Hello!

Thought I‘d start this review series of mine where I Intend to review everything I own.
Where else to start but with the very first game I ever owned Super Mario Bros.

First the object of the game as pictured by my crappy phone camera.

So just your typical save princess from dragon scenario, only people are bricks and flowers scattered throughout….wait.

..Moving on.

At this point there isn‘t really anything that hasn‘t been said a million times before about this game. So doing a review for it is pointless besides I could sum it up in two words.

Kick ass!

I‘m rather going to talk about my experience with the game back when I first played it.

Summer 1988 my parents decided to buy a NES for me. They didn‘t have any special reason for doing so, they just decided to be nice to me (<3 my parents). I had already taken my steps into the gaming world before then. I don‘t think I was more then 3 years old when I first played a game on my mom‘s Sinclair Spectrum. At the local electronics store at the time they always had a NES running the demo for Super Mario Bros and every time I went by the store I ended up watching the demo loop over and over again and be very fascinated with all the pretty colors.

So you can just imagine how excited I was when my dad brought home the NES.

It‘s a 1987 model and it still works (though I‘ve had to make some repairs to the contacts) It came shipped with the NES, one controller, the zapper and of course a Super Mario Bros/Duck hunt cartridge.
I can‘t say I remember my first ever time playing Super Mario bros but I‘m sure it went something like this.

This game frustrated me so much back then that I went all Angry Videogame Nerd because of it, and I‘m sure I‘m not the only one who‘s done that. I have evidence of me snapping on my NES as can be seen on the picture below.

While I could breeze through this game these days with little effort when you were 4 years old, playing games was hard and so I must have seen that game over screen hundreds of times before I eventually managed to beat the game, though mostly with help from my mom, she might actually have played it more than me and I‘d just watch her struggle just as much with it.

When I finally managed to reach the first castle and beat it, and like so many gamers I was pissed that after all that hard work and frustration that that stupid Mushroom had to tell me that the princess was in another castle.

This is what I would have liked had happened. *evil laughter*

Rinse and repeat 7 more times and finally defeat Bowser was really frustrating and took forever but it was still satisfying to finally well lets face it, get the p*ssy.

So yeah while a lot of my memories about this game are just frustration and dying a lot it was still the first step that cemented my love of games and gaming until this day much like Super Mario Bros cemented that video games were here to stay.

I can say one thing about Super Mario Bros. It has aged surprisingly well, it doesn‘t just have nostalgia going for it, it‘s still a solid platformer in its own right being of course vastly outperformed by Super Mario Bros 3 which is understandable and normal. If I ever have kids I‘d much rather let them play these older NES games first then anything else. Because after all, what do graphics matter to kids? 8-bit games are a positive influence as far as I‘m concerned, they are simple yet unforgiving and since they require patience to beat they teach children to overcome difficulties instead of just doing things the easy way and most of all they are just a lot of fun.

If there is one thing I miss about growing up are the jumps gaming took each generation and being blown away which just doesn‘t happen anymore. Graphics aren‘t going to improve much more at this point and I don‘t think I‘d like them too either and there are some innovations in works like the motion controllers, I grew up with a controller in my hand and so I‘ll prefer that any day over jumping all around in front a camera.

Enough rambling lets get down to ratings.

Nostalgia factor – 10

Everyone owned and loved this game. It‘s nostalgia factor is beyond the scale but 10 is as high as I can give it.

Game play – 8

The basis for virtually every 2D platform game made after the crash, as such it‘s just a tad simplistic to get a 10.

Sound - 9

Even non gamers can hum the level 1-1 theme from start to finish from memory, the music is classic and the sound effects are 8-bit sweetness.

Vitality - 7

It‘s not a very long game even if you take into account the harder second quest after you finish the game the first time(without resetting the console)

Final Verdict – 8.5

This has been a GameAddictionBlog.com production. I recommend not going there, it‘s infested with zombie pirate monkeys.

So earlier this week TMNT Turtles in Time Reshelled was released.

