partly due to timing, partly due to the games in question being inexplicably highly-praised in general, and partly because the problems with audio logs in System Shock 2 and Bioshock 1 are widely replicated in other games, even though audio logs really don't have to be this exact brand of poorly-used nonsense. If I'm correct in this suspicion, that's really quite frustrating, as it means these poorly-designed games have poisoned hundreds (thousands?) of other games that would've been better games if they hadn't wasted development resources on replicating all the awful design of audio logs in these games.

Science Ghosts!!! Yes, this merits triple exclamation points. It's that awful. Why was this done? Why did somebody think this made any sense to do? Why did nobody see the redundancy with the audio logs? Why did the devs decide to justify your ability to see its psychic ghosts with your cybernetc rig while ensuring the player is allowed to have psychic abilities that make much more sense to blame for this? Why did Bioshock 1 and Bioshock Infinite do their own Science Ghosts that make even less sense than System Shock 2's Sciemce Ghosts?

System Shock 1 posts

Behind Enemy Lines. In which I discuss the very interesing and effective design purpose of System Shock 1's revive-for-free mechanic, and how the later games clearly missed the point completely.

Hybrid Vigor. In which I discuss how System Shock 1 hybridizes RPG conventions and FPS design to create something unique, interesting, and quite functional. This also involves some discussion on video game RPG history, as I suspect a lot of people nowadays are entirely unfamiliar with the classic first-person dungeon crawlers that System Shock 1 was drawing on. Certainly, reviewers at the time it came out seem to have ncorrectly interpreted it as Yet Another Doom Clone...

And that's all in this particular series, at least for now.