Notes On A Ten Year Anniversary Experience, Recorded from 3/20/23-3/24/23

playing on easy for the sake of speed

mysterious light house

would i be picking up and interpreting the foreshadowing as clearly if i didnt know there was a twist of some kind coming?

old timey music

dead guy with a bag on his head, first Gamer-y feeling thing

okay ringing the bells and then the big red light and fog horns coming through above the clouds is impressive. i like when games give you a sense of something bigger than you can imagine seeing

what do you call this thing that big budget first person western games do where they aren’t *technically* cutscenes but they lock your character in place and give you a tiny field of view to move around in. i guess its nice that the camera’s axes arent so wide i can accidentally miss the religious mantras and turn of the century americana that are what im supposed to be looking at

i know this game isnt explicitly about mormonism, but im getting extreme mormonism vibes

there was a flashback i thought was gonna be a cutscene but wasnt

these three statues of jefferson franklin and washington are kapital K Kitsch. on purpose?

passing the hot dog and lemonade stand and im reminded of a clip from another game i have seen but not played: one of the newer wolfenstein games where a black character recounts his early memories of jim crow era segregation when going to the movie theater with his mother. how far apart were these games?

they did put a lot of work into giving this place a very distinct lingo for its people. “he’s strong in the sword but a bit weak in the scroll and the key if you get my meaning.”

booker de witt sounds Generically Modern in a way i dont like by comparison

there’s a lot of stuff to just LOOK at in this game. its not bad

here’s a name i just came up with for a trope that bioshock games love: Utopian Superhuman Hubris. In any situation where an isolationist society is built on exclusionary elitism and the elimination of cultural difference, it won’t be long before somebody thinks things are so stable and peaceful you can just invent and start selling fucking super powers.

oh and i guess they also sell cigarettes to kids.

getting bogged down a little in the tutorial fair.

oh the heads and tails coin flipper people are the same as the ones from the row boat in the beginning maybe

the raffle

wow fuck these racist assholes

like i knew this was coming but. seriously

i dont get to give the raffle announcer a concussion by throwing the baseball at him thats bullshit

the only way that killing these cops would be better is if my character was black

i never like FPS games’ hurt arrows to point where the guy shooting you is, they’re always too hard to interpret especially since they happen after you’ve gotten shot and by that time my instinct is to just move in a direction until i feel i can figure out what the fuck is going on

goring cops with the blade thing is a lot more satisfying than using the gun, but im noticing that the animation is a canned melee killing animation is a lot less detailed than the first time you do it

met fire guy, killed fire guy, can shoot fire now.

i never used any of the plasmid powers in bioshock one because before i knew the game’s twist, i didnt like how it forced you to inject that first one. if i was in that situation i wouldn’t have anything to do with that kind of stuff. i hope the fire thing is good because i wasnt interested in the turret controlling vigor power

i would like this game better if you could lock on to enemies

okay we got some columbia backstory. i guess columbia did what the confederacy couldnt

“now i’m half a jew when i smell silver” or at least, that’s what i think the character is saying in this audio log.

i remember this whole sky hook thing was a game mechanic that they wanted to be much more ambitious but just couldnt get to work right. might go back and look at trailers to see what the original intention was

i muddled my way through another fight and met some…guess we’ll call them anti-racist white allies? they’re printing posters for “Columbia Friends of The Negro Society”

okay we got to the fraternal order of the raven building. i feel like i have no idea where i am or why it matters.

big statue of john wilkes booth

okay this is all the klansmen stuff. again, why am i not black?

FUCK yeah i just decapitated a klansman, thats the first thing that has unequivocally ruled.

whatever else i end up thinking of this game, no other first person shooter has given me the chance to teabag a klansman

comstock is a phrenologist and that just makes me think about how when this game came out, that kind of thing was not yet mainstream again.

oh this fucker just killed a chinese guy with crows, im going to tear his asshole inside out

oh this seemed like a boss fight? i guess not. got the crow power

i’ll say this, as someone who grew up with the indiana jones movies, cartoonish historical depictions of fascism and racism *are* my go to perfect baddies, and while this game is not saying anything that should be shocking or revelatory about american history, beating the shit out of these honkies isn’t the worst time i’ve ever had in a video game

put it in third person, open up the melee options a bit (bare knuckle boxing, maybe a sword or different knife) and im sold.

