BioShock: Infinite Message Board older than one year ago

The thing about healing via food items is that characters start seeming like gluttons every time you want to restore your health in a game. In BioShock Infinite's case, what with most food being stuff like cotton candy and popcorn, the situation seemed particularly ridiculous. Here's an amusing and well-produced video by HapstanceFilms which makes fun of how players heal themselves in BioShock Infinite. You'd think, with all the eating one does, Booker would become large enough that going around via skyrail would become...difficult, no? Fat Booker (BioShock Infinite Parody) | HAPSTANCE [HapstanceFilms]

The other day we saw what BioShock Infinite might look like as an anime. Today, let's look at a similar treatment, albeit one that's a bit more Western. Argentinian artist Feli Tomkinson has done these incredible mock-up posters for an animated BioShock Infinite movie, with a very Dreamworks style, and the more I look at them, the more it bums me out this isn't a real thing. Why is it we get animated adaptations of games that we never asked for and stuff like this is left to fan art and daydreams? So sad. argentinaland [Deviantart, via Mahlibombing]

In Elizabeth, BioShock Infinite gave us the best AI companion since Half-Life 2's Alyx Vance. For the game's upcoming DLC, however, it seems we might be getting a new best bud. The CV of 2K animator Michael Shahan yesterday mentioned (it's since been removed) that one of his most recent roles was "providing animation and R&D for a new AI companion character" in upcoming BioShock Infinite DLC. Cue the speculation. Also cue me hoping it's not another emotionally developed and wonderfully-animated accomplice. This time around, I'll take one of those giant armoured Abe Lincolns, thanks. BioShock Infinite DLC to feature a new companion [Eurogamer]

BioShock Infinite has proven pretty popular with cosplayers, but most of them focus on Elizabeth. Eeeeeveryone cosplays as Elizabeth. And that's fair, Elizabeth is a wonderful girl and a very cool character. But what about Roaslind Lutece? DeviantArt's LaynesLionRedCat has moved off the beaten path with some high-quality cosplay of our favorite Commander Shepard-voiced quantum physicist. (Via Geeks are Sexy)

This Voxophone by YouTuber Jesse Demers won't give you background and exposition, like the ones scattered in Columbia will. Instead, it plays back some of the songs from the game—like Girls Just Want To Have Fun. Here's what a Voxophone from Infinite looks like, for comparison's sake: Demers says he made the Voxophone using oak and plexiglass, and the inside of the Voxophone holds an MP3 player and a 3 watt amp. " You change the songs with 3 buttons hidden behind the left speaker cloth. It also plays music from Bluetooth devices and has a headphone input," he wrote on the video's YouTube description. And if you're curious—the Voxophone isn't actually playing the record. The record spins just for show, though he's trying to figure out how to add a needle to the Voxophone so it's more convincing. My Working Voxophone [jesse demers]

The dust has settled a bit, and opinions about BioShock Infinite are still all over the place. A couple new things worth checking out: First of all, erstwhile Kotaku contributor Tim Rogers has written a typically sprawling, highly enjoyable review of the game over at actionbutton.net. Second, Cameron Kunzelman has been collecting a whole bunch of criticism of the game over at his blog. Something of a one-stop shop, that.

Here's violinist Taylor Davis performing a two-parter of "Elizabeth's Theme" and "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" from BioShock Infinite. You may remember Davis from such performances as Epically Playing Epic Journey Music While Wearing Gloves on the Beach and Super Emotional Music from Naruto.

According to the BioShock Wiki, April 19th, 1874 is Booker DeWitt's birthday. Today is April 19th. So, let's celebrate! This obviously calls for tiaras and sparkles, if you ask me.

Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz estimates that BioShock Infinite moved 878,000 copies in the US last month. This figure comes from an analyst note sent out to investors as reported by GameSpot; we've contacted the NPD to confirm firsthand.

BioShock Infinite was the top-selling game in the US for March, besting Tomb Raider and Gears of War: Judgment for top honors. Compared to March 2012, last month's physical retail game sales were ten percent weaker, while hardware pulled in 32 percent less revenue.

Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz estimates that BioShock Infinite moved 878,000 copies in the US last month. This figure comes from an analyst note sent out to investors as reported by GameSpot; we've contacted the NPD to confirm firsthand.

BioShock Infinite was the top-selling game in the US for March, besting Tomb Raider and Gears of War: Judgment for top honors. Compared to March 2012, last month's physical retail game sales were ten percent weaker, while hardware pulled in 32 percent less revenue.

What if I told you that Bioshock Infinite was the mostly deeply Christian game I’ve played in recent memory? Because it was. And despite the patience I choose to extend toward Breen Malmberg, the man who returned the game, claiming that it would have forced him to commit “extreme blasphemy,” I cannot let his be the only voice Christian voice commenting on the title. Of course, the game can be read on so many different levels. It is as complex or as simple as you want it to be. You can read it as a failure in its attempt to comment on game violence through violence. You can read it as a foolishly simplistic attempt at documenting the history of bigotry and racism. You can even read it as a gigantic, apathetic “MEH”; insisting that no ideological group has ever done anybody a damn lick of good. It is, of course, all of these things—these shortcomings—and more. But in a more radical fashion, I want to share with you the myriad ways that this violent, AAA shoot-em-up has perfectly captured the subversive spiritual energy that first gave bloom to Christianity, the religion in which I was raised. *** It’s not even a question of digging deeply. The game threw it in your face before you even picked up the controller. Spoilers for BioShock Infinite follow. I mean honestly, a game that is bent on exposing the failures of institutional religion? This criticism may strike at the heart of American, cultural Christianity but it actually lies at the heart of true Christianity. There was no fiercer critic of decrepit religion than Jesus himself. As if oft pointed out, he was not killed by the sinners, he was killed by the religious leaders of his day. So in our age, the customs that bring life in one generation are always decaying by the next, and we must not grow so fearful of losing the baby that we neglect to throw out the bathwater. Complicit in this criticism is a man (and yes, Mr. Malmberg, Booker Dewitt is his own man, though we are more like him than we may care to admit), wracked with guilt over his past misdeeds, who cannot find any way to atone for his sins but by more violence. This feedback loop where brokenness begets brokenness? In Christianity we call it sin. Not merely deeds, but a state of separation; and not just from “God,” but from the meaning of life itself. "This feedback loop where brokenness begets brokenness? In Christianity we call it sin." Booker’s meaning of life ends up being a girl, Anna or Elizabeth, whatever you’d like to call her. Elizabeth enters the story as a Macguffin, (“Bring us the X”) but as we grow to know her, she changes the story, in more ways than one. He loves her. Only, he doesn’t know why. Doesn’t yet know she is his daughter. And here, love is portrayed not as Hollywood romance, but as mystery. Love as terror. “Are you afraid of God, Booker?” “No, I’m afraid of you.” Christianity never painted the loving God as a tame God. He was a mystery beyond any of our conceptualization. One Biblical writer helped us to see somewhat clearer when he penned: “No one has ever seen God, but when we love one another, his love is seen through us.” Although loving a concept of God is easy enough for most Christians today, the true prompt of our religion is a commitment to love him by loving the most terrifying among us. Terrifying not because we don’t understand each other, but because we do. Finally, integral to the story is the critique of symbolic baptism. Not only, the story insists, is it entirely ineffectual at actually wiping away past guilt, it actually redirects the negative energy into something far more terrifying. Sans baptism, Booker is a drunk. With it, he becomes a monster. "Sans baptism, Booker is a drunk. With it, he becomes a monster." This is