I of course jumped at the occasion since Turtles in Time is one of my favorite beat ‘em ups not to mention the TMNT being my favorite childhood heroes.
While it was a big arcade hit back in the day, I only played and owned the SNES port of it and boy was it good.

Now comes along a next gen version of the classic with 3D graphics, online co-op!

However, it turns out it’s boring, extremely repetitive and has some of the worst soundtrack,voice over and sound effects I’ve heard.

Why they didn’t just make a remixed version of the original soundtrack is beyond me. It would have sounded much better then whatever that is they play under in Re-shelled.

Seeing as how this is based on the orginal Arcade version rather then the SNES version, there were a lot of tweaks made in the SNES version missing and mini bosses, levels that I remember in the past which were far superior to what I saw in Re-shelled like the whole level in the Technodrome is missing and all in all you can finish the story mode in about an hour and..that’s it. There is quickplay mode where you can select levels and survival mode where you only have one live but that’s that. There is nothing more left to keep you interested in the game.

I hopped online and played with some random xbox live guys through the story and, boy did it get old fast. Not only are you just mashing the same button constantly but with so many footmen and four nearly identical turtles on the screen I had a really hard time keeping track of where I was. Now I know it’s a beat ‘em up and by nature they are pretty repetitive, but there was actually a combo the turtle did in the SNES/Arcade version. In this game, the turtles just jab the same move again and again.

The boss fights are the worst thing in this game. They are all pretty much the same, and due to awkward 3D plane, it’s hard to judge where you have to be to hit him. I didn’t have fun in any of the boss fights. It came down to running into him to get a few hits and then avoiding his counter.

Throwing enemies and slamming them against the ground were always great fun in the SNES version and they also had a mechanism to them. Depending on where you stood and what button you pressed you could decide whether to throw or slam them. In Re-shelled it just seems to happen at random and you have very little control over it.

The comical things in the original are just annoying in this game due to the voice over, like when they fall into a sewer shaft…It’s terrible. But the worst of all is the “My toe! My Toe!”. It’s really really annoying especially because you move so horribly fast in the sewer level, you are being attack from all directions and due to bad color template it’s hard to notice those pins sticking out. So you’ll be hearing My toe! a lot.

Shredder’s voice is meh, and krang is just annoying.

It also seems like every single enemy you encounter is made out of a sponge since they all make this *squish* sound when you hit them…Even the footmen that are robots, I don’t know what they were thinking.

So lets recap the pros and cons.

Re-shelled

Pro:
Widescreen HD 3D graphics
Online co-op

Cons:
Over before you know it
Missing vital tweaks and levels from SNES version
Bad music
Bad Voices
Bad sound effects
Repetitive combat
Hard time telling the turtles apart
No extra modes to keep people interested

Bottom line, if you have a craving for playing Turtles in Time for nostalgic reasons, don’t satisfy it with this game and play the original Arcade version or better yet the SNES version instead. They are much more worth your time then this game.

- X

Merry Christmas to all from Game Addiction Blog.

Here’s a little treat brought to you by the Angry VideoGame Nerd.

 
- X

It’s here, it’s finally here!

Gears of War 2 hit the retail stores today and I went and picked it up around noon.

I’ve only scratched the surface of it so far but right from the start, not a lot has really changed. The graphics are a little prettier and I’ve come across one new weapon, you can also crawl away now if you are hurt and if you are playing Single player you aren’t automaticly dead, the AI will revive you.

Other then that, the gameplay is the same.

However this is by no means a bad thing, Gears of War is one of my favorite games and so having another crack at gunning down the Locust as Marcus Fenix is a welcome treat.

You start of defending a Hospital against the Locust, 6 months after the end of Gears of War and clearly the Lightmass bomb was not nearly enough to take out the Locust and due to evapouration of Immulsion after the explotion a new disease Rust Lung started spreading among the remaining human population  and thus Humanity is left at the brink of extinction. When cities started to disappear COG started suspecting the Locust were back. Now with their last stronghold being in the city of Jacinto which sits on a  Plateau thought to be impenetrable. But when it starts to show sign that it might not be so. COG sees no other option but to launch a massive counter attack against the Locust and taking the fight to where they live in an effort to save Jacinto.

