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He's got a point, though. Even outside the scope of counter-insurgency, what good is any declaration of universal human rights if it's not strenuously enforced? They only just started trying war criminals at the ICC, there are plenty of people out there who've yet to be caught. And it's difficult to act, even, without eliciting cries of "world police" or "imperialist". Do we just run roughshod over borders and through cultures in pursuit of war criminals or do we wait until it's convenient to act before we do so? Is it really practical to seek justice in either case? But that's all beside the point. I had Gonzalez pegged for gone when he showed his complete contempt for the Congress during the Wiretap scandal. I remember when he had just come on, a lot of people were optimistic that he wouldn't be a crony, and apparently those people were wrong. I've heard rumors of Michael Chertoff being tapped to replace him. I do hope that's a joke. Nonetheless, $20 says Gonzales fails to recall his resignation and shows up at work for at least a few more weeks.

JOSH SPOTTING (blind luck on my part) - weighing in on the hacking minigame. I wish the AV Club would put some more weight behind their games section, but the Words section isn't much better off either.

Buck 65 - Cretin Hip Hop Vol. 1. Remix album from the recent tour + some Situation demos.

Twice, actually. There are at least 2 levels of Hypnotize Big Daddy, but they both take a full EVE hypo to use. The more powerful version lasts longer. And if you kill the girls, Tenenbaum doesn't say anything.

I found the crossbow to be pretty damned effective even into the late game, scoring one hit kills and everything. But on the 360 version it doesn't seem like the autoaim feature works with it.

I've been 21 for two hours and I've gone through a shot of Bailey's, a shot of goldschlager, a shot of Pama pomegranate liqueur, and a soco and dew, and am currently going through a shot of Godiva chocolate cream and a few shots of Tequila Rose. I'm digging the cream liqueurs (slowly), obviously. Feeling pretty good about it, but this is all light and sweet stuff (excepting maybe the goldschlager). We just went out and bought a bunch of shot bottles before the liquor stores closed. I've got some grape and potato vodka and blueberry cream liqueur for later as well, and a bit of Captain Morgan Tattoo.

It's not weird at all. The 360 uses a single set of hardware specifications. PCs come in all kinds. Thus making a stable game for the 360 is generally much easier than making a stable game for the PC.

Also, the 3-word twist was pretty amazing. I'd like to see the RPG Codex would say about it, what with all their concern about not having choice in games and then having it sprung on them that their lack of choice was completely and totally intentional and integral to the plot of Bioshock. Pretty ingenious, really. Andrew Ryan's death sequence was one for the ages.

Man, that endgame screams either "rushed" or "out of good ideas". That boss fight was the easiest boss fight I've ever played, and I've played Mortal Kombat. All you have to do to beat Goro is kick-jump him repeatedly, and voila, perfect victory. Bioshock's boss was easier than that.

It makes sense later in the game. Probably shouldn't say more than that.

There's really no reason you should feel always low on ammo unless you're overly relying on the guns to see you through. With the right tonics you can balance out the Plasmids and the guns and always come out with maximum EVE, health and ammo at the end of every encounter. But I imagine at harder difficulties it's more of a problem.

Ah, yeah, I'm reading about it. They still have the QTEs that say to press the A and B buttons?

There's a PC version? That's balls.

You're playing the Wii version, I take it? And to think, some people actually believed the Wiimote would lend itself to shooters.

I'm pretty sure you can hack the rolling combination locks. Do you want me to just tell you what it is? Because it's the same # used for the surveillance trailer outside the Liberty base in Deus Ex, which is how I remember it. At least, I believe that's it. It might even be an homage.

Look around the coffins for a slip of paper. It's not far from the door. Failing that, hack until you can't hack no more.

As fun as it is watching Shadowstrider be intimidated by games not involving rhyming elves, dragon amulets or mini-nuke grenade launchers, I'd rather this thread not be derailed. Has anyone beat the game yet?

