Blizzard Entertainment owner Vivendi Universal just merged with Activision and now has 52% of the resulting company. The transaction was signed this Sunday and is worth $18.8 billion, giving birth to the new Activision Blizzard brand. Although it’s pending approval by Activision shareholders, everything should be wrapped up by mid 2008. As part of the merger plan, Blizzard will invest $2bn in the new company, while Activision is putting up $1bn. Blizzard is responsible for World of Warcraft and its 9 million paying customers, along with Starcraft, a game that pushes millions of gamers into Battle.Net skirmishes even ten years after release. In turn, Activision develops games for all three major consoles, thriving off generous franchises like the Tony Hawk series, Guitar Hero, Spider-Man and X-Men.

During an 1UP interview, Blizzard President and CEO Mike Morhaime reassured fans that “The most important thing for our fans to understand is that we are preserving the Blizzard Entertainment brand. This was extremely important to me and the rest of the Blizzard team. We think it's a very strong brand, and the Vivendi guys and Activision guys all agree. We built so much value into the Blizzard Entertainment brand over these years, why would anyone want to change it? It just doesn't make sense.”

It’s a good marketing decision and pretty much common sense for Vivendi and Activision officials to say everything stays the same within the two companies. Panic is bad for business, but one can’t deny the reality of past mergers, takeovers and plain studio buyouts in the gaming scene. It’s common practice to switch attention to new projects and move staff around for the greater good, translated in better financial efficiency. I confident the new Blizzard Activision will do that, yet the question arises in regards to the “cost” gamers will have to pay. Is the price right?

Hopefully we won’t see any negative impact in the ongoing projects at Blizzard studios. I recall Blizzard trying really hard over the past three years to make a break in the console business, with studios being erected left and right. Starcraft Ghost is the prime example. Unfortunately that project was put to rest permanently, but instead Vivendi decided to go straight to the veterans from Activision for a piece of the console market.

<-125x125 Button - left->The night is getting colder, tainted by the screams of the unfortunate. Maybe I should have drowned with them, but fate has other plans in store for my perdition. The horrible noise can only mean that our crashed plane is sinking fast and I feel the urge to put some between us, lest I join it in the watery grave. Eerily gleaming fires stretch over ocean waves so calm, yet light pieces the darkness with unwavering certainty. I’ve reached the lighthouse at the end of the world, one lonely withered thorn to support hope where there is none. My chest hurts, but I’ll live yet; these steps - man made for sure. I must find the others.

“No gods, no kings, only man”

In the land of art, science and industry these symbols are engraved upon the walls, like runes of warding, ironically, the truth which brought the city’s downfall. As I descent with my newfound batysphere, I wonder who would have thought a whole city lies here at the bottom of the ocean. Rapture, as they call it, is a dream for all to men to free themselves of social and moral restrictions, and evolve to something greater. But can man be redeemed from his true destructive nature through technology? The wealthy and idealistic industry man Andrew Ryan seems to think this way, but entering the submerged city my welcoming party is grim. Creatures lurk in the shadows at every corner and they are not human anymore. I don’t even feel like leaving the relative safety of the batysphere after seeing IT rip the entrails off my rescuer. It is still out there, whispering secrets of my death and I don’t even have a crowbar to defend myself.

If you liked System Shock 2, then Bioshock is the game for you. If you love the retro theme Fallout used to push back in the days, Bioshock will also feel strangely familiar. I spent quite a lot of game time sight seeing and delving deeper into the complex social reality of Rapture. We’re talking about a large living city here, thus every location used to be someone’s quarters, bar of health center. Evidence of people’s past thoughts and actions can be found at every corner, usually by means of audio diaries picked up along the way. Rapture was created as a city of promise, a land of the free where everyone gets what he deserves in a seemingly capitalistic offer-and-demand ruled society.