At the start of the game, Delta Squad gets a rookie squad member called Benjamin Carmine which is the brother of Anthony Carmine who died in the first game. Now they use this to take you through the tutorial mode which is pretty neat. Since usually it’s pretty stupid when a War veteran such as Fenix would be taken through a tutorial learning about stuff he’s been doing for 20 years, but here they can do it with Fenix teaching the rookie how to do it.

The game also features upgrade multiplayer mode, with 10 players being able to play online vs the 8 player limit in the original and three new multiplayer modes called Gurdian, Wingman and Submission. They have also implanted a Matchmaking system similar to that of Halo. They have also implanted bots in multiplayer matches now, which is great. They are also available in a special tutorial mode for multiplayer so you can actually try out the new game modes before you go online and get your ass kicked.

Also as an added bonus there is a new five player co-op mode called Horde. Where you and 4 of your buddies can play together to fight off and endless waves of Locust attacking.

I’ll add something more about the game once I’ve had a little more time with it.

Oh and also

1920×1200 (Wide)
1600×1200
1280×1024
1024×768 

Totally Epic ^^

- X

I’ve been playing in the beta and the headstart for Warhammer Online. First impressions is that this game reminds of me WoW. However when you go deeper it is in a lot of ways different. First, the game relies heavily on PVP or as it’s called RVR so a lot of the quests you first come across in the game are quests related to killing someone on the other side.

The game also has right from the start battlegrounds not all that unlike Arathi Basin from WoW which you can enter at anytime. There are plenty of these that you can go into throughout the game.

They also have what are called Public Quests which are kind of like instances out in the open. You can join in the fight at any time just by walking into the area. It’s not necessary to be in a group to get something for taking part in the fight. The final prizes for defeating the boss are rolled. So even if you just entered right at the end and did just a few hits you still have a chance to win something though the chances are very slim.

Now as for grouping, they have made it very easy. You have the option to look for nearby open groups. So if you happen to be in a public quest, you can just check for nearby groups and join. If there are a lot of people doing a public quest you can make a warband(kind of like a raid group) and then everyone is in one big group to finish the quest.

The game is divided into chapters. Each section has it’s own chapter and you do the PQ to finish the chapter. You gain influence points which fills up a meter. At certain intervals you can go visit a Rally master and he will give you rewards. You have to accept a reward at each interval so he will give you a quest to go on to the next rally master. You don’t need to do it, but it’s just some extra XP right there.

In retrospective, this is easily the least grindy game I have ever played. You don’t need to grind if you don’t want to you can level up just by doing RvR there are also plenty of quests that don’t involve searching out some parts of an animal he has a fetish for or something like that.

Another interesting thing, I don’t know exactly how it works but it seems ganking is impossible in this game. If a high lvl character goes into a low lvl area flagged for RvR he gets morphed into a chicken, which makes him easily killable and he can’t do nothing but maybe lay eggs.

Now as far as graphics goes. They are good. They aren’t “*nerdgasm*mmmmmm Crysis*nerdgasm some more*” good but still nice.

See below for my character and how it looks.

There are only 40 lvls in this game against the orginial 60 that was in WoW, however leveling goes a little slower and also there hasn’t been a level that I haven’t gained some new ability yet so you don’t have to wait two or more levels like in WoW for something new and exciting to use on your foes.

Anyway I think that about covers it.

Oh and I am currently playing with the US version of the game on the Ostermark server as Agilaz.

- X

Virtual boy eat your heart out! You’ve got nothing on the Cyber FX 3D!

- X

Soooo I’ve been spending some time with Spore. I’m not very far along, I’ve just reached the tribal phase and so far…it’s alright.