“this anarchist is either a mulatto dwarf or a frenchman with only one eye, no more than four feet and nine inches” well i bet you have saggy tits, lady. or maybe really smelly farts

why do i feel like i went in a big circle??? maybe its like circles spiraling closer to the center of the city. i’d love a map to be honest.

i remember this game coming out in the big wave of people starting to talk about ludo-narrative dissonance and how there was something off about how gruesomely violent this game could be and how you go around looting dead bodies and people’s houses and stuff, and i know this isnt the only or worst game that people say has that problem, but i really have zero problem with it here because these people have made it very clear they are almost all a bunch of white supremacists

seriously, who better to be transgressively irreverent and disrespectful to? let me take the klansman, pull his hood up, open his lifeless jaw, and plop my salty nutsack right in there. let me take a fucking selfie doing it.

the problem with this game is that the combat is too chaotic and random feeling to ever feel like i have control of a fight until its mostly over. this is a problem i often have with modern FPS

oh my god its like rail grinding in sonic but first person and therefore completely disorienting and impossible to understand no wonder they had to cut this feature down

“Even god gets a do-over” no man in the 1900s would have said that sentence, jesus christ.

omfg the stupid game tricked me into not killing someone by throwing a bunch of non-violent praying cops at me first and then a woman who then set herself on fire after we had a chance to shoot comstock but didnt

oh FUCK i reloaded to the last check point because i didnt want to get got by the fucking racists like that but it threw me all the way back to literally where i was when i started a half hour ago fuck this game i hate roller-coaster triple A game design so much

walking up and down a dumb little stair case in a circle trying to find the one dude i didnt kill, this is why i dont like most FPS games

oh that is *bullshit*

i cant shoot the nun lady who has the scripted event where she sets herself and most of the zepplin on fire, fuck you game

you let me shoot the cops and presumably feel bad about it so we could get to this moment and indulge our straight male game dev gendered assumptions while also being really sloppy in what is otherwise a fairly well choreographed extended disney ride of a game

this is *textbook* Make My Choices Really Matter. hell they could have done something with the whole quantum whatever twist i vaguely know we’re building up to. yes i know that its also been telegraphing “actually, no matter the timeline, your choices DONT matter” trope that is also a stock commentary thing in games about games that are self-aware they are games, but i’ve never been convinced by that kind of thing

about to meet elizabeth. the thing about this game is its a lot nicer to look at when there isn’t annoying shooting to have to do

we met elizabeth, now its turning into a 90s disney movie

how did we fall in an ocean but are still in the sky do they have an artificial beach?

wish i could tell the black janitor im cool and im on his side. we could be a trio.

i respected the other black janitor asking me not to come in or else he’d get in trouble

the delicate fragile manic pixie flapper* girl cant do the big strong manly levers

*i know flappers arent a thing for another 20 years, i dont know what the slang would be in 1902

elizabeth is mad at us for killing people, girl if you turn out to be racist too we are going to have the biggest issue

oh wow finally a map of some kind

why are there so many places to search for things and most of them are empty. is this because im on easy?

elizabeth got over the fact that we need to do a lot of murdering pretty quickly

she also explains what a tear (quantum portal thing) is when we’re in an elevator and a bee got in and she was scared it would sting her if she tried to kill it

something that occurred to me is that there’s like, two silos that the narrative is occurring in:

environmental storytelling
and
cutscene style/dialogue set pieces.

there doesn’t seem to be enough connective tissue between them. we’ve seen constant evidence of columbia’s foundational racism and booker hasn’t said dick about it

oh my GOD im back at the fucking crows part why

im just gonna ignore dudes and see how fast i can get back

few things stand out more than the arrogance of not having more frequent checkpoints; pffft WE are bioshock INFINITE! gamers shall not moderate their time playing!!! they shall shotgun OUR masterpiece into their eyeballs and lose as much sleep to it as we tell them, so sayeth i, godking Artist Ken Levine!!!

god replaying through this section is so Girl. Look At Girl. Wow. Girl. Girl. She is Girl.

is booker voiced by the same guy who did boss in saints row 3 and 4?

there’s some stuff with a new guy named slate that booker knows somehow, its not very clear. maybe it was better communicated in the environmental storytelling stuff i was trying to breeze past to get back up to speed.

so like, randomly he he has a bunch of dudes and they’ve ransacked the veterans’ museum place and i have to kill them.

we need the shock jokey vigor from slate to power the…thingy. something. to get to the zepplin. i dont know why that’s the only way for us to do that

its weird that its extremely obvious that elizabeth is comstock’s daughter and yet she doesnt know and booker doesnt say anything about it. like again, this is the thing of environmental storytelling > observed by player character >X player character comments on said details to develop the momentum and direction of the narrative

oh wow there’s gonna be a LOT of racism in this part

oh they finally talked about it

okay i guess slate and his guys were there during wounded knee and the boxer rebellion and they’re mad that comstock wrote them out of the history books for some reason

also supposedly daisy fitzroy killed comstock’s wife. there’s always a dead wife.

we can now have elizabeth open different portals for stuff for us

okay so i guess slate is actually upset about automation? like robot soldiers making humans obsolete?

this is so repetitive

slate: i have big feelings about old stuff we did!!
booker: just give us the thing we need please
slate: BIG FEELINGS!!!

