{"id":1159,"date":"2010-11-26T14:23:36","date_gmt":"2010-11-26T19:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=1159"},"modified":"2016-11-28T21:26:31","modified_gmt":"2016-11-29T05:26:31","slug":"bioshock-compared-to-batman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/1159","title":{"rendered":"Bioshock compared to Batman"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I was playing Bioshock<\/em> a little more. Probably because I just played Arkham Asylum<\/em>, it’s striking me afresh just how comic-bookish it is. Specifically, it has the same sort of structure that made me compare Killer 7<\/em> to a comic book: it’s organized around a series of vividly eccentric villains.<\/p>\n

The basic repeating pattern in most levels of Bioshock<\/em> is that you’re trying to just move toward your ultimate goal (Andrew Ryan), but something stops you. It can be a deliberate obstruction aimed at you in particular or it can be an accident that forces you to seek an alternate route, but either way, it forces you into a confrontation with the person who lords it over that section of Rapture. You learn about this person from radio broadcasts and\/or audio journals you find over the course of the level, and what you learn is that he’s over-the-top insane in a way relating to his profession — so you get a mad surgeon, a mad artist, and so forth. In other words, they’re theme villains, only a funny costume away from a spot in Batman’s rogues gallery. I suppose you could argue that they’re all examinations of where Ryan’s philosphy ultimately leads when put into practice, but only if you’re willing to really push it. I don’t think any philosophy leads inexorably to strapping someone to a piano covered in TNT.<\/p>\n

In a strange way, it reminds me of Tales of the Black Freighter<\/em>, the comic-within-a-comic in Watchmen<\/em>. The point of TotBF<\/em> was that it was what comic books were like in an alternate universe where superhero comics never took off. Bioshock<\/em> isn’t even that far separated from superhero comics: when you come down to it, the hero has superhuman powers, by way of plasmids and gene tonics. But it’s far enough away from a conventional superhero story that it feels a little like it could be an adaptation of an artifact from another world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I was playing Bioshock a little more. Probably because I just played Arkham Asylum, it’s striking me afresh just how comic-bookish it is. Specifically, it has the same sort of structure that made me compare Killer 7 to a comic book: it’s organized around a series of vividly eccentric villains. The basic repeating pattern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[417,412,181],"class_list":["post-1159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fps","tag-batman","tag-bioshock","tag-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1159"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4694,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions\/4694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}