A man chooses, a slave obeys.

Every once in a while you find a game where it goes beyond just playing games and the story sucks you in. It sometimes goes beyond saving the princess, earning a ton of experience points and beating the bad guy, and scoring touchdowns. It says alot when the story is as good as reading a book as they could just give you some flashy graphics, big guns, wind you up and set you free.

Bioshock is one of the rare games. They manage to flesh out the characters in the game so well and the voice actors do a fantastic job. The single most thrilling aspect would have to be penetrating the defenses of Andrew Ryan or Frank Fontaine and hearing them steadily more frightened, angry, and defiant as you get closer and closer. The NPCs sometimes plead, sometimes insult, and sometimes muse. It's awesome how much they can flesh out some characters that you don't even meet through the use of taped recordings spread throughout the underwater world of Rapture.

As usual, there is a twist or two, and at least one of them is enough to force you to suddenly reflect on the previous 20 hours that you've put in to the game and go "Ohhhhh......!".

I finally finished the game last night, which is a rarity in itself, but what can I say. It's just one of those rare games that I want to finish. Each enemy, no matter how repetitive, was an experience and not just fodder for my machine gun. They never lost their creepy value, nor did the little sisters or the big daddy.

Graphics were outstanding, and with a game set underwater they made that water as beautiful as possible. Gameplay mechanics were spot on. Music and sound effects were genious. The game was also nicely polished. There was one spot early on where I experienced a couple crashes, but that was it. There are a couple odd glitches but nothing to get worked up about. All told, Bioshock is a really good game.

Now would you kindly go out and play this game.



PS FRAPS is the shit.