So Bioshock infinite

[Queequeg]

[spoiler]I think it is.  The various Elizabeths disappear one by one, meaning that he has accepted his fate and dies.  Though apparently there's an after-credits sequence that I missed during my first playthrough.[/spoiler]

Also, that was just about the saddest end of any game I've ever played.

[Tamas]

[spoiler]disappearing? when?[/spoiler]

[Queequeg]

[spoiler]disappearing? when?[/spoiler]

[spoiler]At the very end, in the river, there are half a dozen Elizabeths and they start disappearing one by one.[/spoiler]

[Tamas]

[spoiler] in the baptising memory? didnt notice that! did you select the cage as her necklace in the early game, or the bird? I wonder whats the significance with that [/spoiler]

[Tamas]

[spoiler]"The entire universe hangs on one, single event: a baptism. In one universe, Booker refuses, flees, and never returns. In another, he comes back, he enters the water, and he is reborn a different man: the madman Comstock."[/spoiler]

[Queequeg]

What's so confusing?

[Tamas]

What's so confusing?

[spoiler]was The Main Evil guy literally your character from a parallel reality?[/spoiler]

[Tamas]

[spoiler]I mean, the "Cornstock is here" line was odd at the baptism scene at the end, but I didn't think of this[/spoiler]

[Queequeg]

What's so confusing?

[spoiler]was The Main Evil guy literally your character from a parallel reality?[/spoiler]

[spoiler]That's what makes the ending so amazing.  Let me explain it, just because it's fucking awesome. 

The Infinite universe presupposes the third type of parallel universes structure shown in this video.  Now, look at that bracket structure, and think of the left-right axis as time, and up-down as the new universes created.  Tears in the Infinite universe can go through all of them; to both new universes, and just to different periods of time.  So the tear where you hear CCR could be a tear to either the late 60s of that world (this would be left-right travel), our late 60s because something is different about our timeline (up-down travel), or an alternative 1960s (travel on both axes).  Elizabeth is able to go both left-right and up-down. 

Now, in the universe where our Booker DeWitt comes from, Booker was so distraught over his role in the Wounded Knee massacre that he once considered being baptized in a new (Mormon?) faith, but our Booker hightailed it.  This Booker eventually gets married, and his wife dies upon delivery of Anna-Elizabeth.  Our Booker is an alcoholic and a gambler, and sells Anna DeWitt to the (pre-Godlike) Luteces and Comstock.  Now, Comstock WAS baptized, and instead of dealing with the guilt of Wounded Knee with liquor and gambling, he rationalizes it in a crazy, racist perversion of Christianity and American founder-worship.  Sadly for everyone, the crazy unleashes a kind of genius, and he allies with a young, pre-"magical" Robert Lutece (or her alternative universe opposite, Rosalind Lutece, depending on the universe) in creating Columbia and developing dimensional gates.  However, the continued exposure to Lutece's devices leaves DeWitt sterile and (ultimately) dying of cancer, so in order to have a child he steals DeWitt's baby.  Anna-Elizabeth has been exposed to this her entire life, so maybe she's different, and the two Luteces have some kind of a Dr. Manhattan moment where they gain the ability to be anywhere, anytime, ever. 

So the moment Comstock separates from DeWitt is the baptism.  Therefore, when Anna-Elizabeth is at the full extent of her power, she is able to travel all the way left to the separation of the two identities, and kill Comstock before he wrecks havoc upon the multiverse.  However, killing DeWitt-Comstock at this date damns Anna-Elizabeth to non-existence in every timeline known in the game.  Columbia never exists because Comstock doesn't, but because post-aborted baptism DeWitt doesn't exist neither does the version of Anna we know of.  Anna and Booker are kind of, well, Quantum Jesus on multiverse Golgotha.  It's really fucking neat.  This final sacrifice (and it's Christian symbolism) is hinted at throughout the game-Elizabeth is always the "Lamb of Columbia", and she 'dies' to save Columbia from it's sins.  [/spoiler]

[Queequeg]

[spoiler]Did the religious symbolism just ruin the game for you, Tamas?[/spoiler]

[Queequeg]

I compared the plot to Inception in a tweet I sent to Kevin Levine about how it's simultaneously extremely elegant and a nice commentary on it's own artform, but I think I might have sold it short.  The game has a lot more emotional heft, and the ending is a lot more interesting.

[Tamas]

[spoiler]Did the religious symbolism just ruin the game for you, Tamas?[/spoiler]

no, why would have it done so?

