At some point during the blur of the past few weeks, I “finished” BioShock. (The Xbox Achievements are still there to remind me I haven’t really finished until I’ve played through a second time, even more slowly and methodically).

The game has been out so long by now that it’s been picked clean of things to say about it. The initial reviews made it sound as if it would be the dawning of a new age in interactive entertainment. And then a lot of people played it and said, “I liked it better when it was called System Shock 2.” I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, but closer to the “landmark achievement in games” end of the spectrum.

I don’t think my initial take on it was that far off the mark — it makes a spectacular first impression, it does a fantastic job of world-building, and it promises a deeper, more complex story than we’ve ever seen in a game. And then, as you play it, you’re reminded over and over again that it’s just a videogame. Right down to the lava level and the ice level. Granted, the lava level and the ice level are tightly integrated into the story and make perfect sense in the game’s world, but still.

One of my first criticisms, I’m happy to say, was completely off the mark. I’d been complaining about the way the game presented its core moral choice, how it completely lacked subtlety. And I was patting myself on the back for recognizing a layer of meaning in the interactivity that the designers had neglected in favor of the more obvious and blatant one. By the end of the game, I realized I’d been completely mistaken about that (as well as several other assumptions). And I’ve never been so happy to get played by a game.

There’s one reveal in particular — I won’t spoil it here — that will stand out as one of those moments I’ll never forget, where all the pieces fall into place and you’re engaged with the game and its story in a way that no other medium can match. In adventure games, they’re usually called “A ha!” moments, but here it’s more of a “Holy shit!”

The presentation is amazing, the attention to detail is exceptional, and the game itself is pretty fun, hitting the right balance between accessibility and depth. But as it settles into a rhythm, you’re still left with the feeling of a solid game with frequent flashes of brilliance, instead of a brilliant vision delivered in the form of a solid game. In the end, it’s still in my Top 10, even though I ended up disappointed partly because my expectations were set so high.

To the complaint that it’s too much like System Shock 2, I’ve got two things: First, I didn’t like System Shock 2. (I don’t remember playing the original). It just felt as if I’d seen everything before — the same old sci-fi setting, with a “haunted” spaceship, cybernetic implants, DOOM rooms with cheesy hanging bodies and messages written in blood, crates that had lights on them so they were “space crates,” and a light RPG clumsily grafted on top of a shooter. It just all struck me as uninspired, B-minus/C-plus storytelling.

I can see how you could dismiss BioShock as the same thing, with a face-lift in the form of a different setting, story, and overall aesthetic; and with the more complex gameplay elements taken out to appease the console market and more casual gamers. But the face-lift is the greatest achievement in BioShock. The city feels, for the most part, like a real place. You want to see more of it, you want to find out what happened to these people and where the story is going to take you. Frankly, I wasn’t enjoying the last third of the game that much, but I was still compelled to go on, just to see how it all turned out.

As for the “more complex gameplay elements,” that’s the second point I want to make: the other greatest achievement of BioShock is that it makes an intelligent, mature story accessible. Which, I’m optimistic enough to hope, could have a huge impact on the future of videogames. I don’t recall ever seeing TV advertising for System Shock 2, but I’ve seen ads for BioShock at least a dozen times. (And any excuse to hear “Beyond the Sea” again is fine by me).

And the game, according to the publishers, is a hit. Not on the level of Madden or GTA San Andreas, maybe, but still: a big-budget, blockbuster game that’s being reviewed well and selling well! It’s sending a message that real art direction, not just flashy visuals, is important and it will help sell a game. Maybe you don’t have to choose between critical appreciation and sales anymore. Maybe we don’t have to keep ICO and Shadow of the Colossus always on-hand to point to as attempts to create art in games, while the industry just keeps churning out more uninspired stuff with reasonable entertainment value but no substance. Maybe you can actually make money releasing a game that has a genuinely adult sensibility — not some fantasy story that’s appropriate for all ages but ultimately shallow, or an adolescent car-stealing game that insults your intelligence as viciously as it assaults hookers. Maybe Half-Life 2 isn’t just a fluke, and people really can appreciate games that focus on presentation and world-building.

Ultimately, BioShock is far from perfect, but it’s impressive simply for what it attempts to do. Only one section of the game outright fails (towards the end); the rest is always above average and frequently exceptional. The disappointments are simply due to the fact that it sets the bar high for itself, and it spends a lot of its time just short of it. A lot of the story could be told more subtly. Much of the game just feels like recombinations of things you’ve seen before in movies and in other games. But when it gets it right, it really does make you feel that this is a sign of what games are capable of.

