Bioshock’s forte is its breathtaking art direction, and it wastes no time in showing it off. You start as an anonymous passenger on a plane that crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. Water and fire are gloriously, fluidly rendered as you swim in the wreckage and eventually you spot the only land in sight: an island with a solitary, imposing lighthouse. The commanding use of light and shadow here set the tone for the rest of the game. It is also the last time you will be in an open space - Bioshock is set in the underwater city of Rapture, and uses clever, claustrophobic level design and a limited but expressive set of enemies to keep framerates smooth.

You soon descend by bathysphere into Rapture, a utopia envisioned by Andrew Ryan to be free of the failures and limitations of the surface. As Ryan’s iconic speech goes:

I am Andrew Ryan and I am here to ask you a question:
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow?

No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something
different. I chose the impossible. I chose… Rapture.

Admist the towering monuments to the greatness of Rapture, something becomes clear: there is trouble in paradise. Genetic advancements have gone awry, turning its citizens into scavenging mutants with only twisted memories of their past lives. They all crave ADAM - stem cells which power genetic abilities - and will gladly kill you for it. Also roaming the corridors of Rapture are Little Sisters, eerie children who harvest ADAM from dead bodies, and the hulking Big Daddies, who protect them.

Gameplay: Well designed, user friendly

Genetic modification is a thinly veiled replacement for what magic and spells are in other games, of course. Througout the game, you use ADAM to purchase plasmids and genetic enhancements which grant you special abilities, as well as more slots to equip these abilities simultaneously. Your abilities are complemented with “conventional” weapons, from the standard-issue pistol, shotgun, and SMG; to the more exotic flamethrower and crossbow. There are three ammunition types for every weapon. There was an innovation I liked: the research camera, which is used to “shoot” enemies, giving you research points depending on how good the photograph was, which leads to combat advantages against that enemy type, or information about their weaknesses.

Combat is unavoidable and plentiful (this is an FPS after all). There is enough variety to keep it fresh, and ample opportunities to use the environment to your advantage. You can use Telekinesis to throw gas canisters at your enemies, Incinerate on oil spills to set your enemies aflame, Electricity on enemies in water to electrocute them, etc. Unlike in Deus Ex, your genetic implants can be swapped out whenever you find the correct machine, leaving you with the abilities for every situation.

Sound: simply masterful

Voice acting, dialogue, and sound direction is impeccable in this game, from the objectivist monologues of Andrew Ryan to the demented screams of the splicers, and the rumbling grunts of the Big Daddies. An one memorable instance I came across a phonograph, turned it on, and the lilting melody of Patti Page’s (How Much is) That Doggie in the Window filled the air. It was a testament to Bioshock’s ability to immerse that I didn’t hear a cute cover of a nursery rhyme, but a haunting remnant of an attempt to invoke memories of the surface world and loved ones left behind:

I must take a trip to California
And leave my poor sweetheart alone
If he has a dog, he won’t be lonesome
And the doggie will have a good home.

But not perfect

That said, Bishock isn’t without its flaws. There is an over-reliance on audio journals to reveal backstory and advance the plot. Granted, the voice acting is absolutely superb, but it still detracts a little from the immersion - what are the odds that *every* inhabitant in Rapture happens to go around recording key points in their lives for you to pick up?

Security-related minigames seem to be the “in” thing in recent games, but most of them miss the mark - the only two games I can remember having decent implementations were Deus Ex, where your skill level determined how long a terminal would stay open and determine how much time you had to fiddle with controls and read classified information; and Oblivion’s lockpicking minigame, which tried for *some* realism. Bioshock’s hacking minigame sadly, falls short of the bar. It’s essentially an adaptation of the puzzle game Pipe Dream. The minigame itself is ok (even though it doesn’t make much sense) - but after about twenty times, it gets old. In theory, hacking is optional, but in practice, since you have very limited ammo and even cash capacity, you’ll find yourself having to hack everything that can be hacked, which spoils the immersion.

Bioshock is also nearly completely linear, which can be a turn-off. There is only one decision you need to make in the game: whether or not to harvest Little Sisters for ADAM, which enables you to purchase genetic upgrades; or to save them, which only grants half as much ADAM. And no, I don’t consider this a spoiler since this aspect of the game was trumpeted in every preview. I found the “decision” to harvest or save the Sisters moot - for one thing, you get “gifts” of ADAM as you save the Sisters, which lessens the penalty. You don’t actually need that much ADAM to get through the game, especially if you have played many shooters. Excepting your first few Big Daddy battles, the game is pretty straightforward otherwise. You know that a game isn’t presenting enough of a challenge when you actually down the final boss on Hard in your first try (and I’m not even very good at shooters, ask my friends!).

Verdict: Instant Classic

Quibbles aside, Bioshock is a game that is destined to be a classic for its immersiveness and artistry, as well as its unique steampunk-noir theme. If there were a reason to go out and buy a good graphic and sound card, this would be it. I liken it to one of those art films which you go “wow!” at, and rave about to all your friends; but know you may never watch again.

