Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on BioShock. We talk about Fort Frolic and the arc of what's coming, guns and plasmids and a bit about their crossover, crafting, and gene tonics. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Sections played:
Up through Fort Frolic

Issues covered: hitting the best beats of the game, having the future be a little blurry, Cohen's theatricality, using the camera purely as a framing camera artistically, the multiple payoffs of the camera, critical path integration of the camera, time-delayed gratification, a bottle episode, the statue splicers, using spotlights theatrically, how do you produce oxygen and filter out carbon dioxide, riffing on space games, putting crafting on the critical path, not having inventory as a presented system but having it underneath, not a lot of difficult decisions, always being able to get enough stuff through grinding, minimal benefits to adding crafting stations, only just getting better plasmids and tonics (not spending to improve them), the changing approach to respecs in modern design, wanting to ground systems in the world, categorizing tonics as a sop to balancing, Trojan Horsing the immersive sim, alienating a smaller audience in favor of a larger one, Jack's mother and father, themes of family in the series, getting a lot of mileage from the narrative setting, the uselessness of the map and the way the objective marker can put you on the rails, not having decisions that mean a lot, the greater impact of the older games, the rise of blogs and critical outlets, explosion of other outlets around the time.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Pokemon Snap, Dead Rising, Xbox, Unreal Engine, System Shock, Thief, The Chronicles of Riddick, Repblic Commando, Prey, Dishonored, Fallout 3, Tomb Raider (2013), Ayn Rand, Resident Evil, Peter, Planescape: Torment, Control, Blarg42, Twin Suns Corp, Batman (film series), Calamity Nolan, Airplane!, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.

Next time:
To Apollo Square

Links:
1998: Why it's (probably) the Greatest Year Ever in video games

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