The Besties - BioShock: Wet and Wild Fun!

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Would you kindly join The Besties as they revisit the dystopian RPG shooter BioShock? Together they discuss the influence of Objectivism and environmentalism on its storytelling. The design aesthetic that incorporates Art Deco and steampunk. And critique the effectiveness of the plot twist (spoiler alert!) Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

um i might have a problem because my computers all the other keys work but f no longer works for me uh did you pay your respects to a fallen soldier in call of duty just so hard and just so fucking like energetically and repeatedly like you slapped the case of that coffin just over and over again like that's my boy that's my boy that's my boy that's my boy that's my boy you think i was too respectful is the problem i think you paid your respects too hard to the fallen soldier and i think you slapped the top of the coffin and i think you did a little conga beat and i think you did start singing cuban p in the middle of the funeral. And Russ, this is actually an intervention. You gotta fucking stop doing that, man.

I mean, some people like it. It depends on the scene. One person has liked it, and it was Jim Carrey at his papa's funeral. He busted a gut. But you do it in video games, you do it in real life, and you need to fucking stop.

You know, I'm playing a numbers game at this point. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of 2007. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of 2007. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of 2007. My name is Chris Plant, and I am somewhere under the sea. My name is Russ Froschek, and I know the best game of the sea. Okay, I like it. Welcome to the Besties, where we celebrate the latest and greatest in interactive home entertainment it is a game of the year show that goes uh no sorry it's a game of the book it's a book of the year show that is games for videos uh but right now we are taking a break

from the latest new releases there's so many passing us by that we are just willfully ignoring as we delve into 2007. So far, we've talked about Portal. We've talked about Modern Warfare. Those episodes are available for you to enjoy if you have not yet. But today, we are, as Mr. Plant alluded, headed under the sea for Bioshock.

This one, more than the others we've done so far probably gave me the most whiplash huh like i feel like i had expectations for portal and portal matched like was exactly what i expected call of duty modern warfare was exactly what i expected bioshock is maybe the first one of these that while playing it i was like wow shit this is so this is so much different than i remember it being can you give a basic idea of what the game is because there are a lot of people who listen to our show who actually have not played the game well that is very we are going to be spoiling by the way if you're not playing by a shot very hard not to spoil bioshock i feel like because a lot of the a lot of the uh okay there's like two things I feel like

two facets of this game that you should know the first is its lineage in like the system shock sort of genre which is to say uh the RPG shooter which is so funny to talk about now because it's like everything is a fucking RPG shooter now like every game that comes out is, you know, the new Super Mario game is an RPG shooter. They all have Schluter mechanics, no matter what. I hate that. But this game had a lineage in System Shock,

which was a franchise that people really loved by, what was the studio? Looking Glass? Looking Glass, yeah. It was a thinking person's first person shooter. Yes. And it was, thinking person's uh first person shooter yes and it was you know

that that franchise was beloved and uh so when bioshock came out like there was a lot of heat behind it just for that i feel like there was because those games weren't just like you know cool because they had rpg mechanics and shooter mechanics they also had like the dankest atmosphere uh and in environmental storytelling which is a term that you're probably going to be sick of by the end of this episode uh that that you know there had been in in games that far thus far so when bioshock came out like a lot of people were excited about it for that reason but also because i feel like this was a capital p prestige game in the tone of it. And the subject matter that it tackled,

rarely did you see games really, really pile on a political message as firmly as Bioshock did. And back in 2007, I feel like it was huge for those reasons because it was unlike it was big and cool in ways that like games that were coming out back then did not sort of feel and it is so wild to play that game 13 years later and it's not a knock against the game it's more just like how things have changed that like all of that stuff feels so dated, like so crazy dated and played out at this point. At the time. Sorry, Russ, you were about to say.

No, I was going to say, do we need to like even like set it up? See what the game is. Yeah. A little bit more. So what Griffin's talking about is the game is in conversation with a single book. It is in conversation with the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I mean, it gets into all Randian objectivism and there's other things, but really like that's why it felt prestige because maybe for the first time, a big AAA game was like,

here's a book and we're going to have a conversation about it through the lens of a video game. So there is a world under the ocean, not a world, a city under the ocean, built by a Randian objectivist named Andrew Ryan, and he has allowed all of his best pals to do really whatever the hell they want, because this is a libertarian paradise. And that means people are gene-splicing, and you can change your race or your gender, as they shout from the speakers at

the very beginning of the game um or you can effectively you can do literally whatever you want there's no law there's only there's only a free market the most transgressive art imaginable which is just a lot of dead bodies yeah it's like if we jump through your headphones right now and stabbed you in the brain and we're like podcast podcast art. That's about the level they're acting on. So you go from one place to the next, engaging with the different, I would say, kind of like businesses or artistic venues that exist in this thing. So dealing with like, what does medicine look like in this? Here's a hospital level. What does commerce look like? Here's effectively a mall. What does art look like? Okay, here is a theater artist. And those people end up being boss fights.