The Creature creator is a neat tool and you can make some wacky creatures with it in a easy way.

But the gameplay is pretty lackluster in the first part of the game, it’s so repetitive and bland, all about either making friends or making enemies and finding food to eat and then “evolving” your creature into a new shape.

I’m hoping that once I reach the civilization and then beyond that the Space stage the game will start to pick up.

I entered the Warhammer Online Beta earlier tonight. Have to give it a try. Problem is I’m getting rather crappy download speed for the client though they are getting better. The client is a like 10GB so it’s going to take some time for it to download, at current download speeds it will take over a day for it to complete.

I know very little about how the actual gameplay is going to be like, but I’ve haven’t heard any bad things about it yet.

In the end I wasn’t really enjoying Age of Conan very much, maybe it was because I had no one to play it with me, which I find essential to playing a mmo game. Now by someone I mean someone I know.

In other news, on September the 18th the demo for Fracture will arrive on Xbox live Marketplace and PlayStation Network.

Now this game has always looked interesting but will be another one of those hyped failures?

I hope not.

- X

I finally got around to finishing Metal Gear Solid 4.

First things first, this game is easily one of the best games I have played and certainly the most cinematic game to boot.

Playing this game really makes you think you are in a action movie.

Both thanks to the amazing gameplay and graphics, that are so good they are used for the cutscenes so there is no pause when going from cutscene to gameplay then there is of course hours of cutscenes to watch. The last cutscene alone was like 40 minutes or more.

It’s everything the earlier installments were, just better in every single way imaginable.

That says a lot about a game right there.

The story is way overly complicated, really hard to follow at times, it really is a must to have played MGS1-3 to really understand what is going on.

Of course the story is still very elaborate and good and it’s cinematic quality stands out, I remember when I played MGS1 first, it was totally different from anything that had come out before it because there was a distinct difference between games and movies at that time.

Now Hideo Kojima, the man behind Snake and his illustrious Career has long since announced that Metal Gear Solid 4 would be his last.

However he has since announced that though he might not be working on it anymore, that doesn’t mean that Metal Gear isn’t going to continue on in some form or the other.

I don’t know if it’s going to work without Hideo Kojima since he is the brains behind the series but I will still keep my eye out for a new Metal Gear game.

Anyway enough about MGS, it seems that the new Bionic Commander game coming for PC,PSN and XBL has been given a release date and it’s just next week at $10 for PSN and Xbox Live Arcade but for no apparent reason it will cost $15 on PC.

Also while PC version will launch on August 14th and the XBLA version will be available on August 13th the PSN version for Japan and US will arrive on August 13th but EU release date hasn’t been announced.

Oh I think it’s worth mentioning but tomorrow will mark 2 years since I first posted on this site. I can hardly believe it has been that long. The site has changed a lot in that time and grown in popularity, and by grown I mean, has a few RSS feeder readers and few hits there and here from google and of course my banner on CAD forums.

Back then I didn’t plan this site out to be a gaming blog but in the end that’s what it turned into maybe because they are and always shall be something I find interesting.

So happy birthday GAB!

- X

Okay I’ve been giving Metal Gear Solid 4 a try today.

It’s true what I’ve heard, this game really has a lot of cutscenes. The first hour you barely get to walk around between cutscenes, they are cool and all..but dear god…LET ME PLAY!

Well you eventually get passed the most heavy cutscene part and then you get to try Snake out a bit. Now the reason for the title for this blog is that at least at the beginning of the game this game is very unlike earlier titles.

You are thrown into a warzone so you can’t really sneak around all that easy, Snake’s Camo suit does give him good cover, but with so many eyes all over the place, getting around through the usual sneaking doesn’t work in many situations. You do get a disguise so you can mingle among them and I suppose you could get through it that way, but then again you are still an enemy in the eyes of the opposing force and they are the ones you have to get through.

I found out in many situation it’s easier to just put on the disguise and help them kill the others, not exactly the approach I’m used to play in Metal Gear Solid but hey..it’s fun either way.