Andrew Ryan sought to build a perfect society comprised out of elite individuals in the fields of art and science. In truth, man covers all the aspects of labor even in such an idealistic endeavor, thus physical work also needed to be employed, by those most fitted to perform it. Ryan was the father of Rapture, yet the rules he enforced lead him to be just one player in the vast game of economics. When rivals finally emerged, with the mindless back-up of the masses, power hungering turned to system corruption in the upper hierarchy.

“Adam is the canvass but plasmids are the paint”

The tool of this muffled civil war was Adam. Extracted through sea shells and developed into a mutagenic agent by a group of Rapture scientists lead by Tanenbaum, Adam enhanced humans with powers beyond their wildest dreams. Through Adam one gains the capacity to store plasmids and use them as they wish. Plasmids resemble spells since they require substantial quantities of Eve to be triggered off. Telekinesis, the control of fire or the power to freeze your foes are just a few; doubled by combat, technological and physical tonics which passively augment the denizens of Rapture, and now, yourself. But in order to gain Adam, a choice is to be made.

At some point it became apparent that there is not enough Adam to go around, and Tanenbaum engineered the Little Sisters to collect Adam from the dead. Guarded by massive armored robots called Big Brothers, these fiendish little girls have been transformed to see dead people as angels. Approaching them has since become a crime in rapture as they carry that which everyone here craves for. Big Brothers hit extremely hard and the first time you fight them is one of the most interesting things in Bioshock. Plenty of healing hypos, running around pillars and aiming for the head with armor piercing ammo should eventually do the trick.

And here’s the choice. The best way of getting Adam is to harvest it from the Little Sisters, leading to their impending death. Should you play nice, the little girls can be rescued from their mutagenic curse by a method taught to you by Tanenbaum. It leads to less Adam, but substantial rewards later on because the good doctor feels guilty and wants her children back. If you’re the kind of player that searches for items through every crevice, you’ll do just fine with less Adam. Ignore that completely if you plan to take on the game on the legendary difficulty. Spend Adam to gain more plasmids and increase your characteristics, including the amount of health and Eve you have. Tonics can be picked up on your journeys and basically represent items lying around. However, there is a possibility to gain more from research.

Humans never change

So we have a ‘50s retro themed city swarming with plasmid infested creatures that most of their humanity and spend their time hungering for Adam: splicers. It’s been a genuine pleasure to approach them from the shadow and listen to their rants undisturbed. Beyond the dim lights of Rapture, shadow and reality come together in a ghoulish fest where seeing and believing can never be the same. Complex shadows dance on the wall in front and I can tell a mother is bent over her child’s crib just around the corner. At first she sings a lullaby seemingly happy but then sorrow and madness take over. Wailing, crying out to the men gods of Rapture that took her child away, she lounges towards me with a wild look on her face. At first Adam made super humans out of the elite citizens of Rapture, but their developed Adam addiction lead to the loss of sanity. It’s only one of the main withdrawal symptoms, but the flesh decays as well. Splicers are bloodied and paranoid, their bodies scarred and their wits gone.

The doctor seems to be working late tonight, down at the gene splicing dental lab. I can tell by his shadow movements that he’s quite busy as I approach silently from behind. But then again, the light turn off leaving me defenseless and I must retreat as healing is expensive at this stage. Much of the scare comes from this use of lighting, sound and superb voice acting. I haven’t heard such great monologues since Sanitarium, one decade ago.

Atlas is directing you every move through the radio straight from the beginning, seemingly a true friend in this hour of need. With his help you going to discover the traps of perdition which brought great men and women to despair and madness, and Adam had a role to play in each story. First off we have Dr. Steinman, the surgery’s Picasso, obsessed with plasmid perfection in human beauty. Ryan’s rival in the works of industrial Rapture used to be Fontaine, now presumed dead. The story then arcs to Pete Wilkins, the underground rat living a parasitic life off his former master Fontaine. Land Ford is the biologist which used Adam to grow trees here on the ocean floor, subdued by Andrew Ryan’s strong grip over all things Rapture. Who can forget Sander Cohen, the mad artist who used plasmids to nurture a kind of grotesque art form built on pathos and death. The list goes on as you face Andrew Ryan in the end.

