FTM GAME DIARY 1 : "BIOSHOCK INFINITE - SONGBIRD EDITION FOR PC" with spoilers

I wanted to preserve my ingame-experiences for good. Expecting to trust happily in present 3D-gaming after user-expectations-failed AAA titles like: Dead Space 3, Aliens CM, SW Old Republic, Defiance, Gears of War 3, Resident Evil and many more. If it was KI, design of the environment, storytelling, scripted events, length of gaming or for other reasons.

Some weeks have gone by now after I touched the right mousebutton to finish the credits of BIOSHOCK INFINTE and the Songbird Figurine now stands unwatched on my shelf. I was so happy and nerdy-kind of proud to own something valuable like the next great episode of the BIOSHOCK world in full aspects, the number one storytelling-immersive-gaming experience and the reason, why I actually started to become a real gaming nerd after I first got to experience Half Life 2 on Valve in 2004. Now I feel like a victim of that old stupid advertising marketing clowns telling you to buy and to consume nevertheless you´re able to spend this amount of money on a Collectors Edition expecting something without a longer value than 18 hours of my precious lifetime. As much as I wanted my imagination to be accelerated by this gaming experience, fueled by all the vids, reviews, foreshadowing interviews and the comments, I find myself now in front of a wall of reality where it all got smashed.

First Ten Minutes 24 May 2013 @ 12:50am
Ten Minutes Firsts Status geteilt.

30th March, 4 days after release day

FTM-GD: "BIOSHOCK INFINITE" DAY 1: "Will the circle be unbroken.. listening now to the touching downloadable Bioshock Soundtrack while working. Song 3+4 make me kind of cry. I don´t know why, "but may be the answer is in the...sky". And I haven´t played one pixel of my rare one-year-before-preordered-Songbird-Edition even yet that I took out yesterday from the GS-Store in former East-Berlin. Still staying with the queeky little Industrial Revolution game and want to solve all the minipuzzels (59) before starting the -Big Sista-.."

DAY 2
FTM-GD: "BIOSHOCK INFINITE" DAY 2:

Couldn´t finish my "Industrial revolution" gaming temptation for exploring the "big sista" was too hard. Went straight onto Columbia and got totally lost. I was once in Epcot when I was younger and Bioshock Infinite is like the return of something like this great to explore again. But: I tried to "jump" several times, the game held me back. I wanted to explore outside the gardens and the walking areas of the ordinary people, columbia police and scripts kept me away too soon. Finally after the "how-to-use-the-game-mechanics-part" I didn´t throw the ball at the mixed couple-no temptation at all- and the people wanted to fight me immediately, so I needed to fight back to save my avatar. Skyhook was available promptly with a small tutorial how to use it - to kill avatars with it. Pretty cruel to tell you, spilled lots of avatars blood. Crazy powers where available and I have the feeling that a user of the Ultimate Songbird pre-ordered edition might have a lot of extras to use. The blooming colours and the wonderful hummingbirds, which really can be seen closly enough are around when you enter, later when you have to fight defending your avatar all the wonderful creatures seemed gone, except for the crows, why ? Mother Nature usually doesn´t care so much, but anyway, no romance in "gun-am-style". What else shall I tell you, it´s "Bioshock I/II 4.0." Faster, much faster more to see and taking you away breathless from where you want to go, when you go around the next corner go up some stairs. Now I´m about to find a hole for a key I found. Hopefully this trip doesn´t end too fast. I think it was worth the price..but we´ll see!!

FTM-GD: "BIOSHOCK INFINITE" DAY 3:

Got totally lost yesterday in Columbia, thought I travelled skyhooked some minutes but actually I stopped 3 hours later. It was 02:00 a.m. while my rendering finished on my editing and I stopped playing. I met "Liz". She continues throwing internal gaming money (Silver eagels) at me so I can buy more upgrades in the game, but it´s getting much more easier and I´m afraid that the progressive gaming balancing will make me finishing the game too early. The modified Unreal Engine III makes environment looking great, but to be honest it´s still a comic world and to tell you the truth: Liz is like Snowhite 3.0 and I´m not sure if I really can "feel" something for "her", I wish I could like I used to do for the Big Daddy, that old grumpy "King Kong Monster"-like suited thing reduced to its surreal limitations in Rapture of stalking and sorrowing diving. I have a feeling, that the game was meant to be much more "immersive" because some parts of my walkthrough make me stop and explore, but more searching for addons than fascination of the environment that starts to repeat after 4 hours of playing. anyway: I hope for a talk to Songbird..yes, why there is no talk possible with lots of choices to the characters like in Mass Effect ? A role play modification would have made the game so much more "sticky" to me and I for sure would have stayed much longer. The videoparts in the kinematic-machines through the game are nice, but do not fullfill their duty in terms of information, it´s more propaganda which I consider as useless, because the obsessive dreaming of a fascist mind feels wrong anyway from the beginning, so why following his propaganda ? "Quantum mechanics" ( en.wikipedia.org ) I´m really fine with that and I would have liked to share this vision and to learn, but here it´s more decoration and lacks of proof. I know I expect a lot, I know it´s hard to fulfill all the user`s wishes, but where Rapture woke up the good old "Jules Verne" in me the "Bros. Wright" are slowly waking up and disagree in terms of a greater "vision" and beyond. Yes, it´s great to fly virtually but where I land is kind of "wanted" it doesn´t make me "fear" and "wonder" so much like it used to do in "Rapture". The emotion ismore: "let me get through it without breathing, let me get the mystery from Liz let me find out if something here is real or just a Booker dream, the "Maltese Falcon" of gaming the Humphrey Bogart of Anti-Disney-Wonderland. But it´s sweet and I like to tell you that I finished all the 59 mini puzzles in "Industrial Revolution" and to tell you: I loved that really. It made me realize that I can still use my brain and give it a real challenge with something so absurd like adding rack-wheels to make a flashgame roll. Try Industrial Revolution yourself, you find yourself in loosing patience so often, without being angry and start to throw a party when you solved puzzle No.56.

April, 10th

FTM-GD: "BIOSHOCK INFINITE" DAY 4: " I´m much further now in the game somewhere in "turning the time back" during the "Search for Chen Li"- Chapter and Liz is really growing for better as a companion in avatarism. I think that sometimes without noticing she comes to places where she actually couldn´t be as being a real organism. From the very end of the steps in a long way of climbing she suddently appears in the next elevator and doesn´t ask to wait for her or just letting me go a bit. I´m rushing through it, always repeating with returning with her by my side, in case I might have missed something important. Allthough "the mechanic patriots" are too easy to knock down and I don´t need to wait too much to return after "death", I might have "died" now like 9 times and the game still rewards me in my "mediocre" modus. BUT: Yes, it´s amazing and I really start to like it now seriously. It gives me the ultimate feeling of a vacation from work. The colours just make me feel so good and I can´t wait to open up the box with my "Songbird statue" it rewards me for being such a nerd and it´s making me feel good to earn more from this great gaming concept than just a DVD. Design is still the leading way I´ve got to tell you and I would really, really love to interview Ken "Walt" Levine about the real secrets concerning this game. Yes, it´s awesome and I want to finish it using as much real time that my little life can offer. It´s the new "shit" and I simply got lost in it. Great artwork , everythings done right and the franchise will hopefully become more immersive in the
next one. Thanks a lot for this sticky, fast pace experience over more than 8 hours. If you want to see where I stand in giving time to this, here you go: steamcommunity.com

18th April

FTM-GD: "BIOSHOCK INFINITE" DAY 5: The Nemesis of the Songbird and the Big Daddy is their taking care for a young woman ? As much as I try to understand or deeply wait for some kind of a deeper meaning in the Bioshock franchise I end up in the straight following of a hollywood-like path to the untrue kingdom of the directors will under the influence of the very capitalistic attitude from the sales managers. I already started to doubt that the artform of 3D-gaming really wants to bring up new ways of defining the real world if it´s not an Indie game. It´s not possible for a AAA title. A former and very old interview partner of mine who went through the horrifying tragical consequences of Hitler and Stalin with the loss of his family and the very traumatic experience of the Gulag told me, that for him it doesn´t matter where the "club" comes from, if its the ultra-right or the very communists, the othodox-religious or the anarchists. Now while I went through Booker de Witts some kind of "heroism" in the resistance of the Vox Populi I feel betrayed and left alone as a user with design and avatar-shooting. So if even "family" (caretaking) doesn´t seem to be a better reason to live straight forward, what actually is the message ? Nihilism ? Is there something like a message at all or is it only the designers will for simple projections ? Does a megalomanized product wants it ? The reason why I start to doubt Bioshock Infinite is it´s cynical way of story telling and non-wanted-indentification with its protagonist and its repetition of the 2007 franchise success. The more I "play" the more I get frustrated, the lesser I feel connected and I wonder how all this "storytelling" will end..maybe there are more reasons to understand the increasing amount of bad critics of metacritics for this game: www.metacritic.com

1. Mai

DAY 6
FTM-GD: "BIOSHOCK INFINITE" DAY 6: I think I met " Liz´mother". It was a very strong visual moment of a quicktime ingame film after playing 2.5 hours without a breath. I wish I could had have a dialogue. My neck hurts and I don´t think I can have a clear thought about what I just experienced through looting and shooting myself with scary but sometimes random avatars. I forgot to lower the sound so my ears hurt and I ´m not sure if I damaged something. Hopefully not! Tricky traps along the arena ways, always with obstacles that I could manage in the second try. Amazing environment changing like clouds in the sky, perfect design and amazing colours throughout the way. Disturbing textures in a total great compositions of light, sound and action. I´m confused what I really saw, experienced but I can´t wait to finish and to give you all my final conclusions about something that for sure has touched me, but lowered my expectations for the true meaning of something complete I imagined because of all that trailers and teasers. Anyway I will tell you if it was worth spending 130 Euros on a Collectors Edition and it is possible, that this could be my final game after all these years of being virtually involved in 3D gaming environments rushing.