And that is the story of the game. We'll obviously get into it way more. Other things that sort of at the time felt very novel. One, and I think why this made such a big impact at the time. One, aesthetically games didn't look like this um still don't still yeah i would argue yeah um it is a this hybrid of like art deco and steampunk i would say that sounds fair um and and it is an aesthetic the games don't have and it's sort of an aspirational aesthetic where a lot of games

at that time weren't reaching for it it was you know you're very much playing in the aesthetics of film and tv and uh just like this is a military base or this is exactly scientific laboratory whatever like generic things the other thing that was massive and that I'd like to address specifically is environmental storytelling. And that is something that is so ripe in this game. I feel like inspired so many game, I mean, for the next decade, really set the standard for environmental storytelling.

So many rooms that you walk into have a story in them that is not laid out for you, but is there, is not dict out for you but is is there is not dictated to you i should say but is there in the room if you are willing to like poke around and look for it um what i think personally is really interesting about that specifically and and a lot of the tone honestly i think the aesthetics too uh was inspired by a show called sleep no more which i'm not going to get off on a tangent about, but Sleep No More is a small tangent about,

thank you for being correct. It is an immersive theater production that was initially in Boston, where I believe Ken Levine saw it there, from what I understand. And it is very much about going into your room and having the story sort of like, you absorb it through osmosis.

You're looking at things and trying to piece together the story that way. Between that and like especially there's a lot of like Hitchcockian music cues in Sleep No More that are used pretty frequently. And I feel like you see some of those in Bioshock and I think some of the aesthetics and stuff. When I went and saw Sleep No More for the first time in New York, it was after I'd seen – I played Bioshock and I think some of the aesthetics and stuff. When I went and saw sleep no more for the first time in New York, it was after I'd seen by, I played Bioshock obviously. And it really clicked. It's not copying.

It's, it's like a real actual, like influence, like artistic influence that you can really feel if you've, if you've seen the show, but yeah, environmental storytelling, audio logs.

I feel like we're, I don't think this was the first game to have audio logs in them but this was the game that when every game that made it made it legally mandated mandated yeah i think it was the first one maybe that had audio logs where you could just hold down the a button as soon as you pick it up and it would automatically play it while you do other shit and that was enough for me to be like oh now i'll actually listen to these because i don't have to like hop into some fucking menu and like read and sit there and just have the story done to me it can it can be a like component of the gameplay like reloading a gun like it's that it is that integrated so so i know we've

talked there's a lot to like go over specifically about like the dated nature of it and stuff like that but i did want to talk just briefly about the like first 20 minutes of the game for a second yeah because i think that's probably what gave me the most whiplash is the first 20 minutes so that's interesting i don't know what specifically what you mean by whiplash but just to sort of like break it down the first 20 minutes again uh if you played the game will be very familiar to you you start off in a plane the plane crashes you uh wake up under the water and you swim to the surface and there's the and there's this lighthouse and you go into the lighthouse and you're basically just slowly introduced to this world of Bioshock through like a slide projector and Rapture through like a slide projector. And, you know, you float through in this bathysphere and there's whales and shit and skyscrapers, stuff like that. I think as an introduction introduction it's still fucking spectacular

i think it's really really good i think um the only like beginning intro that like stands out to me that is on par is biotalk infinite which is a game that i didn't really like but also has a fucking spectacular introduction um that follows obviously a lot of the same tropes uh but like i'm trying to think like they're trying to introduce you to this very weird world that you've never seen before and i think they do an amazingly good job of not even easing you into it you're literally thrown into it but i think that's i think that's what works about it but that i my only hang up with that is that this time around for whatever whatever reason, like it seemed so rushed. It seemed so rushed and so hurried.

You're in a plane crash. You swim to the surface. There's a lighthouse right there. You walk in the front door and then it's just like the lights turn on and it's like they're having a libertarian surprise birthday party for you. And you get in this bathysphere and then there's some dude like, the government wants to take all your milk or some shit. And it's like, what the fuck is going on? It's like, I built this incredible undersea city

and I wanted to be like, for whatever reason, this is the first time that it seemed absurd to me that I was like, I was just in a fucking plane crash. Did we crash into your shitty lighthouse in the middle of the ocean? It shouldn't be there for some reason this

is addressed at the end of the game yeah i mean that's i know i know exactly why it happens like there's there's a capital p plot reason for it but like i i i it just i don't know it seemed just so now murder this guy murder this guy okay yeah again that's like the whole well the a that's the whole point but b i would also say like i think a lot of it has to do with like your prior knowledge of this world so like i remember when i was first playing it it was at a preview event at like some random place in new york city and i knew very very little and they let us play through the whole introduction and like the whole medical level and the you know know, that came after it.

And I remember being like super overwhelmed, like, holy shit, like I'm not even like following some of this stuff. There's so much that they're throwing at me. And now because I know the whole arc and I've thought about this game for 10 years, it does feel somewhat old hat. But I do think that rushed nature actually works in the game's favor because it does for people that don't know anything um it doesn't let you absorb what's going on yet you kind of have to do that over the course of many hours um so this is kind of like a slap in the face and now you're like oh wow this is weird and now i'm gonna jump in for real okay i'll get one thing because i want to go back to something you said and then obviously we can talk about the twist, because it's a whole thing.

