As a rabidly hardcore fan of the original game, I feel almost duty bound to dislike BioShock 2. In about as much need of a sequel as the Mona Lisa, Ken Levine’s original creative work was a stunningly complete vision, telling a perfectly orchestrated tale of the rise and fall of one of gaming’s most memorable locations. The prospect of a purely commercially-driven sequel drew understandably hushed accusations of cashing in and selling out. Yet as hard as I’ve tried, BioShock 2 is simply too good a game to dislike. 

Initial interviews with new creative director Jordan Thomas suggested that the man had a rich appreciation for what made BioShock such a unique vision, but appreciation doesn’t always translate to ability, yet Jordan and his 2K Marin team have done the impossible and created a valuable expansion to the 2007 masterpiece. Set 10 years after Ryan and Fontaine’s war tore the city apart, BioShock 2 puts you in the boots of the original Big Daddy – a more manoeuvrable but conversely less tank-like build of the iconic lumbering goliath. 

Giving you access to the immense power of the Big Daddy of course demands a more threatening set of enemies and spearheading that threat is the scarred and dysfunctional evolution of the Little Sister – the Big Sister. Combining the grace and agility of the ballet dancer with a frightening arsenal of weaponry including an arm-sized syringe, the Big Sister takes a stern approach to sibling protection and strongly objects to your interference with the little sisters of Rapture, appearing regularly to make your life more difficult. 

10 years in Rapture has seen political upheaval, and from the ashes of Andrew Ryan’s extreme objectivist philosophies has risen Sophia Lamb with a fiercely socialist agenda. More than simply a re-skinning of antagonists, Lamb’s collectivist ideals have given birth to an entirely new culture of beliefs and concepts that go against everything Ryan stood for, and in design terms that equals new environments and boss characters. That’s not to say that the drastic shift in values has discarded everything Ryan stood for – his DNA was woven so deeply into Rapture’s architecture that even 10 years on from his demise, the clashing of cultures is consistently evident.

Big Sister is watching you.

As with the original game, Rapture is clearly the star of the show. Obviously a significant amount of the original’s appeal was in discovering and uncovering Rapture’s mysteries – a sensation that sadly can’t be repeated once you are familiarised with its secrets. What BioShock 2 does manage to succeed in doing however is creating a perfect addendum to the first game, expanding on ideas that Ryan’s Laissez-faire capitalist society simply wouldn’t accommodate, such as religion and collective responsibility. The new characters sit comfortably alongside the likes of Sander Cohen and Yi Suchong, furnished with their own objectives, ideas and of course shortcomings.

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Halo: Reach factoids have been popping up all over the place like decloaking Elites, thanks chiefly to the chaps at Edge and Game Informer but also, somewhat less officially, to EB Games, who let slip a few gameplay screenshots on Wednesday morning. You know what this means, readers? It means Whining Season has officially commenced.

We’ve had a good old gander at the material, and we’re ready to throw down a gauntlet or two. Brace yourselves for some serious subheadings.

What’s hot…

Six Spartans is a bit ridiculous now, isn't it. The Covenant really should have called in sick.

The return of the Elites

We got on well with the Brutes in Halo 3. Which is to say, we enjoyed blowing their shields away with our battle rifles and grenade-tagging the suckers to screaming submission. But for all their secondhand camo cloaks and jet packs the Brutes never quite lost the status of thuggish Covenant middle-management – glorified bully boys, giddy with excitement at their newfound prominence within the caste structure. For a game as solemn, as elegaic as Reach, we need an enemy we can respect. And with the Elites, it’s all about respect.

Crysis-style power-ups

Bungie is good with gizmos: slightly ludicrous though they appeared in concept and execution, the Bubble Shield and Grav Lift proved to be fantastic, highly tactical additions to Halo 3’s campaign and multiplayer. Reach tips its hat to Crysis in the form of recharging, one-at-a-time “armor abilities”, transforming your Spartan into a speed freak or a tank at the touch of a button. We like it. We also like what it implies for the game’s environments, which will probably need to be both larger and more abundant in secondary routes and landmarks to accommodate the greater range of run-gun possibilities.

Reach can handle up to 40 on-screen light sources, in contrast to Halo 3's two or three.

