Little people remain the largest market for video games, so you'd think the summer holidays would be packed full of new releases to make the most of a captive audience of kiddies.
But no. This is not the case now, nor has it ever been — more's the pity. Instead, every summer, the industry suffers from what amounts to a drought. Nothing of note happens for a number of months. Summer is the season throughout which I wonder whether it's worth keeping up my subscription to LoveFilm; I replay games as rarely as I reread books, which is to say almost never, so I tend to rent rather than buy outright.
Invariably, though, there's an array of older releases to catch up on that make the holidays tolerable, and to a certain extent gamers have become conditioned to this period of listlessness. We look to downloadable titles for quick fixes. We go back to Battlefield 3 or some other multiplayer game, or revisit a few single-player favourites.
But mostly... we wait. We wait for the flood of new releases unleashed every autumn. And as of today, I think it's safe to say we're almost underwater.
I mean, crikey, I'm already behind! I've been keeping busy with Darksiders 2, Mark of the Ninja and Tales of Graces f, but I've already got copies of Borderlands 2 and the new Resident Evil in my queue, both of which look to be exhausting, 30+ hour affairs.
And there's so much more to look forward to! In the next six weeks alone, Halo 4, Assassin's Creed 3, X-COM: Enemy Unknown, Criterion's Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Far Cry 3 and Hitman: Absolution are all set to be released. Beyond that, the list goes on, and on, and on.
And on.
It doesn't, for instance, include the game I'm most excited to play this autumn. No prizes for guessing that I'm talking - and about time too - about Dishonored.
In case you're wondering why, let me clarify. Dishonored represents something none of the autumn's other contenders can: it's an original IP. A new experience. And there have been precious few of these in recent years. To purloin a semi-famous phrase, everything is a remix — a remake, a re-imagining, a straight sequel or a sequel to a sidequel. Or something.
On which note, go watch these videos. You simply must see and hear Kirby Ferguson's thesis.
To wit, Dishonored too takes its inspiration from any number of previous games. The project leads have been variously involved in Deus Ex, Half-Life 2 and the Thief series. In Dishonored they're evolving several of the systems they created in the first place; unifying a diverse spread of mechanics into a single, story-driven specimen.
In itself, all this is enough to make me moist.
But you know what really excites me about Dishonored? Well, I've been watching the developer diaries, and original IP it may be, but I'm getting a right Bioshock vibe from the footage — and I've adored no game this generation as much as I did and I do Irrational's last. From the propaganda posters to the way the player's powers can be combined in different ways in different situations: thus the way is paved for some experiential uniqueness, at least.
It's not a lot to go on, no, but if I'm right, we might well be talking about Dishonored again in a couple of months, when it comes time to pick our favourite games of the year.
It's coming out tomorrow for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in North America, and on Friday in European territories and the UK. I'll be waiting; indeed, antici... pating. Will you?
It's the end of World War II. FDR's New Deal has redefined American politics. Taxes are at an all-time high. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has brought a fear of total annihilation. The rise of secret government agencies and sanctions on business has many watching their backs. America's sense of freedom is diminishing... and many are desperate to take there freedom back.
Among them is a great dreamer, an immigrant who pulled himself from the depths of poverty to become one of the wealthiest and admired men in the world. That man is Andrew Ryan, and he believed that great men and women deserve better. And so he set out to create the impossible, a utopia free from government, censorship, and moral restrictions on science -- where what you give is what you get. He created Rapture: the shining city below the sea.
But as we all know, this utopia suffered a great tragedy. This is the story of how it all came to be... and how it all ended.
***
Whether or not you play video games, you'll have heard of Bioshock, I bet. Somebody, at some point, simply must have told you all about Rapture, the great city under the sea which rose to impossible heights in the thrifty 50s before falling to cataclysmic lows only a few years later. This is that story.
Perhaps you know about Little Sisters and Big Daddies, too: the creepy, dead-eyed little girls with their syringes for extracting ADAM from bodies littered about the city, and the behemothic monsters clad in old-school diving suits who kept them company wherever they went. Certainly they proved an iconic pairing; in fact, I have a figurine of one of the latter on my mantelpiece.