But you talked about Rapture and the idea of environmental storytelling, right? And again, I just want to underline, and I have a feeling most of us can relate to this. This game, when it was released, was revolutionary, and it's still very good. The problem is obviously that tons of games have borrowed ideas from it and since done them better so going back it just feels a little jarring and the thing that really struck me is i remembered rapture as being the pinnacle of environmental storytelling right like oh my gosh they built like this city and it's using all this artistic inspiration from like traditional art like you said not just film um you know this it looks like fine art at times um and replaying it

what i was shocked was how dull i found the actual city like i i don't think i think this city's fine you look out a window and it's always like the same stuff out in the ocean it looks kind of bland the the architecture is fine it's good at the beginning and i think kind of falls off but really the environmental storytelling in this game is just dead bodies like that's that is what gives this game its entire environment most of what you see is dead bodies um that have been like twisted or mangled and left to kind of like a thing a thing happened here and now they're dead that's the story of pretty much every room you walk into um and it's i think it's why the standard so there's an area that's sander cohen

who is this like theater performance artist visual artist who who has you take photos of dead bodies and who has effectively cast dead bodies in papier-mâché or something or sculpting material. Plaster, yeah. Plaster around his area. And that area still feels legit. Like it feels like the best part of the game because it's embracing what they're doing everywhere else,

which is like, yeah, there's a reason for these bodies to be displayed in this very performative storytelling way but then you go to other areas and it's like okay now the doctor likes to use bodies also as art um and like crucify them everywhere or like oh now we're in like the town where like the proletariat rised up and they also also choose bodies as warnings. At a certain point, I was like, man, I can't believe that I found this game fun because it really is just mangled corpses all the way down.

They definitely lean on that too hard, but I think that you're also discounting the splicers, which are the main enemies in the game. You often catch like fragments of dialogue from them that i think help to paint a picture of what rapture is um and and they're not you can't necessarily they're not reacting to things in the environment that you can see um so it gives this very fragmented disorienting um kind of vibe that I think they achieve a lot with that

I would have listened to them more if their heads weren't made out of magnets that pulled my wrench right at their noggins oh they love getting hit by those wrenches yeah they love getting hit by wrenches there's a disconnect I feel like between and this is true of all the Bioshock games maybe less Bioshock 2

which I haven't actually finished but there's always been a disconnect it's great by the way Bioshock 2 rules the ending of Bioshock games of maybe less bioshock 2 which i haven't actually finished but uh there's always been a disconnect it's great by the way it is very good i've heard the ending of bioshock 2 bioshock 1 is in conversation with the fountainhead bioshock 2 is in conversation with bioshock 1 yeah it's actually really great like i really want to play it but there's there's there's been a disconnect between like the storytelling and tone and all the stuff that they're doing and the gameplay of it uh and maybe that's like maybe that is the whiplash I was talking about earlier, where you think about more modern prestige games. The comparison I kept coming back to was Prey, which is unfair because Prey had 11 years of time of this genre being fleshed out and new discoveries being made. But Prey,

I feel like you use the word slowly eases you in when talking about the intro to Bioshock. I feel like that is more fair to describe a more sort of modern take on this, this game. There is something about just hopping right in and then all of a sudden having magic wizard powers to set shit on fire and shoot it with a Tommy gun that like always kind of felt, and honestly

i like bioshock infinite uh still to this day like i still think it's a cool game that does like really like some of the best settings in a video game that has ever existed but you cannot get over digging your fucking grinding blender claw into a dude's brain after like oh wow that's a really pretty cover of that beach boy song to like i just fucking split that man's cabeza in half and i feel like bioshock kind of suffers from that i'm gonna set up justin for the talking about the twist because i got i got the transition here we go this is the game that clint hawking he's the he's a very famous designer he made far cry 2 he made splinter cell he's working on Watch Dogs 3 right now.

He also wrote a blog for a while. Wrote the essay on ludonarrative dissonance. Oh, no. Yep. Yeah, we got to talk about it. Ludonarrative dissonance. Can we track when people stop listening to the podcast? Ludonarrative dissonance, for everybody listening who wasn't reading blogs in 2007,

was the hottest phrase of nerdy video game blogs in 2007. And the idea of this was that the Ludo, that's like the play in this game, made sense. You control a dude who just slaughters everybody to achieve his goals. And the game is about Randian philosophy, which is just purely about self-interest. Great. They nailed it. The play matches like the theme and the game is about randian philosophy which is just purely about self-interest great they nailed it the play matches like the theme of the game but the narrative doesn't make sense because the narrative is like hey you need to help atlas like do all these like nice things that he's asking you to do like take care of his family which is the least randian thing possible so dissonant right or is But then ultra dissonant because what is the twist, Justin?

