New Video Games on the Horizon

[djnemo65]

I am really nervous about Bioshock 2. As much as I enjoyed the first, I don't get playing the game as a Big Daddy. How will you capture the same sense of tension and dread that defined the first game when you are navigating rapture as a nearly invincible giant smelly robot? How do you have story and character development when your protagonist is a soulless hunk of scrap metal? Add in the fact that it is being developed by a different team and you have a tremendous potential for disappointment.

While the Ayn Randian dystopian intellectualism of the first game was significant, what really made Bioshock so groundbreaking was its seemless integration of a player morality into its gameplay in the form of the little sisters. This was something new for a console game. However, this simplistic model of save/don't save was put to shame recently by the quandary provoking Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3, for my money the best game I've ever played. In Fallout's world the moral questions are more complex than yes/no, and the consequences less obvious (I'll never forget the feeling that came over me playing Fallout when my previously good character commited his first murder of an innocent...heavy stuff) So Fallout upped the ante, and it seems like Bioshock in response is going to be content to make a straight up action game, with like awesomer weapons, and tubular explosions. IMO that's a recipe for mediocrity.