Muffin Wrench

This is a bit of an older game now, with no shortage of reviews out there telling you that's it's great, game of the year, a life-changing epiphany waiting to happen, possibly the cure for ebola, or just a game worth sinking 12ish hours of your life into. But, I like this game, and I have a witty title that ties into the gameplay and muffins, so I'm writing it whether you like it or not. Even if you don't like horror games, play this, it's not horror, it's awesome, you can't help but like it, and if you don't, you may be a communist, and since this game has a retro 60ish feel to it, that means that by default you'll be exiled by your friends and neighbors and that the local gas station won't serve 'your kind' anymore, kinda like C3P0, yes, not liking this game would make you that annoying. But, if you're reading this, I'll assume you're not a commie, and you're not annoying, mainly so I can sleep at night knowing that the dirty reds aren't being entertained by my writing nor are they being guided through the capitalist petri dish that is America, rather that they are floundering around out there, trying to figure out why the hell radioshacks even exists, but, then, the average american might not even know that anymore. But I digress.

Though on a related topic similar to communism and broken down reactors that make entire cities uninhabitable, for some odd reason, we as human beings seem to have a strange fascination with wandering around a failed dystopian society whilst being the lone sane person left alive and killing everything else. And if this fantasy is one that you have every day at work, on your drive to wherever the hell it is that you decided to go, or simply when you're around other people, then Bioshock is likely a game that will fullfil your deepest desires and leave every other aspect of your life feeling comparatively empty. Is this to say that the game is a dream come true? Well, maybe, maybe not; while it will certainly fuck your dreams over with a steam powered blender and to a 50's era soundtrack just like in your twisted dystopian fantasies, it does have some drawbacks. It has no multiplayer: no co-op (which would have been awesome, like, crawling around Chernobyl fighting mutant commies awesome) , no versus, no CTF, nothing. To me that's a missed opportunity. But would you really want to share your dystopian fantasy world with your friends? No, of course you wouldn't, it's your dystopia, and all the miscreants in it are your bitches, and you're not in a sharing mood. Sharing is for commies anyway. But the lack of multiplayer is, sadly, not your perfect dystopia's worst flaw: the save system is. While it's not the horrendous holocaust grade trajedy that was the password system of old, it is something akin to finding out that the hot girl you just drunkenly hit on was your sister, or worse yet, your mom's sister; it's bad, game-breakingly bad. It makes dying more of an inconveinence than anything, or, in some cases, even the prefered method of playing the game. And only the commies prefer to play games by dying for mother russia; Americans survive, like McGyver, or Chuck Norris: we don't die like those commie death whores.

Oh, and you play Pipe Dream as a minigame; I'm not joking. I thought that had died with Windows 3.11, but, i guess if you're gonna have a minigame you can at least pick a classic and give it a slightly shiny new coat of paint. But it is a lump in an otherwise smooth and creamy milkshake of gaming goodness; but hey, some people like lumpy milkshakes as is their right, in America: but in Soviet Russia, milk shakes you.

Now, the good about this little, personal, communist free apocalypse. For one, it's beautiful; the Unreal 3 engine does a superb job of rendering this game, especially for the 360. It's not the prettiest game, especially not for the PC, but everything fits together perfectly. The art style is, well, art. This game could be put in a museum and, not only would it be the most badass piece of art there, but it would piss on the mona lisa and scare away the small children; basically, it's the perfect piece of art and a general improvement to society in general. But not only is it beautiful and a functional scarecrow for the elderly and the infantile, it's gameplay is fast paced (usually, with a few rare exceptions), well balanced, fluid (ok, the system's a bit clunky, but it works beautifully), atmospheric (the first five minutes of this game draw you in as nothing else before or since in my experience), stays fresh for the entire game (really, the game never gets old, and rarely repetitive), and is some of the most satisfying combat in a FPS game (possible exceptin being the Condemned games, but they're different, lets compare apples to apples here, or at least toasters to stainless steel toasters). But really, one of the greatest points of this game is it's plot, and the way it's told; you can't get this in any other medium: not movies, not books, maybe comics, but that's a stretch. It's phenomenal, I can't spoil anything for you, I won't, only a communist would do that; and if you have a friend that did spoil it for you, they're a communist, and you should email your state's governor to have them hauled off to a commie-camp, or at least start telling people that this friend has the herpes, everywhere, and is contagious, all the time, so that way people will avoid eye contact with them and treat everything they say as meaningless herpes induced alphabet vomit.

Essentially, if you enjoy, life, freedom, happiness, cars, and the right for every random person you meet to potentially be carrying a boomstick in their pocket and a miniature poodle in their purse, then you'll like this game, or at least enjoy it more than licking Oprah's fat rolls.