bioshock infinite Archives

The cycles of violence in BioShock: The Collection

Between 2007 and 2014, Irrational Studios and 2K Games told a story. This single story had five acts: BioShock (2007), BioShock 2 (early 2010), Minerva’s Den (late 2010), BioShock Infinite (2013), and Burial at Sea (2013-2014). Since episodic presentation encourages isolated judgment, it wasn’t always easy to see the unity of these fragments as they were marketed and released. But the legacy of the BioShock series is marked by rigid and often irrational schisms: between expectations and reality, themes and mechanics, rabid fans and equally rabid detractors. Now that 2K has kindly assembled all these narrative segments in BioShock: The…

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The Psygnosis generator will remind you how great game box art can be

Videogame box art is in a pretty awful state. This isn’t really news to anyone; it’s been like that for a while. In fact, since the days of the second generation of the 3D era, box art has been on a steady decline. That’s a long time, so long that you might have even forgotten what good box art looks like. Perhaps you don’t mind DOOM’s painfully generic marine, or Call of Duty’s yearly scraping of the bottom of the barrel for new poses men can hold guns in. It’s not that every bit of modern box art is bad per…

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Videogame dadification takes a delightful turn for the bizarre in Dad Quest

IRL dads are basically super human. In fact, there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to dad reflexes because they are so outside the realm of normal human capabilities that their special powers only activate once the fruit of one’s loins is threatened by malicious gravity and the like. Perhaps this explains why dadification has taken over so many gaming plots: because the super-human capabilities of a dad translates seamlessly to the super-human feats achieved by most videogame protagonists. But usually in games, the super-human capabilities of a father are explored through a very specific lens. In titles like The Last of Us and…