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I would argue that BioShock was always a lackluster retread of System Shock 2. I wish modern games had more of this chunky, tasty poetry where characters end lines with "industrial age machine" and say things like "The unplanned organism is a question asked by nature and answered by death." They needed a system, yes, an industrial-age machine." "The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because human beings themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves.
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System shock 2 Pc#
System Shock 2 comes from a golden era of PC game writing where prose really, really mattered. If you choose to lie down with the machine, we will rend you apart, and put you separate from the joy of the mass." We hear your thoughts, and they rage for your brothers you believe dead. Why do you serve our mother? How can you choose cold metal over the splendor of flesh? But you fear us. "Do you not trust the feelings of the flesh? Our biology yearns to join with yours. The terrifying aspect about The Many as it is presented, is that if you were to relent, allow yourself to be incorporated, and completely lose your individuality, you might actually love your new state of existence. And they constantly talk about how wonderful it is. When The Many talks to you, you can audibly hear the hundreds of voices of the minds that have been incorporated.
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You are fully dead, and your body is taken and genetically reprogrammed and repurposed to serve the hive, but your mind is gone. The same can be said for the Zerg, and although the Kerrigan aspect made for a very dramatic twist, it was ultimately still pretty basic, and while I absolutely love the look of Tyranid units, as with the other two aforementioned hiveminds, the concept of getting killed by a Tyranid isn't special. There's no morality to it, really, they're the unfiltered, unburdened will of life. They're just the raw, broken down motivations of all life, to consume and grow and procreate, repeat. When I'm presented with an 'enemy' like The Flood, there can be a good story built around them, but there's nothing specifically about The Flood that's particularly interesting. The Many always stood out to me as the better antagonist of SS2, and stands well above any other hivemind antagonist in other games/media.