The first of these is Bioshock 2. I waited a long time after the game’s release to play it because, honestly, I just wasn’t that excited. In the end, the game pretty much met my expectations. It was okay, it was well-made but hardly my favorite of games. The whole parenting angle was kind of neat, and I enjoyed turtling during the guard-the-little sister portions, but somehow I’d hoped for more from the game. I guess the Bioshock series just doesn’t gel with me like it does with some people. Still, I give it a B.

Chime Super Deluxe is a game that really surprised me. One day, I’d been looking for something new, scanning the PSN demos, and I downloaded the game to check it out. After trying it, I bought it, and it’s been added to the list of 3-4 casual PSN games that I constantly go back to, right beside others like Hoard and Pixeljunk Monsters. Chime is a Tetris-like shape placement game, but the shapes don’t drop. Instead, you’re looking at the grid top-down and playing against a time limit. The game’s music also reacts to your in-game actions. B+.

I suppose that in playing a game like Cut the Rope, I’ve jumped on the bandwagon a bit. It’s up there with games like Angry Birds. But despite its mainstream nature, it really isn’t a bad game. I’ve finished nearly every level with a 3-star rating. C+.

Although you may be aware that I found the original Bioshock to be an overrated game, I played through and enjoyed it enough. Now, Irrational games has released the original design documents for the game. Very very cool. Check it out.

So what about the game settings I do like?

Ultima
I first entered Sosaria when I got a copy of Ultima III for my tenth birthday. Sosaria was a crude world, like the worlds of Ultima I and Ultima II before it. Later, I played Ultima IV, which introduced the world of Brittania. Somewhere between ultima IV and Ultima V, I fell in love with Brittania. Between those two games, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I’d spent a thousand hours in Brittania. Don’t be shocked – I’ve heard of at least one person who took 15 years to finish the game. On summer vacations, I’d spend all day playing, and stay up until well after midnight.

The game’s crude graphics didn’t exactly lend a vivid sense of realism, but they forced me to use my imagination in the same way that reading a book does. As I travelled south down the coast from Britain to Paws, I imagined the seashore, and envisioned what that must look like. When I exited the eighth level of a dungeon into the Underworld, I thought of just how dark the sunless world must be, and imagined the dank smell of stagnant air. Travelling through the poisonous swamps near the village of Cove brought to mind visions of The Swamp of Sadness from the Neverending Story, except with more disease and rotted overgrowth. The game’s poor graphics forced me to use my imagination. To me, that was a vivid world, and I grew to know it well.

Starcraft
Starcraft doesn’t have much in the way of landscape – just different maps that you fight on. But somehow, the setting calls to me. It’s a space opera, and the races are far more interesting than Klingons, Wookiees and Sebacians. When Starcraft: Ghost was annnounced, I was very excited to enter that world and see Mutalisks and Ultralisks up close. Walking amongst Protoss pylons in top-down Starcraft is one thing, but to envision a Terran Command Center lifting off or a zergling ambush from first-person perspective is fairly exciting. I would absolutely love to see a game in the Starcraft setting that is not a RTS.

Beyond Good and Evil
It’s not the geography of Hillys that calls to me, but rather its inhabitants. In real life, we think of ethnic diversity in terms of Caucasians, Asians, Africans, and Hispanics. On planet Hillys, the inhabitants aren’t only the human descendants of Apes. They’ve also descended from pigs, rhinos, cats, sharks, and hippos. The notion seems so wildly creative.

Half-Life 2
The opening of Half-Life 2 expresses so effectively the oppressive atmosphere that exists in City 17. The people of planet Earth have been conquered by an alien invasion, and the cities are nothing more than internment camps – even the names of the cities have been taken away. This is an excellent example of the “showing rather than telling” technique of authorship. They show you the horribly oppressed people and then put a crowbar in your hands and let you fight for them.

The story is as epic as the Star Wars trilogy and the setting as rich as any I’ve seen. This page does a fantastic job of laying out the timeline, filling in the backstory, and putting forth theories as to the motives of the mysterious G-Man. I’m eagerly waiting for Half-Life 2 episode 3, mainly to see where the story goes.

Oblivion
I never played Morrowind or any of the other Elder Scrolls games before Oblivion. But when I heard all the buzz about Oblivion on a discussion board I frequent, I had to try it. Oblivion is one of the most atmospheric games I’ve ever played – from the sunny mountain peaks to the swampy villages to the eerie Ayleid ruins.

