Now that my AT&T U-Verse Internet and television service is up and running, it’s time to fix up my consoles and games. My consoles have been ready to go, just waiting for a solid Internet connection. My games are in boxes in the living room. I didn’t want to unpack them until the wiring was all done. As expected, I had to move the shelves several times and that would have been a pain in the ass with hundreds of games and movies on them. After the dust clears, I’m going to try to play some Fuse for PlayStation 3, but just a little bit. E3 2013 festivities start on Sunday. I’m excited for the show and looking forward to catching up with old videogame friends.
How about you? What’s on your weekend playlist?
I’ll be working on Bioshock Infinite.
Are you going to E3?
-M
I suppose so. It’s just a few miles away and all. Ha! I wouldn’t miss it for the world. E3 with new consoles = exciting.
Excellent. We can discuss this once you are through.
I’m by the part at the Fink Manufacturing plant where Elizabeth hates me for trying to trick her into going to New York, but she begrudgingly teamed up with me again because we need to get our airship back.
It’s going pretty slow right now because only play for a little bit during the weekdays and I’ve also started the game on 1999 mode right off the bat. That and I typically love to explore every nook and cranny and search every garbage can for supplies since I always seem to be low on salts and health after a fight. It’s challenging, but fun. I should get a good leg up on the game this weekend, though (not during the Finals, however).
-M
Yes I explored every nook and cranny myself. Honestly you do yourself a disservice as far as story is concerned if you don’t find most of those recorders.
I just finished the game last night (or rather, early this morning) and I’m still trying to pick up the pieces of my brain off the floor after my head exploded from the resulting mindfuck that was the ending of that game.
I’ll have to play through the game again and pay a bit more attention to details. Even though I was a bit more focused on survival, I thought I did a good job keeping up with the story up until the climax (and conclusion). It just seemed to get exponentially more convoluted as the game went on.
Bioshock 1 and 2 were pretty straight-forward stories with their own unique twists, but Infinite was just a jumble of plot threads and concepts mashed together in the Large Hadron Collider (with the same results). Alternate reality, quantum physics, messianic allegory, biological engineering, and that’s just the beginning. It’s way too much to wrap my head around right now.
Sometimes I really wish there was some kind of reverse-screenplay thing where video games with good stories could be turned into novels. I usually play with the captions on, but for some reason, they didn’t show with the voxophones, unlike the previous Bioshock games. Do you know if there is a way to have the voxophones captioned?
-M
I played on PC so I would just press the O key to read a transcript. Pretty sure the 360 has similar ability.
Mindfuck: do you remember the songbird in the first bioshock
I’ve played through the first Bioshock several times and I am pretty sure there were no Songbirds in that game. I would have remembered something like that.
-M
You can hear Songbird dying in the first Bioshock. It’s when Fitzpatrick is playing the piano and has the bird mask on. Plausible due to the fact Levine made both games.
I never played 2, but supposedly you can hear Songbird dying in 2 as well.
O.K., I had to go back to Bioshock 1 to find out what you were taking about. Yeah, the part right before Sander Cohen blows up Fitzpatrick on the piano and yes, you do hear something similar to Songbird dying in the background.
After careful consideration, however, I have decided that this is just a coincidence. It’s a “holy shit that was weird” coincidence, but still. The reason for me saying that is because I’m pretty sure Levine didn’t even think about the existence of Infinite while they were programming the sounds for Bioshock 1. If I am not mistaken, you hear that “wailing” sound at other points in the game as well. I just thought they added that in for the atmosphere. Similarly, the “bird” mask you see in the first game is fairly common. There are a bunch of thugs you fight in the game that are wearing different animal masks because of the New Year’s Eve costume party.
I think this is just a matter of people finding something that shares an eerie coincidence, but was not planned by the developer. Still, it is an amazing coincidence. Kudos to whomever found this out.