I remember when the intro clips they showed at movie theaters used to be cool. You’d be flying through space and there’s a Coke formation up ahead but all of a sudden popcorn starts exploding all around you and then they thank you for not smoking. Nowadays, the theater conglomerate that currently monopolizes Marin is called CineMark, and for some reason they’ve chosen to start every movie with a trip to the concession stand with a couple of furries. Their mascot, who has the vaguely dirty-sounding but I can’t explain why exactly name of “Joe Front Row” does a Busby Berkeley dance with a bunch of generic candy and his ballgown-wearing girlfriend. I’m convinced there’s some kind of subliminal messaging going on, because by the time the movie starts, I’m always overcome with the urge to buy some popcorn and screw a cat.

I’m 0 for 2 in my attempts to see a good, stupid summer movie over the past two weeks. Last weekend I got invited after work to go see Balls of Fury. Tonight, a sudden power outage at the office left me with no option but to see Shoot ‘Em Up.

If the ads for concessions weren’t confusing enough, the choice of trailers is almost as baffling. The trailers before Shoot ‘Em Up, a gun-heavy action comedy aimed at post-adolescent males, were: a Sean Penn movie about some guy in his 20’s discovering himself by becoming a hobo (sure, fine); Hitman (obviously); a horror movie about vampires in Alaska (I see where you’re going with this); a movie where Stiffler’s mom is played by Susan Sarandon (all right); and The Jane Austen Book Club (…the hell?)

Before Balls of Fury, there were ads for all the latest attempts at comedies, including The Comebacks. Anybody who thought that the double-whammy of White Chicks and Little Man finally put an end to the Wayans, not so fast: they opened Pandora’s box with Scary Movie, and we’re going to be feeling the after-effects for decades to come. You can see why Hollywood would be attracted to these parody movies, since they let you save the expense of hiring comedy writers. The Comebacks claims to be a parody of those schmaltzy Disney underdog sports movies, which sounds like a reasonably clever idea, except the trailer has a lot of footage where they’re parodying Dodgeball. Which was itself a parody of underdog sports movies. How much more can you scrape the bottom of the barrel and still be inside the barrel? Isn’t that a little like releasing a parody of a Leslie Nielsen movie?

So why have I been going on about the trailers, instead of talking about the movies themselves? Well, because there’s not much to say. I went into each having lowered my expectations as far as they could go while still looking forward to the movie, and they still managed to disappoint. Each time, I was hoping for a fun, stupid comedy, and each time they only managed one out of three.

Balls of Fury is the easier target, since it aims so low and misses. I’ve seen a lot of movies where all the good bits are in the trailer. This one is remarkable because they managed to take everything that was funny in the trailer, and then render it unfunny in the actual movie. I’ve read reviews that call it offensive, but it’s not. It’s just kind of lazy. It feels like they took a concept with a lot of potential (even the most soulless person has to admit that an Enter the Dragon / Bloodsport parody based around ping pong sounds like a can’t-fail idea), got together a bunch of funny people to make cameos, then started filming without realizing they’d neglected to write any funny material. It’s like they wrote the screenplay in Microsoft Word using “BLIND MAN WALKS INTO POLE” as a macro for “INSERT JOKE HERE”, then forgot to do a search-and-replace. “Oh well, Christopher Walken in a geisha wig will patch over the weak spots,” is all well and good, but the guy can only do so much.

Shoot ‘em Up is basically what you should expect from a movie called Shoot ‘em Up. Emphasis on should expect. I expected an over-the-top action comedy with actors chewing scenery and big, ridiculous shoot-out sequences — a movie every bit as ridiculous as John Woo’s Hong Kong movies, but which didn’t take itself at all seriously.

What I should have expected was a movie made by people who aren’t clever enough to come up with a better title than Shoot ‘em Up. It’s a deadpan riff on Hong Kong shoot-out movies with over-the-top action scenes, a Bugs Bunny or Roadrunner cartoon done in the style of Quentin Tarantino, but without Tarantino’s subtlety or nuanced dialogue.

That’s right, I said without the subtlety of Quentin Tarantino. I’m as stunned as anyone else; I always thought the appeal of Tarantino was the same as that of listening to a really imaginative, hyperactive 15-year-old who’d been raised on B-movies and TV shows describing the most boss fight scenes ever. It’s a hell of a lot of fun mostly because there’s just no sense of restraint or self-censoring.

Before seeing Shoot ‘em Up, I never fully appreciated what goes into Tarantino’s movies — it’s actually very risky to go as balls-out as he does, because when you get it wrong, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. I would’ve welcomed any of the interminable dialogue scenes in Death Proof if it meant I didn’t have to hear another unforgivably, suck-the-air-out-of-the-room unfunny attempt at a one-liner or the “ain’t BMW drivers annoying?” moments in Shoot ‘em Up. This movie feels like it was made by the type of guy who’s watching Kill Bill, and needs to lean over to his buddy and say, “Did you see that? She’s driving a car called the Pussy Wagon! Get it?”

