Holy sweet mother of horror! The Xbox 360 Marketplace has a playable demo for Bioshock. Get it now! Set your 360 to download and then read this while you wait. I’ll wait…..(whistles jaunty tune)….Ok, you’re back..good.
Welcome to Rapture, the free city of tomorrow… today. Founded by Andrew Ryan, Rapture is a city free of government, religious or moral bindings. A place for scientific freedom! And then something went wrong…..who knew?
The opening plane crash and entry into Rapture is just freaking amazing looking. The best description of Rapture is Gotham City (of Batman fame) circa 1940′s underwater.
The demo does a good job of presenting you with the backstory of Bioshock and giving you a good taste of what you can expect in the final release. You get to try bashing in the heads of mutated residents with a wrench and you get to tryout a few of the Plasmid abilities. Whether it’s the 1000 volts of pure fury or burinating crazed residents, you will enjoy it’s effects both visual and games play aspects.
Ok, you should be done downloading soon. Get comfortable and watch out for Big Daddy. Remember crazed women with rabbit masks and knives = trouble.
Prof. Venatus, looking for Plasmids at the local Kwiki-Mart
P.S. If you can find a copy I recommend System Shock 2 also from Irrational Games. I don’t know how well it may run on current systems, but I realy enjoyed it a few years back.
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1 user commented in " Bioshock: The Demo in Review "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI have to second its awesomeness. They really seem to have put a lot of effort in instilling the place with backstory in a subtle way. Many games spend a lot of time on their art and then grab the camera and say “LOOK AT THIS COOL THING WE MADE!”, where Bioshock (like Half Life 2 before it) leave the details there to be discovered if you’re interested, making it that much more rewarding. Many games struggle with making dark creepy environments, because while making things dark adds suspense, it gives the player not much to look at and is disorienting. Bioshock’s art design handles this in a pretty ingenious way, by setting you in an art-deco underwater city; so most rooms have large windows to the ocean which allow a a bit of ocean filtered light to stream in (still murky and scary), and by putting up a lot of neon lit decorations, which are plainly visible but don’t illuminate a lot of the dark corners.
For some reason, the part where you ride down to the city reminded me of an amped-up version of the Tower of Terror at Disney World. The attention to detail and use of audio is similar.
I only wish the demo had more of the “interesting ways to kill the bad guys” that are hinted at in the trailer. Other than zapping dudes with lightning who were standing in water, it’s mostly wrench and pistol. Though no doubt I’ll be getting the game to see the rest.