Bioshock

Occasionally, a video game comes along and changes the way that people perceive games, both from an industry and player perspective. The famed developer of the critically acclaimed System Shock 2, Irrational Games, has created a truly mind blowing experience with their latest shooter, Bioshock. Morality, intellect, and skill are all factors in their latest foray into the survival/horror genre, and to put it simply, they've succeeded in creating an atmospheric experience unlike any before it.

Having only played the twenty minute demo available on Xbox Live, these might seem like lofty claims, but I think I can safely make them. If the game stays on the same track it is on in the demo, it will be the herald of a new golden age of video games.

The demo begins with a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. A short cinematic shows, in painful detail, what it would be like to almost drown from a first person perspective. After pulling his head up out of the water, the reigns are handed over to the player, and the game begins. Burning fuel cascades across the water on either side of you, and the tail end of the plane is seen ahead in the distance sinking slowly beneath the waves. More curious, a strange stone lighthouse is jutting up out of the water near where the plane is sinking, and as your only option for survival, it appears as though you must swim for the artificial island. As you get closer, the plain descends further until it is gone completely beneath the surf, leaving only the oil fires and some small wreckage floating on the surface. Not knowing what else to do, you follow the path on the tiny island to a door which leads into a human built stairwell. Playing in the background as you walk, Bobby Darin's Beyond the Sea perfectly juxtaposes a sense of foreboding, and causes your first steps into this new world to be very cautious. Following it down, the architecture is oddly familiar to the time period (1960s) but also unfamiliar in many ways as well. A strange looking elevator is waiting, door open, at the bottom of the long stairwell, and after studying it for a moment, you enter and pull the lever in front of you.

Thus begins your journey into Rapture, an underwater city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the great would not be constrained by the small, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, and where everything went horribly wrong.

I won't talk more about Bioshock now, because it must be experienced on its own.

More later.