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Games Entertainment

BioShock Receives Record-Breaking 12 AIAS Nominations 65

dampeal writes "The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences today announced the nominees for the 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards. The nominations for the peer-based awards have been dominated by two blockbuster first-person shooter games, BioShock (2K Games) and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision) by receiving an astounding 10+ nominations from industry leaders and members of the interactive entertainment software business. In addition, finalists in close lead with top nominations include: The Orange Box (Electronic Arts and Valve Software), Rock Band (MTV Games) and Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo of America), all up for the Overall Game of the Year Award."
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BioShock Receives Record-Breaking 12 AIAS Nominations

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  • by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @11:33AM (#22094784)
    I wasn't that impressed with Mass Effect, or it's heavily promoted conversation system. Conversations could sound natural if you select options fast enough, but more often than not they ended up still sounding as stilted as ever. In addition, even the longest lines were unskippable, and one of the alien races spoke with an annoying e x t r e m e l y s l o w voice mod that made me want to pull my hair out. (It even used the cliche "reverse the audio, add an echo, reverse it again" effect, ugh.)

    As for the game itself, it's pretty much standard Bioware. And like every Bioware game, there's one point in the game where, once you reach it, it's impossible to go back and complete previous quests. That really peeves me off, they could at least warn you that "hey when you land on planet X, the game's on a path to finishing and you won't be able to freely roam anymore!"

    The controls were clunky and unintuitive, especially the lunar rover. (It has two weapons, one bound to right trigger, one bound to right shoulder, making it impossible to fire both at once! Meanwhile, the left trigger does virtually nothing.) Equipping mods to weapons and armor was always a pain, and I went through the game confused about when to use X to go back and when to use B to go back. (Getting into the galaxy map, then mistakenly hitting B instead of X wastes a whole lot of loading time! I did that probably a half-dozen times.)

    However, it does get kudos for actually allowing my character (with a high personality stat) to talk the villain into killing himself. That's something I've never seen before. 7/10
    • by Pojut ( 1027544 )
      You do know that during ANY conversation, you can hit X and it will skip to the next line of spoken dialogue... right?
      • by Aladrin ( 926209 )
        No, only during most conversations. Any time there was animation as well, you could not skip the dialogue.
        • by Pojut ( 1027544 )
          splitting hairs here, but I would consider those to be more along the lines of in-game cinimatics...
        • by JMZero ( 449047 )
          ..and, honestly, the conversations with animations were the only ones I wanted to skip. The only time I died more than once in the game was Matriarch Benwhatsia - so I got to watch those cinematics (she points, the soldiers appear, oh boy!) a bunch of times. I remember being annoyed.

          Oh, and it would have been nice if some of the "merchant dialog" was skipped by default. The "Hello". "Would you like to see what I have." "Yes. Show me what you have." conversations were slow and annoying.

          (Note: for whatev
      • I do now, but too late to change my impression of the game.

        Why didn't they use A like nearly every other game ever made? Again, that's just poor controls-- I tried A, I tried B (for Back, again like nearly every other game ever made) and I tried Start, Back the triggers... pretty much everything but X.

        What possessed you to think that X would skip dialog? Be honest with me: was it because that decision was intuitive for you and you just knew it would work, or was it because you spazzed out over the entire co
        • by Pojut ( 1027544 )
          I found out by reading the game manual...sometimes I will jump straight into a game and try to figure everything out for myself, but not having to fight with the interface or the controls when you start makes things much smoother...
      • Not to mention one of the characters does notify you that once you perform a certain action you likely won't be able to go back for anything else. I think the OP possibly hasn't actually played the game.
        • Maybe I didn't select that dialog option, if it was there. If the game warned you about that, good for you, but there was no warning for me, and it negatively influenced my opinion of the game. Although, having played previous Bioware games, I kind of saw it coming and rolled with the punches, since they *all* do that (and it pisses me off in every game.)

          I mean, people in this thread talk about the depth of the game-- maybe it has depth, but there were over a dozen quests I couldn't complete because of this
    • Ummm... You use your index finger on the RB button and your middle finger on the RT button. Also, left trigger operated the first person mode and allowed you to zoom. Did you actually read the manual?
      • Ummm... You use your index finger on the RB button and your middle finger on the RT button.

        No I don't. Please don't tell me how I hold a game controller, thank you.

        If I actually held the controller that way, my hands would be aching in minutes, instead I put in index fingers on the trigger and move them up as needed to the shoulder buttons. Of the 20+ Xbox 360 games I've played, holding the controller this way doesn't impact the game play in any way. Mass Effect is the first game I've played where you need
        • No I don't. Please don't tell me how I hold a game controller, thank you. If I actually held the controller that way, my hands would be aching in minutes, instead I put in index fingers on the trigger and move them up as needed to the shoulder buttons. Of the 20+ Xbox 360 games I've played, holding the controller this way doesn't impact the game play in any way. Mass Effect is the first game I've played where you need to use the trigger and shoulder, on the same side of the controller, at the same time. IM

          • And sorry for the double post here...but you probably spent more time complaing on a slashdot board about the controls than it would've taken for you to look up "Controls" in TOC and look at the diagram. Maybe you should check your priorities.
        • When running around normally, the left trigger zoomed in then too. Why change this for the rover?

          I do agree that the controls could have been slightly better, but I didn't RTFM and I had no problem working them out. And having played the game through several times, I've not problem with them anymore. Even the back button for the (strangely non-arcing) grenades is no problem.

