Hype Machine!

I just finished Bioshock. It was pretty dope. But was it a perfect 10.0?

Umm... no.

When I first started playing it I was having a hard time getting into it. All of the things that Ken Levine has said over the past year about revolutionizing the shooter genre kept popping up in my brain whenever I ran into a flaw. Bioshock is a good shooter. Shit... it's even a great shooter. But is it going to completely revolutionize the way we make shooters? Is it the effing messiah?

Umm... no.

But maybe that's ok. Maybe it's up to us as gamers to block out the gargantuan silly hype machine and just focus on the final product. Once I started playing the game with this in mind I started having a LOT more fun. It is a great game. Who cares if it's not going to revolutionize anything... it's incredibly polished, creepy, beautiful, etc, etc... and it should be recognized for this... I'm sure it's going to win a ton of awards this fall. It's more evolutionary than revolutionary... but that's ok too. I happen to be a big fan of just about everything they do over here.

I just wish that the Hype Machine wasn't so wildly and ridiculously hyperbolic when it came to games like Bioshock. Just tone it down a bit and I'll be cool with it. If your game is great, just believe in it and present it as work that you're proud of without all the rigmarole.

I'll leave you with this video that was passed around the internets... splicing some choice sound bytes from Ken Levine together with gameplay from Bioshock and older games that it... umm... "borrows" from.

-Brad!