At times you'll question how superstitious those who live on the backs of zeppelins really can be, however they seem to think that shooting live crows from your hands by drinking a bottle is passé, as a collective sigh can be heard from the citizens. Whereas in the original Bioshock you at least had the comfort of knowing the people you were killing have gone insane from splicing their genes so they can shoot fire and electricity out of their hands, in this game the only reason these people are hostile toward you is because you've been harolded a heretic, and later because you are mistaken for a ghost. Either way, the trope too is getting old. As insult to injury, Booker is another in a recent and long list of Take Two Games characters who can be summed up as "I'm kind of getting too old for this but I've got one last job to do." Why? Maybe Levine and other creative directors making games at Take Two feel like they're getting too old, or maybe they're trying to keep the 18-24 year old demographic from ten years ago cornered. And yet this experience is Booker's experience-his thoughts are my thoughts, and I am only along for the ride, the cold puppet hands to his confused and hardened mind. I thought Irrational Games could discuss these ideas about American imperialism, racism, our tendency to re-write history, as well as the misuse of organized religion, especially Christianity, as justification for violence. He doesn't suffer fools lightly, and he will quip about any number of situations as you experience them except for recognizing the tens of hundreds of people he mows down with his science-y magic hands and trigger finger. He's got a mysterious and dark past he can't escape from. ![]() He holds a gun over his shoulder on the box art. Instead of the series standard silent protagonist-Jack in I, Subjct Delta in II-you play Infinite as Booker DeWitt. This because the world, Columbia, doesn't make sense the way Rapture did. But they do so ineligantly, not because it's violent. With all these ideas swirling around, Bioshock Infinite does offer some interesting questions, if only because videogames rarely enter this territory. The other, the very same anti-foreigner, frenzied nationalism that Columbia practices fanatically. Perhaps most interesting of all is a museum in Columbia dedicated to the "Battle" at Wounded Knee and the Boxer Rebellion. I swear I saw a tutorial message at the beginning of the game that said I could avoid fights whenever possible, but those moments didn't happen in my playthrough. I had no choice but to kill them-men, distributing food to the poor. I can run away-which I did, but when I emerged from the bar I'd holed up in, they were waiting for me. This apparently was a storefront, and by stepping over an invisible line these men, whom I now realize were trying to distribute food, pulled out shotgun, engaging in combat with me. I saw something I wanted-a vial-just behind the man at the desk. One time in Finktown, a shanytown for factory workers, I saw a bunch of people in line for something that looked like a desk. The game holds the dejected view that either leader of either side are equally horrible, which is carried over again from the original Bioshock. ![]() But it just comes off a little brutish, potentially because just before and after meaningful moments in the story that play with the idea of racism, you have to mow down whichever side of this civil war isn't trying to kill you, be that Columbia's rich white policeforce or the down-trotten yet violent Irish and Black 99 percenters, Vox Populi. ![]() I can almost imagine Ken Levine, the game's creative director, sitting in on an early concept meeting, hands resting palm-to-palm just under his nose like a namaskar to one's brain. "But what if it's OK for us to talk about racism by making the city racist?" he questions, while one junior gameplay designer nods feverishly along in confused agreement.īioshock Infinite sets out to explore the issue of racism. And boy, are these people fucking racist. It has the highest rate of employment of sculptors of any city that ever existed. In Columbia, patriotism has given way to piety, and this city's leader is the figure-head of the cult, with the Founding Fathers becoming idols of worship. The question I continually asked while I was playing through Bioshock Infinite, which saw worldwide release late last month, was "why is this a Bioshock game?" The series, of course, has come to be known for Rapture, its gorgeous, deco-modernist, undersea utopia dystopia, along with the haunting whale groans of the iconic Big Daddy filling the flooded halls, and the maniacal denizens circling around you in the masquarade of their lost sanity. Only here, Infinite's setting has been replaced by Columbia, a floating city in the sky, a symbol of America's coming superpower-dom, taking place in 1912.
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