Rating: 85
+5 if you really love good graphics and sound
-5 if non-linearity puts you off

Postscript: Technical Issues

When first released, Bioshock featured a fairly restrictive DRM which limited every purchase to two “activations”. This limit was subsequently increased to five, and recently abolished altogether. There were also issues relating to how widescreen FOV was being implemented, but that’s fixed in the latest patch (Turn “FOV locking” off in Options).

Screenshots:

Popularity: 46% [?]

Internet Explorer 7 is currently in beta and slated to be released next year with Windows Vista. Looking at the specs on it though you have to wonder if anyone is expected to be impressed with it. Its “new features” are more like “features-which-we-didn’t-think-of-but-we’ll-call-them-new”.

If you’ve used Opera, or Mozilla Firefox - and you really should have - you’ll be nodding your head right now. In fact you probably couldn’t imagine using Internet Explorer ever again, and silently scream when you have to work or surf away on another computer and it only has IE installed.

I used FF first, and then switched to Opera, and I must say Opera is a whole new experience altogether. Let me see:

Tabbed browsing

Alright, FF has this too; IE6 doesn’t, of course. Opera keeps a step ahead by giving you previews of the page when you mouse over the tab, and you can easily close, duplicate, and rearrange tabs on the fly.

Sessions
FF and IE don’t have this. You can save all your currently open pages as a “Session” to be reopened later. Very handy, especially for all the blog-addicts out there who simply must visit their friends’ sites each day.

On top of this, upon closing Opera the pages you were viewing are saved as a session, and you have the option of resuming your browsing the next time you fire up Opera.

At work, it’s a huge, huge convenience to be able to simply close my browser at the end of the day and just head off. Seeing as doing programming usually means you have many references, tutorials, or documentation pages open at one time, this simple feature means you don’t have to painstakingly go through every page to see if there’s anything you need to bookmark; just Alt-F4, see you tomorrow. Even better, this “memorization” happens in real-time. If your computer crashes or you have a blackout, Opera will still be waiting with your pages while the Mozilla and IE users beside you scream and have to hunt down their pages again.

Trash Can
Automatically stores any page you’ve closed in the current session so you can reopen it easily. Not too big a deal, but still convenient and saves time wading through your History folder.

Mouse Gestures
The reason why I checked Opera out in the first place and still its best feature. Opera takes shortcut keys a step further, and focuses on letting you surf one-handed. Holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse in certain directions let you perform common actions. Down-> Right for example closes a page; Down opens a link in the background; Up -> Down refreshes a page; -> Left simulates the “Back” feature; -> Right the “Forward feature”, and many more. And it’s all customizable to boot! Never again do you have to let that itch on your head go unscratched while surfing, because you can go “look-ma-one-hand!” with Opera.

Read more about gestures here.

Built-in Rss Viewer
Half of you out there may not know what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are. Sites which support RSS (they’ll have an icon like this: somewhere on the page) can send headlines or small excerpts of new articles or features to your RSS program. This saves a lot of surfing time - try it, and you’ll see.

With most browsers (including IE of course ), you need an external RSS program to get the feeds from your sites, with Opera it’s all built-in, so you just click on the RSS link on your site of choice and you’re set to receive headlines in an email-like interface.

Great transfer handling
You can resume/restart transfers like in Firefox, but even better, you can perform operations on the file right in the Transfer history window, i.e. copy, open, delete, extract, etc. IE6 has…zilch.

Customizable search

Most other browsers only allow you to specify a preferred search engine. Opera allows you to add and customize search settings. By default, typing “g [search term]” will search Google; “n [search term]”, Google News; “o [search term]”, Opera Support; etc. With a bit of fiddling you can get assign your own prefixes to search through any site - I’ve configured mine, for example, to use “w [search term]” to search Wikipedia and “l [search term]” to search LowYat.net.

Customizable popup-blocker

You can right click on any offending ad in a page, and choose “Block Content” to automatically block it. That’s not all, either - you can specify the blocking level, e.g. http://ads.ign.com/advertisers/*, http://ads.ign.com/*, http://*.googlesyndication.com. Mucho better than IE’s (very annoying) popup blocker.

Syntax-highlighted “View Source”!
Simply awesome feature. In FF and IE “View Source” leaves you with an unending block of text in Notepad, Opera highlights everything for you.

Sweating the small stuff

Double- or triple-clicking any text on a page automatically highlights the word/paragraph and a pop-up menu immediately appears with the option to look it up in the Dictionary or Encyclopedia, copy it, search for the term, or translate it. Instead of just a “Paste” option when you want to paste a link to the address bar, you can choose “Paste and Go”.