Bigger but not too big

Numbers are a much-abused weapon in the fanboy arsenal. Right now, for instance, there’s a lot of ballyhoo among the PS3 faithful about how the 256-player MAG is da biggermost online FPS everer, and so forth. While Halo has always gone heavy on modes and auxillary content, Bungie has never been in the business of feature overkill, and nothing’s changed with Reach. Online matches are still limited to 16 players – cosy affairs in which a man can be reasonably sure of walking two feet from a spawn point without taking a bullet through each of his major organs.

Which is not to say the game won’t offer more: Reach can handle double the AIs per area that Halo 3 can, we’re told. But the onus, as in past Spartan sequels, seems to be on providing more stuff to do within existing parameters, rather than piling on the bullet points.

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The Killzone franchise is five years old today, and Eric Boltjes, Mathijs de Jonge and the rest of Guerrilla Games are accordingly sinking into mattresses of purest purple cotton-candy nostalgia over at the official site. The grimy shooter series has returned to headlines for other reasons of late, with the second iteration swiping a Golden Joystick and no less than three nominations for Spike’s Video Game Awards 2009. An appropriate time then to slip off those rose-tinted goggles, strap on some glowing Helghast varieties and do a little retrospective whinging.

I loved, and still love Killzone 2. Rather fortunate, that, as I spent close to 100 hours with it in the hysterical two or three months before its release. But the game had, and still has some definite shortcomings, and recent tidal shifts in the waters of first and third-person shooting have made one of these shortcomings especially evident.

Do you feel lonesome tonight, Sev?

If you’ve been keeping up with our reviews, you’ll know it’s a great season for cooperative gaming. (So great, in fact, that we’re going to publish an editorial on the subject in the next couple of weeks – but I digress.) Following in the footsteps of Insomniac’s Resistance sequel, Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2 have boosted their respective co-op components from humble campaign add-on status to that of a full-blown separate mode. Left 4 Dead 2 is busily reaffirming the marvellousness of the original game’s signature four-players-against-the-world dynamic. I am utterly gutted that I didn’t get to grade New Super Mario Bros Wii, that peerless provoker of beery retrohead camaraderie. And all this occurs against a backdrop of mighty advances in multiplayer gaming generally, with the MAG beta asking unheard-of feats in team (or rather, army) management, and Demon Souls carving a wild, uneasy line between roguelike and MMO.

In that context, Killzone 2’s strictly solo ten levels feel a little bloodless, despite its artery-ripping graphical excess. This game needed co-op – needed it like a daffodil needs sunlight, Jade Raymond her hair straighteners or David Jaffe his sedatives. Its war-ravaged, multi-storey maps and the find-fix-and-flank nature of its action would have suited team play right down to the bullet-scoured earth.

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I'm too young to die!

Poor old Left 4 Dead. Just over a year old, and already consigned to the backseat of history by Valve’s uncharacteristically headlong rush to sequel-dom.

Well we’re not quite ready to let go, chaps – as befits the PC version at least. Here are some reasons to put off uninstalling the original zombie co-op FPS for a few months longer.

Because Left 4 Dead wasn’t broken, hasn’t been fixed.

Bit of an obvious point, this one. Left 4 Dead is still utterly, utterly fantastic, and worth experiencing alongside its younger sibling. Those soggy North American forest, industrial and residential maps aren’t getting any less gripping or well-balanced. It’s a whole five quid cheaper than Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam, too.

Because Valve’s keeping its word as to downloadable content.

OK, they took their sweet time bringing out Survival mode, the new “Crash Course” campaign and Versus functionality for the original maps, but Valve seems to be building momentum on the DLC front. We downloaded a 4v4 matchmaking update only a week or two back. Watch this space.

Because Left 4 Dead now boasts hundreds of custom maps and campaigns.

There are plenty of prolific would-be Valve employees out there, it seems. This writer’s favourite custom maps include Claustrophobia, a cramped, two-storey Survival arena featuring some stunning broken wood geometry and shadows, L4D Dust 2, for all the Counterstrike freaks in da house, and Who’s Laughing Now?: The Evil Dead Cabin, a bastard hard homage to Sam Raimi’s stuffed-crust B-movie classic. Hunter Training is great for putting a little extra spring into your pounce.

Custom-campaign-wise, you might want to consider this Silent Hill remake, or this sequence ripped from Resident Evil Outbreak File#2. Cream of the crop, though, is Death Aboard, which takes you from the depths of a prison to a gloomy dockyard and onto a precariously balanced ship. Fans of the surreal should check out Night Terror and its daring hot-air balloon rescue. Gadzooks.

