0verhyped

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Now for those of you who read my last post on BioShock (which according to all this fancy WordPress monitoring software is absolutely no one), you would know I felt that BioShock was a clumsy collection of various gaming elements that had been watered down to a level that made them effectively pointless and combined in a massive mediocre paste that had been carefully produced by corporate executives to contain a flavor that offended no one but had just barely enough taste that people wouldn’t mind eating it.

So for those of you who know my “N0t Hyped” banner refers to things I felt didn’t get enough attention (which, again, is no one because in addition to nobody reading this, I’ve never bothered explaining what any of my categories mean), you might be confused to how I can spend one day complaining endlessly about how overrated BioShock is and how it got way too much attention, and another day claiming there’s a part of BioShock that went unappreciated and didn’t get anywhere near enough attention.

“Am I some sort of crazy schizophrenic suffering from wild mood things?”, the person who reads all my posts who only exists my imagination might ask. Yes, that’s why I’m both on anti-psychotic meds and under constant watch. But not because of this, I actually do have a logical reason for this.

First, an explanation of the not so logical process that lead me to buy a $10 downloadable pack for a game I didn’t really like. The PS3 was the last of the three seventh generations home consoles I acquired and in a pitiful last ditch attempt to convince myself I didn’t have buyer’s remorse over it, I joined a Trophy “league” on the gaming site I was currently frequenting, VGChartz.

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Trophies are like achievements, except their named trophies. A trophy/achievement league is a sad collection of people competing to get the most achievophies, or failing that, trying to be the best in some bizarre and overly narrow subcategory, like earning every trophy in a game more times than anyone else, which since I was an obsessive compulsive freak, is what I tried to do.

Since I was a new PS3 owner, I was already pretty far behind everyone else and needed a way to pad out my trophy count. Since I had already beaten BioShock multiple times and it was a fairly easy game, renting it for the PS3 seemed like an surefire way to bag a quick Platinum Trophy, the trophy you get for getting all other trophies. And since the PS3 time stamps your trophies down to a minute, I devised my own metagame to keep BioShock from being too boring. I decided to see if I could earn a Platinum in BioShock in less than twenty four hours.

A long boring twenty four hours of keeping track of lists I had printed off GameFAQs and occasional light napping later, I had succeeded. “Hooray!” no one said, because nobody gave a shit how fast I beat an easy game I had already beaten thrice before. I’m ready to go to bed when I noticed my trophy score for BioShock isn’t 100%. This is odd because typically earning the Platinum Trophy means exactly that, 100% finished. But after checking carefully, it turns out there is a dozen trophies I’m missing that are all part of a downloadable add-on that costs ten dollars. Too tired to care, I just went back to bed. The next day though I kept looking at my 82% rating on my Trophy score card and kept wondering about the last set of trophies.

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I’d like to remind you at this point that I had RENTED BioShock, and this expansion costs ten dollars to download. Which means I’d be spending money on an expansion that I wouldn’t have access to after I returned the game to the video store. (This was back when we still had video stores instead of red robots that rent games.) This is also a game that I don’t even particularly like. The expansion also had all the earmarks of a cheap crash grab.

It was simply called “Challenge Rooms”, a phoned in uncreative name if there ever was one, and it simply added three separate rooms that were in no way connected to the main game or each other. The fact it was EXCLUSIVE to the PS3 also seemed like a bad sign, like the producers didn’t really think anyone would care, but they could give this (i.e. charge ten dollars) to PS3 players in a vain attempt to convince them this extremely late port of a critically acclaimed game was actually the definitive version, in that it had extra content you could get nowhere else, even though it costs extra money and has nothing to do with the rest of the game.

Well I can happily say I didn’t buy the Challenge Rooms expansion pack…until a few days later during an unusually restless night right before I would have to return BioShock meaning I had like only eight hours left to finish the entire expansion… Yeah, I’d say that was a low point in my life, but it’s not the last time I would do something like that… But, just as a broken clock is accurate twice a day, a compulsive freak with no self control and a poor grasp on his money occasionally makes a smart purchase.

