BioShock: Infinite Message Board older than one year ago

The investigative documentary style of Bioshock: Infinite’s Modern Day Icarus videos tickles my pleasure-nodes. The earlier reveals of the clockwork catastrophes and mechanical malignancies that roam Columbia are failures of imagination in contrast, and anyone fortunate enough to have instigated some form of media blackout regarding the game last year would be well-advised to continue that policy, with a glimmering exception for these informative and menacing reels. The first covers the vanishing of the city and the second, below, contains dark children’s rhymes and the sinister Songbird.

(more…)

#bioshock The first installment of the Columbia: Modern Day Icarus? video series reminded Luke, me and loads of other folks of the low-budget, off-putting documentaries and filmstrips that aired in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I used to have to watch those things in class, too, with some annoying homework assignment attached to them. Imagine if anything as disturbingly cool as the Songbird was ever shown in your classroom. All fart jokes and note-passing would cease. And a quiet terror would settle over the student body. More »

The second installment of BioShock: Infinite's clever pre-VHS school room documentary series explores Columbia's Songbird. If you missed the first chapter, check it out here.

GameStop, EB Games and Micromania locations in Europe, Australia, and New Zeland will have a special, exclusive preorder item for the upcoming Bioshock Infinite. Players who pre-order the game at the specified retail chains in those regions will be rewarded with a special "Fink Manufacturing SteelBook case," emblazoned with the Fink Manufacturing logo.

In America, GameStop already offers the "Industrial Revolution" pack with a preorder, as well as a special in-game weapon. But it looks like the SteelBook case is just for GameStop International customers. Bioshock Infinite is due on March 26.

Best Buy is reportedly making recompense for its cancellation of BioShock Infinite pre-orders by offering the game for free to some affected customers.

"We would like to make it up to you by sending you this product, via expedited shipping, free of charge," reads an email obtained by SideQuesting. "You can expect to receive your product around the street date or when the inventory becomes available."

The generous customer service move affects both Xbox 360 and PS3 orders, as those were the ones hit by the glitch that reportedly caused over 3,000 pre-order cancellations.

[Thanks, Michael]

We may not be able to judge how BioShock Infinite plays as a game yet, but we can certainly tell that it's a pretty experience with some intriguing characters, at least superficially. Now you can own two of those characters, Elizabeth and one of the Boys of Silence, both made by the video game toy gurus at NECA.

The Elizabeth and Boys of Silence figures are available in the Irrational Games store for $20 each or $35 as a set. Irrational also added lithographs of the Handyman, Elizabeth and Songbird, and Charles, each for $25 or $65 for the trio. A limited edition trio includes signatures from Irrational creative director Ken Levine and artist Rob Waters, running $150.

NECA's Sky-Hook replica will also hit the Irrational Games store "soon," in a limited quantity. It's not safe for too much awesomeness to exist in one online retailer, after all.

Last night an issue struck 3,000 customers who pre-ordered BioShock Infinite at Best Buy, effectively canceling their orders, Side Questing reports. The glitch hit pre-orders for both PS3 and Xbox 360, and predominantly online transactions.

It's a fixable problem; Best Buy asks anyone who pre-ordered to check their emails and call customer service if their order is canceled. Best Buy offers a $10 gift card to each affected customer, so make sure to ask for that if you run into the problem. After your heart settles back into a normal rhythm and you stop screaming about how you'll miss all the sweet Sky-Hook action this March, of course.

I think I gave myself a mild aneurysm trying to keep track of all the symbolism in this trailer.

Hot one the heels of the mockumentary from earlier this week, this BioShock Infinite trailer gets down and dirty with some gameplay, or we should say up and heavenly. We hope the game, unlike the poor sod in the chair, doesn't disappoint when it hits on March 26.

Trailers are like dreams. You can’t really touch them or play with them in a way that is actually of any use, but they happen anyway, and when they’re over you’re left with a lingering feeling that they were trying to tell you something. I don’t know why I dreamed about eating marshmallows that morning when my pillows had disappeared, but I do know that Irrational want us to take note of what they’re trying to build with their setting for Bioshock Infinite: Columbia, a miraculous flying city at the turn of the 19th century. Here be philosophy and politics, there mechanical monsters and stuff on fire. There’s really no precarious uncertainty here, what they are trying to tell is that the expectations for this game should be sky high, and when giant metal ravens come for you, it’s time to find ammunition for the rocket launcher. Facts, you see, are super-true.

Bioshock Infinite will fall to Earth on March 26th.(more…)

Remember the boring history documentaries you had to watch in school? Now imagine that they were about the incredible, floating city of Columbia. Actually, don't imagine it - just watch this video.

Now this is some quality video games marketing.