But then, I would, because I loved Bioshock.
Is it the best game of all time? I don't know... I haven't played every last one, have I? But I'll say this, in no uncertain terms: the most meaningful experience I've ever had with a console controller in hand, I had while playing Bioshock. So I come to Bioshock: Rapture with great expectations. Yet hand in hand with every expectation, I bring an equal and opposite sense of trepidation, in part as a result of lessons learnt from Bioshock 2 -- a perfectly adequate sequel to the original ground-breaking game which nevertheless demonstrated that more of the same good thing isn't always a good thing. Bioshock 2 asked if lightning could strike twice. Turned out... not so much.
Maybe the third time's the charm, then?
Assuredly, with Bioshock: Rapture in the capable hands of Bram Stoker Award-winning genre author John Shirley, who previously novelised the silver screen adaptation of the comic book Constantine, there's every reason to think so. And Bioshock: Rapture begins very much in that mode. In an exceedingly smart move - the first of several testaments to the author's understanding of the craft (if not the art) of cross-media storytelling - Shirley opts not to retell the tale of the video game, of a city under the sea already in ruins, but rather expand upon than pre-history alluded to throughout Irrational's masterpiece, of Rapture's incredible rise.
"At first it was an experiment. Little more than a hypothesis - a game. I already have the drawings for a smaller version - but it could be bigger. Much bigger! It is the solution to a gigantic problem..." (p.15)
Shirley's wisdom is also evident in his decision to place the burden of this narrative on the shoulders of a lesser-known figure from the Bioshock mythos: rather than the lunatic visionary Andrew Ryan or his entrepreneurial adversary Frank Fontaine, or even Jack - the player character in the game proper - Shirley selects handyman Bill McDonagh as protagonist of Bioshock: Rapture. A down-on-his-luck plumber when we meet him, McDonagh is instrumental in the events leading up to the experiment's untimely conclusion, yet only a tertiary figure in the narrative as it has been established. Seeing in him a certain shared spirit, Andrew Ryan raises McDonagh up and up so that he becomes the practical mind behind the undersea city that is his dizzying dream.
Bill McDonagh essentially becomes Ryan's conscience: he helps Rapture's own God among men see reason when his ideas and ideals threaten to bring this wondrous new world of their creation down around them; he acts as a go-between for Ryan and Fontaine (of Fisheries and Futuristics fame); and when it turns out that "Not everyone can start their own business. And if they do, who'll clean the toilets?" (p.265) and Ryan promptly leaps off the deep end, it is McDonagh who tries to bring him back down to earth. But as with Rapture, McDonagh's rises comes at a grave cost.
In fact - spoilers off the starboard bow! - Bill McDonagh dies at the end.
Come to that, McDonagh is dead and buried (though I suppose I would not swear to that latter) well before the events the first game chronicles have even begun. If you played Bioshock back in the day, you'll know that. If not... shame on you! What are you even thinking, reading this when there's a perfectly incredible game ready and willing to change the way you play?
In any event, I'm not merely being mean-spirited, because the tension in this novel is not so much whether or not our man might make it as it is exactly how he doesn't. To wit, Bioshock: Rapture is in every sense a book about the journey rather than the destination. As McDonagh muses, "He had helped build something glorious, something unprecedented. Sure, Rapture was untried, was a glaringly new idea. A gigantic experiment. But they'd planned Rapture down to the last detail. How badly could it go wrong?" (p.123) A line of questioning to which, per my reading of Shirley's value-added narrative, I would also ask: how did this great city, and these basically decent people, fall so far? So far and so fast and so hard?