So what is the consensus? I'm only about halfway through the game or thereabouts, assassinating the artsy Cohen guy's former apprentices. So far I've enjoyed myself, but Bioshock for me has run into the same pitfall that FEAR, that other ambitious shooter, did, though not to the same extent, and that's lack of enemy variety. Aside from the myriad sentry turrets, and 2-4 Big Daddy types, there are 5 different kinds of splicer: the thug, the gunman, the grenadier, the teleporter, and the hook people. I would have found it so much more creepy and exciting had they followed the designs of the concept art, in which as the game goes on, the splicers change themselves so much that they progressively become monsters that could have easily been living out of the Master's lair or your average Id game. I seriously would have found that cool, although I could see how it might be refreshing to some that the enemies all stay recognizably human for the most part. But that's alleviated a little bit by the endless supply of Big Daddies, who are much funner to play around with. If you're playing on a not-hard difficulty, you can mine the things, as they keep respawning. Usually it takes less ammo to kill a Big Daddy than you could buy with the money earned from the Daddy's corpse, which basically allows you to max out most everything constantly. Some have complained that there's no real meaning to the choice given regarding the Little Sisters, and I suppose they have a point, as all sparing the Sisters seems to do is delay the reception of half your Adam until you've saved a certain number of them (I think Tenenbaum gave me the Adam after 4 saved Sisters, which was well through the game, as I had been killing most of them) There is one added perk in the "Charm Big Daddy" plasmid, which to my knowledge you can't receive if you kill the Sisters. Like I said, I started off killing the first 7 or so Sisters and saving a few after it became clear through the audio diaries that Tenenbaum was not a nazi (at some point in development, she was supposed to be Mengele's daughter) but a holocaust survivor with guilt issues. So I think I've pulled off the Sister balancing act fairly well. The game wouldn't be as good as it is without the voice acting, which is generally awesome. If the diaries were all text, the game would fail miserably. The voices are what make the characters, and I've found that it's the case with a lot of games. The hologram logs in KOTOR2, for instance, were inherently more interesting than text-only datapads, most of the time. The inclusion of the audio diaries elevates Bioshock above standard objective-based shooting into narrative-based shooting. Although I will say, since Irrational never uses actual character interaction, I usually expect that any sane NPC is going to die and their hopes will collapse around them, and I'm always right. In that, there's very little suspense in Bioshock. Since I figured Atlas was going to be around until the end of the game, and since inter-character interaction isn't how Bioshock works its magic at all, I expected his family would end up being broken apart or killed, and I was right (although there wasn't any response from the submarine, so I'm a little suspicious that Irrational might pull a surprise happy deus ex machina ending, if they don't kill Atlas) Unfortunately, as good as this game is, and it's pretty damned good, it's not going to be able to occupy all of the time between now and the next big game's release (I don't like Halo) so it's back to Fallout, I guess.

Towel that bitch.

Once you get the Ice blast, you won't need it anymore. Not only does it allow for hacking, but it lowers the speed of the water going through the pipes by half. The downside is that if you use it on an enemy and destroy them, you can't get anything from the bodies, ala flesh to stone. You'll bang your head against a wall should you use it against a big daddy. I'm not hating it. It's been pretty good so far, but I'm not as wrapped up in the game as most probably will be, because I know how Irrational rolls with their narratives. I am getting pretty goddamn tired of hacking, though. And the Big Daddy's seem to be pretty easy to kill, at least on Normal difficulty. I've decided to go half and half with my Little Sister kills/saves. Right now I'm in the "forest" part of the game. In the winery area there's a sculpted cheese wheel with a number of pebbles arranged in front of it, a nice little Pac-Man easter egg, if you can notice it. And that "Circus of Values" thing is pretty annoying. I'm tempted to look up "Circus of Values", since I'm betting it's a philosophical term, perhaps Randian in origin. But I'm tired of that clown.

That was actually pretty good.

OH SNAP Really, though, MotB should be just like a Mike Hammer novel, in which women throw themselves at a PC who couldn't care less about them.

You must kill your nephew, for he is actually Ayn Rand in disguise. Look at those eyes. It's kill or be killed.

It wouldn't have been a problem had they maybe lifted the ammo limit above 100 or whatever it was. I found that more than anything I was choosing my weapons based on the amount of ammo they used, the less the better, and since all weapons used the same ammo I had to micromanage which weapons I was using, since a shotgun blast cost me three pistol bullets, and an RPG cost me twenty-five or whatever. It didn't make sense to have anything more advanced than, say, a silenced EMP black market pistol. It wasn't that it was an awesome weapon, it was that you'd go through a level with your shotgun or Sniper Rifle or RPG and at the end of it you didn't have enough ammo to continue. The nice thing about differentiated ammo types - if you ran out of one type, you had another. In DX:IW, you ran out of ammo and you reloaded the game or used whatever paltry melee weapons you had to slowly rebuild your reserves. At least with the pistol you weren't constantly leaking ammo.