entirely reasonable. A splashing of water was never going to bring redemption. So why is the imagery so powerful? Because the real meaning of baptism, even in Christianity, is far, far darker. *** Remember Inception? Dom Cobb, chief inceptor, leads a rag-tag crew into the mind of a wealthy businessman, constructing a dense and elaborate plot, leading the subject on a wild-goose-chase to create a single moment, and plant a single thought. Hold that thought. *** Bioshock Infinite is ambitious in ways that make talking about the game a daunting task. Should we start with the themes of religion? Racism? Populism? Oh, not enough? What about quantum physics, time travel, and alternate realities? Some have suggested that by the end of the game, the story has begun to tear itself apart. They’re so right. The dream is collapsing. But what if it was not about constructing a watertight plot at all? What if the entire game was constructed in order to bring us to a single moment? What would we find in that moment? *** In fiction, the villian exists so that we can project our own internal conflicts onto an external source. We do not know how to deal with our own issues, but if we can witness the defeat of a villain we can avoid our interior pain, angst, and confusion a little while longer. This is nowhere more the case than in video games. Not only is the villain stopped, he is stopped by us, the hero. What would happen if we realized that we were both the hero and the villain? How would we then be stopped? *** At the heart of Christianity is the steadfast insistence that we are all beautiful, but we are so, so far from perfect. We all are, and can be, heroes. We all are, and can be, villains. "Baptism is actually far more bizarre than we realize. It is a symbol—get this—not of cleansing, but of drowning. It means that something in us is dying." And as it all spun out of control for thousands of years, we tell the story of how God came down to earth as a person, telling us to love one another before dying a very violent death. And we conjecture that his death had great signifance. In fact, we toy with the possibly insane notion that he actually showed and made a way for us to be free from our sin. By dying. Baptism is actually far more bizarre than we realize. It is a symbol—get this—not of cleansing, but of drowning. It means that something in us is dying. Something is being smothered. “I have been crucified with Christ.” - St. Paul After taking us by the hand to show us the failure, not just of religion, but of any utopian vision, Ken Levine and team must now show us their version of a satisfying ending. Smother. Smother. Smother. We kill the villain, and he is us. What we find, as the last, haunting notes ring out, is a vision that far more closely resembles Christianity than many of the shadows that have falsely claimed the label in our lives. It is redemption through death. Atonement through sacrifice. And after the credits roll, we are left, as in Christianity, with merely a hint that something more lies beyond. That death is, perhaps, only the beginning. *** Comstock’s cult has as little to do with the heart of Christianity as hate-groups like Westboro Baptist do. Indeed, it is as far removed from the teachings of Jesus as the anti-religious comments I’m sure to receive are from the thoughtful and generous atheism I’ve witnessed in certain of my friends. "It is redemption through death. Atonement through sacrifice." My own spiritual journey has led me to believe that the mysterious universal(?) that we recklessly refer to as God is far more inclusive than I had ever fathomed, and yet, the road to redemption is a road that leads, perhaps, to a type of death. Ken Levine has, in many ways, failed to craft the perfect game, but I believe he has done something even more important, he has spoken as a prophet. As I come to these conclusions, it may very well be the result of pre-formed thought patterns; synapses in my brain, firing off in the darkness; looking for connections where there are none. Or perhaps we’re all onto something. He who has ears let him hear. Jordan Ekeroth is just a guy. He writes for Gamechurch.com and spends a lot of time wondering if he drinks too much coffee. Follow him on Twitter .

