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Zeus Dreams Do Come True: Ability to throw honest-to-god lightning from our fingertips.

Much ink -- virtual and actual -- was spilled before BioShock's release. It's the game that launched a thousand blog posts, the game that made critics go wide-eyed during demos, the game that looked like it might even become the-little-game-that-could and maybe, just maybe, trip up the cocky Halo 3 on its way to its preordered/preordained victory lap.

Now that it's out, it's safe to say that BioShock is indeed one of the great games of all time. No, it's not the gift from the gods that some of us -- OK, all of us -- hoped it would be; it's not perfection in disc form.

Nor is it the far-too-easy, multiplayer-less, overrated, overproduced debacle that those in the backlash community -- and you know who are -- would have us believe.

No matter who you are or what you believe in, if you are a gamer, then you simply must recognize BioShock as an important moment in our medium -- a moment in which, amidst the deluge of crass sequels and quick-and-dirty cash-ins that flood our game stores each day, a developer dared to be bold. No game released this year -- no, not even the mighty Portal -- delivers a world as convincing and as rich as BioShock's world. Simply put, no game does more for our relatively young medium than BioShock does. Love it, hate it, or be indifferent towards it, at the very least, you must show it the respect that it deserves.

In case you've been busy watching reruns of "Shot at Love Starring Tila Tequila" (you damn fools), here's the BioShock 10-cent tour: The game opens with a plane crash. You survive. You swim to a nearby lighthouse. Inside the lighthouse, you take a submarine/elevator-type contraption to the bottom of the sea. There, you find a city called Rapture (think Atlantis crossed with New York City circa 1954).

This one-time utopia was the brainchild of the William Randolph Hearst-like Andrew Ryan, a man who says things like, "It wasn't impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the ocean. It was impossible to build it anywhere else."

Via exploration and the occasional 1950s-style public service announcement, we learned that Rapture was built as a city where artists and scientists could flourish without censorship, and without what Ryan calls "petty morality." Scientists, without restrictions, fooled with genetic code. They developed something called plasmids, which alter a person's DNA (think of it as plastic surgery for your double-helix.)

And like with plastic surgery, the citizens of Rapture began splicing their DNA to extremes, eventually turning themselves into genetic monsters.

The city has since been overrun with these "splicers," creepy citizens who seem to have a penchant for wearing unsettling party masks and carrying firearms.

You're guided through the game by the calming voice of Atlas, who communicates with you via a two-way radio. Atlas speaks in an Irish brogue, and asks you to help locate "me wife and child."

OK, pal, we thought. Sure. We can do that for you.

If all this sounds like a slightly more cerebral version of DOOM's go-there-and-shoot-that plot, you'd be right...and wrong. There are certainly moments in BioShock that echo the granddad of all first-person shooters. But those moments are far outnumbered by plenty of unconventional twists on the genre.

Like DOOM, we got our standard-issue first-person shooter arsenal -- shotgun? check; machine gun? check; grenade launcher? check, etc. -- but we also got the chance to do a little plasmid splicing of our own. After only a few levels, we were able to send lightning shooting from the fingertips of our left hands, shoot flames, and pick up and toss items via telekinesis. In later levels, we were able to launch swarms of bees and even freeze enemies solid with ice.

We spent much of the game getting into scrapes with splicers, but every now and then we'd have to square off with a Big Daddy, hulking beasts wearing what looks to be a diving suit straight out of a Jules Verne novel. A Big Daddy's job is to protect Little Sisters, zombie-like little girls who sap a substance called Adam from corpses scattered about Rapture.

The Big Daddy and Little Sister wouldn't bother us, just as long as we didn't bother them. But provoke either one of them -- which the game makes clear we absolutely need to do at a certain point -- and trust us, there is a shit-ton of hell to pay.

Our first Big Daddy fight, to put it mildly, did not go well. There was much running, much hiding, and more than a little dying. We were attacked with a kind of balls-out viciousness unlike anything we have seen before. It was like being mauled by a pit bull on steroids. This big, bad bastard just would not let up.

After limping our way through our first few Big Daddy battles, we got wise: We set traps for him; left a trail of landmines for him to follow; arranged turrets and attack bots to swarm him; and basically, very carefully, we learned how to orchestrate his demise.

Taking down a Daddy always left us with a moral dilemma: What to do with the now-defenseless Little Sister? BioShock gave us two options: Rescue or Harvest. Rescue results in turning her back into a nice, normal, sweet little girl again, but getting only a small amount of Adam for your troubles. Harvest means getting much more Adam, but -- that's right -- killing the girl in the process.

Yes, BioShock continues the relatively new trend of asking gamers to make ethical and/or moral choices, and then forces them to live with the consequences. Being the big, liberal, tree-kissing saps that we are, we were completely and utterly helpless when it came time to choose. Translation: "Harvest" was never really an option for us.

The Big Daddy battles function as non-traditional boss battles in the game (though there is one disappointing, all-too-traditional boss battle very late in the game). But beyond that, whether the Big Daddy is angry and doing everything in his power to take us out, or, after having lost a Little Sister, lumbering about the level, looking lonely and bereft, these hulking creatures clearly form the spiritual heart and soul of BioShock. (Not to mention that the Big Daddy has achieved icon status, and, to our mind, is now as indelible a character among the videogame community as, say, Pac-Man and Mario.)

Finally, what makes BioShock a landmark achievement is Rapture itself, which seems so very, very far-fetched, and yet, at the same time, the game makes us wonder, "Well, why can't there be a damn city at the bottom of the sea?"

That's the ultimate magic trick at the core of BioShock, the thing we never saw coming. No matter how hellish Rapture seems at times, with pipes bursting and water flooding in around us, and splicers and Big Daddies lurking at every turn, we can still obviously see what this place was once like -- what it must have looked like in its heyday, even in its current post-apocalyptic, blown-out form.

We can see that it was once beautiful down there. Hell, it's still pretty damn beautiful down there. And, as nutty and unsympathetic as Andrew Ryan seems, at the heart of the BioShock experience is the dirty little secret that we, as gamers, inevitably wind up being seduced by his wild, utterly impractical vision.

Buy it. Play it. And relish every glorious moment of it.

Verdict: Seriously. Do you really have to ask?

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.