K-Man: Well, I mean... that's the plot. It isn't supposed to have aliens and monsters, it has crazy mutated people. I thought the combat was fine. I've seen videos that demonstrate some pretty decent AI, but the demo has almost entirely constrained areas with little room for movement. Once you threw a couple ranged combat guys and some cover into the mix, they performed pretty well, but there were only a couple spots where they could do that. I felt like the combat felt solid in general though, just didn't have a lot of variety because there were only a few weapons, and it was stuff we'd seen all over the place before in previews and such. I think the full game will fix those problems nicely.
I guess I can sort of understand wanting more things to kill, because as gamers we always want more and more stuff to fry in more and more ways, but I don't expect that it's going to bother me in this case. I need it to stay grounded so it keeps within the game's immersive elements.
Belmont: Oh yeah, it's *heavily* inspired by it. It's a very good and interesting book in its own right, one that has me on both sides of the issue constantly, which I guess is partly why I love it. I both agree and disagree with virtually everyone. Obviously there's some overstatement in terms of heroism being presented and some of the villains seem a little bit overly comic, but when you look at today's political landscape it's difficult not to cringe at how accurate some of their whining is. Rand's philosophy is a sort of hyper-pride in self worth, a thing that's all about working hard and working for YOURSELF, not for anyone else. "Give" is not in her vocabulary or in the vocabularies of her characters. I feel that it goes much too far in that regard, but I also find that some of what constantly bugs me about overt liberalism and those who want to dish out and those who want to ACCEPT handouts from the government is some of the same stuff that her ideologies address. I believe strongly that you should work for yourself and make your own way, and I've always been very against most assistance programs. So I'm stuck in the middle on that issue. Rand was also a staunch atheist, so obviously I don't get along with her there, either.
One of the biggest threads I think you'll see is that Andrew Ryan, the founder of Rapture (and another A.R., eh?) has a very similar background to Rand. From Wikipedia:
Rand was twelve at the time of the Russian revolution of 1917, and her family life was disrupted by the rise of the Bolshevik party. Her father's pharmacy was confiscated by the Soviets, and the family fled to Crimea to recover financially. When Crimea fell to the Bolsheviks in 1921, Rand burned her diary, which contained vitriolic anti-Soviet writings.[5] Rand then returned to St. Petersburg ("Petrograd") to attend university.[7] She studied philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd. Her major literary discoveries were the works of Edmond Rostand, Friedrich Schiller and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Soviet background that basically fucks your life so bad you become a hyper-capitalist. Objectivism, Rand's philosophy, is based on a lot of that, and this plays a *heavy* role in BioShock from what I can tell. The difference is that instead of the BUILDING UP of it all like we see in
Atlas Shrugged, BioShock tells a story of its complete destruction. Whether or not this is a philosophical statement from Levine I don't know, as there may well be stuff in the game that suggests that this Randian utopia *could* have worked in other circumstances (I've heard there's some content to suggest this). So... yeah. Who knows. But case in point, reading
Atlas will definitely have an impact on your enjoyment of the plot to at least some degree, I think. Even just with the demo I felt a heavy presence, and not in a cheap or stupid way. It felt really nice to have those allusions in place.
Also, it seems there's some Dostoevsky influence in there as well. I know the IGN review mentioned
Crime and Punishment, at least, but I think I'll have to dig into the full game before I can really confirm any more literary threads other than the obvious.
EDIT - Sorry, wanted to add that last statement and fix some weirdness in the last paragraph. I'm fucking tired from editing this podcast...
EDIT x2 - Okay, just wanted to add that I watched the Gamespot video review and that was a bit better than the text review. Shows some stuff you might want to miss though, so view judiciously. It also shows the hitching problem Gerstmann was talking about, which does indeed seem a bit strange. Stranger still that I've heard zero other reports of it. In the end Gerstmann feels the combat just isn't quite beefy enough (mostly because as guys get stronger toward the end of the game, they don't look bigger or more menacing, so you feel like you're just doing less damage) and... well, that seems to be the main complaint. It seems a little hard to buy that watching the video, though, because the combat looks great, and the PC version's slightly more frenetic pace may help make up for this also (as well as get rid of that hitching problem he talked about... though I don't see proof that it's going to show up on a lot of people's 360s). In other words, I think Gerstmann may be attempting to give his usual hardboiled review in the interests of seeming objective, when much of what he's talking about is at best subjective (taste), and at worst just... wrong. But I won't say he's wrong as I don't have the game yet, and his niggles are fairly minor regardless of their context. Either way, it was a nice video review. But as I said, watch yourself if you watch it. There isn't anything directly spoilery, just a couple short scenes you might want to be surprised to find in the game (a couple location-based things where there's something shocking on screen, and one of the Little Sister scenes that another video review spoiled already).