The action scenes are decent, and there are a couple of genuinely clever* moments. Almost all of them are in the first 10 minutes, though. And the cast are good but all feel like they’re slumming. I’d think that Clive Owen was parodying his performances in Children of Men and those BMW ads, except that even that obvious a parody feels too subtle for this movie. The unintelligible Monica Bellucci seems wasted, and she was in The Matrix movies. It even seems like a low point for Paul Giamatti, and he was in that movie with the Nickelodeon stars where he gets dyed blue.

I think I’ve about given up on movies that are trying to be bad, because they’re so good at it.

* “Clever” in this context means (spoilers): killing a guy with a carrot, and delivering a baby by shooting through the umbilical cord.

I haven’t been writing on here much lately (apart from tonight), because I’ve been too busy not getting my work done. Since I’m currently failing on the development side of things, maybe I can be of use to my company in marketing and promotion:

Sam & Max Season Two has been announced, and there’s a trailer you can watch and everything. Last season, I was freelancing, so I would just submit some text (late, usually), and then three months later the game would be finished. This season, I’m getting to see it as it goes.

When you’ve got a whole team of people working hard on something, it’s a bad idea to single anybody out. But I’ve got to say that I’m really liking Jared Emerson-Johnson’s music for episode one. The season one soundtrack was excellent, so it’s no surprise, but I’m liking the new stuff even better. And the new opening titles sequence just fills me with glee. With glee!

Now that I think about it, pretty much all the games I’ve worked on have had excellent music, through no fault of my own. Curse of Monkey Island had the best music of the series, Grim Fandango’s music was perfect, and I think I like SimCity 4’s music even more than the game itself. But it’s still the “Midtown Cowboys” theme that I’m using as the ringtone on my overpriced phone.

The best commentary being made about videogames today is from a guy named “Yahtzee” Croshaw, who started with videos on YouTube and is now doing them for the online magazine The Escapist.

I don’t know the guy, but after seeing his review of BioShock I want to be his best friend.

And below is the one on Fable, just because it’s pretty funny and can be embedded in a blog:

Today Apple demonstrated its love for the early adopters and hard-core Apple fanatics who’ve supported the company by announcing a 200-dollar price drop on the iPhone.

The best part, if you’re the type who reads the internets, is that it opened the door for all those who didn’t already buy an iPhone (you know, poor people) to jump on the various message boards and comment threads and shout “Suckers!!!!” So as if it weren’t enough to have Apple giving us the metaphorical kick in the nads, we’ve got the typical internet yabbos coming along and kicking sand in our faces.

It is to those fine yabbos that I offer the following retorts:

You know electronics are going to quickly drop in price.
Of course. Apple in particular is known for releasing new iterations and dropping the price on the new versions. But one third of the price after only two months is extreme. That’s not expanding the installed user base, that’s just saying “Screw you, suckers! Ha ha!” to the people who respect your company enough to give you money for version 1.0 of your product.

If it was worth that much money to you when you bought it, a price drop shouldn’t change that.
And if people could just be nice to each other, then there wouldn’t be war. Sure, I was willing to pay an obscene amount of money for a damn cell phone two months ago; that doesn’t mean I was happy about it. When are the doctors going to stop going on about videogame addiction and start looking into a cure for compulsive consumerism?

You paid $200 for bragging rights.
Who was bragging? Were people really going around saying, “Ha ha I just paid too much money for a cell phone! Suck on that!”

So my warning/advice still stands: if you want the phone but haven’t gotten one yet, wait for the next iteration. Sure, they’re cheaper now, but the cost was only one of the problems with the thing. It’s still buggy as hell, it doesn’t have enough software (although the third-party stuff is surprisingly sophisticated and easy to install, another “screw you, consumer!” from Apple), it doesn’t have enough storage, and will undoubtedly have improved features like GPS and the like in a future version.

If you just wanted the fancy iPod and portable web browser, I don’t know what to say about that; I needed a phone and didn’t want to carry around two devices.

A lot of Apple’s promotional stuff about the iPhone mentions all the ways you can communicate using only one finger. Which, of course, is appropriate, since what I have to say to Apple only requires one finger.

P.S.: Another one of the awesome announcements Apple made today is that they’ll be offering ringtones on the iTunes store for the low low price of two bucks each! That’s right, you get to pay them 99 cents for the privilege of copying a file from one folder to another! Go screw yourself, Apple!