The plot thickens

Often enough you’ll be faced with hacking various turrets, robots, safes and vendor machines through your incursions in the world of Rapture. The mini game is always the same and presents you with a race of wits against time, rebuilding an exit way out of the given puzzle game. You have to arrange the tube pieces in such a way to structure a way for the liquid to reach its destination, while avoiding alarms and broken fuses. It’s refreshing to see that personal wits make a difference in the game, no matter how (un)skilled the in-game character is. Rewards are great should you crack these graphical riddles and range from ammo to cash, health and eve packs. Should you run out of ammo, tipping off an alarm and hacking two or three bots to escort you through the remainder of the level is generally a good idea.

Bioshock isn’t a hard game though and pleasure derives through every aspect of the work presented before your eye and fingertips. I’d like to think that it’s one of the good aspects of the multi format games, since Bioshock has a PC and Xbox versions. For a shooter, the mouse is pretty much involved in aiming the gun faster and that’s pretty much it. The casual style gameplay doesn’t require you go to that much trouble when it comes to strafing, jumping around and dodging bullets behind obstacles. So it’s not a hardcore shooter where you go out of bullets fast, which in turn lets you enjoy the creepy atmosphere more.

Take a picture. It lasts longer

The basics of research lie in accurate observation of your surroundings. Yet taking pictures of splicers wandering around or rushing for your scalp isn’t exactly the first thing that came through my mind when I picked up the camera. Its screenshot time now, because the more you catch on film, the more research points you gain and every time the bar goes to full, you learn something new about the creature. Yes, most splicers are vulnerable to anti personnel ammo, but I bet you’ll want to gain that special (free) tonic from research level two, or maybe that incredibly powerful ability the creature has been using to drop you dead. I was lost when I met Houdini Splicers for the first time. They just teleport around and throw fireballs at me, laughing the mad man’s laughter. Yet after careful observation through the use of my trusty weapon six camera, I found out I can stealth myself and go invisible if standing still with the new camouflage physical tonic. It can’t get any better than that.

Plasmid eye candy

It would have been unfair to start the review talking about graphics, but time has come to praise Bioshock and its wonderful use of the Unreal Engine 3. Movement is all right with the note that jumping is a bit off by default and you need to boost your character with running tonics to get the full feeling of a shooter. Turrets have no problems throwing at you high speed bullets (which can miss), rockets and flames. Flying sentries come in like butterflies, inaccurately hovering up and down in a very realistic movement pattern. I did mention lighting earlier. While 2K Games advertised Bioshock runs on Shader Model 3.0, there is an unofficial patch out there which allows 2.0 shader graphical cards run the game just fine. Even so, darkness is never impenetrable and developers use shadows to great effect, hinting that which you can not see, pushing you further exploring. The Houdini Splicers are some interesting characters and their rendering and invisibility effects left me jaw open and wondering just what the hell that was. World textures are detailed yet have a sense of roughness about them, which only adds to the depth of the retro concept. Taking screenshots of poster ads never gets old.

Where to next?

All in all Bioshock offer very good value for the money and Bioshock main concept man Ken Levine along with the new defunct Irrational Games developers (swallowed up by 2K Games) did a fantastic job at about every aspect of the game. The sense of playing a polished release that won’t disappoint is unmatched, and will undoubtedly weight heavily when looking for the game of the year. The only way to destroy your own gaming experience is by abusing some generous game mechanics like the Vita Chambers which basically spell resurrection safe spots. If you stick with the regular “kill first, ask questions later” modus operandi and save the game often, there won’t be any need to resurrect at the last visited Vita Chamber. Feeling that Big Daddy would go down faster if you hit it with a wrench is wrong; don’t do it. I positively adore the retro atmosphere and if you are a Fallout fan, I’m sure Bioshock will look like a welcomed revival and not a rip off because imagery and dialogues are rebuilt from scratch.