also given that elizabeth is extremely sheltered, the fact that she has almost no reaction to the deeply intense racism on display in the hall of heroes is…weird

after all that silliness, im not going to kill slate for no reason.

or maybe i should, is he racist?

this really feels like there’s a lot more information left in a design document that makes this make sense that im not privy to.

it actually might make sense that they sell extremely lethal body modifying chemicals to random rich people in a society of racists because im sure they feel threatened by black people pretty all the time

okay one involved little backtrack done and now we get to finally move forward in the game

but not before another big shooting fight, the most confusing yet, since it features a bunch of guys on airships. i am however using the sky hooks in a fashion i imagine was closer to what they imagined using them for in the initial pitch for the game: swinging up and down to try to get in range of baddies in a way that’s feels a bit free-form

its so weird after all the wanton destruction and the feeling like tons of parts of the city are starting to fall apart, this one zepplin is still anchored to its port. but also maybe it will explode and we’ll be flung somewhere else

nope, but what does happen is elizabeth figures out we’re not going to paris, we’re going to new york, so she cries and then wacks booker into unconsciousness with a wrench

WOMEN AMIRITE FELLAS?

we finally meet daisy fitzroy, and this scene feels like its from a different draft of the script since it has a little more period detail polish (booker says he has “perilous need” of this airship for example), and they sure do try to make you not like daisy or the vox on first impression but im not falling for any both sides crap tbqfh

i think it kind of sucks you can only hold two guns at a time if for no other reason than you could accidentally spend money on upgrades that you dont or will never need

here we go with another “here’s an elevator and a window showing you stuff and a sound file of an eccentric patriarch explaining his life philosophy” part

so we have to go find a chinese gunsmith named chen lin and then we get to his workshop and he’s gone and his wife is there crying praying to buddha asking why the vox populi didnt help him

now here’s the thing

i live in the san francisco bay area, i can tell you that race relations between the black community and the chinese community have not always been (and indeed continue to not be) totally sunshine happy go lucky rainbows, but i doubt the real life version of this nuance is what this game is going to achieve

“tell you this, sometimes there’s precious need for folks like fitzroy. cuz of folks like me”

booker, maybe fighting racism isnt actually about how much of a broken bad but still badass man you are

all this shooting is getting really boring

okay we found chen lin dead then went through a portal to a version where he’s still alive and now everythings wonkydoodle and i have no idea why and i dont care

“some people are treated like men…and others are treated like animals” wow elizabeth is learning that racism and capitalism exist

elizabeth wants to believe in the revolution and booker is just grumpy

did some more silly portal stuff that doesnt make a ton of sense. look last year i played a lot of kotaro uchikoshi games, my standards for reality jumping quantum phase whatevery scifi are a little higher than this

okay but this revolution-red version of columbia owns hard

“when it comes down to it, the only difference between comstock and fitzroy is how you spell the name”

literally and objectively no, booker. no.

im avoiding getting into this next gunfight because im busy listening to this cool socialist speech that daisy fitzroy is giving

oh and chen lin and his wife are dead, which makes elizabeth sad, and that does suck, no argument from me there. but we have no reason to assume that it was anybody other than comstock loyalists who killed them

like, what are we supposed to go, oh no if only the revolution hadn’t happened. seriously? is that something we’re seriously supposed to entertain?

this is the most fun this game has yet been because it finally feels like im fighting for something important

like, i brought down an enemy zepplin, everyone’s cheering for me, i feel like a hero

come on comrades, lets get in there and show that capitalist oppresser pigdog jeremiah fink what we’re made of!

elizabeth: they’re just right for each other aren’t they? fitzroy and comstock.

uh, yeah a black socialist woman *is* the hero in a society lorded over by a virulently racist white religious zealot, elizabeth. or did you not mean that that way?

daisy calls us up to tell us the fact that we’re an alternate timeline universe booker who did *not* die a martyr for the vox populi “complicates the narrative”. i mean, true.

oh that means she tells the rest of the vox to try to kill us. lame. also feels like it doesn’t make sense because if the version of booker daisy knows is a cool revolutionary guy, and this version has almost completely done nothing to indicate he’s anything different, why would she turn on us?

daisy kills fink, that’s cool.

i dont like shooting my revolutionary homies, that sucks

oh that’s how they really try to make sure you dont like daisy by having her kill fink’s kid.

look, does she need to do that? no, but we also don’t need to make it an entire referendum in microcosm of the validity of her politics.

look, i dont know what the “”right”” thing would have been to do with the fucking romanov children either.