We like to talk about video games. A lot. Sometimes we do it on camera, like on The Gameological Society's The Digest video series. But, even then we can't get all our thoughts and observations in. So we're kicking off a new feature called: Did You Notice? Think of it as a sort of commentary track to Kotaku's appearances on The Digest, where Gameological editor-in-chief John Teti and members of this very site will dig a little deeper into the details and elements that make a new video game sink or sing. So, hey, did you notice these things in… BioShock Infinite? Evan Narcisse: So, John, we’ve already talked about some of the things that made a bigger impact when we played BioShock Infinite. But, I know that we both had other things that we noticed and wanted to call out. I'll start: when you first get to Finkton, all the non-player animations of the hard-working Columbians are all syncopated in rhythm. It immediately lets you know that you're in a place where human beings are there to become part of or serve a larger machinery. The syncopation was charming at first but then it got really creepy when one NPC turns to look at you, but his arms keep mechanically scrubbing or hammering or whatever he was doing. That moment takes that sequence from Looney Tunes to indentured servitude real quick and really drove home the idea that Columbia's beauty comes at terrible cost to some of the people that live there. John: I didn’t notice this touch, but I love when visual programming loops like this lend an added poetry to a moment. When you hear a word repeated enough times, it tends to lose its ability to signify. Yet the kinetic equivalent—a “word” of motion—doesn’t behave the same way. When you see a certain motion repeated in a certain rhythm, it often takes on new meaning. It’s a phenomenon that has long been present in video games, but you’re seeing it applied to the pop culture at large in the rise of the GIF. My favorite instance of this is a mission in Mafia II where you walk in on a lame party at some thug’s seedy apartment. There’s a guy in the bathroom who simply hovers over the toilet and retches again and again. It struck me as both funny and sad that there was this virtual being whose sole job was to puke repeatedly—forever, in theory, if the player kept standing there. He also summed up my feelings about that game pretty well, but let’s get back to BioShock Infinite. Hey, Evan, speaking of tiny, GIF-able movements, DID YOU NOTICE that the best motion-capture performance in the entire game belongs to the kid in the newsboy cap who hands you a telegram? I love this kid. Look at the way he winds up with his whole upper body before he jabs the paper at you. And he gives you a crisp, nonchalant salute when he dashes off. It’s playing off a familiar character type from the movies: The eager delivery kid/newspaper boy is essentially the American version of your typical English street urchin. To get it right, the kid has to carry himself with a certain dutiful swagger. He has to impart the sense that sure, he’s chipper right now, but he also can’t wait to be done with you, because it’s a hardscrabble life and he needs to get back to it. Infinite manages to capture that whole sensibility in the span of a five-second performance. It’s awful swell of Booker to reward the kid with a nice tip—oh wait, Booker stiffs him. Because it’s not like Booker has HUNDREDS OF PIECES OF LOOSE CHANGE in his pockets. Evan: You know, it’s funny that you mention the telegraph boy and the paradox of duty and swagger. Because looking back at that moment, he’s probably one of the most free and least liberated characters in Columbia all at the same time. Picture it: a grade-school kid darting in and out of Columbia’s districts with an urgent message for Booker DeWitt. He can go where he pleases as long as he gets that telegram to Booker. But if he doesn’t deliver that message, something really bad will probably happen to him. I can imagine that, in Columbia, you need to do the thing you need to do, or you’re screwed. If you can’t, then the consequences of living in a society where you don’t fulfill your function are dire. Those Duke & Dimwit movie reels imply as much. The character of Slate is another example of this, but he’s someone who understands Columbia’s perversion of the social contract. He rants about machines taking the place of human soldiers but really he’s scared senseless about losing his status. Lack of status means living life as The Other and, from what we see of it in the fringes of Infinite’s sky city, it’s an awful existence. It’s a dead end, because the collective will to debunk the stereotypes plastered all over Columbia simply doesn’t exist. When you come across that interracial couple, nobody’s saying, “Hey, they might actually love each other.” When you’re fighting your way through the Hall of Heroes with caricatures of Native American and Chinese, no mention is made of their humanity or what they lost at Wounded Knee or during the Boxer Rebellion. They’re not allowed to have another dimension, another reality. DID YOU NOTICE the code-switching moment that crystallizes this, John? There’s a black man scrubbing the floors at one point in the game and he’s talking to himself in high-faluting proper English. When the player comes across him, his dialogue changes to obsequious, Stephin Fetchit dialect. It stopped me cold in my tracks. When you consider the racist caricatures and this man’s performance of them, the game shows you what The Other looks like to Columbians and, then, how it's actually lived. The guy scrubbing floors may not actually be the stereotype—and may be smarter than anybody gives him credit for—but he’s still trapped. John: That struck me as one of the game’s cheaper moments, actually. I cringed a little. It’s so on-the-nose. It’s as if I walked into BioShock Infinite’s living room and it was holding a copy of Invisible Man up in front of its face. “Oh, I didn’t see you there!” Infinite says. And then it puts the book down on the coffee table, with the title facing me. Subtle! What struck me is not so much that the guy took on the low-status dialect but that the game’s creators give him the patrician accent when “nobody’s looking” in an attempt to lend him some dignity. The trouble is, you can’t really take a shortcut to dignity like that. If you want the residents of Columbia’s lower echelons to have some depth, you have to put in the work and flesh them out. Instead, as you and I discussed in the video, Infinite takes a characteristically glancing approach. But since Infinite’s underclass end up as bit players in the game’s “everybody’s an asshole!” cavalcade of strawmen, the drama of this moment came off as unearned for me. If the context were different, I might be more moved. Still, when I hear how you reacted, I’m inclined to give Infinite a bit more credit than I did before. And let’s not lose track of the fact that there are shreds—however scant—of genuine subversion in Infinite. Did you notice that this is a game where you’re told to murder George Washington? (I mean, of course you noticed. You have to kill Robot George Washington a number of times. I’m just trying to stick to the rubric here.) Infinite takes the present-day beatification of the Founding Fathers to its logical conclusion and forces us to face a striking truth: When you turn the Founders into infallible gods, you actually turn them into monsters. So here we have George Washington as a literal monster, and you, the hero, must pump him full of shotgun rounds. Preferably by sneaking up on him and shooting him in the back! If Irrational had dared to also show Washington’s sideboob, Fox News would have had a field day with this. Did You Notice? is a recurring discussion series that will run when Kotaku writers appear on The Digest, The Gameological Society's talk show.

