soapbelt
Revisited in anticipation of Part 2 coming out. Still a great game! Feels better on PS4.
2020
A good game that feels burdened by a bunch of design decisions that are cool on paper but unfun in practice.
A fine campaign with some good set pieces and story moments, but its attempts at commentary on morality in warfare are ultimately toothless and unfocused. Multiplayer is great fun though, even if it does feel like a regression in some aspects, namely the return to killstreaks and rewarding camping.
Very good story and graphics, immersive to a fault.
last time i played this i was still rocking a pentium 3 for god's sake. it ran like shit but i didn't care. all the physics stuff still rocks. i can certainly appreciate the story better now as an adult than as a dumbass teen who'd skip everything. sam lake really understands heroic bloodshed better than any other writer outside of hong kong. every bullet, every spilt drop of blood dripping with tragedy.
2019
really nice palate cleanser after going through 5 high intensity games. dunno why i put it off for so long. laughed when claire said she hasn't gotten around to it yet. me too!
it was nice to come back to rapture and see what it was like in it's (sorta) prime, even if it was just a glimpse. the art direction still holds up very well, gorgeous city. i don't really get what the story is at this point, maybe it'll all be answered in part 2 but i do like the noir vibe they were playing with here. all the snarky hardboiled dialogue serviced well by the voice acting. gameplay is bioshock infinite as usual. nothing really different to talk about here. shocking splicers in water is still satisfying though. the hook is so much less satisfying than the wrench still.
longer than the first episode which is nice, and i like the switch up in gameplay to stealth. it fleshes out bioshock 1 a lot, and retcons a controversial part of infinite. weirdly i still think the narrative is kinda wack? lots of unexplained things and motivations that don't make a lot of sense. at least the presentation is still excellent, interesting cutscenes and great voice acting as usual.
i remember liking this when i was 14 when it came out. nowadays it's kinda bad. i don't think it's unplayable but it's really annoying to play. mafia feels like the most C+ game series. the soundtrack is really good at least. the gameplay loop is simple but the pull here is that you're going from segment to segment for a piece of the story, and the story isn't good. it's like "mob movie greatest hits" without the stuff that actually makes those things iconic, like good performances and direction and characters. everyone here sucks, but maybe that's the point they were trying to make. it's sort of admirable that they were trying to portray the humdrum life of a criminal but they don't really nail it, like trying to split the difference between an action blockbuster with setpieces and faux life-sim stuff. also i have no idea what kind of remastering they did here cause it's not good looking. part of that is due to the huge amount of visual bugs, shit pops in and glitches out an awful lot. though i do dig the changing of seasons here, not a lot of open world games have a snowy segment that isn't like a limited-time multiplayer thing or a part of the map.