The twist is that, seriously, if you haven't played Bioshock, you should probably stop listening. It's kind of two twists at the same time that are revealed to you. One being that your helper, the person who's been guiding you through the game, Atlas, is in actuality Frank Fontaine, who is a a gangster basically who is in competition with with ryan for control of uh rapture second is that you have been um basically

brainwashed into following the commands of anybody who uses a trigger phrase which is would you kindly which is something that you hear Atlas say a lot and is used to sort of like keep you in order. It's on the note, on the present, at the very beginning of the game, which I absolutely love. It's like my favorite. It's a cool, yeah, on the airplane,

you see it on a piece of paper and you are the one who brings the airplane down. It's a cool touch. You are also Andrew Ryan's illegitimate son. Also that. Which is another part of the twist. And that, I guess that is kind of at the same moment yeah like you you kind of get that triptych of of uh twists all hitting you at once i think that okay so two things that are interesting about that

uh one briefly is that i think it really helped to ignite bioshock because when it first came out, it was what you heard from so many people was like, you have to play it right now. Like you can't let anybody spoil it for you. You have to play it right away. And I think it led to a bigger rush of like uptake of this new IP, um, a lot, a lot sooner than it maybe would have gotten otherwise. Um, two, what I think is interesting about it, and maybe isn't saying as much as it could, but is definitely like raising the question, is drawing the parallel between you were taking the,

you were basically like following marching orders and doing these atrocities without really thinking about it. You were murdering, I mean, dozens upon dozens of drug addicts without so much as blinking an eye. And you as the player were taking those actions because the game told you you had to. And then in the moment, it's revealed that your character

was also sort of doing the same thing. They were taking these actions and doing these terrible things because they were being mind controlled i think that that is very interesting if the point they were trying to get to and maybe they were was like are you when you play video games how much are you questioning what you're being told to do i think that that's very interesting and would have hit so much harder if that wasn't at the midpoint of the game but rather the end because at the midpoint of the game you get cured of the brainwashing and then you're

like now i'm killing drug addicts for me that is a fair point this one this one is all me. I'm doing this because I am. A man chooses. A slave obeys. And this man wants to kill lots of drug addicts. I mean, it's not at the midpoint. It is at the final act. It's closer than you. It's earlier than you fucking remember because the game is a slog from that point on.

Once they drop all those on you it's like do you want to keep doing the same thing for another few hours okay well anyway here's more of it that should have been the end we know but you have to have we have to have a big giant boss fight at the end of it and also it's 2007 so games have to be 20 hours long so here's the best we got what'd you guys say i mean how did it how did it hit you i hit you? That's my take on it. I think it's interesting, but would be more interesting at the end of the game rather than the midpoint. The point that Hawking made

in this ludicrous distance essay, which I think is pretty spot on, is for a game that is best remembered about its writing, it is weird and kind of frustrating that the twist is built on this kind of invisible contract with the player that you don't ever have control like like yes it makes for a good twist but it is

it it's it's spotlighting arguably the biggest weakness of games is which games like want to pretend to be about you having free control but in reality they are like shaped and sculpted and and linear to some degree by whatever the game designer is intended for you to do but is that a bad thing like that's not a i i think i think it's i i i'm like mixed on it i don't know if i agree with him entirely but i think it is a little unusual in a game that is literally about free wit like about randy and things to have that but then not say anything more with it like it the problem for me is it feels like it starts to say something and then doesn't

finish it i don't i i don't know what it's actually trying to say it reminds me of spec ops align which i know a lot of people love but but is a game I just despise, which does a similar thing of like, oh, you did all these terrible things, but it was you, the player, who chose to drop napalm on innocent civilians. And then it's like, but also, like, we've got a multiplayer mode if you want to kill some more. It's like, okay, like, you made this game, y'all. Like, what are you trying to actually tell me? I think the message is also muddied by the little sisters because that's yeah that's yeah because the the okay so again to if you don't know um the one of the main sort of i don't know i guess antagonists of the game not really so these little girls have been turned into harvesters of Adam,

which is the drug that gives you superpowers in Rapture. Fair? Yeah. And they have these defenders that are big daddies, these big diving suit clad behemoths that just protect them. So if you kill the big daddy, you get the little sister. And the little sister, you can either kill the little girl harvest thank you uh the or rescue if you harvest you get more atom which is the the drug that gives you powers

or if you rescue you get less atom but so that even that is is sort of blunted because you have plenty of atom if you rescue everybody you never feel the pinch you actually get better rewards that's why it's broken yeah yeah yeah so it's to be fair they don't tell you that the rewards are going to be better at the beginning it doesn't matter man i read an interview with ken levine where he he was talking about how he wanted it to be a bigger difference between the two but 2k felt like you can't penalize people. It's less fun if you know that you could be more powerful. I don't agree with that. But anyway, the point is you're making this moral choice, which I would argue is not much of a moral choice.

Do you want to kill a little girl? I don't actually. Wait, wait. She's squirming in your hand begging for you not to kill her, and she looks like she's six years old. Do you want to kill her or no? No. Okay, that's a no. It's not much of a moral choice but even the fact that you're able to make it sort of blunts the the what the rest of the game is talking about

because you are making this moral choice about this but you aren't making the moral choice about everything else you're doing and also atlas directly tells you, he doesn't say, would you kindly, fair, but Atlas tells you, like, you should harvest these, you should harvest her, like, you should do this. It's the right thing to do. And then you don't do it. So it's like, I feel like introducing- Well, and then Tenenbaum is there, right?