Because despite Challenge Rooms having all the tell tale signs of a shoddily made small set of completely thoughtless objectives that would only last you an hour, they actually managed to provide the most clever and challenging content in all of BioShock. No I’m not being sarcastic, I had more fun playing the challenge rooms than I did the whole rest of the game, which I had beaten four times by now.

I don’t know what happened, where did this go right? Maybe the people making the challenge rooms realized almost nobody would actually be buying them and just said “Fuck it. Let’s actually put something together that is a damn challenge. Almost no one will even play these things, so who cares if we don’t pander to lowest common denominator.” That’s basically the same approach I take to this blog, nobody will see this so I might as well do whatever I want, and if that’s what the people who made the Challenge Rooms did, I’m glad.

The Challenge Rooms add three completely separate challenging scenarios that are not part of the main game. There’s no story, or cutscenes, just three different areas each with the same goal of rescuing a stranded Little Sister somewhere on the map. These aren’t part of BioShock’s greater narrative either, the only narrative is the title cards that look like comic books that appear at beginning of each room. After that it’s all you, 100% gameplay, no distractions. All though the challenge rooms are made using the same basic layout as the rest of the game, they all tend to have their own specific limitations and rules that make them unique, and that’s where the fun begins. Now since there are only three rooms, I’ll go head and break each one down for you.

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The ‘I’ in Team: The first room is basically one giant puzzle you have to solve. Now for those of you who didn’t read my last post on BioShock, I don’t blame you. But I said I was disappointed that BioShock featured a lot interesting elements, but rarely used them as anything other than blunt weapons you can bash your enemies with. This first challenge room seems to change all that, where the actual puzzles have been worked into the environment and the keys to solving it are actually plasmids and items you already used in the main game. But now you have to use to them to solve your problems in ways you didn’t expect. You’re not given any actual offensive weapons and there’s no straight up fighting. Instead you need to find ways to apply the powers and items you collect to solve the problems that impede your progress. You can’t just bash stuff to death here, you actually gotta think, but once you put it together it feels all too satisfying.

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A Shocking Turn of Events: It’s not enough to just be clever this time but thrifty and cautious as well. The second room has a Little Sister trapped on a Ferris Wheel, the catch is the controls to get her down are all screwed up and require a series of electrical blasts to get the wheel moving. Unlike the main game, you don’t have vending machines and constant supplies thrown at you, there’s only a set number of items you can use to produce the electricity, so you need to search the abandoned carnival from top to bottom. Unlike the first room, you have to defend yourself from occasional attacks this time. So in addition to trying to find ways to zap the Ferris wheel into moving, you’ve also got to keep yourself alive with only limited supplies. Where as the first room had a single straight forward progression, this one lets you explore, and there’s actually more ways to move the wheel than needed to get the sister down, so you might not always arrive at the same solution depending on what you try.

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Worlds of Hurt: So far the challenges have tested your wits and survival skills, but the third and final challenge room also requires a great deal of cunning if you plan to succeed. This time the Little Sister is trapped in plain sight in the middle of a large room, the only way to reach her is by fighting your way through the eight arenas that surround the area. You’ll find a complete set of fully stocked vending machines at your disposal, but only a small amount of money and Adam, so you have to choose very carefully what powers and upgrades. Strategy is absolutely crucial. With no vita chamber and a very limited amount of potential supplies, you have only one life to live and you’ll have to play smart not to lose it. Each arena pits you against a different type of enemy in a different environment, and if you don’t adopt an appropriate strategy you might not survive long enough to fight in the next.

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That’s the three challenge rooms in a nutshell. They’re all pretty short, but they’re all really fun too. By severally limiting what the player has access to, I found myself becoming increasingly creative in the face of difficult obstacles. But just finishing the rooms only nets you three out twelve trophies. The other trophies are designed to really put your skills to the test.

