BioShock (Xbox 360)

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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.