-M
Hmm if you do hear it many times in the game does that mean songbird has been killed many times? For instance…Booker has done the events in Infinite over 100 times based upon the marks on the chalkboard. I don’t think it is inconceivable. Did every Booker fail the 100 plus times? Did Songbird always die? Did Booker sometimes fight Elizabeth instead of being drown? Would the Luteces have killed him if he resisted? I don’t know. Lots of possibilities and I plan on buying the DLC actually.
Granted it is far fetched but does fit in well with the alternate dimension and disjointed story lines. Also I would find it hard to believe that the storylines are so in sync based upon how the protagonist arrived at the Lighthouse in the first game etc. Still fun to think about. Who knows…could be answered in the DLC!
O.K., see? That’s the problem with time paradoxes. The branching alternate realities doesn’t help, either.
I went through the entire game again, focusing on the voxophones and story. It’s starting to become a little bit more clear and I have to say that Levine is either a genius or a mad lunatic. This is the type of game that screws with your head almost as much as Eternal Darkness (only more subtle). I find something new on every playthrough. This time, it was the music. The first time I played, there was a nagging voice in the back of my brain that kept trying to make a connection between the old-time-y music in Battleship Bay to Cindi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I tried to dismiss it as just me being stupid, but on my second time around, I discovered that, sure enough, the tears allowed Fink and Comstock to listen and see other realities where the songs existed and recreated them in the current game’s timeline. So yeah, the song in Battleship Bay really is the 19th century version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” The other song I found being sung by some old lady from a phonograph was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears (appropriate on many levels). I totally need to buy the soundtrack for this game. I haven’t been this excited about game music since the first Halo.
Anyway, I digress. In starting to come to terms with the ending, there are a few really glaring plot holes that need to be filled. But the one that bothers me by far is the drowning of Booker by the Elizabeth(es) at the very end. The justification for doing so is to make sure that Comstock never emerges from the baptism. I get that. What I don’t get is why killing the 1912 Booker from timeline “B” (the one we play as through the whole game) will prevent all Bookers from turning into Comstock in 1892. What they should have done is kill the Booker from 1891 BEFORE he gets baptized. Instead, the ending makes us believe that killing the 1912 timeline “B” Booker will prevent past Bookers from accepting the baptism, even though it happened 20 years ago. This doesn’t make any sense.
There are, of course, other issues I have with trying to come to terms with the story, but that is the most glaring one right now that breaks the narrative. The other one would be in the form of a time paradox of which the daughter drowns the father in the river, but then when she does that, all Elizabeth(es) cease to exist because they were never born in the first place… so then if she was never born, who drowns Booker?
Have I scrambled your brain yet?
-M
Choices are not constants.
So what if the drowning doesn’t matter? It’s obvious Elizabeth is like the Luteces in that she speaks to herself in other dimensions. Who is to say she hasn’t been corrupted or will travel and stop herself? Does she have to kill all of the Bookers? Also since the Luteces have had so many Bookers thus far…does he always get drown by Elizabeth since it will inevitably make a loop once he is in Comstock world? Maybe that’s a constant. Why would it stop the cycle? Would it be like her little finger in that there are 2 dead Bookers in the same dimension?
I agree though. She should be dead, and probably is, if she drowns him. The other Elizabeth(es) started to disappear but I don’t get why multiple disappeared.
Idk the game has too many variables to consider. Fun to discuss though. I need to play it again.
The game (Elizabeth and Booker) clearly state that there are constants and variables. Every lighthouse at the end symbolizes a choice… a branching out of a reality. Bioshock Infinite focuses on ONE of these constants in ONE universe which is at the very crux of the whole entire narrative: the baptism at the river.
This is a constant in “X” amount of universes. In “Y” amount of universes, there is no baptism or no Booker, or a million other scenarios where none of this exists. For the sake of simplicity, we are only focusing on the “X” universes where there is a Booker and there is a baptism. From that crux event, we have two choices: walk away (resulting in timeline “B” Booker) or get baptized (resulting in timeline “A” Comstock). I say timeline “A” because that’s the one where we play in. It then turns into timeline “A1” after Elizabeth opens the first tear, then timeline “A2” when she opens the second tear where Booker is a martyr, and then “A3” where it’s the future Elizabeth and NY gets destroyed. The climax happens back in the “A2” timeline, I think.
