Skip to main content

Review of BioShock 2

BioShock 2 was a lot of fun. Rapture is even more artistically beautiful and intriguing than in the original. The world is full of details making for a constantly absorbing experience. The enemies are fun to fight and give you plenty of incentive and opportunity to experiment with different weapons and plasmids. Upgrading your character makes you feel powerful and the enemies make various satisfying noises as you dispatch them.

The spear gun was great. Pinning enemies to walls is a lot of fun. With upgrades, it works like a sniper rifle. However, I found that the game suffers from poor collision detection at times which results in your long shots simply disappearing along the way. You quickly get the hang of dual wielding plasmids and weapons. Certain combinations are obvious and make the game quite easy. You may find yourself varying attacks just to keep it interesting instead of just trying to stay alive.

I really liked the new research method which encourages you to try out multiple plasmids, weapons, and attacks to get the most research points. In addition, I found that upgrading was easier (i.e. there was more ADAM available and items were cheaper) making it possible to create a huge combination of tonics and plasmids.

The additional moral decisions you make along the way are a nice touch. However, they pale in comparison to the depth found in games like Mass Effect and Fable. I occasionally found myself doing things that felt morally ambiguous and wondering if it would affect the outcome. They didn't.
Xbox 360
Damon played: 30 hours
Laura played: 0 hours
Conclusion
Damon says: A great game and a lot of fun.
Laura says: Too much graphic violence to play (and this from someone who counts headshots in Call of Duty). But Rapture is beautifully rendered.
Replay Value
Damon says: I'll try the multi-player but will probably not play though the single-player again.
Laura says: I'll probably never try it.
Favorite Part
Damon says: The spear gun.
Laura says: The steampunk art.
Fun Factor
Damon says: The combat and upgrade system.
Criticisms
Damon says: Very hard was too hard at the beginning. Hard was too easy at the end. I played through on hard and found the game was fun, though not challenging.
Laura says: Damon thinks that less blood and gore would make it more accessible to me, but it's not even that. Parts that Damon likes (like the fact that when you hit someone with a speargun the spear pins them to the wall) are really just too realistic for my taste.  If I'm going to play a game with violence, it has to feel clinical.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Bot Commander r1 Released

I just published Bot Commander , the code for my Lego NXT rover . There's a lot left to be done, but release early and often, right? Currently it provides a UI for controlling the direction and speed of all three motor ports on the NXT brick. You can link motors together to adjust their speed in unison. In addition, you can enable "Tilt Control" for a steering-wheel-type experience. To use tilt control: Hook up motor A and B to be the left and right wheels of your vehicle. Hold the phone sideways (i.e. landscape). Tilt the phone forward and backward to drive forward and backward. Turn the phone right and left (like a steering wheel) to steer right and left. As you tilt the phone, you'll see the UI update the slider controls for the speed of motors A and B. I plan to expand the UI to provide a lot more than just motor control. Before that, though, I'll push a JAR to make it easy to integrate control of Lego NXT robots into your own Android project. The code...
Read more

Email Injection

Not so long ago, I ran a wiki called SecurePHP. On that wiki, there was one particular article about email injection that received a lot of attention. Naturally, with all the attention came lots of spam. As a result, I disabled editing of the wiki and content stagnated. Still, the email injection article remained popular. About a year later, the server that hosted SecurePHP died and I never had a chance to hook it all back up. I saved the article though and I'm reposting it now. It may be a bit old (I've been away from PHP for a long time), and I didn't write all of it, so feel free to leave comments about needed updates and corrections. Though this article focuses on PHP, it provides a lot of general information regarding email injection attacks. The PHP mail() Function There are a lot of ways to send anonymous emails, some use it to mass mail, some use it to spoof identity, and some (a few) use it to send email anonymously. Usually a web mailform using the mail() funct...
Read more

XBee ZNet 2.5 Wireless Accelerometer

I managed to put together a wireless accelerometer the other night using my two new XBees, an Arduino XBee shield, an XBee Explorer USB, an ADXL330, and some Python. I struggled a bit with some of it, so here's what I learned: First, a parts list. XBee 2mW Series 2.5 Chip Antenna Arduino XBee (with XBee Series 2.5 module) XBee Explorer USB ADXL330 I'm not sure exactly what the specs are on the XBee that comes with the Arduino shield. But, it is definitely a series 2.5. The first thing to do is to configure and upgrade the firmware on your XBees. To do that, you'll need X-CTU (for the firmware upgrade at least, but it's also nice for configuration) which, unfortunately, is only available for Windows. But, it works fine from VMware. First up, the XBee we'll hook up to the computer to read incoming data from the accelerometer: Plug one of the XBees into the Explorer (it's also possible to do this from the Arduino shield by shifting the two XBee/USB jumpers to USB...
Read more