I’ve seen enough of Bioshock: Infinite for now. The next time I see Columbia, I want to be playing the game rather than watching somebody else falling out of the sky or presenting fast-cuts of footage. The latest video doesn’t show the game at all and, remarkably, that isn’t a problem. Presented as a fragment of documentary footage, a teaser for a fictional element of Infinite’s universe as well as for Infinite itself, the Truth From Legend video is as effective a piece of marketing as I’ve seen for a good while. Creepy, convincingly dated and mysterious, it’s an invitation to another world. More of this and less of that and that please, thank you.

(more…)

#bioshock If you went to school in the 1980s, well, you'll probably find this to be one of the best video game trailers you'll ever see. More »

Watch a fictional documentary explain the the mysteries of BioShock Infinite's floating city of Columbia.

The toughest question to answer is “How do you write for a BioShock game?” Wait, let me back up.

I started at Irrational almost a year ago. At that point, there wasn’t a “writing team”, it was just Ken Levine. Luckily, Ken is a smart guy and knew that this upcoming game was going to be big. Bigger than any game he’d worked on before. So I tricked him into hiring me, and a couple months later we realized it was still a really big game, so Joe Fielder tricked us into hiring him as well. And the three of us, along with Jordan Thomas, tried to wrangle the beast that is BioShock Infinite.

The writing team at Irrational is structured a lot like a television writing staff. (At least I assume. I’ve never worked in TV, so maybe they don’t have a special room for footrubs and/or quiet sobbing.) We’ll sit down with a problem to solve (“How do we make Infinite make any sense?”) and pitch various ideas (“Free drugs in every box?”) until one of them sticks. (*INSERT ENDING OF BIOSHOCK INFINITE*) Then we’ll grind on that idea until it either sucks and we start over, or it becomes something… well, good. Hopefully.

But the key is this: We’re never satisfied. Something can always be better. The first idea is never the best one.

Our roles at Irrational are pretty well defined: Joe is the guy who can churn out an insane amount of writing in a very short amount of time, and I hate him for it. I’m really good at finding pictures of dogs who think they are people.

And Ken is able to take everything, mash it up, and deliver a coherent, challenging, and medium-defining piece of art.

So back to the first question: “How do you write for a BioShock game?”

You just start. And then you do it again. And again. And again. And eventually you get something pretty damn cool.

Hopefully, on March 26th, you’ll all agree with us.

BioShock Infinite's "Industrial Revolution" pre-order pack will include a gaggle of goodies to jump-start your experience on Columbia. The pack includes three in-game gear combat items, 500 extra starting cash, five lockpicks and a puzzle game that unlocks stories, along with some Facebook thing.

A new trailer reveals what the Industrial Revolution DLC pack will contain, which is being offered free to all who pre-order the game.

BioShock Infinite will be preceded by an ebook called Mind in Revolt, intended to offer greater detail about the world of Columbia and its inhabitants before the events of the game begin. "After reading the e-book, players will have a better understanding of BioShock Infinite's world, the struggle between its factions, and the motivations of key characters, like rebel leader Daisy Fitzroy, without spoiling the mysteries of BioShock Infinite," Irrational's Joe Fielder, who wrote the book with creative director Ken Levine, explained in the announcement.

The ebook will be released February 12 for Kindle, priced at $2.99. Amazon pre-orders of BioShock Infinite will be entitled to a free copy. All pre-orders worldwide will also get the in-game Industrial Revolution Pack, with in-game gear, currency, and the Industrial Revolution puzzle game.

Though Irrational Games co-founder Ken Levine says he isn't a religious person, he takes religion's place in Bioshock Infinite seriously. During development, his conversations with religious employees at Irrational created a major shift for one of Infinite's characters.

"One of the characters in the game was highly altered based upon some very interesting conversations I had with people on the team who came from a very religious background, and I was able to understand they were kind of upset about something," Levine tells OPM.

"What I said to them was, 'I'm not going to change anything to get your approval, but I think I understand what you're saying and I think I can do something that's going to make the story better, based on what you said.' So I did that, and I'm grateful for them bringing in their perspective. The last thing I wanted to do was change something because it offends somebody, but the thing they pointed out was making it a lesser story."

Infinite offers an intriguing blend of religion, philosophy and science, as we discovered last year. The city of Columbia is presented as a real-world heaven and its founder is a God-like prophet. The entire game hinges on the philosophy of objectivism and it addresses the pseudo-science of "the ether" and resurrection. That leaves plenty to talk about, religious or not.

The religion conversation for Infinite mirrors one Levine remembers during the original BioShock's development. "I think that we had a similar conversation about Bioshock 1," Levine says. "It involves infanticide, I don't think there's a larger taboo in the world. There were people who were very nervous about that. We didn't have that because we thought it would be cool. My feeling was if it's not just there to be exploitative, if it's true to the story and you're telling something that you think is honest, then everything has a place."