In that sense, Bioshock: Rapture is a rip-roaring success. It offers one last glimpse at an endlessly fascinating place in time, and provides neat insight into the minds of the men and women - great and small - behind it. It is too as authentic a piece of work as one could have hoped for; those non-canonical words and speeches Shirley has Andrew Ryan, for instance, ventriloquise, are perfectly in line with the character's voice and philosophy. Take the following nugget of wonderment:
"I've always had a fascination with the deep sea. It's another world - a free world! For years I read of giant squid netted from the depths, the adventures of explorers in diving bells and bathyspheres, strange things sighted by submariners. The thrilling potential of it all!" (p.97)
Or this patented Andrew Ryan wisdom:"A man must make of his life a ladder that he never ceases to climb - if you're not rising, you're slipping down the rungs, my friend." (p.33) Bioshock: Rapture is absolutely in line with the the world and the characters of Bioshock proper; indeed, it seamlessly incorporates certain elements of the sequel, too. And the notion that there is more to know about Ryan's Rapture proves in the final summation the most attractive aspect of Shirley's novel.
Want to hear why all the Little Sisters look alike? John Shirley's got you covered. How about why there are tommy guns and grenade launchers leaning against every surface, or how Plasmids came to be dispensed from vending machines, or why what seems sometimes the entire population of Rapture started documenting random episodes of their day-to-day lives on audio logs? If you answered yes, gather round and listen, because Bioshock: Rapture has all that, and much more besides.
That being said, if you're after something more substantial - a satisfying narrative in its own right, for instance, or characters with anything but the broadest of arcs, or perhaps something approaching the same sense of untapped wonder that made Bioshock the first such an unforgettable experience - I dare say Bioshock: Rapture will disappoint. Shirley's slavish devotion to the demands of the narrative canon, such as it is, leaves precious little room for development along those lines, I'm afraid. But you can't have it both ways, and to a point, this way... this way worked for me.
In the end, the only real question one can ask is this: does Bioshock: Rapture sink, or does it swim? Well, strictly speaking, I'd have to admit it does neither, not quite... not right. But at least it floats. There's bloat in these here waters, alas, but also buoyancy, and I for one come away pleased to see there's this much life left in the old girl yet.
If you don't have 15 minutes to watch this video right this second, do yourself a favour: find them, and report back here immediately.
What I'm embedding below is a video of a game which stands to change the way we play. I'm talking about Bioshock: Infinite, of course. Sure-fire Game of the Year contender and undisputed winner of E3 2011... spiritual successor to what is perhaps the most ground-breaking video game of the millennium... the very demo which stunned everyone lucky enough to get eyes on it at this summer's Electronic Entertainment Expo has finally been released.
Having recovered my jaw from the floor, all I'll say is that this marks the last time I'll be paying attention to footage from Bioshock: Infinite. It's still a ways out, alas, and that I'll buy it and play this thing to death and rebirth whenever the release date rolls around, well... after this demo, you can take that as said.
But I'd like to be able to... to discover it for myself, rather than have any more of it pre-empted by videos like the one above. Irrational Games aren't idiots; if they're prepared to give this much of the game away, there has to a whole lot more they aren't showing. And that makes my heart very glad indeed.
That said -- this far, and no farther!
Now, you all played Bioshock, didn't you? I'll thank you not to speak of the sequel, incidentally. Anyone our there as excited as I am to read Bioshock: Rapture by John Shirley? My review copy came in the mail this week - of which there'll be more in The BoSS, returning this weekend - and I can hardly wait to get a start on it.
Actually, you know what? It's not like I've anything better to do tonight...
If the reveal of Irrational Games' long-gestating next project left you crestfallen, as the debut of Bioshock Infinite - aka Skyoshock - did me, and you haven't yet seen the ten minutes of live gameplay the esteemed developers put out presumably to allay such fears as my own, do yourself a favour:
Now I don't know that I believe heavily scripted sequences such as this will be commonplace in the final game - one can only imagine how much work it's taken Irrational just to pull off this 'un - but pack up your troubles in an old tin bag (don't worry about the cavalry), because if that gameplay is at all indicative of what Infinite is aiming to be, I think it's safe to consider it a potential game-changer already. I can't even begin to describe what a leg-up this kind of authored experience would give the medium...
