june gloom on 19/2/2013 at 23:05
Actually, I'm pretty sure within the fiction, everything went to hell on New Year's Eve and with all those ball masks around pretty much everyone wore them to hide their ADAM disfigurement.
Phatose on 19/2/2013 at 23:29
That still paints them pretty firmly into the "Fucking Insane" category. A society that's been happily modifying their own gene codes using a substance harvested from forsaken children, to the point where they go on a massive bender and everybody keeps their masks on afterward?
Maybe we can blame it on the ADAM eventually, but it seems to me that's a road you gotta be pretty fucked up to start down.
Pyrian on 20/2/2013 at 00:04
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Ha! Spoken like someone who clearly godmoded his way through the game, if you've even played it at all.
Got halfway, playing on normal. Quit 'cause I was bored. It was a reasonably fun dodge game, a bad shooter, and generally a pretty dull grind overall.
Quote Posted by heywood
It seemed to me that leveling up in Bioshock had a lot more to do with completing research than spending Adam wisely.
I've heard it said that Bioshock is too easy if you do all the research and too hard if you don't research at all. BS1 probably had the most seriously difficult model for research, it took real effort at the actual expense of killing enemies; SS2 is basically just click-and-go-fer (maybe would've been neat to actually have a dissection minigame as per ZB's "description" of what actually amounts to a couple mouse clicks), BS2 is kind of cool for rewarding variety but still just killing stuff like you normally would. I kind of ended up somewhere in the middle for BS1, not really completing all the research right away but getting most of it eventually, and I certainly have no recollection of anything remotely like what you're describing with having too much Adam and nothing to buy. On the other hand, I had fun playing with all the toys, and didn't find very many to be useless at all; and if anything was overpowered, I'd say it was the crossbow (or obviously the Vita chambers); there's endless great ways to mess around with enemies, but does any of it really matter if they're dead?
This, again, is an area where BS2 really improved on the formula: left-click to harm, right-click to mess with, no need to choose one in favor of the other.
On the semantics, I really don't care all that much about the details of how I go through a game and get cool new powers to mess around with. Equipment, experience, stats, whatever. Tron 2.0 certainly had a neat system, although again I think that game had balance issues.
CCCToad on 20/2/2013 at 06:20
Quote Posted by Phatose
That still paints them pretty firmly into the "Fucking Insane" category. A society that's been happily modifying their own gene codes using a substance harvested from forsaken children, to the point where they go on a massive bender and everybody keeps their masks on afterward?
Maybe we can blame it on the ADAM eventually, but it seems to me that's a road you gotta be pretty fucked up to start down.
To be fair.....is it really that hard to imagine a society going that crazy? Hell, there's plenty of societies that HAVE gone that crazy and some of the research we're doing now is that crazy. For example, experiments into splicing human and animal genes to make a hybrid.
henke on 20/2/2013 at 08:55
Quote Posted by Phatose
Maybe we can blame it on the ADAM eventually, but it seems to me that's a road you gotta be pretty fucked up to start down.
Probably peer pressure plays a part as well. If you're in this enclosed city and everyone else is doing it? It seems like the kind of radical thing that once most people are doing it, the ones who don't juice up would start getting ostracised.
DDL on 20/2/2013 at 09:32
Quote Posted by CCCToad
some of the research we're doing now is that crazy. For example, experiments into splicing human and animal genes to make a hybrid.
This sounds so much cooler than it really is, though. Rather than "MANSQUITOES" or something, it's more like "a completely normal-looking sheep that also makes a human protein in its milk", or (more commonly) some cells. In a dish.
The former is exactly the same as sticking foreign genes into bacteria/yeast (which we've been doing for years anyway), just....bigger and woollier.
The latter is usually just straight cell:cell fusion, because cells are fairly easy to manipulate and maintain. They will, however, remain "just cells" because cells fused together like this have zero potential to form an actual viable animal. You can't just mash cow and human cells together and make the incredible cowman because that is absolutely 100% not how organisms work.
The science is interesting, and has some useful applications, but it only sounds
crazy if you listen to idiots.
And attempting to shoehorn it into a discussion about a game where magic injections of "plasmids" (god, my inner mol biol soul cringes everytime they use that word) suddenly allows you to conjure and throw fucking
fire....that's crazy.
Muzman on 20/2/2013 at 09:58
heh. Oddly enough I didn't really have a problem with fire, as such. It's common enough in games I guess. It was my arm suddenly producing bees that really made me go hmmm
Quote Posted by henke
Probably peer pressure plays a part as well. If you're in this enclosed city and everyone else is doing it? It seems like the kind of radical thing that once most people are doing it, the ones who don't juice up would start getting ostracised.
The implication is also, I think, a whole society made up of the self described 'elect' of humanity, that's run on pure competition. You wouldn't want to get left behind. There was something of an arms race going on too. I can imagine arch individualists really enjoying not having to stockpile guns for personal defense, but instead give themselves superpowers.
DDL on 20/2/2013 at 10:49
Hah! And here was me thinking the opposite. :)
A bee-arm seems ludicrous but almost plausible (it's a biological organism producing smaller biological organisms, something for which we have a ton of potential pre-exisiting templates), whereas a biological organism producing and controlling actual fire (or indeed, ice. Or..well, telekinesis?!?) is waaay outside the realms of biological feasibility. I guess some sort of hot sludgey noxious mixture a la bombadier beetle might be possible.
Electricity is also a maybe, though firing actual lightning bolts seems unlikely.
As to rapture, really: taking an entire stratum of purely competitive objectivism-devotees and letting them compete is one thing, but dumping them in an isolated underwater environment is where it all goes wrong. It's the difference between "which of these sharks is the best at killing stuff?" and "let's check by putting all these sharks together in a tiny tiny isolated tank with no food".
It takes an interesting sociopolitical observation and transports it to "well, duh" territory.
ZylonBane on 20/2/2013 at 18:38
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Got halfway, playing on normal. Quit 'cause I was bored. It was a reasonably fun dodge game, a bad shooter, and generally a pretty dull grind overall.
Well, good to know your opinion on FPSs can safely be ignored forever.
Quote Posted by Phatose
That still paints them pretty firmly into the "Fucking Insane" category. A society that's been happily modifying their own gene codes using a substance harvested from forsaken children, to the point where they go on a massive bender and everybody keeps their masks on afterward?
Also a society that has
ammunition vending machines. Like people are just wandering around, in this underwater city, constantly firing their guns into the air? Where are the guns to use all this ammo even coming from? Why?
polytourist97 on 20/2/2013 at 19:54
It's best not to ask these questions about BS. It will only end in sorrow for you and the ones you love.
