BioShock Challenge Rooms is an expansion pack for the excellent BioShock exclusive to the PS3 that features three self-contained areas. One area focuses solely on the combat side of the game, while the others focus mainly on a mix of puzzles and exploration.
While the Challenge Rooms do not in anyway form part of the originals storyline, it is best to have finished BioShock completely before loading up the expansion, as it does give a bit away as to what BioShock is as a game.
There is only one thing wrong with the Challenge Rooms. They are well designed, memorable, fun, and clever. The only thing is, they aren't BioShock. Gone are all but trace elements of the things that made the original stand out as different, and more importantly, better.
The first room, The 'I' in Team is a prime example of this. In this level, you are tasked with taking down a Big Daddy, and subsequently rescuing a Little Sister. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. The catch is, you don't have any weapons, or any damage dealing Plasmids.
And here in lies the problem. The whole point of The 'I' in Team is to not let you play BioShock, to not let you experiment with all the different weapon, plasmid and tonic combinations that made the game great. Instead, you get exactly what is necessary to take down the big daddy, but nothing more. Which is fine, but like I said, it isn't BioShock.
And the level is short as well; in fact you can complete it in less than 3 minutes. There is even a trophy for it. And while this will likely take you multiple run throughs to get (it took me 3) as you shave seconds of your total time, after completing The 'I in Team once, you've already seen all it has to offer. There are 4 Roses scattered around the place. Finding and acquiring the roses offers some substitute to the puzzles of the main game, but they are pretty simple puzzles, although finding one of them will prove a head-ache.
Thankfully, the next puzzle room, A Shocking Turn of Events, warrants the title, "puzzle room". Here, you are required to save a Little Sister trapped in a Ferris wheel by electrifying its controls six times. With this level, you are rightfully given back the ability to make choices, as there are more ways of doing this than required, and there is no specific order in which they must be done.
In total there are 9 ways of electrifying the controls, and exhausting all of them is probably the most rewarding puzzle in any of the 3 rooms, even though in reality it requires nothing more than combing the level for everything it holds, not that hard a task in such a small place. And while it doesn't really have great replay value, there is another trophy for completing the room with in 4 minutes, which this time proves more of a challenge.
There are roses to collect again, however this time there are 10, and quite a few of them will prove a challenging find. The combination of roses and striving to complete the level in under 4 minutes was enough to get me through A Shocking Turn of Events 3 times.
The third and final room, Worlds of Hurt, is all together different. World's of Hurt is what the other rooms should have mirrored. It forces you to be resourceful, plan ahead, and generally experiment with which plasmids and ammo to buy.
Worlds of Hurt is all about freeing another Little Sister, this time from a circular prison. Freeing her requires you to confront and kill the enemies in each of the levels eight chambers. After beating the first chamber, you are given all of the weapons from the main game, albeit with no ammo. Clearing a chamber grants you some Adam, coinage, and a save point.
Adam is again used to buy plasmids and tonics. However, you really have to match which plasmids you are going to buy with which enemies you are going to attack next. For example, there is no point in buying a Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid, and then going and attacking some Spider Splicer’s. This is a nice change from the spoon feeding of the first level.
You are given all the money you need to buy plenty of ammo. Hacking makes a return, with vending machines again dispensing cheaper products when hacked. The difficulty of hacking has been increased, and it is worth buying some tonics for making this easier if you struggled with hacking in BioShock. You can also invent stuff with LOOT which you can collect from dead enemies, like in the main game.
Before entering the chamber proper, you get a bird's eye view of the room, through the looking glass as it were. The chambers actually have good variation, and on the harder difficulty levels can be quite a challenge. Even on easy, where the enemies are easy to take down, you will have to watch your resources closely.
Worlds of Hurt is the only Challenge room to be truly replayable. Its good fun and very rewarding trying out multiple strategies, and if you are going to go for the 'Tough Guy' trophy, this is essential, as it requires good knowledge of what is coming and how you can take it down.
Challenge Rooms is a very short experience. Even if you complete it in its completeness and go to the trouble of getting all of the trophies, you can be done with in an hour if you’re a good player, while the everyday player will take no more than two. They are rewarding though, even if not on the same scale or level as BioShock itself.
