The Bioshock Limited Edition: Requested by fans, exclusive to Gamestop/EB Games, contents voted upon, and an extra 10 dollars. But what does that extra 10 dollars get you? The advertised perks of the Bioshock Limited Edition are: a Big Daddy figurine, a soundtrack CD, a behind-the-scenes DVD. Let’s cover these one at a time:

Big Daddy Figurine

Rather awesome, provided the tip of your figurine’s drill hand isn’t broken. I don’t have numbers on the failure rate here, but apparently it happened enough that 2K Games has offered to replace the figurine and throw in a printed edition of the Bioshock art book. The painting on the Big Daddy could use a bit more detail, but overall it’s a hefty collector’s item that will inspire awe in your friends and family.

Soundtrack CD

That’s kind of a stretch. If you’ve ever been burned by picking up a movie soundtrack CD only to discover you bought “Music inspired by the movie”, you know how I’m feeling right about now. The included CD packs a whopping 3 tracks…not tracks from the original game score, but techno remixes by Moby & Oscar the Punk of the classic songs found in game like “Beyond the Sea”. On a scale from 1 to Suck, these remixes ring in right around Piss Poor.

Behind-the-Scenes DVD

Perhaps the greatest disappointment of the Limited Edition. Where fans expected some looks…behind the scenes, they have instead been treated to a series of uncomfortable interviews with the game developers in front of a green screen. There aren’t the customary shots inside the development environment, over the artists’ shoulders, inside the sound booth with the audio team, etc., just people talking about making the game. There is honestly an entire DVD chapter on the Art of Bioshock without even so much as a screenshot. Behind-the-scenes game movies have been around since the introduction of the CD-ROM, the earliest I can think of being included with Myst in 1993. If you haven’t seen that in a while, give it a look and see what a behind-the-scenes movie should be. 2K Games totally tanked on this.

Not So Limited Content

Perhaps the most surprising yet encouraging moves following the release of Bioshock are the public release of both the art book and the original score on the internet. This is the stuff that could be in a limited edition, and yet it’s out there for anyone to download and enjoy. I’m not complaining that these assets are available outside of the limited edition, but how about including a hi-res version of the art book and full score CD with the paid limited edition? Either way, I’ve downloaded them, and they are excellent.

Conclusion

$10 for a Big Daddy figurine ain’t so bad, frankly, and the box for the limited edition looks nice on the shelf. And oh yeah, Bioshock is in the box, so that makes me happy.

I’m just going to pretend that I haven’t been persona non-grata for weeks and go ahead and talk about gaming as if I was never gone.

I will admit that a great deal of my absence has been… well let’s call it a “WoW related symptom.” I took my third character to level fifty-eight and Outland and frankly I’m not sure why. The mage character has been extremely enjoyable to play if for no other reason than the holy ass-whippings one can deliver with the myriad powers of the arcane at hand. My sister and I pulled off a double pass on Dragnut in the process - a feat which we bragged about but frankly had no right to do so. We suffered mightily in the action both mentally and physically. After a short period that can best be described as a cool-down, we’ve both quit playing. Not for long, I’m sure, but the itch has been scratched. Scratched till it bled.

In the brave new Minimally Single-player Offline world I have reverted to the classics of childhood. I have a GameTap subscription and I’m finding it to be interesting if not directly money expedient. The service is a mixed bag, mostly because I find the GameTap interface to be imperfect in its translation of controls. For example, the Quest for Glory games are a loss because the type-chat interface is fuxxored beyond usage. It’s a shame really, because those are games which I wish would be released in some sort of historical compilation. Turns out my dusty old DOS 3.50s don’t work so well anymore. There are lots of new games I haven’t tried yet though, most notably Overlord, Sam and Max, and the entire Hitman franchise.

Mostly I use it to play the old arcade classics. I used the power of infinite quarters to see levels of games I’m pretty sure are actually impossible to beat in their original arcade form without the expenditure of several months worth of laundry payments.  If I get my shit together I may make you a “guess this game” image collage with the shots I’ve been collecting, but it turns out my shit is scattered far and wide, scattered by the hand of a particularly spastic monkey. On the upside I found a game where I can score, get this, 200 trillion points and still not be on top of the leader board.
What else was I going to say…

I was in Boston for a job related conference last week, and I stopped in at Jeff’s to catch up and play Bioshock. It’s pretty fantastic. As a fan of the System Shock games I can tell you that they’ve really caught the feeling of the franchise. In all honesty I had to quit playing because the tension was making me sick to my stomach. I’m not sure that it’s better or worse that I’ve played System Shock, as I do not feel the burst of revulsion upon discovery of something awful, rather a long slow dread as the game foreshadows conventions I have seen in the past. I’ll let someone with more play under their belt review the game fully though, as I was drunk on cranberry and vodka at the time.