Later on you do get to sneak around more though.

But yeah this game reeks of awesomeness and I just know this game is just going to get better and better.

Anyway this is just a short review on the game, got other stuff to do right now…

- X

So I just came home from a nearly 12 hour long party..and while I’m gone the party still isn’t done..

Dancing, drinking, dancing some more, drinking even more..

The reason for the party is a school reunion celebrating 10 years since we were babtised. So getting all the gang together that I have known for most of my life while I was at school was bound to end up as a hell of a party.

Especially considering that it will probably be 5-10 years until we will all meet again like this.

I’m not much of a drinker and in the 12 hours I only drank three beers so they never really got to me, just helped me relax a little. I’m rather down to earth and stiff but even I couldn’t resist dancing a little with them. It was amazingly fun being there and seeing them again.

I’ve always been out of the loop since I was never a party animal, I didn’t drink but I just had to let loose for the short time I’ll see them again.

I honestly could write on and on about this but I don’t know..I just felt like writing something.

the ‘84 gang rules! woo!

- X

Nice insights Vorrador but here is a review of three crappy games based of the Indiana Jones Trilogy to keep with the theme of things.

- X

Here it finally is, my thoughts on the latest installment in one of the best and most highly controversial series of games Grand Theft Auto.

Lets start with the basics in case that someone out there has never seen or played GTA. Grand Theft Auto belongs to the Sandbox genre of games, meaning that it consist of a vast world you can explore and with in it you can do pretty much anything you want or go anywhere you want.

Now for this reason the game is a focus of a lot of controversy. Being made for adults you can visit strip joints, pick up hookers and pay them for sex and then you can even kill the hooker and take your money back to name but two examples of what makes this game controversial.

The main character in GTAIV is named Niko Bellic. A man with a shady past and a former war veteran plagued by his past he decides to travel to Liberty City after his cousin Roman tells him all about how great life in America is and he had a great apartment and women and so on.

When Niko arrives to America only to find out that the stories Roman told him were a little exaggerated.

Now this is how the game starts and now you can go run around the city and scope the place out.

The scale of the city is enormous. It would take you hours to run a circle around the city. Many of the famous landmarks from New York City are there like the Statue of Liberty, which in the game is called the Statue of Happiness. It also has some minor touches to it that make it different like the fact that it’s smiling and instead of holding a torch, it holds a coffee cup.

There has been a vast improvement in the visuals and physics over the earlier titles. The City looks absolutely stunning with highly detailed textures and nicely rendered 3d environments. The Draw distance has also been improved by a lot. When in the air you can see all the city without any fps droppage.
The NPC models in the game are also more varied then in the old games. In the old GTA games, there were only a few different 3d models available so you could run into the same sort of guy standing next to each on the street corner.

In GTAIV I haven’t noticed anything like that, they all seems to have their own character and realistic AI helps with that too.
For example, you can see a bum seeking out a barrel with fire in it to warm himself. It really helps to humanize them.

As with earlier titles the games comes with some great music and radio shows along with good voice acting and even some famous people lending their voices. The Radio is filled with humor and they alone are worth driving around the streets for sole purpose of listening to it. If you get bored with the radio, don’t worry you can also watch TV in the game that has a few channels on it with some shows to watch.

Each GTA game has been set in different time periods. GTAIV happens in the present as such you can see some technologies that are standard today that weren’t in the earlier games like being able to go online and visit some websites and receive emails.

You also have a cellphone, through the cellphone you have can call friends for business or even leisure actives such as go get drunk with your friends.(you can also drunk drive in the game, although I don’t recommenced it, it’s a rather unpleasant to drive a car like that in the game)

With it you can also access the multiplayer portion which supports up to 16 players online and offers a wide variety of different game modes. It’s a blast and makes an already great single player game even better. It has also been heavily optimized obviously, while playing I have never noticed any major lag online and that’s a major plus right there.
This game can suck you right in and you can often end up just wasting away doing nothing constructive in it, I know I have gone into a helicopter more then once just to let myself fall down somewhere and go splat on the ground below and been in more then one fight against the cops and trying to outrun them.

