The first game, Bioshock, is a really good game. It takes place in a beautifully rendered underwater city, Rapture. Rapture,is built on the ocean floor, isolating the city from the rest of the world. The city’s founding philosophy is un-fettered competition. You are free to carve out your own place in the society without fear from government interference. Only the best of the best were invited to come and help build the greatest city the world has ever known.

You know, John Galt’s wet dream.

Get it? Galt. Underwater city isolated from the rest of society. Underwater. Wet. Dream.

Anyway.

As everyone pursued their own best interests in Rapture, the needs of the city and the society were cast aside and allowed to rot. They ripped each other to shreds on a genetic level. And then the genetically modified son of the founder of Rapture, Andrew Ryan, murdered his father as a pawn in a power struggle to control everything and the city was flooded.

That would be you, btw, playing the part of the genetically modified son who was a pawn to destroy Andrew Ryan and the world he built.

There was even a morality system in the game about morality- you could either choose to set altered children free or harvest them for your own personal gain. As you can see, it was a great game with something to say about Rand’s work, Atlas Shrugged and her philosophy of Objectivism. The orginal Bioshock is on my list of top 20 games, and easily in my top 3 FPS games.

Which is a shame the inevitable happened, 2K Games through their Marin studio put out a sequel, Bioshock 2.

Bioshock 2 takes place 10 years after the events of the first game. You play one of the iconic villains from the original, a Big Daddy. The whole goal of this game is to rescue a young woman who is held captive by the game’s antagonist, Sophia Lamb. Of course you have to go from zone to zone, constantly gathering equipment or powers in order to rescue her at the very end of the game.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Abraxas, that sounds a lot like the plot of any Mario or Zelda game. Or for that matter, Sonic the Hedgehog.”

And, you’re right. It is a lot like those games. You know you’re in trouble when the plot of your game can be compared to every Mario or Zelda game ever made. Or Sonic the Hedgehog.

To compound this sin, 2K Marin made the decision to not bring back the original antagonist Andrew Ryan but instead to bring in his polar opposite, Sophia Lamb.

If Ryan is a Ayn Rand wet dream, you know a “self-made” industrialist of incredible wealth who believed in the “genius of the self”, then Lamb is his opposite. Lamb is a highly educated, elitist that preached the self needed to be subsumed to the interests of the group who secretly has nothing but disdain for those that follow her. She is also a psychologist that produced or created nothing. That part is important, remember it.

Not bringing back Ryan and swapping him out with a different villain, in my Unhumble Opinion©, is a huge mistake. On a lot of levels.

You don’t write a follow up story without either continuing the same themes, refining them further, or not bringing back the antagonist. That would be like having The Empire Strikes Back without Vader.

Can you imagine that? Killing Vader at the beginning of A New Hope, and then have to spend time in the second movie tryng to create a second credible threat? It would be farcical. Well, actually, it would be exactly like Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. So, yeah, like I said, farcical.

You also don’t follow up a game that takes a clear stand against Rand’s philosophy by show-casing what happens with unfettered competition by then taking the opposite stance that group behavior is equally destructive.

For the home-schooled: Rand felt that the only good was self-interest. In her philosophy Objectivism Rand argues that only individualism and individual achievement allows society to thrive and grow. She also argues that coerced sacrifice (in the form of limitations, taxation, and similar things) will cause the collapse of society. The fullest expression of this idea is in her final novel, Atlas Shrugged. She also said that people who did not create or build were a drain on society. It’s the whole concept of Rapture- no government, only creators and builders living together making and doing whatever they want with no restrictions.

What? You didn’t think video games took philosophical stances and argued for or against them? You should probably take a closer look at the games you play. No, really.

In Bioshock 2, Sophia Lamb feels that the only good is to sacrifice the self for the group. That society will only thrive if the individual is less important than the group. She’s even the embodiment of the great evil in Rand’s philosophy; she creates nothing, she builds nothing, and took control of Rapture from the people who did build it. From Rand’s Objectivist view, Lamb is the greatest evil. Ever.

Which completely undermines the argument of the first game, that uncontrolled competition is destructive, which in turn weakens Bishock 2’s own argument that group-centric activity is equally destructive. And, frankly, it looks half-assed in the writing department.

You can’t fight against rampant individualism in one game and then endorse it in a second game. Even the protagonist of the second game, a Big Daddy that shakes off his genetic conditioning (becomes an individual) supports this endorsement of Rand’s ideas. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the first game.

Also, Rapture is still Andrew Ryan’s city. His ghost is every where in terms of design and structure of the city. His voice can still be heard through the empty corridors and halls. His image is everywhere. The remaining populace still stalk and murder each other for resources, Little Sisters still harvest the dead and you can still choose to murder or save them.

The design and graphics of the game are still striking and beautiful, even if they are showing their age. The combat has been tweaked so you can wield a gun in one hand and fire off the special powers. The “hacking” mini-games have been streamlined and simplified for ease of play.

There is also a rather pointless multi-player portion attached. I say pointless because it doesn’t blend with the story of the game- lone hero plodding through an isolated city. It’s pretty standard fair, so I don’t imagine anyone playing for long before going back to the FPS multi-player of choice.

In honesty, Bioshock 2 comes in as a poor follow up to a great game and, in my Unhumble Opinion©, is nothing more than a naked money grab. While Bioshock 2 does tweak game mechanics for the better, it adds nothing in terms of story or content while contradicting many of the story elements of the first game, and adds on a multi-player portion that isn’t supported by the game in terms of context.