There's also a 45-minute video over at Giant Bomb wherein ruggishly handsome Irrational mastermind Ken Levine - perhaps the closest thing, not coincidentally I would suggest, we have to an actual auteur in video games - explains what you've just seen and how it's significant. I'm not going to embed it here, but for all those of you with an interest in Bioshock and indeed, what gaming could be in a couple of years if Infinite makes the mark it surely means to, you owe it to yourself.
Well, a guy can dream - and aren't dreams what made Rapture real (not really) in the first place?
It appears my borderlinelunaticravings about Guillermo del Toro potentially being involved in Irrational Games' next effort were all for naught; I was just tilting at windmills anyway. Del Toro isn't making a game with the creators of Bioshock after all. What he's working on remains to be seen. The ultra-secretive project the talented folks at Irrational have been keeping busy with since 2007, on the other hand - Icarus, as it's been known till now... that, there's been some news on.
To say there's been some news, in fact, is perhaps to understate the case. As of yesterday, we know perfectly well what Irrational Games are making. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you... Skyoshock.
Skyoshock, aka Bioshock Infinite.
What?
Quite frankly, this announcement absolutely baffles me. Irrational have gone on the record repeatedly since Bioshock's release to say they were working on something worlds apart, and having sister studio 2K Marin develop the disappointing sequel to the original game somewhat cemented the notion that Irrational would either be creating new IP or revisiting a classic property. But no. They're making Bioshock... in the sky... with (steampunk) diamonds. Transposing the Randian philosophy and retrograde aesthetic of that modern classic to a floating wartime flotilla.
Rapture, meet Columbia.
Well, if anyone can pull it off, I believe Ken Levine can. But I'd been hoping, I confess, for something rather more daring than what the internet has already taken to calling Skyoshock.
One way or another, we won't know for sure what Bioshock Infinite truly is until closer to its projected release in 2012. Perhaps between now and then Irrational can convince their marketing gurus that slapping the Bioshock brand (such as it is) on the box is only going to lead to unrealistic expectations and unnecessary confusion. Perhaps two years is long enough that doing so will prove more harmful than helpful. Please, 2K Games: give this world room to breathe.
Quoth the head honcho of development studio 2K Games:
"Minerva's Den is a substantial addition that will give players more of what they're looking for: more story, more narrative, more gameplay and more of Rapture. The core team has created an exciting product that further enhances the mystery and allure of the world of Rapture. Minerva's Den will be a fitting conclusion to the BioShock 2 saga."
I beg to differ.
No one, as far as I know, has had their eyes on Minerva's Den as yet - I certainly haven't. At best, it'll be an entirely new zone for indefatigable Rapture enthusiasts to plumb, with new enemies, art assets and, as Christoph Hartmann (president of 2K) teases, added story and narrative. Wait, added story and narrative? My my, Christoph... you really are spoiling us!
At worst, Minerva's Den will be a cheap repurposing of all the already-repurposed elements that helped to make Bioshock 2 such a tremendous disappointment. It will be a greedy money-grab as if Bioshock 2 wasn't a greedy enough money-grab. It will not falter at the thought that it could further diminish the significance of the original game, just as the shameless replication that was Bioshock 2 did not.
In all likelihood we'll be looking at something in between the best and the worst case scenarios when Minerva's Den is released. But I'm going to say this now, and you can all hold me to it when the time comes: not a chance. Not by the hair on my chinny-chin chin will I be going anywhere near Minerva's Den.
I held the original Bioshock close to my heart for a long time, and though I did not see the narrative need for a sequel, I understood that its surprise commercial success would dictate just such a thing. With Ken Levine's tacit blessing and so much of the original development team on board, I was not immediately down on Bioshock 2. News of its multiplayer component helped me along the road to that conclusion, but mostly, I came to it on my own terms... after playing it. And having done so - while its failings were no reflection on the original game - I found my admiration for the original Bioshock wanting, because Bioshock 2 really was just a carbon copy, and if Bioshock could be so easily cloned, could it truly have been all that?
I will not, in short, be buying or otherwise playing Minerva's Den - nor the inevitable Bioshock 3. I am done with this world, I think, once so fantastic, so awe-inspiring; a single sequel has robbed me of my respect for a game I once believed to be among the best of the best. And so. No.
