The barriers have finally come down! No longer shall my sonorous notes be confined to their previous parenthetical prisons! LET MY FREEDOM MUSIC RING FREE!!!....A strange way to open a blog, but an oddly fantastic way to transition into BioShock. You know, that five six year old FPS game where you shoot lightning at drug addicts while Ayn Rand gets beaten to death with a golf club. Guess what, guys? It's still effing awesome.

And I'm still going to make all the jokes about it I probably made in 2007. For instance, one day in the 1950s, a man gained access to a movie that wouldn't be released for 30-40 years. Spurred to action by a homosexual crustacean whose E just kicked in, he builds the city of Rapture, wherein the only currency is the sweat of your brow. Fast forward some amount of time, and a man survives a plane crash just outside Rapture, leading to a journey of discovery, collapse, hobo-esque foraging, and unexplained ghosts. What I'm getting at is that this story has more leaks than the underwater city it's set in. Ghosts and easily survivable plane crashes aside, if Andrew Ryan is a tight-fisted tyrant with absolute control over a city he'd like to keep isolated, how the hell does Jack get in in the first place? The guy knows to send Splicers to Atlas' fake family in their bathysphere, but never bothers closing off the one that let the CIA hound or whatever into his city in the first place? That's a pretty important detail to overlook, Ryan. And the "would you kindly" plot twist would make more sense if it was said more than four times until that point.

But are you going to care about any of that? Hell no, you aren't! You're too busy just drinking in all the atmosphere. Yea, this game was released in 2007, but even today, it still looks amazing (at least on a technical level). Just look at that lighting. Look at how murky and abandoned everything looks; look at all the advertising just bombarding you around every corner; look at me tell you all this, which I can't imagine actually helps you experience any of this. Trust me: the game does a good job of building some atmosphere, and not just with lighting and level design and stuff like that. The characters like getting in on this stuff, too. Hell, those generic enemies you fight again and again? It goes a long way toward making them into sympathetic victims of a city where you can't trust a single person. How awesome is that?

And if you'll allow me to contradict my earlier statements (would you kindly?), this game's really good at thinking things out. I know, but hear me out. That whole "objectivism sucks" thing? It reaaallly thinks this stuff through. And I don't even mean in terms of showing it in practice; we also get the developers straight-up pointing out all the dumb little contradictions the philosophy presents. I'd say that Ryan sounds like an idiot when he says he believes in magical chains instead of God, or how dehumanizing the prick can be, but for some reason, I'm oddly drawn to the guy. I can't even really say way. I want to say it's because of the decline of his ideals, but even in the end, I don't get the feeling he sold himself out. The guy's just trying to make his (incredibly bad) ideas work, damn it! Just cut him some slack! I'd like to balance all this blind praise out and say that the game's a tad blunt with all of these messages, but it might be just me. I don't know. Was I the only person who thought the intro was objectivist as fuck? Was the Greek naming obvious to anybody else? Or how about ADAM as an allegory for nuclear power in addition to the religious connotations? No? That was just me? OK, screw everything I said before. This game has a fucking awesome story.

The challenge, however, is....weird. I don't know how to explain it. At some points in the game, you're gonna be the richest man in Rapture, while others will see you occupying the role of....still the richest man in Rapture, but not by as much. You think that would make the game balls hard, and you'd be right. And you'd be wrong, too. Here's the thing about BioShock: you're going to die a lot, but it's not going to mean anything. Any time you die, you just get revived for free in a nearby Vita-Chamber, thereby sucking all challenge out of certain situations. Why waste your first-aid against that Big Daddy when you're two feet from the nearest insta-revive station? Hell, I once let a Big Daddy beat the fuck out of me while I pelted him with bees because I was zero feet away from a Vita-Chamber and the poor schluck doesn't understand the concept of cause and effect. I wish that was something I made up, but that actually happened late in my BioShock experience. So for the love of the Great Chain, DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME WITH THE VITA-CHAMBERS ON. Otherwise, it becomes the Shining Force of FPSeses. Why yes, I do have a Photoshop for that.

Probably Shining Force III, given how political BioShock is....fuck. I've already covered that. How about the shooting, though? That's pretty damn cool. I mean, you get quite a few decent weapons (I never disapprove of crossbows in an FPS), a billion different types of ammo for each one, and enough frantic fun to act as a reason for all that. I know what you're thinking because I have the Plasmid for mind reading: wouldn't the idea of "fun" contradict that hellhole feel BioShock's trying to go for? Surprisingly, no. All that chaotic shooting actually contributes to the atmosphere, somehow. What better way to show that the city has become a militaristic, misanthropic mightmare (I'm surprised that word works as well as it does) than by making everybody willing to shoot you on site for some of that sweet, sweet ADAM? Or by making their leader somebody who actively encourages this to go Chickenhead on his dreams? The only complaint I could possibly have about the shooting is that this is clearly a console shooter (hacking isn't so difficult when you can click EVERYWHERE), but ignore that, for it is a dumb complaint.

Instead, let us focus on a much more legitimate complaint: why do you have a black and white morality system, BioShock? Mind answering that for me?...Perhaps I should explain. Your magical Plasmid powers are fueled by ADAM, a substance you gain from killing steampunk pimps (why else are they called Big Daddies?) and molesting their little girls. OK, it might as well be, given how the game presents it. You either rescue them with the power of Jesus McGoodyGood (again, might as well be) or kill them out of the blackness of your Hitler heart. What's that? You want ignore them and maintain a neutral stance? Or you want to phone up Dr. Tenenbaum for the ADAM, thus ensuring you don't have to kill anybody to get it? Fuck you and your moral ambiguity. We're giving you pretty much the bad ending for being so...neutral. The game literally forces you into a moral choice from the beginning, since you have to interact with at least one Little Sister to get through the game. Worse still, the morally good route is the one that goes against Rapture's own morality system. Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself. Look, BioShock developers, I know you guys aren't the biggest fans of objectivism, but for the love of the Great Chain, you can do better than just saying "objectivism is evil".

