Bioshock

If you follow computer or video games at all, you’ve heard of Bioshock. In fact, if you’re a serious gamer, there’s a good chance that you already own it. Like most casual gamers I actually don’t own it yet, but I have heard the buzz about it so I did download the demo (which, at 1.84 gigs — yes, you read that right — is a beast of a download) and played through that. At cable speed the download took all night, and installation of the demo took around 10 minutes. And I’m on a dual processor Dell XPS.

The demo gives you about half an hour of the game, and that half an hour is stunning. I’ll let MSNBC’s full review fill in all the details on what makes Bioshock such a groundbreaking game. They got to play through the whole thing, after all, so they know where all the plot twists are. But even in the demo, the plot twists on you a couple of times.

Bioshock comes with a Mature rating, and there’s a very good reason for that. If you’re looking for a game to sit down and play with the kids, Bioshock ain’t it. Get a Wii. Even in the demo there’s some language, and the look and feel of the game is downright creepy. Like Night of the Living Dead creepy, only much better. But the atmospherics alone make this game better by far than most other games and probably 99% of horror films. The retro sets and backdrops are incredibly detailed, so much so that you find yourself sensing movement in the shadows or in the glint of a piece of glass on the floor. The water and lighting effects are mind-blowing. The first time you walk through a sheet of falling water, you may do what I did and back up and do it again just because the effect looks so cool. The sound design is nearly as good as any film (and better when you play with headphones on, as I did. It’ll give you chills.). From the opening plane crash, the lapping of the waves, the crackling fire burning on the surface of the water, and the distant voices of fellow passengers crying out for help, the sound pulls you right into the gorgeously rendered scene. And it doesn’t let up until, sadly and regrettably, the demo ended before I really had the chance to figure out who’s who and what’s what in the underwater city called Rapture. But I did run into this little girl with the giant bubbleheaded guard dog thing, and she totally creeped me out.

Be advised of a couple of things. First, as I said before, Bioshock really isn’t a game for kids. Second, as a first-person shooter it runs to the gory side. The first weapon you find is a wrench, and you put it to good use whacking a zombie guy not too long after you find it. When you get the plasmids and the machine gun, well, you’re just getting warmed up. There are mods down the storyline that let you power up your weapons in all kinds of insane ways, and through puzzle-solving you can hack security hardware and get it to fight on your side. And pretty much all the fights end up with blood spraying before a freaked out zombie thing ends up dead either at your feet or across the room, lying in a pool of blood. And then you search its corpse for goodies like First Aid kits. A lot of that stuff is standard for shooters, but this one just looks so good it pretty much fills your screen with horror.

The third thing to keep in mind is, if you plan to play this game on a PC, you’d better have a very powerful PC at your fingertips. You’ll need the very latest nVidia or ATI graphics hardware, tons of RAM, fast processors (two or more are better than one) and a lot of hard drive space. I did mention that the demo is nearly 2 gigs, didn’t I? I installed it on my XPS with all the trimmings (as of about 18 months ago) and it ran fine, but the machine did hiccup on a frame every now then. This machine handles editing a couple of stacked layers of HDV video with no problems, but Bioshock pushed it a little bit. It’s a very demanding game. If you own a 360, you’re probably better off playing Bioshock on that, even if the game supposedly looks a little bit better on a high-end PC with the latest graphics.

Based on the demo, I’d say that Bioshock has taken what to me have become two stale genres, the first-person shooter video (of which I’ve never been a huge fan, since I’m more of a real-time strategy guy) and the sci-fi/horror film (of which I am a fan), and turned out a hybrid that’s better than most content that’s produced in either genre. Halo 3 will probably outsell Bioshock based on that franchise’s dominance, but I would be surprised if this game isn’t 2007′s Game of the Year.

And I’ve only played the demo.

So why am I telling you all this? Because we can’t do politics 24/7. Sometimes you just need to do the 21st Century equivalent of hoisting the black flag and commence to slitting throats, which in Bioshock’s case means you inject yourself with some plasmids and shoot lightning from your fingertips. And from what I’ve seen in Bioshock so far, it’s very satisfying.

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