Anyway, back to your point: The drowning does matter in the “X” number of universes where Booker is at the baptism because if he dies before the crux event, there will be no Booker or Comstock in any timeline after that event in the “X” number of universes… and no game to play. Likewise, Elizabeth/Anna would never be born because she is a product of timeline “B” Booker in the “X” number of universes after the “no” event at the baptism.
Now, there CAN be Bookers in “Y” number of universes of where he never even went to the baptism event. In addition to that, there can be “Yz” number of universes that contain a Booker that gave birth to Anna without experiencing the baptism event, but don’t forget that the only reason Elizabeth/Anna has her powers was because she existed in two dimensions at once. Her pinkie finger was in timeline “B” while the rest of her body was in timeline “A” in the “X” universe. Lutece (the woman) had a theory about that (stated in one of her voxophone messages) saying that she believed the girl was “special” because two parts of her existed in two separate realities. That, in combination with the discovery of the Lutece field (and those quantum particles they discover) allow Elizabeth to have a complete mastery over opening dimensional tears (somehow). Anyway, that is the explanation they (kind of) give you.
So, because the Elizabeth with powers only comes from “X” universes where timeline “A” happens after the baptism event, there can be no other Elizabethes from “Y” universes that can open tears. This game is ONLY dealing with “X” universes where Booker is at the baptism. All of the Elizabethes from the game’s end HAVE to be from the “X” universes because those are the only ones where she can have multidimensional powers. She doesn’t have to kill all of the Bookers, just the one that is responsible for the branching off into timeline “A” of the “X” universes.
The Luteces have brought in 122 Bookers from the “B” timelines of “X” universes… or maybe the same Booker 122 times (who knows?). This indicates that the Luteces are trying out different probability scenarios in timeline “A” of the “X” universes where Comstock takes possession of Anna. Finally, when we play the game, we figure out a way to control the songbird and actually rescue Elizabeth as one of the many probable outcomes. Once the siphon machine in her tower is destroyed, she is free to explore different alternate realities. So, to me, it seems that the time traveling thing is a function of the alternate, branching realities thing.
So, in summary; “yes” the drowning matters because, if Booker dies at the crux event, then there can not exist an Elizabeth with tear powers. She doesn’t have to kill all the Bookers, just the one that accepts the baptism. That will prevent the timeline “A” from ever happening. I am going to assume that it’s only one Booker (from timeline “B”) that the Luteces keep going back for simply for the sake of simplicity. If not, then it would be 122 Bookers from timeline “B” alternates like “B1”, “B2”, “B3” all the way up to “B122”. There are 121 times that Booker tries to rescue Elizabeth and fails (for some reason), the Booker we play is the 122nd that actually succeeds, which leads me to believe that the branching, alternate-reality mechanic is the more prevalent one. The problem is that when he succeeds, not only do they kill Comstock and prevent the destruction of NY, but the timeline “A” Booker as well as any Elizabeth with powers also dies. This creates a time paradox IF they were to kill the 1891 Booker right before the baptism. But that doesn’t happen. Instead they kill the 1912 Booker which has already made the decision not to get baptized.
In that sense, it wouldn’t be a time cycle, but more akin to cutting off an entire tree branch. By killing pre-baptismal Booker, all of the possibilities and alternate histories stemming from that decision would have never existed.
Anyway, that’s my take on the whole thing (which is probably lacking at this point). I really need to brush up on my quantum physics… unless you have a better explanation.
-M
I like referring to the Large Hadron Collider as the CERNy Collider.
I’ll probably get a couple more hours logged on Pokemon White 2 and Luigi’s Mansion 2. Maybe LM2 multiplayer or Mario Kart 7 is anyone ever wants to play. I’d offer a Pokemon battle, but I don’t think enough people here play to have any takers for the offer :)
I’ve been totally sucked into the world that is State of Decay. The game is amazing. Graphically it isnt anything to brag about and the frame rate dips every now and then but it doesn’t matter.