The Haul

People who know me well know that I have no love for Objectivism, the philosophy I not-so-charitably describe as an excuse for people to act like jerks.  So imagine my great surprise and glee when Bioshock (by famed designer Kevin Levine who created the excellent and remarkably frightening System Shock 2) announced he was creating a game that was–aside from being a first person shooter–a criticism of Objectivism.  Although this PS3 version is a year late compared to the 360 version that won a ton of Game Of The Year awards last year, that has no impact on the quality of the gameplay, or the inherent cleverness of the theme.  You play a guy who survives a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic, only to find a lone light house out in the middle of the ocean.  It turns out the light house is actually more of a “elevator shaft” that has a bathysphere which brings you to “Rapture,” an underground city built by Andrew Ryan, in order to house the best and brightest of the world from the greedy, uncaring, grubby hands of the mediocre above who would insist the gifted share their talents and work with the rest of the world.  As you might imagine in a videogame, when you arrive, this is anything but a utopia, a la Atlas Shrugged.

This one, I have to admit, surprised me a lot.  I knew picking up Resistance 2 was a foregone conclusion at some point since we have a friend at Insomniac and want to show our support and all, but the game actually is pretty entertaining.  I thought it looked so-so from trailers and gameplay videos on the internet, but apparently those compressed images really, REALLY didn’t do justice to the colors and details because when I finally saw it on my TV, I was quite impressed with the quality of the visuals.  The game itself also seems quite competently paced as an FPS, so the game has gone from being an obligatory buy for moral support to “Y’know what, this is actually a pretty damn good game.”