Mmm… vodka…

Duriel is a bad motherfucker. Word has it, he’s the hardest boss in Diablo II, and he’s only in the second act! Which means he’s got bad people skills too. Otherwise, he would have been promoted by now. Too late though. I killed his ass and fed his pus ridden corpse to the maggots:

Brixtone had warned me about this guy and had me nice and scared. I leveled up to 26 which was pretty high for Act 2. It wasn’t as bad as I was prepared for, but I still had to escape through the town portal , resurrect my hired help for 4K, and stock up on potions about 5 or 6 times. I died once, but was able to sneak in, grab my stuff from my corpse, and escape through the portal before dying again. Now I’m on to Act 3. This one will have to wait until after I move…

This guy’s farts smelled minty

Go Time

Well this little gem was waiting for me in the mailbox when I got home this evening. Now there’s a problem: I’m in the deep heat of crunch time at work, leaving scant time for gaming. Next week, the folks are in town so that’s family time. As I see it, my only option is to go South Korea on this thing. Sleep, food, hydration be damned, this is too important to put off for a week. Stay tuned for some incoherent updates.

The Bioshock demo was released Monday for the XBox 360.  If you care anything about what makes a great game–music, sound, design, concept, aesthetics, and above all, story–you gotta download and play this.  If the rest of the game fufills the promise of this demo, it’s going to be a classic.  It’s creepy and it’s beautiful at the same time.  The PC demo releases soon.

I’ve been playing the beta of Tabula Rasa.  It’s fun.  I can’t say it totally re-writes the MMO rulebook…maybe shuffles things around a little.  Tastes a little like Anarchy Online with a dash of Auto Assault fried in a pan that WoW was cooking in. I don’t have a lot to say, I just wanted to break up the WoW pissing contest.

I’m in Outland and I’ve heard all the stories about how phat the lewt is here. Well, the stories were right and if anything, they didn’t do the lewt justice. For example, my wand walking into Outland was 44.4 dps. Within a half an hour, I had a 73.8 dps wand +8 peanut butter. Another surprising development is the skewed XP you get for killing folk. For example, a level 59 kill in the Western Plaguelands yields 706 XP yet in the Hellfire Peninsula, it yields 1132. WTF?!? At first, this would seem to be a good thing. But in thinking about it, why would I do any questing outside of Outland now if I want to level up most efficiently. Now that I can get in to Outland, I’m not so concerned about leveling up as fast as I can but I know that’s most important for many players.

On the bright side, I was extremely pleased to see that Outland - the limited parts I’ve seen so far is not just a collection of new high level zones. There’s a totally different feel to it than Azeroth. My sputtering video card can attest to that. Also, it seems early on that there is more attention paid to storylines, something I know we all prefer. Whether this will continue the further I venture into Outland remains to be seen.

I was also happy to hear a new set of music tracks. They definitely have a different feel and a more ominous tone to them which matches the area.

There you have it. Impressions from someone who didn’t cheat to get to Outland.

In conclusion, LO~!LO!LO!L!O!O!O - tangly clam meat

Unlike Mister Scrimpnut, I can’t claim i got to the top of the mountain without a helping buddy. But I’m sure the debt which Brixtone holds over me is more than compensated by the pure joy of being able to FLY OVER ANNOYING SH*T (you know, those things the game gods intentionally put in your way like random elite giants or hordes of randy scorpions).  

Behold, and he said ‘it is good’…..

But not the best….

As soon as I work off this debt to Brixtone I can call it quits. Until then, if you need me I’ll be killing timbermaw for a certain someone….

It will be that much sweeter…

In light of Barry Bonds’ recent breaking of the homerun record, I’d like to say that when that historic day arrives and I reach the 58 milestone, I can proudly say I did it the right way. Over the last 3 years, it’s been clear to most writers and fans that some - if not many - of the Eat My Bomb Guild have egregiously used performance enhancing helping buddies in the ascenscion to the top. And while these performance enhancers were tempting to me, I stood firm and continued to do it the right way. So when I do reach the milestone, it will be with full pride and no sense of emptiness I know that other players feel who have already reached the hallowed number. I find it no coincidence that just to the west of the Dark Portal is a symbol of what these cheaters represent, a Tainted Scar. Because that’s what you’ve done to the game. You’ve tainted it. And left a scar. And no Neosporin on the shelves can erase that scar. That Tainted Scar. By the taint.