[Syt]

Ok, just finished the game. I think my head hurts a bit.

[spoiler]I always find intersecting/alternate realities fascinating, though it always comes with a naggling gripe: how do we determine that one reality is superior to another, or which is the right one (we presume, of course, the one we're in, but that makes it likely that other reality-egos view it the same). Also, I have trouble wrapping my head around how an act in one intersection of realites (killing Booker/Comstock) wipes the event from all (Infinite - hence the title) realities. At any rate, it doesn't spoil my suspension of disbelief.

Also, first hint for me at alternate realities: the first tear Elizabeth opens to Paris, showing the marquee for Revanche du Jedi (Revenge of the Jedi), an alternate title that Lucas scrapped in favor of Return of the Jedi (Retour du Jedi).

I think I missed a few voxaphones, because the Lutece's backstory isn't quite clear to me - there's stuff hinted at the brother understanding what it's like to die, or (the way I understood it first) Rosalind being Elizabeth's mother, from the ones I found? And yes, I did understand that they're the same person from alternate realities.[/spoiler]

Anyways, how did I like it? It was a blast. The game is beautifully designed, with the main forces being Languish inspired, it seems - a floating city in the sky that has seceded from the U.S., based on Southern ideals, with inferior races/working classes oppressed? Hell, key characters are even named Lettuce Lutece! On the other hand the revolutionaries, led by Ide, if he was a black woman.

Where Tomb Raider went for realism, Bioshock goes for a more stylized, almost Pixar-like approach with lots of attention to detail and some of the most marvelous set pieces I've seen in any game. I suck at action games, so mid game I had to switch from Medium difficulty to Easy (which is depressing, when most sites recommend playing on Hard, because Medium is too easy for average action gamers).

There's so many design bits to gush over, from billboards, to chats of people, to songs, statues, bits and bobs, really, that I could go on and on about them. They really set the stage, and  revisiting areas with some changes applied after major plot turns was pretty cool. The Washington-Bots with their quote-spewing were rather amusing.

Special mention goes to Elizabeth - a truly well designed character, intriguing, eminently likable and actually useful in battle, and not a liability. It's weird to say that about a video game character, but I really cared about her and her fate in the end.

[spoiler]After the reveal that Booker is Comstock, some stuff made much more sense. Like the bit with the "traitor" Slate, that I considered contrived exposition at the time (that Comstock wasn't at Wounded Knee, and that he was a fraud, and that Booker did some pretty bad stuff at the time), but which suddenly made sense - Comstock wasn't there, Booker was (and Slate remembered him). Also, it suddenly made sense why Comstock would know so much about Booker (like the AD brand that was advertised as sign of the False Shepherd at the beginning of the game) - helped, obviously, by the Lutece experiments.

Going through Comstock's abandoned house in the alternate 1980s (snowfall) was actually pretty creepy and messed up. Then again, so was Songbird. I thought the final big battle on the airship (before destroying the "cage" wasa tad too long. It was epic seemed to go on forever and ever, and without Elizabeth constantly throwing me ammo and salts, I doubt I would have made it.

I liked that they didn't really pull their punches and went full Bolshevik revolution with the Vox Populi uprising, though I thought Fink's/Fitzroy's end was rather anticlimactic and didn't carry the emotional weight it should, even though it means a major step in Elizabeth's character arc.[/spoiler]

Overall, very happy with the experience; I thought I saw the plot headed in a few clichéed directions during the gameplay, but fortunately that didn't happen. I avoided spoilers as far as I could before and during playing the game, so I cam into it pretty fresh and unprepared (except the basics, like setting and main characters). If I had one criticism of the game it would be that it sometimes felt too hectic, with sometimes the action getting in the way of the plot pacing, but it's pretty negligible; also, the fights were a bit cartoony at times.

Anyways, I need to order my thoughts a bit, been rambling a fair bit there. All I can ay at this point is: wow. I rarely buy FPS (because I suck at them, and they need to offer something "special" to get me interested, usually a somewhat decent plot - SpecOps: The Line and the latest Tomb Raider come to mind. But I think story wise Bioshock Infinite really blows them out of the water.

[Syt]

Oh, and a more in depth explanation of the ending (obviously spoiler heavy), and why it's a bittersweet happy end:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/28/understanding-bioshock-infinites-ending-ending-explanation/

[Syt]

Another interpretation, but I think he overdoes the political analysis:

http://peripsuche.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/bioshock-infinite-thematic-analysis.html