Bioshock Infinite: All a bored.

I moved on to Bioshock Infinite. Spoilers or whatever. Spoilers for a game that everyone has already played, a 26 year old Alan Parker film and a 127 year old Jules Verne story.

The game begins, I'm shot into Heaven by a rocket and find out that now I'm stuck in a Disneyworld full of people I wouldn't want to be around, a sterile amusement park where you're not allowed to do anything unexpected or die while inside.

Things quickly take a turn  and then we're off. Elizabeth is every bit the Disney princess, and playing the part of Booker the swashbuckling Beast is fun enough for a while, but it wears thin too soon.

Soon the wonder is gone and Disneyworld becomes a depressing shell of itself. Everyone is dead, gone or attacking me on sight, and my most emotional interactions are with the buttons of elevators. Elevators move me as much as anything.

I've killed or driven off everyone in Main Street USA and am now marching through the rest of the rides and attractions, looking at something just long enough to strip it of cash, food and salty booze.

I get my hand bandaged up and I start thinking about Angel Heart, I have a vision of Robur The Conqueror (although I think of Czar Vargo first because that's the kind of geek I am) and realise my attention is wandering. I'm looking for the handholds of a story to keep things lively but it's hard work and the game isn't helping me nearly as much as Elizabeth is.

There are yawning tears in the reality of the world, treacherous gaps in the story, holes everywhere, places where it feels like content was cut or altered in haste- I can't help but feel we should've seen or heard more of Jeremiah Fink, Songbird and Booker's time with the Vox- and I have a suspicion we'll only do so through DLC.

Despite making a valiant attempt to confuse and aggravate the player with the way it delves into time travel, parallel universes and shameless usage of some of the hoariest plot devices and tropes available to modern mad science fiction, I don't think I have much to add to the discussions of Bioshock Infinite- most of what I'd like to discuss and what  I wish I'd said is already out there.

I really wish I had more to say about it, good or bad, but while it was an enjoyable tour around a nice looking theme park, it was a kind of shallow experience at the end of the day. It's a very self aware game, but the things it's self aware of don't strike me as being particularly necessary or clever.

It's a game about a man with a gun and no past following one particular railroad through a multiverse of possibilities, most of them indistinguishable from one another except in the most superficial ways, mainly in terms of what guns you use.

In short, it's another post-modernist first person shooter like Spec Ops: The Line or something. Probably. I didn't finish Spec Ops.

First-person shooting is really all you'll be doing so it's nice that it does it at least adequately, unlike Bioshock, but it certainly doesn't throw anything new or unexpected at you. Big slow guys are scary, guys with knives will run at you, snipers and explosives are annoying and keep their distance. You get magic combat powers and things to upgrade. It's an FPS. That's all it is, a well-made single player FPS that literally runs on rails at times.

Not often enough, frankly. The times when you'll be zipping around a nice big arena on a shooty rollercoaster, feeling like the swashbuckling protagonist of a summer blockbuster action movie are drastically outnumbered by the times you'll be hovering on the threshhold of a smallish room plinking headshots into guys as they pop out of cover and run screaming at you, or doing a desperate Benny Hill chase around a small piece of cover trying to break line of sight with a rampaging Patriot.

At least it gives you plenty of seriously gorgeous things to look at along the way. I took 700 screenshots and set them up as rotating desktop wallpaper. It's a shame the game couldn't give me a good war story to go with each of these wee postcards, but every story would be roughly the same: "I went into a room and then everyone aggroed me. I used my powers sometimes for variety, but it had to keep reminding me that I had them because I wasn't bothered. Oh, and sometimes there would be a Handyman who killed me a dozen times."

I probably wouldn't even have bought Bioshock Infinite if not for 'the pre-order bonus' of XCOM, and I probably wouldn't have gotten around to buying XCOM so quickly if not thrown together with Bioshock Infinite.

They have nothing else in common, but they complement each other well. They both wrapped meu up in their narratives but only one of them gave me anything to think about.