Because you can stuff all the original game’s content into the sequel.

Those lynch-pins of the underground code-breaking scene at L4Dmods have figured out how to transfer all Left 4 Dead campaigns (and, excitingly, custom campaigns) to Left 4 Dead 2 – well ahead of the release of Valve’s official SDK.

Hold on though, doesn’t this make the first game rather redundant, we hear you protest? Ah, my son, but you’ll need a fully paid-up, squeaky-clean legit copy of both games to pull the trick off. Plus a bit of technical know-how, naturally. And the patience to endure a fair few non-crippling bugs. Hit the link for a tutorial, and check out the video evidence below.

Because Zoey is way fitter than Rochelle, innit.

Look, let’s not beat around any bushes here (after all, one of them might contain a Boomer). If we had the chance to leap into the sack with either of the Left 4 Dead ladies, it’d be pasty girl-geek brunette Zoey all the way. Rochelle’s too respectable for our unhygienic, society-averse tastes. She’s a TV producer, for God’s sake. Plus she wears a Depeche Mode T-shirt (admittedly it’s got a stencil of Gordon Freeman on it). Stupid establishment chick.

So what’s keeping you glued to the original Left 4 Dead, oh well-informed reader?

No related posts.

Simultaneously the best and worst thing about the First Person Shooter genre is that there are so damned many of them. And because there are shooters appearing with such alarming regularity, the truth is that sometimes it’s difficult to keep up. You know what it’s like. Three games come out in the same week that you like the look of, you pick one of them, and by the time you’re ready to go back, something else shiny and new has distracted you.

Over a period of time, it’s inevitable that we’re all going to have missed out on some great games – maybe the ones with a quirky premise that never quite got the recognition they deserved. So that’s where we come in with a round-up of some of the bona-fide Cult Classics of the genre that you may have missed out on the first time around.

A great FPS never dies.

The Operative: No One Lives Forever
Monolith (PC, PS2), 2000

For reasons that are not entirely clear, very few people wanted to play a game starring a sexy female spy in a catsuit, the buffoons. Evidently influenced by late 60s Bond movies and, more recently, the Austin Powers movies, Monolith created a superb premise where ex-cat burglar Cate Archer tip-toed around a plethora of memorable environments armed with a plethora of gadgets.

Exceptionally ambitious for its time, it gave players a great deal more opportunity to experiment than many modern shooters ever bother to offer. Players were afforded the opportunity to sneak past hazards with the aid of gadgets (such as the guard dog distracting electric poodle), dispose of corpses with body-removing powder, or just blast their way out of situations.

The overall look and feel of the game was memorable, too, with excellent swinging sixties-inspired music, and all manner of unusual locations and scenarios, such as a space station in zero gravity, a shipwreck, or a freefall from an aircraft. And yet despite scooping awards galore, it sold precisely bugger all – even a subsequent PS2 port and sequel didn’t do the job. Go and see what you missed.

A sight for sore eyes.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay
Starbreeze (Xbox, PC, Xbox 360, PS3), 2004

Precisely one month before Riddick came out, the press got to see the game for the very first time. Gobsmacked as we were by the visuals on display, it seemed incredible that publisher Vivendi wasn’t shouting from the rafters, but a combination of film-based restrictions and general PR apathy ensured that the Xbox-exclusive game limped into stores with a complete absence of hype.

A few sites championed it around release, but by then it was too late. The Vin Diesel movie bombed, retail didn’t put it in front of punters and few gamers put their money down, despite the game being arguably one of the best shooters of its era. Blending stealth, adventure, melee, shooting and even mech combat to quite glorious effect, it almost defied categorisation, and proved beyond doubt that this was how to treat a film license.

To compound the tragedy of it all, Starbreeze also managed to create one of the finest technical achievements of that console generation. No other Xbox title even came close to matching its ludicrously detailed, bump-mapped environments. The game’s subsequent ports to PC and, eventually, 360 and PS3 via the recent Assault On Dark Athena release have put it back in the public eye again, thankfully. Check it out.

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Much has been said about the price tag of Modern Warfare 2 in the build up to its release, and not much of it publishable. But if a videogame’s worth can be measured by how much of it stays with you after you’ve put the pad down, then even the most indignant will have few complaints if this hugely anticipated sequel ends up delivering as much as the original did two years ago.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the original Modern Warfare was the fact that most people didn’t put the pad down, devoting untold hours to mastering its thrilling online component long after they’d come down from its monumentally brilliant, if brief, single player campaign. Having mastered such a winning formula, the last thing you expect are radical changes, and so it proves.

