Welp, time for another Bioshock Infinite post. I’m sure you guys are getting sick of these by now, but I suppose you’ll have to suffer through our praises of this game for just a little longer.
As I already noted on Monday, Bioshock is a gorgeous game. The worldbuilding and the design of Columbia are enough to take your breath away for the first few hours, and everything begs to be explored. But what happens after that? You get sucked into the story, and soon you’re rocketing along faster than skyrails.
Every now and then, I find myself trying to slow everything down, though. Not in a bad way, like the game is moving too quickly. But more in a way that I want to appreciate everything instead of tackling it at a breakneck speed. Certain story games prompt me to blast through them and enjoy the ride no matter where it takes me, but with Infinite I find that I’m trying to pull back just long enough to remember the experience and make it matter more.
So my question for you guys is: when is the last time a game did this for you? Do you try to take your time with games, or just push through them as quickly as possible on your first playthrough? Do you pace yourself? Go!
I’m ashamed to admit that my pacing with BioShock Infinite was rushed. I wanted to complete it before somebody inevitably spoiled it for me, and so I ended up beating the game in two five-hour sessions. While I had a blast with the game, I do wish I had slowed down or, even better, broken the game into chunks that I could digest and savor as they came.
Generally, I go at a slightly faster pace when playing games, but I do play them multiple times. If nt for the story, I replay games to see how I can exploit them. This is why the PC versions of Half-Life 2, Ep1, Ep2, and Portal will ALWAYS be superior. The command console in the Source engine is wonderfully powerful and so much fun to mess around with. Cheating aside, I will do a slower, more analytical playthrough once I’ve beaten the game.
The last game in which I really took my time on the first playthrough was the first inFamous. Most people wouldn’t have spent as much time as I did cleaning up the streets and retaking territories, but I got this wonderful sense of progress when I did so. I wasn’t rushing from main quest to main quest.
Pacing myself these days is not so much a choice as a fact of life, but I’ve always had a tendency to take my time, at least with highly anticipated, story-heavy releases. Particularly as a second playthrough is a pretty rare occurrence for me. I definitely find that taking time to soak up the atmosphere and admire the details of a well-designed game really heightens the experience and makes it more memorable.
I usually try to take my time in the early going of a game and really soak it in. Lately though I feel I’ve grown impatient and end up resenting the games that I’ve slowly gone through, like Tomb Raider, or worse, Far Cry 3. The last few hours have been a struggle for me lately and it’s unfortunate. Infinite was propelling you through the game at full speed after the first couple of hours, which was probably a good thing in my case.
I think the last game to do this for me was Deus Ex: HR which I only discovered recently, god damn it really lets you sink your teeth into it if you want to. Apart from that I think in ME2-ME3 I found every SINGLE codex entry, god damn I f-ing love those games, I can never have enough of that universe.