I am about 12 hours in and I’m only about 20% through the mainstory of the game. This game can easily take over 50 hours to finish and for people probably much longer then that. Very rarely are games actually worth the high price tag but in this case the longevity and the amount of stuff you can do makes it well worth the money.

I imagine it will take quite awhile longer to finish this game because as with so many other games I can get sidetracked easily and move on to other things and then pick it up again later. But that’s one of the beauty of this game, you can always pick it up again for there are so many things you can do.

I don’t usually give games ratings since they don’t mean jackshit. However the 10/10 rating GTAIV has been getting is fair. There are very few kinks in it. I haven’t run into any myself but there always is something. The four years they invested into this game seem well worth it and Rockstar have made a splendid job with this one.

A true masterpiece and comes highly recommended to anyone who can legally play it by me.

- X

Can’t even be arsed to blog regularly.

Anyway, I just received a copy of Super Mario Bros 3, Blaster Master, Chip n Dale Rescue rangers for NES and Mickey’s Magical Quest(some fond memories of this game) and Killer instinct on the SNES.

Killer Instinct and Magical Quest works fine but the NES games won’t work on my old NES. They are PAL version so I don’t see what the problem is, then again it’s always been a little picky. It seems I’ll be forced to pick up another NES or disable the lockout chip in this old one. Picking up a new NES is more attracting since my old NES is in pretty bad shape on the exterior(no lid for where you put the game in and a broken gap on the top), and while the 72pin connectors works much better now that I’ve fixed it, it’s still rather annoying. It would have no real value on ebay due to it’s rather crappy condition.

Another game I’d like to talk about is Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune which exclusively available for the Playstation 3.

I had heard good things about this game even before it came out. I picked up a copy the other day and what a great game this is. It isn’t revolutionary in any sense and pretty much all gameplay elements have been used before but that doesn’t in any way change the fact of how good this game is. It utilizes what has worked so well in the past  that this game is absolutely awesome. You can think of it as a cross between Gears of Wars and Tomb raider gameplay wise. The story is interesting and so far it seems grounded in reality unlike what you’d see in Tomb Raider. But there have been times I’ve just waited for some skeleton to jump out at me because this game reminds me so much of Tomb Raider.

Now, the graphics…absolutely amazing. Stunning visuals and very well put together areas in the game are mindbogglingly detailed, there are plenty of times in the game that you can completely forget that it’s a game because the environment and everything is so realistic it’s frightening.

The characters themselves are very detailed, not to say that I haven’t seen better character models in games however what makes them more real then any other I’ve seen is the animation in the game.

Nate(main character) acts and move in almost all sense as a human. When he’s being shot at you can see the fear in his eyes while running for cover. When the cover is shot you can hear him utter words to himself to try to calm himself. He flinches and dodges when he’s being fired at, his movements while climbing and running are all very detailed He also has a sense of frailty while doing them, giving out sounds when he’s close to falling and while doing this extremely dangerous stunts, he reacts to them realistically instead of just climbing without any sort of attention to the situation(Think Lara Croft). You get the sense that he could be falling and is just barely hanging on sometimes.

Another thing that makes the game great, is the voice acting. All the characters I have come across have a great characters to them and the voices make them believable. Obviously they put a lot of effort into finding good voice actors for this game and I applaud them for that, this good voice acting seems to be so rare in games today.

Overall, playing this game is just like I said, a cross between Gears of Wars and Tombraider. You have shootouts with enemies utilizing a similar cover system to GoW and then you have the climbing/puzzle and of course the overall idea from Tomb Raider.

Together this makes for an interesting journey and exciting one to boot.

In closing, if there was any game I’d say worth getting on the PS3 it would be this game. Until Metal Gear Solid 4 gets here I think this game could sell more then a fair share of PS3.

- X

So Bioshock is finally here, after months of anticipation it has arrived.

