Schrodinger's Bioshock.

So, yeah, I played it, I beat it, and you know what? I'm not going to talk about the story. Not right now, anyway. Or maybe I will, and maybe I won't. I guess you'll see at the end of the post.

What I want to talk about tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is gameplay. To begin with, Devin's side of this review pretty much sums up everything I thought about actually playing the game. Combat, as it starts, mostly felt grafted on, clunky, and in the way of getting to the next part of the drama I am here to see. Which makes it a real shame that the presence of the combat is the only thing that actually makes this a game.

(Are there spoilers under the cut? The only way to know is observation.)

Arkham City's Social Implications: the Bad, the Good, and the Lazy.

So, Shieldhaven is on the New Game Plus of Arkham City, which is, really, a good enough game to go ahead and play through a second time on, "OH FUCK WE'RE ALL GOING TO BE MURDERED OVER AND OVER BY MOOKS DEAR GOD WHY!?" difficulty. I mean it. It's everything good about, say, Prototype and everything good about Arkham Asylum rockin' it together in a bad-ass package where you even get to play Catwoman!

Which doesn't mean that Well-deserved criticism is not well-deserved.

But I don't really want to talk about the details of how the egregiously gross attitudes of the thugs in Arkham City are wrong, though I'm going to. What I want is to talk about one of the defenses that I keep seeing pop up for this kind of thing. Basically:

"It's not sexism, it's just lazy writing. Which means it's disappointing, but not really malicious."

I also want to talk about the social issues deal that Arkham City does do right, but we'll see if I have enough brain for that.

Taking the compel.

I will cover this more in this week's Roundup, but I wanted to take a moment to say that so far, I really like the FATE system.

Also, I find that lately, when I make characters, since I am mostly making female human characters (modern games), I almost always build a mixed-race girl of some kind. Which I suppose makes sense, as I am a mixed race modern girl. But my last two are Black and Sindhi (Over the Edge) and Black and Mexican (Dresden Files). Which would be curious if I were a (not-mixed) white person, but... well, whatever.

Anyway, Over The Edge and Dresden Files, if you hadn't guessed, will be the subjects of this week's Roundup, and are both games that I am seriously looking forward to playing more of.