Lara Croft is going to make another game title shine under the computer screens soon, and it's going to be called "Tomb Raider Underworld", or at least that's what's indicating an application for this game title at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

<-125x125 Button - left->The phrase for the trademark request is the game title and it covers the games and the materials related to them, that are stored on either physical discs (CD/DVD) or distributed via digital download systems like Steam. Eidos Interactive has confirmed that the game is in the works and no additional specific details have been given about it at the moment. The latest title, Tomb Raider Anniversary was a success mainly because of the improved graphics - although the automatic-movie-key-sequences were a bit of a downside as the pressing of the keys did not always work properly - we can only hope to see something better in the next title.

Surfer Girl is known to pick up accurate gossips that soon enough turn into news and todays treat picks up the lead of a Gamasutra job’s listing. Part of the team that developed Bioshock for 2k Games is setting up a new studio in the San Francisco bay area. The listing profiled the search for a lead animator with and since has been removed, but 1UP was fast to catch a cached version of the posting which can be found. That’s what I mean by Surfer Girl sending ripples through the online gaming press. Everyone seems to pitch in on the subject. The page reveals the name of the new studio: 2K Marin.

<-125x125 Button - left->Some of the people who created the award-winning “Bioshock” are starting up a new studio in the Bay Area called 2K Marin. We are looking for a character concept artist who can name all of the “Masters of the Universe” characters who had mustaches. That qualification, however, is less important than your DaVinci-like knowledge of anatomy coupled with drawing skills that easily put the entire Hanna-Barbara pantheon into question” in Surfer Girl’s own words.

In a rather ironic twist of events, the good people at 2K Boston don’t look forward to working with Ken Levine. Considering the game’s back story, the father of all things Bioshock seems to follow up on the evil odyssey of Andrew Ryan, his game’s arch villain. Levine used to be the head Irrational Games, the studio which originally developed the title. When faced with financial difficulties which threatened to impair the game’s smooth release, he was forced to make a so called pact with the devil and sell his company to 2K Games. It was so that the co-founder was faced with a choice, either releasing an incomplete Bioshock or losing his first brainchild. Levine played the PR machine aware of the implications of failure and maybe sometime along the way he started to ask too much of his development team.

Ken stated on several occasions that he isn't interested in doing BioShock 2 due to the ending of the story arc in Rapture, but the decision is not his alone. 2K Games feels like running the Bioshock franchise even further and will most likely get the new 2K Marin built up specifically for the job of developing a prequel of a sequel. As far as Ken Levine is concerned, he’s going to move on and develop a new X-Com game.

A very irritating bug that occured during the multiplayer online action was the fact that some group members became invisible and it was really difficult to go through the game like that. The multiplayer version of the game receiced a hotfix patch, namely 0.6, which adresses this particular issue. So now the co-op game should work flawlessly.

From the notes of the developers about the patch here's a quote: "Patch 0.6 has one very notable fix – the invisible group member bug has been slain. This was a crafty, fierce thing with rows of nasty sharp teeth, but we believe it has now fallen into the mists of legend. We’ll stay vigilant in case it raises its ugly invisible head again."(...) "We’ve also made great strides on the Engineer Drone issue where items become unequipped. There are some cases where Drones (as well as players), will still have items unequip. The main cause of this is when players “ladder up” the equipment on their Character or Drone by using items with statistic bonuses. This results in the Character or Drone being able to use a better overall set of gear than they normally could, and thus causes issues if the items are not equipped in a specific order (or used at all). We’re continuing to work on this one, but it is better with this patch."

The next problem they are going to look at and will find out how to fix is the memory management issue. The only thing that remains unknown is what will happen to the single player mode - a new patch to fix the memory management in single player mode hasn't been confirmed yet.