How to transform a Shakespeare soliloquy from a gorgeous ballad of love and loss into the chilling stuff of nightmares: Whisper it Play it backwardBioShock Infinite features hidden dialogue in its Possession Vigor, both in the scene where players first encounter the stuff, and when it's used to possess enemies. It's a line from Romeo and Juliet, played backward and whispered: "Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd [night] / Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die / Take him and cut him out in little stars."

Technically, BioShock Infinite has no multiplayer mode; you can only play the single-player story. But let's look beyond how we traditionally understand multiplayer games for a moment. If we do, what we find is that just because a game doesn't come packaged with a multiplayer mode doesn't mean it can't become a multiplayer experience. Multiplayer games are just games played by multiple people, right? At one point during BioShock Infinite's development, traditional multiplayer was in the works, yes. We reported about two different multiplayer modes that were eventually axed: one that put players in an old-timey arcade machine, and one that was similar to the Spec-Ops mode in Call of Duty. According to our report, the idea was that multiplayer should be included as a means to deter people from trading Infinite in to used game stores, as multiplayer can prolong how much time people spend playing a game. And while in November Ken Levine confirmed that there would be no multiplayer, I'm pretty sure the game I've been playing lately is a multiplayer Infinite. Spoilers follow! Friend of mine said the other day "The multiplayer of Infinite is really in the debates and speculation online." — Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) April 13, 2013 I suspect that many of us—after sitting there stunned, wondering what the hell just happened—did the same thing after finishing BioShock Infinite. Part of it is that some of us filter a lot of our experience through social media and feel a compulsion to share our opinion on the Internet. Part of it is that, well, Infinite is a mindf*ck. Infinite's story is mysteriously constructed in that there's little a player can say with confidence about the world. Much of what we walk away with necessitates speculation, inference and deduction. What exactly happened at the end? If we set off a paradox, did anything we do in the game actually happen? How did it take Booker so long to find Elizabeth, by that point an old wrinkly woman? To what degree can we draw parallels between Rapture and Columbia? Why do we need to kill Booker to allegedly end his tragic paths if there are infinite universes? Doesn't that make them finite? There are, to be hyperbolic, a million questions. And you might have theories; I've spent a good deal of time going online and reading the crazy, sometimes awesome, and always intriguing musings on what happened in BioShock. But many of the questions that Infinite raises don't have a definitive answer—not until/if Ken Levine sets the record straight, anyway. That's part of the fun. In backslashdance's video, we can see an attempt to share with the world a parsing of everything that happened in Infinite, particularly when it comes to the stuff that makes little sense. And so after BioShock ended, I'm sure that many of us raced online to see what others were saying about the game; we rushed to talk to people about what we had just experienced. We felt the need to make sense of it all, and the best way to do it was to make a game that isn't 'social' in the traditional sense of the word into a shared experience. I feel as if much of my understanding of the game has been crowdsourced. The arguments, debates and obsession to figure Infinite out strikes me as a multiplayer mystery game that starts when you finish the main BioShock story. And this is that we're barely a few weeks into BioShock's release! I can only image what people will draw out from the game after they have more time to dig into it, or after Irrational releases additional content for the game. The ambiguity is key to the experience here; without it, BioShock Infinite would merely be a big game that lots of people talk about, as they are wont to do. My hope is that other developers take note and think about which ways they can make games into social experiences outside of the game itself—and outside of what can obviously be monetized and controlled by the developer. It might save us from games where multiplayer feels shoehorned in. It might also create experiences that are way more interesting than your run-of-the-mill team deathmatch—or heck, more compelling than the main game itself. Infinite has no multiplayer mode, and yet it's the best multiplayer game I've played in a while. The Multiplayer is a weekly column that looks at how people crash into each other while playing games. It runs every Monday at 6PM ET.