Picking up from where the 2007 classic left off, you’re once again on the trail of a Russian Ultranationalist leader as he plots the destruction of the West. driven by a desire to cause maximum mayhem to the West. Having spun the death of his predecessor as an act of martyrdom, and successfully convinced his followers of the tyranny of the West, Vladamir Makarov proves to be an adversary with an impressively evil CV.

Four by two of reinforced plastic is a soldier's best friend.

Shock tactics quickly become a feature of Modern Warfare 2, so much so that the game specifically checks – twice – if you’d rather not be subjected to scenes of gratuitous violence. Evidently revelling in its new Adult Only status, Infinity Ward waste no time in repeatedly pushing the violenceometer needle into the red, depicting the kind of shocking scenes we’ve long been used to in gritty dramas, but rarely get exposed to in games in such uncompromising fashion. Expect an ugly media frenzy to develop as the wider world wrestles with the ramifications of What This All Means. [We started without you, actually - Ed]

What it means in the context of the series is simple: that terrorism is an ugly business, and Infinity Ward hasn’t tried to mask the reality, or trivialise what it looks like. Whether it crosses The Line is perhaps a topic to wrestle over at length another time, but it’s hard to divorce yourself from how brutal some of the scenes really are, even when, in truth, it’s still some way from reality. The fact that it’s often unclear who the bad guys actually are, and that it’s you that’s pulling the trigger is, of course, the difference.

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The once populous combat arena of Winter 2009 is an echoing shell. A few notable action franchises still circle in the shadows, IPs like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Pandemic’s plucky original The Saboteur, but the vast majority have migrated to the over-subscribed stomping grounds of Spring 2010. There in the centre of the unspoiled, uncontested sand stands the usurper, M16 dangling absently from one hand. Despite contentious server support and pricing decisions, Modern Warfare 2 seems to have won the struggle for Christmas revenue before it even begins.

But has it? There are inhuman shrieks from the auditorium, a confused surge of rotting bodies against the barricades. Left 4 Dead 2 has had its own battles to fight on the road to release, against Australian ratings boards, disgruntled fans and over-sensitive US newspapers, and the Infected are in no mood for further upset.

The face-off between Valve’s necrotic B-movie homage and the military shooter’s military shooter turns on more than their simply being released a week apart: the two games are in most respects polar opposites. So which one should you be taking home with you (or at least, which one should you be taking home first) come mid-November? Let the tournament begin…

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Whilst it hasn’t generated the buzz of LittleBigPlanet, or the barrage of impressive statistics that filled the Spore universe, Halo 3 can still hold its own as a champion of user-generated multiplayer content. As we’ve seen with other titles, however, the more popular and accessible your creative toolset, the less easy it is to filter out the dross. Bungie’s community files section, though a fantastic tool in the past, is struggling under the weight.

So that’s where the following list comes in. This is by no means an exhaustive guide to the very best that Forge has to offer, but we’ve compiled from long experience, cherry-picking the maps and game variants that have earned a permanent spot in the FPSG multiplayer hopper. It’s a connoisseur’s selection of carnage. And so, without further ado…

Sky Castle

Sky Castle – SandTrap – CTF, Slayer, Infection

Sky Castle is among the crème of the many Forge architectural oddities by virtue of being both aesthetically interesting and functional. The huge tower that dominates an otherwise untouched SandTrap provides a great sniper’s outlook, a less-than-impenetrable fortress for CTF or Tower of Power, and an approachable last-man-standing hideout for Infected. As with all the best Forge creations, crafting your own experience around Sky Castle’s geometry is half the fun. This design rises far above the competition.

Shenlong Dragon

Shenlong Dragon – Standoff – Slayer

In contrast to the utilitarian appeal of the previous entry, Shenlong Dragon is almost entirely fanciful. Painstakingly perched on top of the Standoff valley, this is an impressive structure to navigate. With multiple routes to the top, its curved body and Chopper-laden mouth provide some picturesque and occasionally useful scenery for slayer matches. Dismayingly popular amongst the juvenile machinima crowd, we urge you to put the Dragon to good use elsewhere.

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