SUPER MARIO GALAXY VS. BIOSHOCK!!!!

[Non Sequor]

I have played Bioshock and it was a disappointment after the praise heaped upon it. I absolutely loved the bathysphere ride into Rapture, but inside it was too dark and cluttered for the art deco style to really come through. The story was intriguing and the "Was Andrew Ryan right?" debate that the storyline implied was good but forced, but the storytelling itself seemed, like the design, to be cluttered as well at times. Certain story elements seemed really silly and really stood out badly in a story that mostly took itself seriously. The repetition of enemies and the fact that half of the tonics and plasmids are useless made the combat more of a nuisance than something enjoyable.

For the record, my favorite single player PC game of all time would have to be Max Payne. Max Payne was a game with vastly more enjoyable combat, a magnificently executed visual style, and a lovably cheesy writing style with fantastic voice acting. Yet it got reviews averaging in the upper 80s to low 90s as opposed to the mid to upper 90s scores that Bioshock got.

I strongly believe that, for various reasons, reviewers wanted Bioshock to be a masterpiece even though it wasn't. I think that one of those reasons is that they wanted a mature game to prove that gaming can be taken seriously as art and they picked the wrong candidate. I think another reason is that many reviewers recognized that the System Shock games never saw the success they deserved and so they wanted to see Bioshock succeed where it's predecessors failed. Essentially, this is an example of where reviewers either consciously or unconsciously use their reviews to try to shape the path of the gaming industry. I think that Bioshock IS a step in the right direction, but it's not the great leap forward they proclaimed it to be.