The add-on is bug free from my experience; although textures can be a bit slow to load some times. Otherwise the graphics are good, as is the sound. Probably one thing missing though is Ryan, and hearing him going on about his city, although considering that you kill him in the main game, that would be a bit odd.
In summing up, Challenge Rooms don't quite cut it as a BioShock product. For any other game, they would do, but given BioShock’s lofty standards, it is a bit of a let down. I left wanting more, but not in a good way, there just wasn't enough in the pack. It's almost like they forgot how to make puzzles complex enough to fit the name of BioShock, although Worlds of Hurt is the shinning light of the package. Challenge Rooms overall would have been better off, had it left a bit more room for the player to make some decisions of their own, after all, that is what made the original so great.
In 2007, BioShock was released for the Xbox 360 with wildly unexpected levels of success. No one expected the game to be as phenomenal as it was and it earned over 50 Game of the year awards from various website and magazines. The strange thing is, no one really expected a sequel. This worried fans, and the fact that Ken Levine (the original creator of BioShock) had nothing to do with BioShock 2, didn't help allay fears. Bioshock 2 is finally here, and everyone is eager to know if it lives up to its legendary predecessor.
The story takes place in 1968, eight years after the first game, and as you can imagine, things haven't exactly improved in the so-called Utopia. Doctor Sophia Lamb, a Rapture psychiatrist, deeply believes in unifying the remaining citizens of the city, calling them "The Rapture Family". Dr. Lamb is sending out Big Sisters to kidnap little girls from the surface and bring them back to rapture so the ADAM fueled gears of the city don't stop turning. You play as Delta, the first prototype big daddy, who has got some pretty legitimate beef with Dr. Lamb. Lamb robs you of your little sister, Eleanor, but also (without going into spoiler territory) forces you to make a pretty painful choice. Shortly after waking up from the "Lamb incident" you get a message from Eleanor, who isn't so little anymore, telling you that she desperately needs you to find her. Your mission is pretty clear after that: find Eleanor and find out what the hell happened while you where KO. Thankfully, some of the sane citizens, like Dr. Tenenbaum, and the selfish Augustus Sinclair (the creator of Sinclair Solutions), are willing to help you. You also get to meet entirely new faces, like the acclaimed Rapture jazz singer, Grace Holloway. What's unfortunate, though, is that Delta's interaction with each character in the game is somewhat repetitious (it almost seems the same for everyone you encounter). The characters are more like chess pieces that, depending on how you've manipulated them, change the end cut-scene of the game. To add to the impressive storyline, audio diaries also make a return with the same quality of work put into them as in the first one. The story can get a bit confusing at times, but it's exceptionally well written, and as more secrets get revealed to the player, he or she will sink deeper and deeper into the plot and characters. Nevertheless, players might find it difficult to get really interested in the main character until close to the end of the game. Delta is simply a bit of a dull figure. Not much is known about him, and this is probably the way you'll feel until certain specifics are revealed in the last few hours of the game-which then skyrockets the interest in him! The game starves the player of almost any information in the first 75 percent of playing-time, and then most of the important information hits the player at once. This effect can be extremely overwhelming. I can almost guarantee that you're going to put your controller down several times in the last few hours of the game to mentally unravel the massive amounts of information thrown at you.
BioShock 2 PlayStation 3 Video - IGN
Gamervision: "Ever since gamers were first introduced to the Mushroom Kingdom, the alternate realities of the video game universe became an escape for millions. Be it the USG Ishumura of Dead Space or Sera of Gears of War, developers have crafted thousands of unique locations in gaming's short history. Some are wonderful, utopian societies, while others… well. Let's just say that not every area in the gamingverse is somewhere where you'd want to live, and that's just what this list is about.
Here are the top ten Worst Places to Live in Gaming."
I would wanna live in Rapture before all the chaos. It'd probably be a pretty cool place.
I'd probably die of a stroke if I had to stay even an hour in Silent Hill. This line from the list made me LMAO though:
"Citizens of Silent Hill fall into two categories: monsters who get raped regularly by Pyramid Head, or literal manifestations of fear."
they forgot that place of demons souls, that should be number 2, I accept new york, and where's tokyo?
deadspace should be in there IMO, being stuck in the Ishamura with the whole crew infected (around 1000 of them) would be the most worst place to be at the time.