WHOA WHAT THE FUCK ELIZABETH HELLA STABS HER

WOW WHAT IF BOTH SIDES
IT SEEMS LIKE BOTH SIDES
I WONDER IF BOTH SIDES
MURDER SURE IS WRONG, THAT IS NON NEGOTIABLE BUT
BOTH SIDES

press x to comfort elizabeth, bitch NO!
im not gonna comfort you, that was your idea, i didnt tell you to do that!

oh my god i cant bypass it

i cant fucking believe

the deepcore absurdity of how much we are supposed to fawn over Pretty White Girl Murderer for no fucking good reason

oh and elizabeth finally changed clothes so now she’s sexier i guess

slight titanic sinking vibes what with people lifeboating off of columbia

“look at this! fitzory’s no better than comstock, was she?”

ALRIGHT GAME I FUCKING GET IT YOU’RE A CENTRIST WHAT IF BOTH SIDES TRACT THAT IGNORES THE FACT THAT COMSTOCK WAS THE ASSHOLE WHO WAS SO RACIST HE ATTACKED CHINA AND SECEDED FROM THE UNION AND RAN A COMPLETELY SEGREGATED SOCIETY AND HAS HIS OWN VERSION OF THE KKK AND IS EVEN A GODDAMN FUCKING PHRENOLOGIST

does daisy fitzroy think white people are bad because they’re racially determined to have smaller brains than black people? does daisy fitzroy want to publicly beat to death mixed race couples? does daisy fitzroy think that white people are inherently more prone to violence and troublemaking and can’t learn how to read or write?

(there’s fucking irishmen in the vox populi!!! you can hear them singing victorious folk songs during some of the fights when you’re on the same side!!!!!)

if ANY of that was fucking true, believe you me we would have fucking seen in in the goddamn Environmental Storytelling

vox radio announcer saying get anybody with a gun or glasses SIGH yes i know about the cambodian genocide, ken levine, that has nothing to do with the revolutionaries you wrote in this game.

“youre homes are ours! your lives are ours! your wives are ours!”

if this game had actually focused on illuminating the internal workings and perspective of the vox populi as a group, this could be a very interesting moment where the intersections of unquestioned prejudices are coming to the fore (black female led revolutionary group with probably a heavy presence of white/irish male rank and file memebership)

jesus christ now we’re talking about if it comes down to it she never wants comstock to take her back and she makes booker promise to kill her if that might happen.

this girl’s favorite solution to problems really is Murder First

more fights more fights, oh im not just fighting vox anymore, the racist cops are back

more fights, then we fight the ghost of elizabeth’s mom. this is dumb

now we’re at the central bank of colombia “50 percent of everything people earn here goes to comstock as a tithe”

I WONDER IF THE COMMUNISTS ARE STARTING TO MAKE A LOT MORE SENSE NOW ELIZABETH???

we’re going through getting the three plot detail portals

kay i guess elizabeth is a science baby actually

okay that ending was slightly poignant, i still think its a goofy cul de sac of this game’s fast and loose hollywood quantum time zooming

jesus fucking christ how many giant things are in this city this place is absolutely sprawling

brute forcing my way through these last fights is definitely a slog, over the course of the game i do not feel like i’ve either RPG-progressioned myself to be stronger *or* increased my inherent skill at this game to make any fight any easier than the last

this is a bad game because all of its most dramatic ideas require the player to stop playing the game, and stand still and listen. this is no different than any hideo kojima game or anything any western developer has complained against as regards “too many cutscenes”

this is also the only section of the game that’s kind of decided to try out some jumpscares of all fucking things??? like now we remember that bioshock was sort of trying to be a horror game a little bit??????

this is just american ff13. just a hallway with really nice murals on the sides

no its not even that because at least ff13 gives you all the basic stuff by the near-end of the game and you ARE allowed to screw around in a big monster fighting area

wow didnt expect i’d have to press X to cinch up elizabeth’s corset

or waistcoat

is that really the best thing for her to be wearing right now with a giant puncture wound in her upper back? we got like a big loose t-shirt or something for her?

its bullshit that in this open air section when the balloon mounted gatling guns attack, i cant just shoot the balloons and drop the guns out of the sky

there has been SO much “let me take care of this on my own, im a big strong man who can endure the pain of being a murderer” “no im going with you because i have psychic powers that are stronger and also i look up to you sort of”

ive been beating my head against the wall of this last fight

this is completely unrewarding

maybe if i reload to earlier in the game and try to get myself better like, vigors and stuff? the guns alone are not cutting it

you know what no i dont care

im just gonna watch the dumb ending on youtube

whoa multiple universes am i totally blowing your mind GAMERS im ken levine

okay that was the most pointless and underwhelming game i’ve experienced in a long time. that had nothing to say about anything and was completely circular bullshit. i can see how this ending exists to top bioshock’s twist and how it may have seemed like a good idea in development but its bad. lets ignore the world completely and zero in on these two crappy characters and this plot twist about their connection.

holy shit