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There were times when I wished the game was third-person because it would have been quite comical to see this hulking behemoth being beaten to death by two thugs wielding iron pipes. Just getting from point A to point B is a chore, and you can forget actually trying to strafe or dodge in any way, which is kind of a pain when every single enemy in the game will take off at least a third of your health bar in one hit. In Bioshock 2 - at least to begin with - you move at the speed of a wounded sloth. They got the not as heavily armoured part right, but strangely they forgot the part where the player was supposed to be faster and more maneuverable. Hentzau: The in-game excuse for this is that the player is supposed to be an earlier model of Big Daddy, one which is, and I quote, “a more streamlined and agile type of Big Daddy, meaning they are not as heavily armored, but are faster and more maneuverable”. You were forced to mainly use guns, to go for headshots, to be precise and stealthy and everything one of those massive fuckers definitely is not. Jim: Basically, they decided that you should play a human who just happens to be wearing a fancy suit.

Which, when depleted, forces you to clumsily flail at nearby enemies with all the brute strength of an enraged flamingo. Hentzau: Except the drill now does sod-all damage to begin with. So out go the obscene levels of armour and health, the powerful attacks and the inbuilt rocket launcher, but you can keep the incredibly slow movement. Bioshock 2 did not trust you with that level of power, so it made a compromise – you can keep some of the attributes of the Big Daddies, but not all. Jim: And so you wake up as said mini-godzilla, espy a splicer bearing down on you and begin to laugh at his puny gun and his puny armour and…oh, you’re dead. Bioshock 2 was supposed to fulfil this wish the concept as stated is pretty much the dream of anyone who played the original Bioshock. Dodging red-hot rivets, losing half my health to the drill attack - part of the morbid attraction of that kind of power asymmetry is that after dying for the umpteenth time the player mutters under their breath about what they’d be able to do if they had those weapons and that obscene health pool. I loved that I had to work up to those kinds of fights, setting elaborate plans and traps and just generally thinking before I shot. Jim: You still had these memories, didn’t you, of battling those diving monstrosities in the first game. The sequel’s hook is that you’re playing as a Big Daddy, one of the lumbering armoured juggernauts of destruction that features so prominently on the publicity material for both games and which is the Bioshock franchise’s signature monster. I enjoyed Bioshock for what it was an inoffensive enough shooter that didn’t do anything to justify stealing the “shock” nomenclature from System Shock, and which ended up being an average game attached to a spectacular opening as a result. Hentzau: The road to hell is paved with cheap Steam purchases.

2K weren’t done, however, and brought out Bioshock 2 a few years later, to a chorus of world-weary shrugs. Then everyone played it, realised a lot of that was blustery bluff that masked a reasonably pleasant, novel-looking shooter, and moved on with their lives. Big Daddies were an iconic design of 2007, the incredibly meaningful choices were more heavily trumpeted than the walls of Jericho. I mean, Bioshock had been big when it was released. “Gosh”, you think, “are they still going?” Similar thoughts crossed my mind when Bioshock 2 flashed up in the Steam sales.

Jim: Sometimes you’re watching TV, around about the hour when you’re starting to give up on being a productive citizen, and you’ll catch a glimpse of a half-remembered childhood hero, trying to make it big in America as a singer, or filling in the rubbish cooking quotient of Celebrity Masterchef. After the last diablog was so rapturously received (by which I mean three people said they liked it) Jim and I decided to team up to review another game we’d both been playing recently: Bioshock 2.