The next three trophies are gained by finding a set of hidden roses in each room. This sounds like mindless collecting, and it kinda is. But each room tends to go about hiding the roses in a different way. The puzzle room only has four roses, one in plain sight. The other three require some added clever thinking on the player’s part, especially the fourth rose, which you can’t actually see, but you can reach with the right tool at your disposal. The Carnival room plays it more like an Easter egg hunt, picking the absolute craziest and unlikely places to hide away ten roses, including cramming one in a Little Sister vent that you can only see from a certain angle. Where as the Worlds of Hurt tends to play this a little more traditionally, simply hiding one rose in each of the eight rooms. No tricks, just a little careful searching required.

Three more trophies are devoted to an added challenge for each room. The puzzle room adds the requirement of not destroying any of the gun turrets. This requires some quick use of a decoy for certain parts, but a manageable task that otherwise doesn’t change things to much. The Carnival challenge is to find all nine different ways to activate the Ferris Wheel, meaning you’ll have to figure out how to exploit every angle to move the wheel the maximum number of times. The Worlds of Hurt challenge ask you to beat all the combat arenas, WITHOUT ANY GUNS! You’d better pick your plasmids and tonics carefully, because other than them you’re just packing a wrench and a camera.

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The last three trophies are for completing speeds runs of the three rooms. The puzzle room is nothing difficult, just memorize the way forward and don’t stop. Speed running the carnival requires some planning as well as some trial and error, seeking out the fastest way to move the wheel six times. The Worlds of Hurt pushes you to think fast as you have only fifteen minutes to clear eight different rooms filled to brim with baddies. You’ve gotta work out your strategies ahead a time and buy your supplies as fast as possible because the clock don’t stop just because you need to manage your inventory.

The Challenge Rooms, which I only bought for what I thought would be easy trophies, ended up totally sucking me in. These difficult challenges were actually thoughtful and engaging, which rewarded clever planning and creative thinking. The speed run for Worlds of Hurt really pushed me to my limit. Dying is for real, but you can save your game freely, so you can save before each room to try different strategies. I found myself up against the wall trying to figure out to tackle the Big Daddies room. There was four of them stomping around in there and even if I can survive the brutal attacks and knock them down, I was taking way too much time to finish.

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I go back to the vending machines to look for a better solution and I notice the enrage plasmid. Enrage drives Big Daddies into a fit and they start attacking anything in sight. In the main game this isn’t much help because Daddies usually work alone and attack splicers anyways. But here, this was exactly what I needed. Using the enrage plasmid I pit all the Daddies against each other and as they neared death, begun raining down explosives to seal the deal. I had to completely change my style of attack several times to clear out all the baddies but I narrowly finished the speed run with a measly two seconds to spare.

I truthfully had more fun earning all the trophies for the challenge rooms than I ever did playing the rest of BioShock. The tricky puzzles and difficult battles really pushed me to step up my game in a way I didn’t think possible. And yet almost nobody talks about the challenge rooms, maybe because they don’t contain some protracted story that people can pretend they’re smart for appreciating, or maybe just because it’s ten bucks and only available on the one system that got BioShock last, that sure as shit isn’t helping.

BioShock being to ported to PS3 was a fairly quiet affair. I’m sure there were some fanboys cheering because now they could add one more title to the list of games that proves their system was better. But most people who really wanted to play BioShock had and already moved on. So when it’s later announced that the PS3 version will get new ten dollar add-on called “Challenge Rooms”, it’s understandably hard for anyone to get excited, which is a shame really.

But the little mention of the challenge rooms I did read just seemed to complain about how short it was. So what? It was actually fun. I felt I got a lot more from my ten dollars and few hours in the challenge rooms than I did in twenty or so hours I wasted playing the rest of BioShock on a rental. If there was an option to buy the challenge rooms separate from rest of BioShock, I would gladly put down some money to own them.

Sadly you can only play them by paying extra if you own a PS3 and its version of BioShock. I guess my recommendation doesn’t mean much, seeing as how I thought the rest of BioShock was boring and forgettable, but if you do own the PS3 version of BioShock, enjoy a good challenge, and like thoughtful gameplay that requires you to think, consider splurging on the Challenge Rooms sometime. There’s worse things you can blow ten dollars on, believe me, I’ve done it…