Telling you, like, you should save her. Yes, there's a character who's playing basically the angel on your shoulder. Is there a version of this game? It feels, by the way, kind of weird to relitigate bioshock because it was like it was i was fucking head over heels in love with this game and i still i still think it's one of the most impactful games ever made yes if you want to read some effusive writing about bioshock google the year 2007 and then your monitor won't melt uh but is there a version of this game where after the twist, after the reveal, there could be more subtle sort of changes to the world and the way it looks and the way that you are able to interact with it that sort of people uh and then like the now it's not you have this this this

trigger word in your brain that turns you into a killer psychopath now you actually kind of have to confront the the reality of what you're doing that's maybe a grim like take on on what the game could be but it i think would be a much more effective way of sort of getting its point across i think that's a big problem with bioshock replaying it is i think after the twist there is very much i don't know i think that it is i in talking to people after this game was released i think part of it was budget and scoping like they just didn't have the time that's why the final boss is such garbo because like they didn't have the time to like actually implement everything that they wanted to with it yeah but i really think

that after the twist the game's like now let's play some fucking video games like there's a bad guy there's a good guy let's go fucking get him yeah i mean this game began as nazi island like that was like the origins of it they spent so much time working on this game that by the time they had to ship i think it was like okay y'all have had a lot of time to figure this out um on on the stuff after andrew ryan and like how to do it a better way i apologize i don't remember which game designer came up with this and i'll put it on twitter once i can google it after the show but there was an idea of like how do you fix the ending um and a lot of people were talking about it back in 2007 and i think the big thing is the reason the ending doesn't work in the in the

current game is you kill andrew ryan you're forced to do it and then you uh have to like remove whatever like the thing is in your body that makes you controlled by would you kindly right um but you're still listening to people like you you now you just do what tenenbaum says like you're effectively constantly just shifting masters yeah um so which the game points out yeah which which yeah it says yeah and and and so that like that shift happens the other shift that happens is until this point in the game largely the story has taken place in the past you are discovering everything that happened here um and it every everything that you're coming across is stuff that's you know the decisions were already made and you're learning about it through audio logs.

And suddenly, once you become the star of Rapture, the game shifts to the present. And I just don't think, like, at the time they quite knew how they wanted to handle that in a shooter. Like, the audio log's stepping a crutch. And then the third thing, the, so there are these bio chambers that revive you, right? Throughout the whole game, whenever you die, you can immediately be saved by a bio chamber. And it's like the way that you can- I think it's Vita Chamber.

Vita Chamber, yeah. It just fills up with the vitamins that all human beings are made of. Yes, yes. But you can do that to like, just immediately spam big daddies to kill them but at the end of this game you effectively become a big daddy right yeah so the idea that i i'd seen floating around was the way this game really should end is frank fontaine becomes you you're a big daddy now and frank fontaine now has the gene code because the gene

code of the vita chambers are tied to you slash andrew ryan and that it would flip that he would become the person who has the gene chambers so suddenly the boss fight is you can kill frank fontaine but there are infinite frank fontaine's so you are effectively trying to help the little girls get out of rapture while dealing with like swarms of no longer drug dealer enemies it's just Frank Fontaine but he's endless and the only way to look very goofy come on no that'd be fucking radical and then the way that you have to kill him because the only way to stop this would be to flood all of rapture because that would be literally the only way that you can stop it which would be him the ending like the scene that the designer said was would be like underwater him dying from drowning and then immediately a vita chamber

lighting up and him being thrown back into the ocean dying from drowning just over and over and over into eternity yeah i mean i like that to me feels it's a way of not doing what the game does in actuality which is you literally fight the book cover for atlas shrugged yeah yeah which is also the whole i i think that we are all cognizant of this but i want to like put a point out like i don't want us to come across as we're coming back and turning our noses up at what Bioshock is because you have to remember how much it was how like how far they were pushing against what video games were at that point like I think there is so much of a broader palette to choose from when you're making a video game in 2020 versus 2007 uh just in terms of like what games are, what players will accept.

The vocabulary that we have with games, the idea of games that are just environmental storytelling that are just exploring a world and gaining the story.

I think that I don't want it to come across as we're now turning a critical eye and saying, yeah, Bioshock was actually crap the entire time, because I just think it's more interesting to look at it back in that light, but it's not a...

I mean, I don't think that any of this is necessarily a criticism of the Bioshock that is, because I think it's still really important. It's criticism in the truest word, right? Like that's what's good about this game is it gives you a lot to actually critique. There's actually stuff to talk about. And I also make,

just to make the comparison to like last week when we were talking about Call of Duty, like I think it's similar in the sense of like Call of Duty defined a generation of that sort of game. And Bioshock did the same exact thing. Like games that are still coming out today are absolutely directly inspired And Bioshock did the same exact thing. Like games that are still coming out today are absolutely directly inspired by Bioshock. Like Dishonored is a franchise that I absolutely adore.

