Hoarding Underwater

A nice night in tonight, played through the entire first level of Bioshock, up to harvesting my first sister. I am leaving nothing unturned in the game, it’s very satsifying to be able to search every nook and cranny. I’m trying to find all the tape recorders, a)because it’s a nice hoarding thing to do and b) because they really add something to the story. They add a real context to the situation you find yourself in, giving you an insight into some of these characters that you meet / shoot. Another big thing that i like is the hacking. It’s quite satisfying to have an army of security bots at your disposal, ripping into the splicers.

Chief o’Brien does a great job as atlus, he has a real presence over the radio. If only i didn’t think of the chief every time he speaks. It does hurt his character some-what, although so far they do have a certain amount of cross-over-ability, so it’s not been taking anything away from his story.

Just need to find and kill my first big daddy and this level will be well and truly done! How exciting.

A Quiet Night in

As the wind and rain whistled around our flat, I took in a couple of hours of bioshock (Halfway through first mission, on the way through the medical pavilion) and a fair few games of ticket to ride.

The atmosphere of Bioshock is really something, the times when all you can hear are some inane gibberings of a splicer are quite disturbing, and the times where they’ve attacked each other before they’ve seen me is a really nice touch. The way the back-story is handled with the tapes is particularly appealing due to the hoarding mentality it rewards. Hacking seems a bit hit and miss. On a few occasions it seems that you are destined to fail, blocking off so many squares it became impossible to make a chain. Although the penalty is so small it really doesn’t make too much difference i suppose.

As for ticket to ride, i screwed myself over in a big game because all of a sudden you can use some routes twice. Not knowing this, i made a mad dash out of my way to get a track i desperately needed, which resulted in two people blocking off my only ways to get there. Would have been handy to explain that in the stupid tutorial I suppose. I am glad to see that TTR is still being played on the America map, I was quite concerned that everyone would migrate to the Europe map.