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Returning back to the underwater city of Rapture in 2020 feels chillingly relevant – the civil war between the upper-class demagogues and lower-class opportunists which destroyed what should have been a utopia, feels better reflected in today’s context of billionaires flashing their influence on Twitter and espousing their admiration for Ayn Rand. One of the first times a game actually made me jump in fright. It was one of the first MA games I’d ever played. Released in 2007 for PC and Xbox 360, Irrational Games’ first foray into the ideology-themed retro-futuristic shooter holds a special place in my heart.
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They’re not exactly games which I needed to have on-the-go, but for posterity’s sake, it’s good that games as significant as these are available everywhere.īioShock 1 has arguably aged the best out of the whole trilogy.
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Saving the idea of playing on a laptop, this is the first time the series has been truly portable – now in 2020, you can fight the evils of objectivism while riding a train or save a young woman from a terrifying robot-bird from the comfort of your bed. The Switch ports are scaled-down versions of the recent PS4 and Xbox One remasters of the BioShock Collection, which have been tidied up to run on Switch. So given that these are significant titles, are they worth your while on the Switch?
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As I’ll come to argue in a later thinkpiece, all roads lead to BioShock. The series as a whole (or at least more accurately 1 and 3) have laid so much groundwork for the way we conceive games. We’ve never quite stopped talking about it – not as players, not as critics, not as developers.
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And maybe that’s more a statement about how quickly time has passed rather than how robust the ideas within these three games are, but revisiting BioShock feels almost quaint. BioShock, BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite are, amazingly, retro games now. I love how far the gaming medium has come in such a short amount of time.
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