It's a very simple story told mainly through nice pictures.

Chess with guns: XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Sick 360 no scope headshots

In the last month or so I've been playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a turn-based squad strategy wargame from lead designer Jake Solomon of Firaxis, based on an old Microprose game. The concept is partly inspired by the old Gerry Anderson series UFO, in which a small international coalition assemble to fight off an alien invasion of the Earth. It plays very much like a tabletop wargame with all the set-up of fiddly pieces and number crunching handled smoothly and (mostly) invisibly by the computer.

I'd played the demo and enjoyed it despite it only comprising the first couple of tutorial missions. The full thing was... well, more of the same. It's presented well enough, with nice enough graphics (Unreal Engine 3, like so many games I've played recently), serviceable sound and a cool electronic ambient soundtrack by Michael McCann, distinctive and reminiscent of his work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

It's just the kind of game I enjoy, watching a couple of squads of wee soldiers all go from nervous, under-equipped rookies to battle-scarred superhero space marine veterans with a war story to accompany every new ability and fancier bit of kit. Just the kind of thing to keep me playing, coming back for more.

The mad squad fastroping into an alien base

It only hurts for a week

State of the bad-ass art

I don't know. Some lines.

The thing is, because it's just that kind of game, I honestly don't know if it's any good or if it merely triggers this addict impulse in me. I found myself developing tricks and strategies for battling the game itself, just in order to play it. The terrible UI is mercifully customisable, but you're still going to be somewhere on the spectrum from unhelpful to intrusive. It's incredibly easy to select the wrong thing on the game board, leaving you howling as one of your little guys leaps from a catwalk and trots out of cover into the sights of half a dozen enemies, or trying to target a grenade near the edge of range leads to the target reticule sliding around like a dog on a wet tiled floor.

Naw, YOU go first. I'll cover you.

I shamelessly save-scummed whenever someone died on that first game due to this kind of thing, so attached was I to my familiar little wrecking crew. Even with the increasingly insane numbers of mutons, robots and thin men the game was throwing at me towards the end, with squad sizes limited to six there was never quite enough killing to go around for the guys I had, let alone to train up any new blood. I became so attached to Mama Bear, Warlock, Gypsy, Smokes, Scarecrow et al that when I hit a glitch (Wildchild became permanently hospitalised. I suppose it was something to do with his hitpoints hanging when I swapped equipment around. The armour was the only thing holding him together) I replayed from an eight hour old save game, my most recent where he wasn't bugged into a permanent coma. I couldn't let him die like that, not to a bug.

Tactically laying out our approach using tactics

Despite this kind of thing, constantly battling a game that seems to be broken or cheating, I got into XCOM the way I used to get absorbed by games back in the day, sucked in like Bobby Patterson. I've always liked things like that, games like XCOM's distant ancestors Rebelstar's Raiders and Laser Squad, complicated boardgames and wargames, things with special cards and miniatures and funny dice. Science fiction and fantasy games where you win fights by solving problems, rather than vice-versa. (Which isn't to say I avoided the alternative- I was in the chess club at school, which was like Fight Club for people who think they're Napoleon Bonaparte rather than Napoleon Dynamite, and let me assure you that some of those geeks were every bit as keen on violence, with the added advantage of a strategic element and the patience to nurture a long grudge. You pull off a four move fool's Mate and think yourself pretty clever... then one day, BAM! You get hit in the eyesocket with a white bishop thrown with considerable accuracy and force from across the room. Masterstroke of lateral thinking. Well played.)

Those deaths were scripted ones, alright?

I finish up XCOM and find myself clicking around the internet looking for more information, sniffing around, trying to find out where else I can get more stuff like this. I find some pretty interesting and neat things that you might like to check out, but mostly I find out that Julian Gollop, the man behind all of these games, is back in the lab with the Heisenberg hat on again, working on a new version of Chaos. I'm already jonesing.