And I fully see so much Bioshock in Dishonored. Absolutely. But it's obviously an evolution of this model where the gameplay is like, I think a lot better. You know, story, you could argue. There's DNA there too. I know like Sean Elliott, for example, was on Biosho example was right right and there's looking glass team members a lot of people so there's like a lot of connection there but um yeah i mean that's the thing to go back to

i i want to i feel like i've been the most critical of all uh which is which is you know whatever i i feel like the point that would be unfair to make here is that the thing that maybe surprised me the most is how much fucking fun just the combat is. I want to talk about mechanics very briefly. Ludo narrative dissonance is one thing, but that using your shocking power and then smashing somebody with a wrench

is still the hottest shit. The same thing happened this time as what happens every time which is like here's your slug shotgun here's your here's your tommy gun here's your grenade launcher and it's like fuck it fuck that get out of here get out of here i want those tonics they give me extra wrench power and i want to hit somebody with an electric bolt and stun them and then whap them over the head with my wrench and then like move on and it still feels good i do it to flying robots even when it

doesn't make sense i'm like trying to kill a bat with a tennis racket like it is the it is still feels so fucking good and i was surprised by that because i i the first 15 minutes i was like god all this gameplay is getting in the way of all the great storytelling that i remember and then it was like give me some more drug dealers to just zap and smash baby yeah uh there is also i really like the uh the ability to turn turrets and uh security cameras to to you to your side because there's very little more satisfying than like a splicer running at you and it's just like oh yeah cool me my army of flying gun bots. They follow me around everywhere and handle my light work. Except that eventually you realize that if you have to hack one more thing,

you will cry. And I just started hitting them with a wrench because I couldn't hack more. Yeah, that was another thing they fixed in Bioshock 2. Bioshock 2 has a much better, faster hacking system. I would say a lot of the gameplay mechanics, which are still okay, get dramatically better in Bioshock 2. And also

just a plug for Bioshock Minerva's Den, which is probably the best standalone Bioshock story that's ever been told, maybe? It's very, very good. I just wanted to provide a little more context to, wow, things have changed. In 2007, Bioshock won the Game of the Year award

at the Spike Video Game Awards. They announced this with a woman, a nude model in body paint with Bioshock written on it. Yeah, I remember that. And Ken Levine was unable to accept the war the award um because members of gamecock the studio gamecock stormed stormed the stage um and he was he was never able to accept a little time capsule you have presented 2007 was wild yeah what a wild time. It was a time. That was a time.

We have had a time talking about Bioshock, but we're not done with the show. There's so much more show to come. So stick around with us and we'll be right back. And we're back. That was a great commercial. Hi. Hi.

Hi. My name is Greg. Hi, Greg. Well, I don't want to brag, but I'm a senior vice president at 2K Games, and we're working on Bioshock 3, which is a funny title because it's not the third Bioshock. We know. We've heard from the fans, and we're working on that.

But anyway, all we do know— Greg, it seems like an easy fix. it seems like an easy fix no change the number we've talked with marketing and the numbers prove out that bioshock 3 is the it's a trilogy um well not really a trilogy because there are more games in three it's something we're working on anyway we we know that elon musk is very cool with the kids these days, with the Joe Rogans in the 420s and the babies. So we thought that we would want the next Andrew Ryan to be Elon Musk type. But that's basically all we have. we have um so we were hoping that you the besties which we we don't know much about you other than that you're the best um that you might have some ideas about the setting of this new bioshock

you've been working on this game for a while and that's all you've that's all you've come up with you don't have any like artists or nobody's making the guns yet? Titles are the hardest part, we believe. Okay. That seems weird. Well, it's funny you say an Elon Musk type that's like, but the new Andrew Ryan is an Elon Musk type. Like, I don't know that it was much of a reach there. I think he probably started out pretty damn close.

We take the Austin Powers to Austin Powers 2 kind of road with kind of road. Sure. Kind of the same game. Okay. Got it. Right. That's fun.

Okay. Let me hit you guys. Let me just fire it off, okay? This time, Rapture, it's still Rapture, but this time, Rapture is at a water park. Okay. So you still have the wet element, what are you what am i adding with this well one you get to ride all the slides as much as you want because everybody else is dead that's huge no lines people love it secondly it's wet like rapture that will feel familiar thirdly though sexy beautiful people in sun-drenched setting bikinis speedos they were dead hunky guys and gals i mean really filling out those suits you know what i mean sex sells

and this is going to be the sexiest bioshock yet now because every splicer looks sexy. It looks sexy. And the sort of Elon Musk stand-in is like, he looks sexy too. Everybody's really hot. We really respect a creative vision. And listen, we don't give notes per se, but we're just wondering if maybe to get it a little more Tesla, these sexy people are actually just sexy cars, kind of like the movie Cars,

which made a lot of money for Disney. Can they be cars with sick yabos and ding-dongs? Yes. See, this is the type of cooperation that we're looking for. Let me hit you with this. There's a lot of piranhas at this water park. It's chock-a-block full of piranhas. They're having trouble finding room to spawn or whatever

because there's just so many piranhas in the water, and so the government tries to shut down Elon Musk's water park. Sorry, Elon Musk type. We need another name for him, Devin Sint. And Devin Stink has this water park that's full of piranhas government shuts him down and he starts yelling as loud as he can like the government can't shut down my piranha filled water park it's totally safe this sucks this is check out all my sick cars with all the sexy body parts and yappos and ding-dongs on him. This is illegal.

