BioShock Vs. Everything Else

Normally when I pick up a game like BioShock, I hole up in my apartment for a good week, eat very poorly, take great liberties with the upkeep of my personal hygiene and generally go into anti-social gamer mode. Friends become a sort of nuisance, chores are a hassle and even my girlfriend loses some of her womanly charms.

Things are different this time around. After picking up the excellent BioShock on launch day, I spent maybe a handful of days playing it before allowing myself be distracted by other things, including a short road trip into Alberta.

Among the other distractions taking attention away from 2K Boston's FPS masterpiece has been my love/hate dalliance with Fight Night Round 3, which I borrowed from a close gamer friend and the interesting batch of demos and Arcade title release this past week.

The TimeShift demo hit the Live airwaves yesterday and I was able to take her for a spin this afternoon. The good news about this shooter is the dark, grimy atmosphere that I love so much in my games. It's yet another dystopic future where you have to battle faceless, armoured grunts in drab, bombed out cityscapes. The look and feel of the guns are wonderful, as is the modest amount of environmental damage possible in the levels. The vaunted time control gimmick, however, is surprisingly uninspired and does little to shake off the generic stink that pervades the demo. I think between FEAR, the Stranglehold demo and Max Payne, the slow-motion, bullet time gimmick is really on its last legs. Aside from alleviating the challenge from the firefights, the various time controls in TimeShift really add very little to the core gameplay. Yes, you're able to stop or slow time and shoot at your helpless opponents and use reverse time to avoid getting fragged from that grenade that slipped past your guard. You're even given the option of reversing time to bypass certain puzzle-like scenarios... which seems very cute at first but screams of canned, scripted moments rather than emergent, inspired gameplay.

TimeShift is, at its core, a rather by-the-numbers shooter with attractive graphics but an otherwise forgettable feel, from the weapons and setting right down to the NPCs and your character's utter lack of personality.

Demos aside, XBLA saw a two-some release with Puzzle Fighter HD and Streets of Rage 2. I don't have much to say about the former because these Tetris-style variants don't really float my boat. Old-school beat'em ups, however, are a much different story. With Streets of Rage 2, I finally have a classic brawler to make a home on my 360's hard drive. I've been waiting for such a game to arrive and was very disappointed when Double Dragon failed to rekindle my passion with this genre. While it's barely an acceptable imitation of the Final Fight games, Streets of Rage 2 fulfills all of my beat'em up criteria: multiple playable characters, a range of grappling moves and co-op play. At 400 MS points, I figured I can't go too wrong.

Well, I do think I hear BioShock calling out to me again. Or is it Fight Night Round 3? I never thought I'd be removing the BioShock disc from the tray until I had finished it completely, but hey, variety is the spice of life.

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