and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won't be any thieves.
If these three aren't enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course.
The coding I had on my plate was never getting done, so now it is officially being delegated away. I guess that means that I have gone the whole way and am entirely of the non-productive class. (Other than design, which means that I get to write down how things should be down without having to do things myself.)
I wonder how long until I forget how to code?
I finished "Bioshock" last night. I really found it to be a disappointment.
Loved:
- The fact that they tried to make the game "about" something more interesting than space marines vs. demons.
- That they really got both 40s era dialog and Objectivist philosophy right.
- The art deco decor.
Lots of stuff. The "splicers" all look mostly the same, and are really only differentiated by the attacks they use. The game has a heavy quasi-RPG character improvement system, but this is completely undercut by the way the "splicers" ramp up in power during the game. So while you are far more powerful at the end than at the beginning, it is hard to notice as you are still fighting all the same monsters.
At the "normal" setting, I found the game a bit too easy. The "Vita chambers" essentially destroy all pressure about the game as you can essentially keep respawning until you overcome. The last boss battle was one of the easier I've encountered. (And a coworker also found it dead easy, so its not just me.) It seems like there's a general gaming trend to coddle the player. For instance, at one point, you are told that your task is to protect a little sister. Yet this is completely undercut because if you fail at this, the game doesn't end. Instead, you are just given a replacement to protect.
The much vaunted "choice" is not much of one. The game tells you that you will be penalized if you make the "good" choice over the "evil", but as far as I can tell, the penalty is so mild that it hardly matters. I'd hoped that they might do something interesting with divergent goals depending on your choice, but nope, you just get end scene A or end scene B. It hardly matters.
You also never really got the sense that "Rapture" was an actual operating concern given that everywhere you went, you only ever saw completely homicidal splicers. You were told that these were driven into a rage by too many plasmids, but I suspect the irony that you are trained to attack everything on sight just like the splicers do was unintentional.
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