GC 2008: BioShock PS3 Updated Impressions

Here in Leipzig, I just had my first look at the DLC "challenge rooms" exclusive to the fashionably late PlayStation 3 port of BioShock. Problem is, it wasn't GameSpot's first look. We saw the exact same demo during E3. But with BioShock being the incredible game it is, I'll gladly take any opportunity I can to write about it. So here are a few bits of information and personal thoughts of my own based on my trip to the 2K Games suite yesterday.

The Challenge Rooms
The demo for BioShock PS3 was guided by senior producer Melissa Miller. One of the points she got to right away is that they don't wanter to tamper with BioShock's dense, sophisticated narrative. As such, the DLC won't affect the story in any way. Instead, the DLC will take the form of rooms that feel as though they've been lifted directly from the Rapture we all know and love, but aren't actually lifted from anywhere in the game. You can't even acess them in the game, either; these add-on rooms are only reachable from the main menu. So the BioShock story remains very much unaltered.

Each of these rooms presents a challenge for you, some puzzles, some straightforward combat. The one we saw, just like at E3, offered up a situation where a Little Sister has been trapped at the top of a malfunctioning ferris wheel. The electrical switch has been fried, so the conventional solution is out the window. What you need to do is find a solution based on the items and enhancements available to you in the level. At the beginning you'll find some electric buck shells that you can shoot at the switch, which provides an all too temporary jolt that barely moves the Little Sister's ferris wheel car.

It's up to you to explore the challenge room (or in this case, collection of rooms) to find some electricity-based upgrades to give the switch much more of a jolt. The most obvious solution would be finding an electrobolt plasmid, but part of the fun of these puzzles is that the most obvious solution is almost never available to you. (And since you'll be fumbling around quite a bit with trying to find the best solution, there are nearby carnival games that let you win EVE hypos. )After a bit of climbing and thorough searching, the 2K rep playing the game found the static discharge combat tonic, which is an upgrade that produces an electric blast when you've been attacked. Sure enough, some splicers came running up ready to attack, but that's precisely where our demo ended.

Miller says the idea behind these challenge rooms is to provide a fun alternative to the open-ended combat found in the full game. Whereas the story lets you do everything from hack turret guns to shoot bees at deformed drug addicts, these challenges present a limited toolset where you need to find the right combination of abilities to get a particular job done. And once you've completed these puzzles, there's still some replay value to be mined since BioShock will be among the first third-party PS3 games to support trophies, which in this case are unlocked through speed runs on the challenges.

The Port
One of the many things BioShock did right was present Rapture with some pretty stunning visuals. It was a combination of unique art design and technical proficiency that produced a truly great-looking game. PlayStation 3 owners who were hoping for an even better looking game as a result of an extra year and superior hardware might be a little saddened to learn that the PS3 port looks merely as good as the original (at least in my estimation). But if what you're settling for is a game that looks as good as this, you should be pretty happy.