I was watching the Bioshock Retrospect here on GameSpot and it makes me ill.
All these GameSpot staffers talking about Bioshock as if it's anything more than System Shock 2 with a different plot and watered down gameplay.
When does it end?
Let me clear something up first:
-The storyline of Bioshock is fun and original, and the "Would you kindly" twist was cool. Being a Big Daddy was cool.
-I played Bioshock to the end. The game was not bad, it was just painfully unoriginal and the rabid fans of it annoy me and all need to be corrected for their own sake.
Now let me rant. Despite the above, everything else in Bioshock was a direct ripoff and downgrade from a greater game known as System Shock 2, a PC game that came out over a decade ago that apparently not a single soul on GameSpot, its own editors included, has ever played (or refuse to acknowledge when talking about derivative old Bioshock). Unfortunately, we're living in this era where all new gamers are too young to know of any video game that existed pre-2000, and we have the GameSpot staff who unhelpfully enjoy slurping the mainstream sausage whenever possible, compounding the problem and taking great joy in taking a collective dump on old classics to talk up "the next big thing" even when it's just "the next big ripoff of a better game that came out ten years ago with pretty water." Go look at all of GameSpot's Halo launch parties for evidence of their mainstream sausage slurping.
Any proper retrospective or, hell, any proper review of Bioshock should, out of common courtesy, speak about System Shock 2, the game Bioshock so heavily takes gameplay from and is so derivative of that it even has "shock" in the title.
System Shock 2's class system was miles ahead of Bioshock's. You could only specialize in one area, unlike Bioshock where you can do everything equally well, which is extremely cheap and lame. Want to hack a machine? Can't hack? Oh, just pay the robot money, apparently machines take bribes to buy booze with! Want to shoot guns? Go ahead, you're automatically the most skilled mercenary/gunslinger/soldier in the west somehow! Plasmids you say? Here, have a whole bag!
In System Shock 2, if you couldn't hack, you didn't. Period. In System Shock 2, if you couldn't fire weapons, you didn't. Or you did very, very poorly. If you weren't pyrokinetically inclined in System Shock 2, you didn't cast pyrokinesis. And you most certainly couldn't specialize in all three areas at once.
In Bioshock, you're so boringly overpowered and all the combat/non-combat aspects are so horribly simplified from System Shock 2 that they're an absolute garbage heap. You can do every single thing in the game equally well, which presents you with no challenge and no alternate approaches to getting through levels. You can mow everything down with a machine gun, throw fireballs, and throw wads of cash at security robots simultaneously. You're a super-sneaky machine-gunning plasmid-mage at all times.
Why not just put in an "I win" button? It would have expedited the process of braindead-easy victory that was designed to cater to spoiled console gamers who would have a heart attack if they were told they had to use their heads.
I understand partly why Bioshock was dumbed down from System Shock 2; Bioshock was made for younger console gamers, a casual market no matter how you cut the cake. System Shock 2 is something that is only remembered by serious gamers who find Bioshock offensive when you realize they're trying to sell you something you already played ten years ago with a different coat of paint and gameplay that has been braindeadened to the point of retardation rather than enhanced.
But clearly I'm the crazy one here.