Claire Hummel worked as an artist on the recently-released BioShock Infinite, where she helped define the outfit of one of the game's two biggest stars, Elizabeth. With a goal of having something that both looked like it came from 1912 and was also "age-appropriate", the image above - and the first few below - show Hummel's contribution to the character's final design (which as you can see here changed a bit over the years). Having previously worked at Microsoft, with her stint at Irrational over Hummel is once again at Redmond. She's also worked on games like Asheron's Call and Lord of the Rings Online. You can see more of Claire's work at her personal site and DeviantArt page. To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click on the “expand” button in the bottom-right corner. Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you're in the business and have some concept, environment, promotional or character art you'd like to share, drop us a line!

Pay attention, there will be a quiz at the end. No but seriously though: check out this educational video by outsidexbox, which looks at quantum mechanics, and how it relates to BioShock Infinite. Or in other words, the science behind stuff in BioShock Infinite (like floating cities, or multiple universes), along with a look at the real-life important figures that made the discoveries. Not that the game presents wholly accurate science, of course—but that doesn't mean the ideas don't come from somewhere, or that they don't resemble actual real-world ideas! BioShock Infinite vs. Quantum Mechanics: The Real Science of BioShock Infinite (SPOILERS) [outsidexbox]

At one point during BioShock Infinite, you gain a vigor called Possession. The scene where this occurs is evocative and eerie, and the audio that plays at the time is partially to blame. If you play that eerie audio backwards, it becomes even creepier: you can understand what's being said. And this audio found by EveryClickCounts isn't the only secret audio in BioShock Infinite, either. There is also secret background music. If you take an ambient sound in the game and you speed it up, it kind of sounds like a woman is singing. You can even make out a guitar-like tune, weirdly enough. IGN breaks it down: Though these were the only two I could find, I wouldn't be surprised if there were other hidden audio things in BioShock Infinite. Feel free to share if you know of any others. BioShock Infinite - Secret Background Music [IGN] Secret Reversed Audio - BioShock Infinite [EveryClickCounts]

Shooting a moving Handyman in the heart is tough, but you can trap one outside of Chen-Lin's gunsmith workshop to make it easier

Rod Fergusson, former Director of Production at Epic Games, is soon to be the former VP of Development at BioShock Infinite developer Irrational Games, Polygon reports. Fergusson joined Irrational in August to help finish up work on BioShock Infinite, a game that shipped to widespread critical acclaim on March 26. Now he's in the process of leaving Irrational.

"I am very proud of the work that I did and of the team and what they were able to accomplish on Infinite," Fergusson says. "Now with the game shipped successfully, I've done what I set out to do here and now I'm looking forward to the next chapter in my life and career."

