Fourteen months.

That's how long it took 2K Games to port one of the great games of this generation over to the PlayStation 3.

In the immortal words of T.S. Eliot: "So what the hell happened?"

It could be the PS3's notoriously difficult-to-work-with hardware. Or, it could be that 2K was just being lazy. (I'm guessing it's the former rather than the latter.) Either way, the PS3 version has arrived -- better late than never.

If you haven't played BioShock, and you own a PS3, the answer is obvious: Go buy it and play it. But if you've already played through the game on the PC or on the Xbox 360, whether or not BioShock merits yet another playthrough on the PS3 is a question that you'll have to answer for yourself.

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Date Night in Rapture.

After its initial release in August 2007, BioShock quickly established itself as one of the great games of all time. No, it wasn't the gift from the gods some of us predicted it would be; it wasn't perfection in disc form.

Nor was it the far-too-easy, multiplayer-less, overrated, overproduced debacle that those in the backlash community would have had you believe it was.

No matter who you are or what you believe in, if you are a gamer, then you must recognize BioShock as an important moment in our medium -- a moment in which, amidst the deluge of crass sequels and quickie cash-ins that flood our game stores each day, a developer dared to be bold. No game released last year -- or this year, for that matter -- delivered a world as convincing and as rich as BioShock's world. Simply put, no game last year did more for our medium than BioShock did. Love it, hate it, or be indifferent towards it, at the very least, you must show it the respect that it deserves.

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).

Daddy came home drunk and passed out in front of the young 'uns. Again.

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, you learn 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, you think. Sure. I 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.

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Question: Who's on fire? And shot? And has a dumb mustache? (Answer: You.)

Like DOOM, you get your standard-issue first-person shooter arsenal -- shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher, etc. -- but you also get the chance to do a little plasmid splicing of your own. After only a few levels, you're able to send lightning shooting from the fingertips of your left hand, shoot flames, and pick up and toss items via telekinesis. In later levels, you'll be able to launch swarms of bees (yes, bees) and even freeze enemies solid with ice.

You'll spend most of the game getting into scrapes with splicers, but every now and then you'll 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 won't bother you, as long as you don't bother them. But provoke either one of them -- which the game makes clear you absolutely need to do at a certain point -- and trust me, there is a shit-ton of hell to pay.

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

After limping my way through my first few Big Daddy battles, I got wise: I 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, I learned how to orchestrate his demise.

Taking down a Daddy always left me with a moral dilemma: What to do with the now-defenseless Little Sister? BioShock gave me 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 sap that I am, I was completely and utterly helpless when it came time to choose. Translation: "Harvest" was never really an option for me.

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

Which brings us back to the 14 months that have elapsed since BioShock debuted. The PS3 version, especially considering the inherent roominess of the Blu-ray disc format, could have been the definitive version. Imagine a director's cut of the game, including a never-before-seen lost level; a level that the developers wanted to include, but didn't have time to implement in the original. Imagine a slew of documentaries on the production team; live-action video interviews with Ken Levine and company.

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Here's your damn Blue Cross-Blue Shield card!

Unfortunately, what you get is a no-frills version of BioShock. Yes, there's a new Survivor mode in the PS3 version, which forces you to be stingy with your bullets and more creative when it comes to deploying your plasmids. But honestly, it's a save-crawl experience -- i.e., you save, then crawl a few feet, etc. -- and not really all that much fun.

It really wouldn't have taken much to get me to go back to Rapture. I was hoping for an excuse to go back. Honestly, even the smallest nudge, and I'd gladly go. Yet the PS3 version doesn't contain that nudge. There's some promised downloadable content coming along in the form of Challenge Rooms, but what they are, and whether or not they will be the nudge I need, remains to be seen. (Challenge Rooms were not available at press time.)

Still, BioShock retains its status as a landmark achievement in 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 that I never saw coming. No matter how hellish Rapture seems at times, with pipes bursting and water flooding in around you, and splicers and Big Daddies lurking at every turn, you can still clearly see what this place once was like -- what it must have looked like in its heyday, even in its current post-apocalyptic, blown-out form.

You can see that it was once beautiful down here. Hell, it's still pretty damn beautiful down here. 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 and utterly impractical vision.

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