BioShock: The Collection Is Free On Epic This Week

Monday, nothing happened. Tuesday, Tchia tried to hit a major chord from Moana as Awaceb showcased ocean exploration. Wednesday, Dragon’s Dogma crawled out of its cave after 10-years, and Mathew recounted the Dead By Daylight 6th anniversary celebrations. Thursday, yet another game about planting parsnips was announced (by Nacon this time) and Street Fighter bled onto Ubisoft’s Smash imitator a bit more. I tried warning you that it is pre-not E3 season, and thus the news consists of rumored leaks and minor announcements that will get washed out in a few weeks when the remaster of that one SNES game you loved isn’t announced.

Shifting to the Epic Games Store mystery this week, we have all three BioShock games and their respective DLCs. As I said a few weeks ago, when Prey shuffled its coffee cup that isn’t going to jump up at me, honest, the plot of System Shock 2 was so lovely that it had to be stolen. Well, it would be stupid to say Ken Levine stole his own story, but he did and injected 50ccs of Ayn Rand too. The story of BioShock is one as old as my niece: Bathyspheres held down by the utopian dreams of a Laissez-faire environment, one where if you’re paranoid your neighbor wants what you have, they think the same thing of you.

You don’t need me to tell you that the first game was a big success, but I’ll cheerfully point out that the second game wasn’t great. Attempting to capture the magic of the former, BioShock 2 once again sent you into the dingy 1940s rustic nightmare of Splicers and Big Daddies. The fall of the second adventure into Rapture is simply the fact that while gameplay had marginal improvements and a generally fine story, Icarus flew too close to his little sisters and the Big Daddies weren’t happy. It was a sequel that wallowed in its predecessor rather than jumping off it and ascending into the clouds.

Ah, the smell of cloud cities, freshly cut racism, and gun powder are the only things that get me up in the morning to play BioShock: Infinite. It can be argued, though at length that I don’t have here, that Columbia is better than Rapture or vice-versa. I’ve said it before, I prefer a bright and colorful world splattered with enough plasma to keep the 4077 M*A*S*H unit in business for years, especially over the dark rustic monotonal decor of its predecessors. Of course, gameplay and story are where most of the arguments sit, though when thinking of something fondly, I often cast my mind to the colorful over the uniformity of the dark and colorless.

Though I personally find the second game about as entertaining as playing a solo game of 52-card pick-up, BioShock: The Collection features two of the finest games of the last two decades. It is easy to rely on just saying this for the bad games, but that’s two amazing games and their annoying brother for free with their DLCs and a visual kick up the hole. What would there be to complain about with that? If you don’t like them, you can go back to constructing the largest golden phallic object in Minecraft or whatever.

All this week, you can pick up BioShock: The Collection for free on the Epic Games Store until the 2nd of June. Of course, next week will be the third and penultimate week of the Epic Mega Sale, and a continuation of the mystery games for a little while longer. Currently, I am unable to shine a light on what will be available next week, but I am sure I’ll hate it, as I did last week. Who knows, it might be the Mafia series remasters, or we’ll shift to something else from another big publisher.