After reading Alec’s impressions of BioShock’s star-spangled salvo against American exceptionalism, I got quite excited. So of course, I proceeded to do what any rational, well-adjusted human being would: list off all the potential ways it could go horribly, horribly wrong. Nefarious hacker code theft, of course, was up there, as were natural disasters, a scenario in which total destruction of Infinite was the only way to disarm a city-obliterating bomb, and the very real possibility that Ken Levine replaced all the audio diaries with recordings of himself taunting us about how there’s never going to be another Freedom Force. Or, you know, it could just straight up not work. But that last one, at least, seems significantly further outside the realm of possibility than the others, as Irrational’s suggested that BioShock Infinite’s PC version will actually work quite well.

(more…)

BioShock Infinite's PC requirements have surfaced from the depths of the development sea, and the minimum specs aren't as tremendously demanding as one might imagine. We'd even wager that most modern-ish non-gaming laptops will be able to run Infinite, albeit at "Low" settings, provided that they run Vista (at least), rock an Intel Core 2 Duo/AMD Athlon X2 processor and have DirectX10 compatible on-board graphics.

Irrational Games also dropped news that the PC version of Infinite will include controller support and is compatible with Steam's Big Picture Mode, in addition to supporting multiple monitors for those who really exceed the minimum system requirements. The game also spans three DVDs, due to the size of its textures. The full list of both Minimum and Recommended specifications can be found after the break.

These new BioShock Infinite screens tell a brief story. In one, a fight has broken out outside of "Founders Books." In the next, Elizabeth is wielding a heavy tome like a weapon. We did say it was a brief story, and not necessarily a complex one.

#bioshock Sad that this March's BioShock Infinite won't be set in Rapture? You'll get a chance to re-visit the beautiful underwater city of the first two BioShock games with the newly announced Ultimate Rapture edition, which will boast an all-new Museum of Orphaned Concepts filled with concept art and character designs that weren't used for Irrational's hit franchise. The new bundle comes out on Jan. 14 for the PS3 and Xbox 360, at a cost of $40. Here's a full rundown of what's inside: More »

Those certain the Sky-Hook will be their most beloved BioShock Infinite sidearm will be pleased to learn that pre-orders for NECA's recreation are now open. In the video above, you can see the game-accurate "leather textures" and "highly detailed engravings" of the motorized replica.

US gamers can pre-order the 22-inch long, nearly 11-inch tall prop now through GameStop for $79.99. NECA's Sky-Hook will launch ahead of the recently delayed BioShock Infinite, on February 26, 2013.

Those certain the Sky Hook will be their most beloved BioShock Infinite sidearm will be please to learn that pre-orders for NECA's recreation are now open. In the video above, you can watch a woman's apathetic torso (to be fair, most torsos don't know how to emote) model the game-accurate "leather textures" and "highly detailed engravings" of the motor-operated replica.

US gamers can pre-order the 22-inch long, nearly 11-inch tall Sky Hook replica right now through GameStop for $79.99. NECA's Sky Hook will launch ahead of the recently delayed BioShock Infinite, on February 26, 2013.

#bioshock A little under two weeks ago, Irrational Games asked you to vote on a design for the alternate side of BioShock Infinite's reversible cover. Today, Irrational revealed the results, and this is the image that came out on top, with 38 percent of the vote. More »

Irrational Games revealed the reverse cover art for BioShock Infinite today. The art chosen won 38% of fan votes on the poll posted by studio head Ken Levine earlier this month as the result of displeasure from fans over the game's official box art.

The art, the full version of which can be found after the break, will be printed on the other side of the BioShock Infinite cover. Levine noted that other alternate covers will be made available for fans to print.

Now hopefully we've all learned our lesson: It's what's on the inside that counts.

The man responsible for lending BioShock and BioShock 2 their respective aural atmospheres will be returning to the orchestra pit for BioShock Infinite, creative director Ken Levine revealed during his Reddit AMA.

"We're proud to announce that Garry Schyman, composer of BioShock 1 and 2 has returned to the composer's chair for BioShock Infinite," Levine said in the comments. "His score is very different from the first two games, yet very much guided by the same aesthetic principles. We were lucky to have him and I can't wait until you get to hear some of his stuff. He's working in a different, sparer style, but it's awesome."

Aside from the BioShock series, Schyman's resume also includes work on XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Dante's Inferno, among others, though nothing he's worked on before now has featured such a strong emphasis on psychic horse repair. Well, we assume; we've never seen Horseplayer.

I’ve talked a lot about the setting of BioShock: Infinite, but let’s not lose sight of what the game really exists for. To (Booker De)whit, shooting people in the face and magicking them to death. (Actually I’m also going to talk a whole lot more about the setting too, because I can).

The combat aspect of the game is broadly in keeping with BioShocks 1 and 2, though amped up noticeably, while the environments feel significantly more open and the bulk of your enemies are straight-up police and soldiers rather than the creepy, scuttling Splicers. It does perhaps feel a less distinct combat experience than its predecessors despite the dramatic, often open-air backdrops, which is partly because shooting soldiers is such a familiar 21st century videogaming experience and partly because the weapons available in those fourish hours I had generally cleaved a little closer to a traditional videogame arsenal, even though they were in theory from an alt-universe 1912.(more…)