2K Games’ “perfect” first person shooter BioShock has been welcomed with numerous applauses, but the “little sisters” whom gamers have to either kill or save are now a moral dilemma.
The underwater FPS game benefits from ex-Irrational Games (now 2K Boston) president Kenneth Levine’s fantasies and from the incredible work done by the team specially charged with creating the in-game water effects.
The gory gameplay is often intertwined with breathtaking scenes where the water almost seems natural (of course, if you have a high-end gaming rig that can render the water flow at full details…).
The bloody fights, the “plasmidizing” of enemies or the liquid scenery are not enough though to provide BioShock with the 10/10, “perfect” or “almost perfect” ratings it received from the likes of IGN, GamePro or Kotaku. And Ken Levine explains exactly what he did to achieve that level of grandeur that surrounds BioShock today: he simply built the game according to his own fantasies: “I may have my own views and my own tastes in what I do and don't want to include in a game. My own belief in what's right for the product.” Or, more vividly speaking, he “pulled [BioShock] out of his ass.”
Levine is no stranger to the utopian environments depicted in BioShock, since he was also involved in the creation of System Shock 2, BioShock’s spiritual foregoer, which was also praised for its innovative way of putting gamers’ choices in the spotlight:
“…what I loved about System Shock was how you could integrate lots of story into the space and leave it there for people who want to get engaged. Don't force people to engage if they don't want to,” Levine told 1UP.
However, not all’s rosy in BioShock’s aquamarine heaven. Despite having propelled Take Two Interactive’s shares to new heights (TT owns 2K Games, which acquired Irrational Games) and notwithstanding its serious candidature to the “best game of 2007”, BioSchock suffers from serious flaws.
One of them has been signaled last week and concerns a glitch that hinders PC gamers from playing the FPS masterpiece on full screen. Instead of expanding the field-of-view to see more on the sides, the image is simply cut on top and bottom and zoomed in. A patch to fix this problem (which apparently haunts the Xbox 360 version too) has been announced, but we don’t know when it’ll be available:
Chris Kline on the 2K Forum site said that “The game will render in full 16:9 aspect ratio, with no letterboxing unless your resolution is not true 16:9…. You will see more in widescreen. We use a different projection matrix; there is no squashing or stretching of the image involved.”
But what really pissed PC gamers off was 2K’s mind-boggling intention to restrict the installation of the game (through some kind of DRM-protection feature that very much resembled Sony's UMD rootkit) to only 3 different computers. Moreover, the same copy-protection mechanism developed by SecuROM would not allow legal owners of the game to install it on a single computer more than 2 times!
Following complaints from customers 2K said that SecuROM "has been given much more autonomy" to fix these problems, which the security company eventually did, increasing the number of single-machine and multiple-machines installs to 5.
But it’s not only technical issues that plague BioShock’s perfect launch (pre-orders of the game have been stellar, and stocks are now almost exhausted at most retailers). Moral issues are also involved: Levine’s decision to force players into either saving the little sisters or kill them for their “Adam” (the substance that generated Rapture’s collapse and the substance for which all splicers or Big Daddies fight for) has determined Steve Adams, from Massachusetts- based Quincy's Patriot Ledger, to ask whether this is good or bad for gamers to be faced with such options:
"[BioShock] is testing the limits of the ultraviolent gaming genre with a strategy that enables players to kill characters resembling young girls."
Kenneth Levine responded: "As a piece of art, we want to deal with challenging moral issues and if you want to do that, you have to go to some dark places. And BioShock certainly does go to some dark places."
