BioShoXXX

The first drop of the 40-days and 40-nights-caliber storm of big games this fall has landed upon us. And I think the biblical muse I'm channeling would agree with me and say, "And it was good."

Ken Levine and the boys and Irrational Games gained their industry notoriety back in '99 with the release of System Shock 2. According to Wikipedia, the game was technically impressive, played well, AND was scary. Which are all things that most games today developed on fancy-pants Cell processors fail to achieve.

Being a console gamer, I completely missed out on the collectively decided awesomeness that was System Shock 2. But lucky for us console-types, visionary PC designers are making the jump to the console space and making some fucking amazing titles and--hopefully--some profit for themselves as well.

In pre-release interviews, members of the design team were adement in stressing that the game is a shooter. I suppose this was done to ensure sales, because typically ambitious abstractions fail to compete with regurgitated genres on the best-seller charts. It's sad to see a product that will likely be remembered for everything it accomplishes outside of combat be undersold as a shooter.

Though shooting is the vehicle that drives the BioShock experience, it is definitely not its strongest point. In fact, when compared to the Halo's of the world, BioShock is mechanically imprecise. But that doesn't make it any less fun. What BioShock lacks in solid shooting mechanics, it makes up for it's level and character designs.

The plausible impossible underwater city of Rapture and its inhabitants really suck you in. Each room is meticulously detailed and radically different from the next. This isn't your standard gun-metal hallway after gun-metal hallway typical sci-fi shooter level design here. There are constantly new things to see and nooks and crannies to explore.

Rapture is populated by several classes of citizens, all of which are rather creepy and decidedly fucked up. The main enemy characters are called Splicers. Splicers are essentially insane-mask-wearing-lead pipe-wielding-bible-hymn-singing psychos that lurk in the shadows and hunt in packs to take you down. They vary in degree of difficulty, and have a represent a moderately impressive AI behavior. There are times when they will retreat to save their own skins, but that's about the extent of it.

In addition to Splicers, there are the Big Daddies and Little Sisters. In a nutshell, Big Daddies are big and scary and mean and Little Sisters are ugly bug-eyed little girls that walk around poking corpses. Big Daddies are the steadfast guardians of the Little Sisters that will protect them at all costs. Each battle with a Big Daddy is as unnerving as it is exhilarating. When fired upon their docile yellow-lit helmets turn a fiery-red and they charge at you with screen-blurring speed. These fights are amazing at first, but wane in excitement as the game progresses due to their necessity and the game's they-won't-attack you-until-you-attack-them-mechanic. I often found myself completing the game's narrative-related tasks and ready to move on to the next section when an on-screen reminder prompted me to go back and kill the Big Daddies.

I'm well aware that I'm nit-picking, but when a game succeeds on so many levels it forces one to focus on the minutia. BioShock's only failings are its constant reminders to the player that it is, in fact, a videogame. The art direction, sound design, and story are all brought down by the conventions of the medium. Menu screen shuffling that disrupts the action, on screen prompts oblective prompts, a GTA-esque directional arrow, and the final "boss" encounter are all examples of how ambition like this can only go so far given the boundaries of the videogame language.

But is good? Fuck yes it's good, I'd even go as far as to call it great. A definite must-buy that you will not regret going $60 in the hole for. Gaming experiences like this are rare; when cinematic videogame envelope is pushed just a little farther. BioShock could very well go down as this console generation's Metroid Prime, and a higher praise than that I could not give it.