Wouldn't it have been sweet in the first Bioshock if every time he shot a wall, there was a huge gush of water filled with piranhas just pouring onto the enemies? This is just a kind of question for clarification. These piranhas, are they also little cars with yabbos and ding-dongs? Yeah, that should go without saying. Yeah, if you've been paying attention to the pitch.

And for the record, you can fuck the piranhas as well. If you, yeah. If you, yeah. You need a perk to be able to do it. Yeah, and it gives you extra health. Got it, got it. Well, this sounds really interesting. We're just so happy that you could make time.

And we will think about it. And I just want to be honest with you. We're meeting with lots of other podcasts, kind of funny, beyond. We think there's a lot of good ideas out there. So we'll get back to you in the next three to four years. Well, just real quick, I do know that y'all like it when it's based on book, and you do a lot

Ayn Rand. I thought we'd go a different way, and this time, sort of the main sort of literary influence will be Superfudge. So we're gonna tackle Elon through the lens of Superfudge. You have no response to that. It's so good.

Print it, baby. Print it, baby. Do we have any reader mail? We do. Oh, hi, everybody. We have lots of questions. Oh, hi, Chris. Welcome back.

You missed a really funny segment. Yeah? Cool. Hey, here's some reader mail. So, Bioshock, I guess the trilogy, is coming out on Nintendo Switch, like, at the end of the month. Ooh. So, both Kathleen and Sackstab on Twitter want to know, you know, what are our feelings on Bioshock versus Bioshock Infinite? Or really, you know, is it worth going back and revisiting these three games in the year 2020?

I think a lot of it is. I think it definitely is. I agree. I just I mean, a as we were just talking about Bioshock is still fun. But I also think a ton of people did not play Bioshock 2. I really think it was like very unheralded. And I don't actually know if it's in the pack but if minerva's den is in the pack damn play minerva i think it is i think for me it was the you played it as big uh you're a big

daddy in bioshock 2 right and the big daddy part in bioshock 1 was my least favorite part of bioshock 1 i literally think that is the hang-up i've always had with bioshock 2 yeah but you i guess it plays and controls completely differently and i i know i know it, I know. It's a preposterous distinction, but that is what turned me off of it, and it's been a completely arbitrary roadblock for me. Yeah. So I would definitely recommend it. I think play the beginning of Bioshock Infinite.

I don't think the rest of the game holds as much water, but that's just me, personally. You affected me for free. You know what? I haven't returned to Infinite. Yeah? i haven't returned to infinite since the beginning i will echo what uh russ said about bioshock 2 it's i think it's great i mean i honestly honestly um really really genuinely great infinite i just it completely slipped out of my i feel like i should almost return to it because it has completely evacuated my

my mental space i think if i i would be curious to return to it with coming at it from the mindset that it's not going to be the greatest story ever told like if i if i approach it from that perspective and i just treat it as like a sort of roller coaster with like really really really cool set pieces and like kind of neat sci-fi ideas then talk about impossible expectations yeah i know yeah holy shit yeah i i think it's also a lot of the things that i disliked about infinite were in bioshock but just not as visible to me so like the thing that really bothered me about infinite is the both sides ism which is like you're killing these racist you know ghouls um but then later in the game it's

like yeah but also the revolutionaries they're not so hot either right yeah and i i was surprised i didn't remember this with bioshock 1 that like it's weird it's a critique of of these um objectivists but then the plot is also like yeah but the people who clean the toilet they're gonna come and kill you all and they're also just greedy yeah yeah you know monsters with avarice and it's like the dual sides them is it's weak but yes these games are fun even if you ignore or forgive or you know make do with the politics in them um another question from cj uh for me the city of rapture is one of the most memorable settings in video games the sunken randy and dystopia is equal parts unsettling and awe-inspiring

the setting makes a great game incredible what are your absolute favorite settings in video games the mushroom kingdom oh my gosh so much range uh fantastical or real real i think either is fine this may just be recency bias but midgar is still so like crystallized in my mind as being like a a just a really fucking solid place that a video game takes like everything ties back into midgar and the the tone of that game and uh everything that they are trying to do is encapsulated in this one huge city. And I think that that's like kind of incredible. Yeah, I've got kind of a deep cut, but it actually connects to this game and what we've been talking about. And it is Shalebridge Cradle in Thief Deadly Shadows.

Shalebridge Cradle was an orphanage in this Thief game, which is really good. Definitely go back and play it. The level was designed by Jordan Thomas, who worked on a lot of these games. All of them. All of them, essentially. And one of the scary, like freakiest levels I've ever played.