Item the first: Pan's Labyrinth mastermind Guillermo del Toro is making a video game. We have discussed this. We don't know what it is yet, but it's going to be "technically and narratively very interesting," and we'll be hearing more about it "soon enough."
Item the second: When Guillermo del Toro talks about his love of video games, he talks about Bioshock. It's come up multiple times. As well it should - it's a hell of a game. When at the end of that game's second act, Andrew Ryan asked if I would kindly bash his head in with a golf club, I practically wet myself in wonder.
Item the third: Having said basically squat about what they've been working on since Bioshock was released in 2007, Irrational Games are getting a gaggle of games press together next week for the big reveal. Exciting enough in itself, but put items number one and two together with three...
Could it be? Could it really, truly be?
And it could.
I have no insider knowledge. I could be way off base. But just imagine... Guillermo del Toro joining forces with Ken Levine... the successor to Bioshock with the aesthetic and narrative power of Pan's Labyrinth.
If that's what we're all going to find out next week, I'm telling you, my year will be made.
Oh, Guillermo del Toro... we're all a bit disappointed you're not directing The Hobbit.
Now don't go getting all uppity, del Toro my man - we're not unsympathetic. It would have required a tremendous time commitment, six years of your life last I heard, and even that's presuming all this red tape holding production up ends up as expected. I'll miss the iconic lion roaring in films on Sunday afternoon, absolutely, but please, MGM, get out of the way; there are movies to be made. Movies with tiny little hairy-toed people and dragons and Smeagols, mostly.
Anyway, Guilly - you don't mind, do you? - there's all that nonsense, six years is of course a huge ask, and no doubt innumerable other factors played into your decision to give up on The Hobbit.
But.
Well, it's still a bit disappointing. I mean, you've dropped what could very well be the best fantasy film (films, I should say - though the less said about that the better) since The Return of the King... and to do what? Head up an eyes-on-the-prize cash-in take on The Haunted Mansion ride for the Mouse House? Bah. I can hardly believe it's true. If you won't make The Hobbit, well, whatever. Maybe Peter Jackson will do it after all - maybe we could all win. But this is what you're doing with all that talent, all that imagination?
No. Go and make The Devil's Thighbone or Rhyn's Labyrinth or something. Come on, man. I can hardly think of anything less worthwhile than another franchise hoping to rival the success of Pirates of the Carribean.
Wait, what was that?
Well, hell. You're making a video game, too? Guilly! My friend! Couldn't you have told me that before I tore into you?
For those of you haven't heard, Guillermo del Toro just announced - at SDCC, if I'm not mistaken - that he's going to be lending his talents to the world of video games. We haven't the juicy details yet, but by the sounds of it, this isn't going to be some hack character action game with nothing more to do with the man beyond a fantasy twist and his name on the box. Del Toro made that pretty clear in a statement to MTV:
"We're going to do games that are going to be technically and narratively very interesting. It's not a development deal. We're going to do it. We're doing them. And we're going to announce it soon enough."
This from a man who, in the past, has confessed his love for Bioshock, GTA IV and the Silent Hill series - masters of the medium, each and every one. I'd substitute Red Dead Redemption for the last Grand Theft Auto, but otherwise, yes. I mean, exactly. Del Toro is even on record as saying:
"There are only two games I consider masterpieces. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus."
Damn straight, del Toro. The man knows a good video game from a bad one, and moreover, he can evidently tell a truly great one from a passable piece of entertainment.
In short, we have the technology, and by gum, we can - we will - rebuild him!
So I suppose it's all a wash, in the end. It's a bit rubbish that you aren't directing The Hobbit, Guillermo, but if you can come up with a video game half as good as any of those you've namechecked in the past, I'll consider your unfortunate absence from that project a gift unto a medium that means the world to me - and a medium that sorely needs the presence of auteurs such as yourself. Saying that, perhaps we have a better result than no goals scored. Maybe... maybe this was the right move. Good man.
Seriously though: don't let me hear you're making another bloody Hellboy, alright?