2nd Mai Diary: "BIOSHOCK INFINITE" DAY 7..the last day:

"Nope, I guess I will not play 1999 mode. The game is over and the ending is a classic but plain bossfight without something to gain except...well, except some crazy ending of the BIOSHOCK INFINITE world, where you will (spoilers, now:) go for a very short time back to RAPTURE but you actually don´t know why and you might not understand why you´ll played all this at all. Because that is how I felt now: The "sleeping" beauty is your devil and what was real is now just "dreams" or "parallel universe" or "whatever"..gone..sacrificed for some kind of loaded meaning of the "circle".

"Believe" or "Non-believe" is sadly not an option here and that is the biggest loss of a scripted gaming-chance and it´s challenging my critcism:

This game fed me with all kind of tension and miracles, made me rushing to it´s ending to replay it happily with the "1999 mode" and leaves me alone now in the very end with a dead "Songbird" ? I don´t know why I feel betrayed, but with the great benefit of a greater idea and hard vision by Ayn Rand and the Jules Verne´s like Nemo- Steampunk-adaption of RAPTURE that really made sense to me in all its details, non-story telling ways, programmed KI and everything that I even looted and shooted for some greater ideas and characters in Part II that fought in my head about controlling me the simple gamer of a scripted world, there is no competition with Bioshock Infinite now at all with this great efforts for a surreal mirror of capitalsim, industrial revolution and control of the working class.

Steampunk in BIOSHOCK INFINITE is a designing decorative, the "historical-line of a living city" which I really liked as a reason for better and truly believable game design when I saw the PAX vid ( www.g4tv.com ) turned into something expendable for me and it´s actually not to believe that a former enemy of yours ( I felt that in the trailers ! ) suddenly (!) becomes your powerful ally with the Songbird character, he didn´t have a reason to be there at all, like the "Big Daddies". May following DLC´s of BIOSHOCK INFINITE might explain the unexplainable, but who cares when you know that in the final of the main game a strange kind of nihilism rules ? For sure: Nothing actually makes sense what we do as humans on this planet, but even in the very end of the newest "Scary Movie" we can see an ape telling us humans to enjoy living on earth and that´s simply nice for me. I don´t know Booker de Witt and I don´t want to, I don´t know Elizabeth, they were and will not be mysterious enough for me and I don´t think the story is so new or kind of crazy to think longer then 10 minutes about it´s ending.

No sir, I liked the kind of open concept from the former BIOSHOCK. This final INFINITE version ( I guess!) just didn´t make me feel good, scared or caught, it´s strange but I guess no writer of an interactive game should make me messing around with (even virtual) babies (first rule of donots in scriptwriting, people call that a taboo ! ), no one should force me to give little daughters to people you don´t know, you don´t like and that´s the biggest mistake in my eyes: Don´t understand as being such a fashist like the Comstock character. And no gaming construction should make me feeling like a tool for it´s strange story when it´s not as good as being "a lucid dreaming tool" in the first BIOSHOCK. I´m fine with surreal fantasies, but what I liked the most in the very beginning of BIOSHOCK INFINITE was destroyed in the end: Hummingbirds, Songbirds, Lovebirds and even Snow White´s crazy clone.

I don´t know what to think about all that shooting and looting experience, I had to go through investing time, yeah man: Lifetime! Because I really hoped for more empathy in the end after being totally virtualized by RAPTURE, its sick inhabitants for whom I really felt kind of pity, the "Tinman"-Big Daddy and even that dumb "Little Sisters".

RAPTURE was the ultimate "scary kinda anti-butdisney-dream-home§ under the sea. COLUMBIA is still the "Magic Kingdom with a funride" that I didn´t want.

Columbia seemed to me as a kind of promised land in changing architecture, storytelling, technical focus on colours,lightning, deepingameexperiencewhen Imeltedtheicebioshocklike-KI programming, scripted events and state of the art experience by its creators even on PAX 2011 and I´m not sure about owning a dead bird figurine now watching me from my shelf....just because he looks like he knew it before ! ;)