There's almost no combat in it but really spectacular um it is towards the end of thief deadly shadows which is still a good game i don't know how the entire thing holds up but it has stuck with me ever since i played it and really uh fantastic level justin how about you this is uh maybe slightly uh outside the the scope of what we're talking about here but um new york is represented by spider-man games is one that like i go back to a lot just to sort of like be in the environment um i think especially the newest one but like you can go back to to to a lot of the different open world spider-man games that i think that this new one does it the best obviously but um i'm i really

love being in new york as stupid as that sounds. As somebody who grew up in West Virginia, it's some place I really idealize. It's sort of like the center of everything. And being able to virtually go there in a Spider-Man game was a big deal for me. And so it's one that I still kind of return to and check out. Yeah. For me, all the forts horizon games they're like my favorite open worlds kind of similar to just cause but they're they're i guess the inversion of what you're talking about justin those are my um vacation

escapes especially while living in new york it's like oh here's just big big open spaces that you can tear through high speeds i was wrong uh because i panicked and i wanted a good answer mine is for sure for sure for sure inaba in persona 4 persona 4 golden inaba like i want to live there i want to be i want to summer there um i got one more question this one's from kyle now that you're looking back on 2007 with hindsight is there anything you prefer about gaming back then uh when compared to 2020 i definitely miss the immediacy of playing games as soon as you put the disc in as opposed to large and lengthy day one installs oh yeah i mean that's i guess i feel like pre uh pre-downloads i feel

like any game that comes out these these days that like i'm excited about is very easy to pre-download i feel like i have not had to admit do that in a long, long time. But I do... The thing that, like, doesn't really happen as much anymore was that was kind of the beginning of the era of indie games, like, especially console indie games. And I remember there were so few of them that I would get so jazzed about stuff like Summer of Arcade and, like, these big blocks of, like, indie releases

that doesn't happen anymore and i don't think it's because the games are worse i just think they're way more frequent um so the there isn't this like spike of like wow i've been waiting a year for this thing that's finally going to come out of like a random indie game that i'd never played before so y'all i saw everything there was to see in three games this month portal modern warfare fire shock it rules to be able to complete a video game like a book and be like that was it i i got what they wanted me to get out of this and i enjoyed it and i don't have like another 100 hours of collecting various things in an open world to get a mission that I know I won't care about. Obviously, that's a place of privilege.

There's so much value in games at this point. Value in the sense that you can drop 60 bucks or nothing and play forever. But y'all, it was so cool to just enjoy a full artistic vision under 10 to 12 hours speaking of which when are we gonna play assassin's creed because two weeks from now yeah i'm fine saving that um i think that that it was easier for games to sort of surprise you in in like in 2007, I think that like, that we sort of overanalyze every detail of games

and pick them apart a lot more than in 2007. I think that there were more surprises, but, you know, I'd be happy with just video games coming out. Honestly, I would just miss video games. That would be pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, for those video games

next week this fight that we have begun will finally be finished by us we're gonna finish the fight the final halo game everybody misses this franchise finish the fight halo 3 we're going back to finish what we started with Chief, Reggie, Cordy, the whole gang. Taking the flood right out of this big old loop we call Halo. So we hope that you'll join us for that adventure if you are so inclined. How can we play it? Is there an easy way to play Halo 3?

On Xbox. I don't believe halo 3 is on pc yet i believe they're only up to halo 1 2 and reach so it's on is that a joke do they just put it out just put it out on please just put it why are we going for halo 3 on pc is that real just put it out but basically it'll run. Let people play. It'll run on an Xbox One uh, yeah. Inversary edition.

I want to play with a mouse and keyboard like it was intended to be played on the Macintosh computer. So check that out. If you want to share some thoughts about that franchise, mail at besties.fan is our email address. And besties.fan is also a link you can share

if you want to share the show with folks. It goes right to Spotify, where you can follow and listen for free, exclusively there, which you know already because you're listening to us. But we hope that you will maybe share the show with a friend. You can do it. This is a fun...

Do it on Twitter. And follow us a fun... Do it on Twitter. Follow us on Twitter at TheBestiesPod if you want to join our mailing list. It is the pinned tweet right there. You will be the first to know what other games we'll be covering soon. Things like Halo 3 and

Assassin's Creed and... Play some of Assassin's Creed first. Then stop. Play Halo 3 and then go back for the Assassin's Creed. I think I might go that way. Let me know if you get it running. I have not gotten Assassin's Creed to run on my

PC yet. So that's cool. Too many buildings. We'll have to play something else. We should compare notes about this. Boy, I tell you. Real quick. Okay, Super Greg, I do want to say because I know this should compare notes about this. Boy, I tell you, real quick. Okay, super quick. I do want to say,

because I know this is the end of the show, the Bioshock remaster is dog shit. And I know that I'm four years late to that conversation. It sucks. I had to play the original version, which still looks great, by the way, on modern PCs. Although it really, Bioshock 2007, actually,

Ken Levine came up on my screen and says, your monitor is so fucking wide Justin. I said, I know Ken. He said, I never intended for this. This is not my vision. It's so wide. There's a boom mic in the show. Ken is standing to the side like

more corpses. We didn't talk about Jeff Keighley being in the remaster. Okay, well, there's a lot. Maybe we'll do a second episode on this. The remaster's really bad. I had so many problems I couldn't get it to run. It crashes all the time.

Everybody on the internet hates it. Thank you for listening. That is the end of the show. Be sure to join us again next time for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best friends pick the world's best games the besties is a spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch.

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