Bioshock: A Machine For Pigs

[Alardem]

I figured that the spoilers would work best on comparing the protagonists. I'll modify things a little.

Personally, I think A Machine For Pigs was much more successful at pulling off its ending twist. That, and unlike Bioshock which bogs itself down with tons of mindless and gratuitous violence designed to keep a violent gamer's mind from wandering, there's no disconnect between being horrified at the atrocities on-screen while you're simultaneously doing them.

Spoiler below!

Infinite tried way too hard to differentiate Booker from the villain, to the point that there's actually no resemblance and the hand-waves they do regarding their physical differences only raise further questions - why does he turn into Santa Claus while his daughter remains a pretty young thing? A Machine For Pigs has the decency to make Mandus' two selves more plausibly originated from the same hateful seed by never showing what they look like.

In addition, Bioshock choked on its fascinating concept in favor of a painful cop-out (metaphorically going with the "Kill Hitler to stop WW2" scenario). It negates everything that happened, which is extremely frustrating from a story-telling perspective, while A Machine For Pigs instead leaves us with an uncertain future.

I'm not at all saying that A Machine For Pigs ripped anything off of Bioshock, but only that they contain a lot of intriguing parallels. That being said, AMFP was much better value for its money than Bioshock Infinite - a tighter narrative with less padding - and I'd love to see what The Chinese Room could have done with even half the budget, manpower and time that Irrational Games had.

Also, inb4:

Spoiler below!

Oswald is an alternate form of Booker DeWitt.