When Fergusson joined Irrational, he followed a trail of major departures from the studio, including Art Director Nate Wells and Design Lead Jeff McGann. There's no word on what Fergusson's next move will be.

Irrational Games now has eight pieces of alternative cover art for BioShock Infinite available on its site. The bland original cover already comes with artistic opposition, which was chosen by 38 percent of participants in an online fan vote.

Now, all the original designs up for the vote are available for printing, along with a few more custom designs, like the one we chose above. Covers are available in PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. Irrational warns fans fans to follow the printing instructions and do a test run before wasting glossy paper. So many pretty covers to choose from.

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We’re back, well-rested after last week’s GDC, and ready to return to our regularly scheduled Blogcasting. This week, we considered spoiling BioShock Infinite (but we’ll save that for the end of next week’s show), gushed about the simple-yet-sensational Divekick, delve into the pleasures of Puppeteer, and recap our favorite games from GDC (Guacamelee!). All this plus next week’s new releases, a selection of 100% organic listener tips and voicemails, and much more.

Stuff We Talked About

• BioShock Infinite
• Divekick
• Guacamelee!
• Puppeteer
• Nobunga vs. Nobunaga

Send us questions and tips: blogcast@playstation.sony.com

The Cast

• Sid Shuman – PlayStation Social Media Manager
• Nick Suttner – PlayStation Account Support Manager
• Justin Massongill – PlayStation Social Media Specialist

[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.]

• Thanks to Cory Schmitz for our beautiful logo and Dormilón for our rad theme song and show music.

The following theory is not true, but it could be. It’s surely no accident that BioShock Infinite often evokes The Wizard of Oz – there’s even an early stage of the game named after it. Even so, the similarities, be they deliberate or coincidental, run deeper than a turn-of-the-century character being mysteriously transported to an amazing world of technology and magic. Once I started down the yellow brick road of looking for parallels between Dorothy’s adventure in Oz and Booker’s adventure in Columbia, I couldn’t stop – I identified what seemed to be dozens of them. Am I onto something, or am I projecting? It doesn’t matter – this is purely a thought experiment, not a claim to accuracy.

Also, SPOILERS UNBOUND. Do not read past this point if you haven’t completed the game. (Or if you somehow haven’t seen/read The Wizard of Oz). If you have, fire up Dark Side of the Moon and let’s go off to see the wizard.(more…)

BioShock Infinite: Siege of Columbia tells the tale of Columbia from a fresh perspective: the tabletop.

Plaidhat Games is working on the board game port version of BioShock Infinite, which features two warring factions from the game, the Vox Populi and Founders. Commanding "mobs of combatants," each team attempts to conquer the districts of Columbia, the city in the sky; the Founders wish to control it, while the Vox Populi intend to bring it crashing down.

The video game's main characters, Booker and Elizabeth, play a role in the board game, forcing players to "reconsider their strategies as the two cut a path through the burning city."

Siege of Columbia is available for pre-order now, at a discounted price of $60 from Plaidhat Games (normally $85). It's currently under construction and will ship in two to five months.

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The first BioShock was critically acclaimed but can Infinite be just as good? Um...yes. Yes it can. For more episodes, visit: go.ign.com/mixd

IGN details all of the kinetoscopes and telescopes needed for the Sightseer trophy / achievement in the Comstock House and Hand of the Prophet areas of BioShock Infinite.

IGN details all of the kinetoscopes and telescopes needed for the Sightseer trophy / achievement in the Emporia and Downtown Emporia areas of BioShock Infinite.

IGN details all of the kinetoscopes and telescopes needed for the Sightseer trophy / achievement in the Hall of Heroes area of BioShock Infinite.

IGN details all of the kinetoscopes and telescopes needed for the Sightseer trophy / achievement in the Finkton area of BioShock Infinite.

IGN details all of the kinetoscopes and telescopes needed for the Sightseer trophy / achievement in the Battleship Bay and Soldier's Field areas of BioShock Infinite.