BioShock (PS3)
PS3 owners: Fourteen months later, here's your chance to kiss a Big Daddy.
10/21/2008 6:24 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 3
What's Hot: Unique setting; Incredibly bold take on the increasingly dull FPS genre; Engrossing storyline; Manages to be both cerebral and visceral at once
What's Not: Tepid third act; Devoid of multiplayer; 12-minute start-up install (or, as I like to call it, a funstall); Nothing here that 360 and PC gamers haven't seen before
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
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.
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.