Ever since I saw the first trailer I’ve been needing to get my hands on this game and I know I’m not the only one. So did it deliver what was promised?

Yes, it did. It delivered more then I expected.

The game hardly has any weak points, and the once it does have aren’t enough to ruin the incredible game play, beautiful graphics, the compelling storyline and the eerie atmosphere.

I think Bioshock’s greatest shortcomings are with how lenient dying is. When you die you revive in the closest vita chamber to your location and all the damage you inflicted on your enemies is still there so you can basically kill a tough enemy just by going in full force against him and get his health down to zero even if you die a couple of times since there is hardly any death penalty, you start off with a little bit less health, that’s about it.

The graphics are simply stunning. The Unreal 3 engine really shines in this game delivering photo realistic graphics in some cases, it is most evident in Water, as it looks and act like real water, it makes the other effects in the game look bad in comparison. . There is water located throughout Rapture which makes sense as Bioshock happens in a undersea city. The architecture is beautifully sculptured and no two places look the same and there are never any generic empty hallways, Instead there are decorations all over the place, paintings, posters, text written in blood, you name it and it all blends together to produce a believable wrecked undersea city.

Bioshock’s atmosphere is incredible, you really feel like you’re actually there while playing this game and it has scared the shit out of me on more then one occasion so it’s clearly not a game intended for squeamish people.

The story is told with short videos that appear throughout the game and ghostly images that appear and audio tapes scattered throughout rapture and dialog Splicers tell . Going through the game without listening to the tapes will make people confused because they serve the function of filling in the blanks on what went wrong in Rapture and turned most of it’s population into psychopathic gene splicers that are out to get you.

The voice acting is really good and it really adds a lot of to the atmosphere of the game. The guy who does the voice for Andrew Ryan does a excellent job of portraying the xenophobic and insane Mastermind behind Rapture.

The gameplay is pretty standard FPS action style on the surface but underneath it lies a whole new system that I’ve never experienced in another game. You start out with a typical selection of weapons such as a wrench, pistol, shotgun and tommy gun. Since this is takes place in the 1960s the weapons are appropriate for that time.

After you travel a little bit further into the game you come across something called plasmid. These are fundamental to your survival in Rapture and are also necessary at more then one occasion to be able to get past certain obstacles. There are over 70 plasmid to collect and each one gives you different abilities, such as the ability to freeze people, shock them or use telekineses to catch things or pick them up and much more.

Since are a limited number of slots available for plasmid at any given time you are given the freedom to customize your character to fit how you want him to be. This is what makes Bioshock great, being able to control which abilities your character has while advancing through the game so everyones take on the game will be different and you can go through it many times trying out different sets of plasmid you decide to focus on.
Now a few of these plasmids are offered to you as a part of the ongoing storyline but most are bought at a plasmid store. In order to be able to afford those you are going to have to harvest or save a Little Sister.

Little Sisters are girls that have been corrupted by ADAM which is the what everyone wants and everyone needs in Rapture. Little Sisters are gatherers, they roam the hallways of Rapture looking for dead bodies so they can extract ADAM from them. Now you’d think it would be like taking candy from a baby but you’d be wrong since Little sisters are protected by gigantic armored creatures called Big daddy. You will have to defeat them prior to getting ADAM. Now after you have dispose of Big daddy, You’ll have to make a difficult decision, whether to harvest or save the little sister. If you harvest her, she will not survive the process but if you save her she will turn into a normal little girl. Both options have story impact so choose wisely. Now harvesting her gives you more ADAM which will allow you to upgrade faster but saving the girls will make it harder for you since you can’t upgrade as fast but Dr. Bridgette Tenenbaum that created the little sister tells you that she will make it worthwhile for you if you don’t hurt them.
This freedom to choose really adds something to this game and also one of the things that make it so great.

This game promised to do something new and unique and it delivered, lets just hope that Bioshock is a look at things to come from the video game industry.

Only time will tell.

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