If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted for ages then you haven’t been following my tumblog. Anyway, I’ve just broken a several-months-long spell of reader’s block. Not sure what it was. It probably started when I picked up “The Brothers Karamazov.” I wanted to read something hard. So I picked a doozie. As the page turning slowly decelerated over the course of a couple of months, I soon began to grow disillusioned. I’d told myself I wouldn’t go back to reading multiple books at a time. (I’d at one point had about a dozen books with dog-eared pages and could barely remember any of them.) But I also didn’t want to give up on the ol’ Brothers K. So fast-forward many moons and I hadn’t read much at all.
So I hid TBK under the bed and pulled out something a bit more colorful. “Filth” is the story of a man descending into disrepair of the soul and madness. It contains what must be the most vile and despicable antihero in all literature. The main character is a racist, misogynist, foul-mouthed cocaine addict, as well as a corrupt police officer with loose morals who’ll fuck anything that happens by and then berate them afterward. He betrays and sets up for disaster those he would feign friendship with, and then puts them down and says they deserve it. On top of it all, he abandons personal hygiene, has a nasty crotch rash, and carries a tapeworm around in his gut. But the tapeworm is more than just a parasite. It starts speaking to him, giving him instructions and even acting as his conscience when he does things particularly cruel.
“Filth” is the kind of book that when you reach the halfway point you realize that there’s no way this character can redeem himself to bring about a happy ending. Likewise, there’s no ending that could make the story feel more sordid than it already is.
I simultaneously was annoyed by and enjoyed the eccentric spelling and grammar meant to reproduce a heavy Scottish accent. At times I couldn’t even translate, and some cultural references went right over my sheltered American head.
In any case, this blue book with a $4.95 price tag on the front hopefully has restarted my regular reading schedule. I’ll try to get through some more quickly.
Bioshock was the first game I got for the Xbox 360. Excited, I played through the first few levels and quickly became distracted by other fare such as Gears of War, Fight Night: Round 3 and Assassin’s Creed. For some reason, nothing drew me back. Finally, right about the time it became clear that Bioshock was going to win Game of the Year, I decided that it was high time I actually played through it. I’m glad I did.Although a standard shooter in many ways, the addition of the basic RPG elements added a great deal of depth to the gameplay. Instead of just looking for the next biggest gun and the next key a la Doom, I found myself strategizing over which plasmids and tonics I should carry into the next area. I began collecting everything I could see in hopes of being able to invent another tonic at the next U-Invent station. I made an early decision to rescue all of the Little Sisters instead of harvesting them, and I feel that if the game has any flaw it’s that it doesn’t do a great job of explaining why this makes a difference. As a matter of fact, the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining any of the protagonist’s motivations, especially early on. I had collected almost 900 units of Adam before I realized what it was even for.Visually the game is stunning, even on the regular definition television my Xbox is hooked up to. I felt like (and this is a complaint I have with all Xbox titles I’ve played so far) the text was almost always too small to actually read on a standard TV. I’m going to venture to guess that the majority of gamers have yet to upgrade to an HDTV, and most must be more or less guessing what most of the text displayed on screen actually says. Thank god Bioshock’s diaries were audio and not just text. I could have gone blind.The gameplay is top-notch for a shooter. There were almost no clipping issues, and the near-lack of artificial boundaries increased the immersive effect of the outstanding production value of the game. I did feel like I was basically fighting the same 4 or 5 enemies over and over again, and that I rarely met any of the people who were talking to me and leaving me messages, making my journey through Rapture feel a little lonely.Playing through on medium difficulty felt just about right for the first half of the game, but as my weapons and plasmids improved, I felt like the last half of the game was kind of a breeze in comparison. Since I played through and got the “good” ending on medium, maybe I’ll try to play through on hard and get the “bad” ending.Overall, I agree that Bioshock is easily one of the best games I’ve played this year, but it doesn’t exactly bring anything new to the table.
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