          Personally, I just wish ALL xbox games allowed the complete remapping of controls like Halflife/Orange Box does (and most PC games

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by revlayle ( 964221 )

      However, it does get kudos for actually allowing my character (with a high personality stat) to talk the villain into killing himself. That's something I've never seen before.
      [emphasis mine]

      two words: play Fallout
      • I've played Fallout and Fallout 2. Several times. And I've never seen that before.

        Maybe my characters weren't of the right type or something, but don't insinuate that I don't know my RPGs. :P
        • In Fallout 1 you can convince the Master to kill himself when presented with scientific evidence from the BoS that the Super Mutant poulation is sterile and would not survive anyways after thehuman race was "wiped out" by them. GRANTED, you must have discovered this info from discussions at the BoS base *and* you must have a high IN to get to those dialogue options. However, it is possible, having done it before a few times...
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Kotor 2 has some instances of this
        (Kotor 1 might have had as well, but it's been a while since I played that one)
  • ...but CLEARLY Portal was the better game - more innovations and a much better ending. I enjoyed Bioshock very much but I cannot remember being this enthralled with a video game as I was when playing Portal. It felt like it was 1994 again and I was playing an FPS for the first time.
    • by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      Portal doesn't get an award until I get my bath and cake!

      They promised it to me, they owe it!

    • by jandrese ( 485 )
      It was a tough year for game awards with so many great releases. I've heard people comparing 2007 to 1939 in films where the Oscar choices included Gone with the Wind, the Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and other classics.
  • Groundbreaking in BioShock? I mean, a neat plot, simple gameplay where you got better/stronger/faster and all, but was it really that much better than anything else?

    I've not played it, simply because it hasn't interested me enough. Most of the impressions I got from reviews was that it was good but kinda overhyped.

    Me, I'll stick with TF2 a while longer.
    • I've not played it, simply because it hasn't interested me enough. Most of the impressions I got from reviews
      Reading about video games is like dancing about architecture.
    • No. It was much more impressive the first time, when it was System Shock 2.
    • by Pojut ( 1027544 )
      There was indeed something groundbreaking in Bioshock...the art direction.

      Now now, I know...the graphics weren't the BEST GRAPHIX EVAH!!!! but there was a SHITLOAD of detail in that game. Hundreds of different posters, signs, carpets...

      The weapons aren't terribly inventive, the plasmids were under-utilized (in my opinion), and the game is very linear...and yet, it's still an amazingly engrossing experience. You get sucked into the atmosphere like it was a black hole. Granted, as with any game like this (
    • by Xelios ( 822510 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @11:58AM (#22095298)
      Not groundbreaking, it just managed to do a lot of things right. The atmosphere is it's best quality in my opinion, from the first 5 minutes of play I was more immersed in the world than in any other FPS I've played (with the Half Life 2 series being the only exception). I'm not going to spoil the opening, but at first I thought I was watching a cutscene, it took a few seconds to realize "Hey, I'm supposed to be playing already".

      Most groundbreaking game, I'd have to say Portal. Great concept and great humor. The end credits were simply awesome, and I miss my Weighted Companion Cube :(
      • My biggest problem with that is, it was amazing but the rest of the game wasn't as amazing, all the way to a lackluster end. It felt like they blew their load on the demo or something.
    • Everybody's got their own reasons, but for me, it was the fact that every time you approached a given situation, it was different. There were so many ways to approach situations, and the AI was just unpredictable and dynamic enough when you weren't looking, that you couldn't walk down the same corridor three times without getting in three vastly different fights, each of which is interesting and precisely as challenging as you want to make it. It was even more like that with the Big Daddy encounters, which
      • Exactly...rarely have ever put so much forethought into a fight. Every time I had to take down a Big Daddy I would look around and see what I could use. "Look, there's a turret, I could hack it and lure him in front of it. Look, there's a nitro splicer, I can use my Telekinesis to fling Grenades at the Big Daddy if I can just lure him over this way..."

        Other things like the oil pools and standing water allowed you to make tactical decisions if you had the right plasmids equipped. Snapping research photo

  • System Shock 3 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @12:48PM (#22096378)
    System Shock and Deus Ex were groundbreaking. The only thing Bioshock did differently was to be on a console so that the unwashed masses could experience it. And, like Deus Ex 2, it suffered for its console-oriented developement.
    • The only thing Bioshock did differently was to be on a console so that the unwashed masses could experience it.

      I think this attitude explains why the Slashdot gamer-geek is ignored in development for the PC and the console.

      Why he doesn't get the games he wants to see.

    • Groundbreaking games existed before Halo?!?? Say it ain't so!!!
  • Bioshock and CoD4 definitely deserve some attention for storyline.

    Bioshock doesn't need any more explanation than it's received already, but I think the quality of the storyline in Call of Duty 4 has been largely ignored. The incident in the Middle East with the Nuke (and the helicopter scene following) made me feel more disturbed than anything I saw in Bioshock.
    • Agreed, BioShock was great but the level of intensity in parts of CoD4 were amazing and left me a lot more satisfied when the single player game was done. And the excellent mulitplayer was just icing on an already delicious cake that GlaDOS had made for me earlier in the fall.
  • Why no love for Assassin's Creed?

No spitting on the Bus! Thank you, The Mgt.

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