Bioshock Remastered, Promise, and Emotional Torture

We’re all huge fans of the BioShock franchise here on The Slowdown, but we’ve also had our fair share of the game series. We awaited each game, lathering ourselves with collector’s editions (remember the original Big Daddy statue that would crack in half?), with nightly chats about lore and story, and even with articles written on the game here in the archives. They are some really good games. Some guy named John Lanchester once said somewhere that Bioshock “was the first game he played that had the ambitions of a novel” and I find that very damn agreeable.

It’s just that no-one in particular was looking forward to The Bioshock Collection in the traditional sense. We’re not console gamers, so they just weren’t in the view, or on the horizon. The games are bygones for Ken Levine, too, who had claimed the games took such a toll on him that he thought sequels would make him “[…] lose my mind, and my marriage.” 1)http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/we-were-all-miserable-inside-bioshock-video-game-franchise-w439921

We too were arguably done with these anomalously nihilistic, brutal, and taxing video games, perhaps even with additional future games in the series, the idea of which has soured somewhat with Levine’s surprise dissolution of Irrational Games as it were in 2014. With the joint release of the remastered versions of BioShock 1 and 2 on the PC, however, I have been made a fool.

I’ve been roped to care for something that was supposed to be both free and carefree.

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Quote of the Day: Thimbleweed Park

Pledge $25 or more
“I pirated Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island when I was a kid and I feel bad!” This reward tier instantly absolves you of all guilt and includes the Thimbleweed Park game. All subsequent tiers also include guilt absolution. 1)https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thimbleweedpark/thimbleweed-park-a-new-classic-point-and-click-adv

Thimbleweed Park Kickstarter campaign reward tier

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Quote of the Day: Ebb Software

While most people realize that pledging [on Kickstarter] is just a pre-order in the dark, some backers feel like they are investors or game designers, working alongside the development team. If this is true and the final product doesn’t live up to the standards they’ve set up in their minds they’ll feel quite unsatisfied or worse. To avoid this type of complications, we have decided to take a different route with this campaign. We don’t want to deal with the trivial and somewhat elitist stuff like backers only forums, backers having their name in the credits, re-designing stuff in our project or going to dinner with some of the staff. […] We respect the community and are thankful for every pledge we get but we want to create the game the way we envisioned and designed it. We would also like to concentrate all our available time to development, so if you want to support us in hope to get a great game please do so. 1)http://scorn-game.com/index.php/2014-10-27-11-00-26/kickstarter

Ebb Software, developers of Scorn

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