The Game Boy: Best Games You Missed in 2011 -- BioShock 2: Minerva's Den

Posted 01/04/2012 at 12:05pm | by Nathan Grayson

3

Comments

Print

Porter was a brilliant man. Incredibly ambitious. A pioneer of technology. But he wasn't just another top-of-the-heap, bottom-of-the-barrel Rapturite. Folks pointed out that he -- as a black man living in a time of heavy racial persecution -- refused to “splice white” for better chances of success. Meanwhile, he didn't merely want The Thinker to be a giant, talking calculator. He attempted to give it a crash course in humanity -- for better or worse -- while his closest colleague advocated adapting it for increasingly criminal acts. Ultimately, though, Porter used recordings that he made with his wife to give The Thinker an identity.

But then, Andrew Ryan's pesky case of homicidal madness struck, and Porter got hauled off under suspicions of treason – which, in post-craziness Rapture, translated roughly to “being alive.” But why kill a man when he'd make a perfectly good Big Daddy? And then, in that brief moment, it all made sense. Porter wasn't Porter. I was Porter, post-Daddification. The Thinker was only guiding me by reproducing a “familiar” voice: my own. Big Daddies, after all, aren't so big on sophisticated thoughts beyond “Help Little Sister” and “KILL EVERYTHING.”

In essence, I'd spent the whole game learning about myself. My avatar was – like me – completely in the dark about the circumstances surrounding the situation. So we had the exact same “Holy sh**” moment. My jaw dropped, and so did Big Daddy Porter's helmet grating... thing. His state of mind mirrored mine. Confusion. Amazement. Shock. Understanding. Grief.

Mostly the last one. After I toppled my/Porter/Big Daddy's arch-nemesis, Minerva's Den slid a final ace out of its sleeve. I picked up one last audio recording. It was Porter testing The Thinker's newly completed personality replication function. The subject? His wife. “No,” Porter's recording sputtered and cracked upon hearing her voice. “This isn't right!” “What's wrong, Charles?” Thinker-emulated Pearl replied. “Don't you still love me?” Then the recording came to an abrupt halt.

I walked forward. Eventually, I reached a wall completely coated in newspaper clippings illuminated by a nearly endless row of flickering candles. Also featured: a picture of Pearl smiling serenely while Porter held her close. And an apology note. Porter – long before he grabbed the nearest bathysphere to Rapture – had buried himself in his work, leaving Pearl all by her lonesome in London. There was also another apology – from the desk of Winston Churchill. Pearl, it explained, had died in a Nazi bombing of Britain – just before Porter had the chance to set things right. I may have been in a city under the sea, but I couldn't shake a sudden sinking sensation. My stomach felt like it had just consumed a thousand chocolate bars and then ridden an equal number of rollercoasters. 

So I just stared on. Speechless.