Tamriel is one of those game worlds where I can easily envision the routes from place to place. The game locations seemed like real places to me. The game’s landmarks and road signs are distinct, and the terrain is varied such that I can find the way from Bruma to Chorrol without even having to consult the map.

Dragon Age
Perhaps more than any of the other game worlds listed above, the world of Dragon Age has been fleshed out wonderfully. The circle of mages that are watched over by templars to ensure that their magic doesn’t enable them to be posessed by demonic forces. The dwarven caste system, so rigid, so unfair. The seven old gods being gradually corrupted by the darkspawn, leading to blights. The enslavement of elvenkind by humanity, which has been abolished, and which has lead to the current split in the elven race. It’s all so intriguing – I’m totally absorbed in this world and its story.

I’d be interested to hear comments from other readers – what is your favorite video game setting?

I’m going to piss off a lot of people now by talking about how I think some of the best-loved games in the past few years weren’t actually that good. Much of this might have to do with my personal opinion of Bioware’s game engines, since two of my three example games here are from Bioware, but I can’t help but feel that they were overhyped and overrated.

Over the years, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has developed a near-legendary reputation as an excellent game. But while I found the story interesting and the twist at the end was very nice, it was the gameplay that I found to be lacking. The combat boiled down to selecting an attack and running up to your enemy, then watching while the attacks were carried out, with the combatants standing there and waiting in between attacks. This certainly isn’t a mechanic exclusive to KotOr – even World of Warcraft (if I speculate correctly) uses this type of combat mechanic. I don’t like it. And while perhaps the same thing could be said about games I do love such as Baldur’s Gate and Final Fantasy XII, I find it much easier to view those two games as pseudo-turn-based games. KotOR feels like more of an action game, and as such the engine and the gameplay seemed very off-putting to me.

Jade Empire, as a game, had a lot in common with Knights of the Old Republic. But I enjoyed Jade Empire more because the combat engaged the player more by requiring a keypress for each attack and block. In that way, Jade Empire was more action game than RPG, whereas KotOR was more RPG than action game. I loves me some RPG, but not when it’s done with an engine like KotOR’s. I had the same complaint about Neverwinter Nights, which in my mind succeeded despite the poor engine and gameplay. But the main reason I liked Neverwinter Nights was the bundled Aurora creaton tool, with which I spent an ungodly amount of time. I’m not saying that Knights of the Old Republic was a bad game – I certainly did enjoy it – I just didn’t enjoy it as much as everyone else seemed to.

The second game on my “overrated” list is Bioshock. Bioshock had a lot of promise. When I saw the hallways beginning to flood at the beginning of the game, it was exciting. Here I am in an underwater city – maybe gunfire breaking these underwater tunnels will be a common mechanic! Maybe I’ll occasionally have to escape from tunnels before they flood! Alas – the danger is only imagined, and the flooding only happens that once.

Bioshock’s story was good, and the game was very atmospheric, largely due to the much-vaunted graphics. But on my machine, the game absolutely chugged, even at medium settings. I found myself comparing it to Half-Life 2, which was the best-looking game I’d seen at the time. On my machine, Half-Life 2 actually looked better, and ran far more smoothly.

Graphics aside, Bioshock didn’t have as good a story exposition as Half-Life 2 and didn’t have characters that I fell in love with in the way that I fell in love with Alyx Vance, Dog, and Dr. Kleiner. The camera and pipeworks hacking mechanics were cool, but what fell short was the je ne sais quoi – that certain charm that some games have and others don’t. Bioshock didn’t charm me. It received a solid meh.

The final game in my triumvirate of overration is Mass Effect. (*Greg ducks*)

I’ve got a lot of the same complaints about Mass Effect as I did about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It felt more like the game engine you’d see in a point-and-click adventure and less like the engine you’d see in a shooter. In The Totally Rad Show‘s PAX episode, they mentioned that Mass Effect 2 feels “more shootery”, which is very promising, but the whole thing makes me slightly nervous about my much-looked-forward-to Dragon Age: Origins.

Mass Effect had a really interesting story. I loved the notion of an ancient über-powerful race of alien robots who destroy civilization periodically. But they didn’t end up feeling as badass as I’d have liked. They should have felt more like the Borg did in “Q Who?”

All in all, I did enjoy each of these three games. But they weren’t amazing, they were just okay.

So it looks like there’s a new teaser site up for Bioshock 2.  I’m sure they’ll do something clever soon like add hidden links in the flash after everyone’s exhausted themselves on a fruitless pixel hunt. I wasn’t as big a fan of Bioshock as everyone else seemed to be, but it was entertaining.

Anyway, check out the site, and let us know if you find anything interesting.