I want to say that marketing people were more creative in those by gone lost halcyon days but a deeper resentful thought occurs to me that whenever people refer to eras we can barely recall they are entirely full of shit. One I'm fond of is "Gamers these days are dumber" and "has to be dumbed down for the console crowd!"
I'm old as gamers go but I really don't think there was an era where game and intelligence were some sort of ubiquitous marriage. People like to say this but in which era exactly? The mainstream when I was very young was ... Mario. I didn't really enjoy Mario so much as a kid, preferring Sonic through into my teens (and then getting out of console gaming when Sonic should have too) but either or you really can't make an argument for Mario being an especially harder to play game than say, Call of Duty. Have you ever played a fucking FPS on a console? It's quite a bit more difficult than Mario's beep boop run jump gameplay, at least from a mechanical perspective. You could sort of argue that RTS games require 'more' out of the player than either, but RTS games never "Dumbed down" or "dumbed up" anyone. They're just there and they're pretty much the same. There is perhaps some progression of titles that "would have been" for the PC slipping onto the Xbox or what have you, but I'm A) not entirely sure those titles would have existed at all without consoles B) actually any stupider. More RPGs which aren't dumbed down are actually just really irritating and filled with tedium, which in case you haven't solved all the fucking mysteries sherlock, are not actually on any level an interaction with your potential or lack thereof intellect.
So I think that's a load of shit and I think waxing nostalgia about a past era were marketing departments didn't fuck rape the sequel engine is probably intellectually dishonest as well. Still it's hard to really look at Bioshock Infinite and not seriously wonder at least a little bit about the stillborn progression as it goes. I was re-watching some Yahtzee videos (Zero Punctuation) to see how he felt about stuff I'd recently played and watched Bioshock 2's review. I agreed pretty much totally in regards to this one, the game largely did not need to exist and wasn't very good. It was good enough to finish, but not really better than say reinstalling the first game and just replaying it again.
This is a snapshot of Bioshock Infinite's wikipedia page at the time of this review, whenever the fuck that is. The problem here, if one is not certain, is that the game isn't on speaking terms with actually being FUCKING OUT, OR PLAYABLE. There is more detail here than most games I've played or will ever play, in spite of the fact none of these people have to my knowledge played it. Maybe they have, at which point ... Should wikipedia seriously be hosting what is essentially an internally review product shot? (Maybe there's something here to be discussed regarding the natural progression of media outlets arriving and eroding until they become 'mainstream journalism' but cyclical shit is JUST THAT)
But still I digress - the part of this game that I truly well and hate is that it's named "Bioshock" in the first place. Bioshock itself is billed as the spiritual sequel to "System shock" a series I've never played but have been told I'm a bad person for not playing. Tough but fair. The name Bioshock comes from the impact of genetic engineering techniques either on your person, or on a society, at least on a general level. The SHOCK of BIOtechnology. Har, dee har, har... har... I mean maybe it's actually named for two programmers eating too much Domino's pizza and brewing up some truly shocking biology. Maybe. The SHOCK of colon BIOlogy?
What exactly is Bioshock about this one? It appears to grope the same "We're nouveau artists of the sublime video realms" tree as Bioshock -or at least the same low hanging branches- in that this giant paragraph here seems to talk about nazism, but beyond that I'm at a loss. Does it have the same characters? No. Same mechanics? Other than guns in general it sounds like no. Some connection to the story? Coy answers from the marketing department who haven't determined the first fucking thing about their game. Fire all marketing departments.
So they could have called it "something"Shock and most likely it would have fit fine. I would say 'Skyshock' is the easiest from what the game seems to be about, which sounds like Bioshock and I think 99% of the population would get it. I'm not really suggesting that name, since that name is sort of mopey.
But they literally think we're so unbelievably stupid we can't assemble the publisher, the developer, the lead programmer, the genre, the word shock and successfully deduce that this is the successor to Bioshock. It's a real fucking mystery is what it is, and there just can't ever be enough clues! Just never enough FUCKING CLUES! Need INFINITE CLUES! So instead they re-use the same name and then tack on Infinite, as if to reinforce we're infinitely stupid and can't solve the mystery of the missing Bio.
Infinite fuck yous, Bioshock. Not buying you til you're $5 anyway cuz I still haven't beaten ALL THESE GAMES.
Oh and on a side note if you're one of those arrogant and self-congratulating plebs who like to talk about how 'people these days are so gosh darn stupid look at blah blah' you should really ground yourself in a deeper understanding of the material at least insofar as human history. Not only do basic statistics technically argue otherwise, but the most basic points just don't make any sense.
I mean the most ironically parroted one is the bit about how only idiots breed with idiots nowadays, which sounds like good logic if you're a nazi and you think eugenics is proven to work but ... It just doesn't add up. Have you looked at your ancestors? I mean really looked at our pool of ancestors? There's several generations who engaged in gun warfare where they lined up shoulder to shoulder and shot at each other. Before that they were peasants in the dark ages, or busy fucking goats in rome. It's a wonder we don't have goat genome in our blood stream somehow. Or thought the sky was made of Magic. When were our ancestors brighter? Maybe there's a couple glorious civilizations, like say ancient China, but those people turned around and starved to death because they decided to just stop farming.
And sure, you can point to popular culture. Go for it. Thirty years ago was the eighties mother fuckers. Reality TV ain't got shit on this! Bright neon rollerblades and rapping Turtles!
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