Sad, too, because the actual Plasmid system is frigging great. I could bullshit around, but given that I've clearly already done that, it's time that I cut to the chase: the customization. There are 70-odd Plasmids to fuck about with, leaving you a TON of room to experiment and customize and stuff. I mean, I forgot to customize my Plasmids a lot, but given that the game was reminding me so much about ADAM and Gatherer's Gardens and such, I'm willing to let it slide. Besides, there's quite a bit of strategy to how and when you use these things (my favorite would be "short circuiting the water results in insta-kill"), and even ignoring that, they feed back into that frantic fun argument I made so long ago. After all, what better way to see the destructive power of Plasmids than by getting addicted to literally burning people's faces off? So yea, all-around solid game. I'd like to end it there, but before I close things off completely, there's one thing that's been nagging at me this entire time: bee Plasmids. Could you ever think of anything stupider than that? I know that Plasmids modify your DNA (which is already a shaky way of justifying things like hacking open turrets), but I don't think there's any combination of genes that equates to "turn your arm into a beehive for an entirely separate species". And genetics aside, who the hell is buying this damn thing? I mean, what possible market would there be for a bee-shooting Plasmi-

Oh dear god...Rapture is...full of...MASTURBEETORS! MASTURBEETORS, ONE AND ALL! RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!

Review Synopsis

• Hello, I am Vincent Kinian, and I'm here to ask you a question: is a gamer not entitled to the fullness of his morality? No, says the man in the diving suit rushing at me with his drill arm...
• Fortunately, I have all these cool guns and Plasmids to help me through this situation.
• It doesn't hurt that there's a free Vita Chamber every two feet in Rapture. Man, Andrew Ryan's government sure is generous with these life handouts!

I'm not clear on what practical use this could ever have, but here you go! Step one in becoming Andrew Ryan: telling God to go suck it.

I...what? This game is just so confusing. It all started with very confusing reasons: I wanted to put that (admittedly pretty good) BioShock/Little Mer-wait. OK, now I can put it to rest once and for all. Instead, I must now focus on the strangeness that is this game. For instance, why is Prince Eric so cool with his girlfriend being a mermaid out of nowhere? Why does Denmark have walruses? Is Ariel embarrassed when her dad walks around the house completely naked? AND HOW THE HELL DOES ALL THIS ADD UP TO BE SUCH AN AVERAGE GAME!?

Perhaps I should explain things, or at least those things that can be explained. As many of you could probably tell, this game is based off a Disney movie based on yet another spell of Hans Christian Andersen psychosis. What you don't know is how irrelevant all this is. The entire movie? It's all glossed over as set-up for the actual storyline: Ursula's magicking up the sea and it's up to Ariel to stop her! How? By turning back into a mermaid, of course, bringing up the question of why she had Ursula turn her into a human if she could just switch back and forth at will. And isn't it kinda strange that not only does the story completely skip past major details like a first love and changing species and the motivations behind either of these actions, but also that it contradicts these details just as quickly? And then we move from an exercise in narrative focus into absolute insanity. Ursula's freezing the sea, fish rain from the sky, and that cartoonlet from above happens at some point. So in short, the experience is a surreal, bat-shit insane interpretation of The Little Mermaid.

And a...shooter? Ecco the Dolphin knock-off? Generic action game? If it sounds like the gameplay is just as strange as the set-up, though, I'm sorry to say that it's really the exact opposite. You're just swimming through almost the same level again and again and again. And again and again and the game ends after five levels. Doesn't sound terribly exciting, does it? It really isn't, but not for lack of trying. I mean, the final level has a cool maze thing going, and there are a few instances where you get to watch Ariel desperately flop about on land, somehow managing to be more depressing than the source material (see: my last link). I guess it's just the ease of things that turns the game into a bland mush. The bosses don't put up too much of a challenge, and being able to swim wherever destroys any threatening menace the enemies could have held in any other game.

Although it does lead to some mildly interesting puzzles. Yea, I'm surprised, too, mainly because I don't think the game was even aware of this. That probably explains why it's pretty much the same puzzle each time: they didn't think you'd care. But I care. I care about opening those treasure chests and getting the power-ups within. Mainly because there are things like challenge and physics and other concepts attached to all this exclusively. Kinda wish it applied to the rest of the game, at least in more obvious amounts. I also kinda wish those Little Mermaid elements were the focus instead of window decoration for what appears to be Pee Wee's Playhouse. I mean, yea, it leads to some catchy music throughout, but I want more than that. Capcom, you had an opportunity to make a mermaid dating sim (a market that, as far as I can tell, is still an empty vacuum), but instead, you went for a confusing and forgettable...action game, I guess? I'd still recommend this game, but not for anything it did on purpose.

Review Synopsis

• What's stranger than a reverse Katawa Shoujo? Ignoring that in favor of farting on sharks.
• I forgot what I wanted to say in this bullet. Shocking.
• Cool puzzles, though. Somebody tell 1990s Capcom about this shit.

So did any of you guess what the theme is? The answer below:

Drugs. Copious, irresponsible amounts of drugs.