It’s fast!
The best thing of course is that Opera does all this fast. “Fastest browser on Earth” is its tagline, and it lives up to it. To be fair to Firefox, it is open-source, and many of these Opera features can be added with FF extensions. However the extensions are a hassle to download, and usually add processing time. Opera does it all out of the box, and in a blink. It uses less RAM as well.

IE doesn’t have the features, and is *still* slow. To give you a simple example, try creating a page that consists of a 1×1 or 1×2 pixel image (something like this: tiled across the entire screen.

Load it with IE, then load it with FF or Opera. Tell me how IE does.

There are a lot of features I haven’t covered - Opera’s customizable interface, page scaling, Widgets, Bookmarklets, built-in Bittorrent support, a better adherenece to standards than IE, better security - the list goes on. But come on, the download is only 4+ MB and it’s time to sleep…

Popularity: 41% [?]

Some people I know from KL came down to Penang today and I was supposed to meet them for dinner. Thing is I was going there straight from work, and on the way I got a call telling me they were still on Penang Hill - which left me stranded for an hour or two.

At first I was going to go to kill time in Gurney. Anyone who knows me well knows I’m a fan of arcade light-gun games, and Gurney has the newest machines in Penang, with House of the Dead 3 and 4. But as I was going there I remembered the massive jam that plugs Kelawai road and Gurney drive during the weekends… so I opted for Midlands (1-Stop) instead. Midlands’ arcade is ageing, but they have a good deal which lets you play unlimited games for 4 bucks an hour.

But low and behold as I walked into the Midlands arcade… a spanking new Time Crisis 4 machine! How new is TC4, you might ask? It’s so new that I can’t even find a review for it, let alone an FAQ! So let me be the first:

Namco’s original Time Crisis revolutionized the shooter genre with it’s hide-and-shoot gameplay. Time Crisis II was pretty bad. It didn’t add anything new other than multiplayer capability, which games like Virtua Cop and House of the Dead already had, and TC II was also much easier, with generous time allotments (taking the “crisis” out of the name), as well as a horrible case layout which positioned the player way too near the screen.

The series then took a detour with Crisis Zone, another forgettable shooter which a machine-gun instead of the standard pistol. Time Crisis III then brought the franchise back to the forefront with a weapon-switching system and PS2-standard graphics.

Crisis Critique

However with other competing shooters like House of the Dead 3/4 featuring more frenzied gameplay and much better graphics, or the underplayed (but good) Virtua Cop 3 which sported Max-Payne style bullet time, it was high time Namco shipped a new Time Crisis. How does it measure up?

My first impression wasn’t good: the graphics weren’t noticeably much better than TC III and definitely not on par with House of the Dead. It didn’t help either that Midlands opted for the small-screen cabinet. I started the game, and noticed it still had the same weapon choices. Didn’t look good!

But the complaints pretty much ended there. For one thing the story is slightly better, and the NPCs actually do take part in the action - this adds more challenge, since you have to take care not to hit them. The game also suggests the guns to use at key points (much needed, it was hilarious seeing people trying to take down choppers with a pistol in TC III).

While the graphics aren’t absolutely cutting edge, the game makes the most of them. Smoke, glass shards, sprinkler systems, and even bugs sometimes block your field of vision, and there wasn’t any lag, unlike certain scenes in TC III.

Some of the best improvements were the features and scenes adapted from other games. NPCs communicate to you via radio like in Virtua Cop, and the sound even comes through the individual gun stands, not through the screen. There was a scene straight out of the classic LA Machineguns, which placed you in a helicopter raining down rockets on helicopters and anti-air vehicles below. There was a short sniper portion a la the Silent Scope games, and in the beginning of second stage there was even a tribute to Doom III, placing you in a dark cave and attaching a flashlight to your gun to spot the enemies! Coupled with the well-scripted shootouts, TC 4 definitely had the most memorable scenes compared to its predecessors - typically had one or two good ones per game and then turning into a mindless shoot-fest at the end.

Multitasking Your Shooting

The newest feature that has everyone talking is the multi-screen battle. At many points in the game you need to hold and defend a certain position, during which enemies will come at you from all directions. By pointing your gun to the edge of your current screen, you “scroll” to a different screen, with a different set of enemies. Very challenging, especially in solo mode, but also very innovative.

Gameplay-wise, it’s definitely the best of the series. Accuracy is worth many more points now (1000 for each percentile), and the bullet combo system is much less brainless - there’s a gauge on top which increases as you hit enemies, but quickly goes down as you start missing. Although the weapon selection is the same, they are more balanced - the shotgun has a cooldown between each shot, and the machine gun does much less damage, making it unsuitable for bosses. Reloading seems slightly stricter, no more “duck-and-shoot” techniques. Much more challenge now, for better or worse. I couldn’t get past the first stage on one credit!

Anyone reading this who’s a fan or whose name is Benjamin or Khay Soon, I need kaki for TC 4 !!

Popularity: 25% [?]