First off, I'll say right at the top, I'm in a bad mood tonight.  That might affect the quality of this post, so I figure I'll just let you know that much right off.  You've been warned.

There's a lot of reasons for my foul mood.  Did you ever notice that when one thing goes wrong, everything else seems to follow suit as well?  I've lost an important document (more on that in a later post).  My printer stopped working and I don't know why (or how to fix it).  Ditto the master toilet. PayPal is being a jerk, and won't release my own money to me. More on that in a future post, too (see how much fun you have to look forward too with all these planned grudge posts of mine?).  

As I've posted here in the past, my little escape from all the cares and worries of the world has lately been video role playing games (RPGs).  Everything else in my life may be going to hell in a handbasket, but at least I freed the townspeople last night from the evil plans of a diabolical villain.  Or slayed a dragon.  Or got the attention of a game's femme fatale.  Or killed a water buffalo with nothing but a blow dart because why not?

I just completed the critically acclaimed BioShock Infinite.  Frankly, I was disappointed (fully recognizing that my disappointment may be due as much to my foul mood as to the actual game itself).  I started the game late last Sunday afternoon and finished before 8:00 p.m. Friday evening - 15 hours total play time according to Steam.  A good RPG game could last for over 100 hours - according to the Steam stats, I've played 119 hours of Assassin's Creed Origins, 159 hours of Borderlands 2, and a mind-boggling 637 hours of Fallout 4 (maybe that's why everything else in my life is going all haywire on me). 

Okay, shooter games like BioShock are notorious for being faster than open-world RPGs like Fallout and Skyrim, but those mere 15 hours of BioShock weren't even all that interesting.  Half the time, I didn't even know exactly what was going on or what I was supposed to be doing, other than shooting back at the bad guys (I guess) shooting at me.  The storyline was ambitious, I'll give it that, involving quantum theory and such, but the ending scene was ambiguous as hell.  I found a long-ass web page trying to describe what actually happened in that last scene, but if it takes 10,000 words and the equivalent of a Doctoral dissertation to tell you what you just did and saw, then maybe it wasn't all that coherent in the first place.

No spoilers, but I'll tell you this much - one of the devices the game uses is to have the heroine, Elizabeth, become increasingly omniscient as the game progresses.  Something about a tear in the space-time continuum and the existence of multiple parallel universes, and somehow she can start seeing other futures.  This works to keep the action going - she only has to say, "I can't explain why, but we need to go to the armory right now" to move the action along to that location, but even after battling all the bad guys between your location and the armory, and all the enemies in the armory itself, it still wasn't clear why you needed to be there in the first place, because by then Elizabeth is saying you need to confront the prophet now about some such thing or another.  Or climb into a bathysphere (I'm not kidding). Or get baptised in some rural stream (ditto).

I'll be specific - in one scene, you're trying to get past security and break into enemy HQ.  Based on appearance, the bioscanner thinks Elizabeth is actually her late mother and thus eligible to enter (she's the villain's daughter), but she can't pass the fingerprint scan.  So she decides to lead you to the crypt and cut the hand off her mother's corpse to fake the prints, but once there, the mother's ghost predictably arises and understandably doesn't want her hand cut off.  Much fighting and much chasing ensues - exciting stuff - but when you finally defeat the spectral mother, rather than finally getting the fingerprints, the plot has moved on to other things and the attempt to break into enemy HQ is abandoned or forgotten or whatever,  and now you're fighting some rebels who were on your side earlier because why not?

So, incomprehensible plot, use of quantum mumbo-jumbo to gloss over plot deficiencies, an ending so ambiguous it makes the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey seem hyper-literal by comparison, and after a mere 15 hours, the game's over and you're done (I know, that last criticism sounds like the line from Annie Hall that goes "The food at that restaurant is awful, and such small servings" or something like that).

But the game got rave reviews.  Others thought it was innovative and thought-provoking and like, deep, man.  So, are they all wrong, or am I just in a cranky mood because of lost documents, PayPal, and broken household appurtenances?