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Five things about BioShock

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http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200706/N07.0622.1027.01511.htm

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Last week, we got to play through a three-hour BioShock demo. During that time, we saw some amazing and surprising things. Rather than just give you a minute-by-minute account of the entire experience-with agonizing descriptions of every door opened, enemy killed and line of overheard dialogue-we thought we'd cut to the chase and tell you five things you should know about the game.

1. The story...

As a plane-crash survivor who stumbles onto the underwater community of Rapture, you quickly discover that all isn't well in this would-be utopia. All isn't well is probably a bit of an understatement. Ghouls roam the rusting hallways in search of Adam, an addictive substance that allows for a variety of physical and mental enhancements. And if the risk of having someone forcibly try to examine what's in your skull isn't danger enough, there are also signs of a failed political uprising. As soon as the doors to the underwater elevator open, you're met with stacks of picket signs proclaiming "Ryan doesn't own us," a reference to Rapture's founder, the paranoid industrialist Andrew Ryan. Your guide throughout the game is the staticky, disembodied voice of a man named Atlas, who also seems to serve as the counterpoint to Ryan's increasingly crazed agenda.

In addition to guiding players through the game, offering guidance in exchange for helping get Atlas' family out of Rapture, Atlas is also the subject of public-address messages that play periodically over the intercom. These messages portray Atlas and his "gang of bandits" as a menace to Rapture's safety and security. Whether or not this is an accurate representation of things remains unknown-during our demo we weren't allowed to see a long stretch of gameplay, preventing us from seeing a couple of promised plot twists. While BioShock mines much of its inspiration from Ayn Rand's work, it wouldn't be unheard of for a character like Atlas to actually be a made-up bogeyman designed to keep the populace in check, like Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's 1984.

There's also that business about having the option of saving the so-called Little Sisters (children who have been infected with Adam-producing sluglike sea creatures) or simply harvesting the Adam for yourself. Your character encounters a mysterious woman who promises an eventual reward for saving the girls, though her ultimate motivations are unknown.

2. ...And how it's told

While you'll definitely get nudged along a general path while playing BioShock, there's a great amount of flexibility as to how much of it you digest. Personal recording devices are scattered throughout Rapture, and listening to them provides key background information about what went horribly wrong in Rapture. Unlike in a lot of other adventure games, which typically rely on telling the backstory through written notes and cutscenes, these audio snippets allow BioShock to tell a story without wrenching control out of players' hands. When you pick up a tape, you're able to listen to it while you move along-it will continue playing even during combat.

Of course, if you don't care why the Dr. Steinman character went from being a plastic surgeon to a homicidal psychopath, you're free to ignore the recordings altogether. In addition to the recordings, BioShock's environment is an important storytelling device as well. As with the picket signs in the game's beginning, Rapture is filled with little details that paint a much broader picture of that community's former life. How far you delve into it is up to you.

3. Options galore

When Irrational Games said you can play the game as you see fit, they really meant it. The amount of options available to the player is almost overwhelming-in the best way possible. After being exposed to Adam and Plasmids, which give our main character superhuman abilities, combat moves away from simply bashing things with a wrench or shooting them with guns to a free-form exercise in creatively making the most of your surroundings. When we met up with that Dr. Steinman fellow, our encounter included setting him alight with our pyrokinetic powers, then zapping a pool of water to electrocute him when he tried to extinguish the flames. We hacked a health station to poison him and then finished him off with a shotgun. We could have done any number of other things, too, including using our telekinetic abilities to hurl exploding barrels at him or setting pools of oil (and him) on fire. When you encounter roving security droids, you can destroy them with your firearms or hack into them and have them do your dirty work for you.

While it lacks the traditional inventory structure that most RPGs share, BioShock definitely has a lot of other RPG elements. Character customization is deceptively deep, with players gaining new abilities and passive powers. If you're not good at the hacking sections, which center around a Pipe Dream-like minigame-you can upgrade your skills and make it easier. Weapons can be upgraded, reducing reload times or increasing ammo capacity. There's even an invention system, allowing players to develop their own ammunition. Most importantly, these character variations are all valid choices; there aren't any gimmicky, one-time-use powers.

4. It looks better than you imagined

Yes, BioShock is as good as anything you've seen on the 360, and probably even more so. While the graphics are quite impressive, the entire presentation is what knocked us out of our seats. Rapture has the lived-in feel of a place that's seen better days, and the interface extends upon that theme beautifully. It has an art deco meets carnival sideshow look, with chipped primary colors barely covering up the rust and grime beneath. Even better, the environments and level designs actually make sense within the game's mythology. While there are the occasional blocked hallways and mysteriously impassable doors, the overall layouts are sensible and feel believable.

This sensibility applies to character development, too. When you acquire a major new ability, it's accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek animated vignette that sums up the idealized version of 1960 that the game relishes in. Yes, the water effects are breathtaking, but those less-obvious graphical details make the difference. At one point during our demo, we retreated into a hallway and pelted enemies with fire from a safe distance. Upon re-entry, we were amazed to see not only the effects of the fire on our foes-ghastly, scorched and blistered skin-but that furniture within that room was suitably charred as well.

5. It's those little touches

In addition to the way it looks, it's clear that Irrational has spent an extraordinary amount of time polishing the game. There are so many little details and touches interspersed throughout BioShock's world that it actually feels like a real, living place. Things like consumable packs of cigarettes scattered throughout bars, bottles of whiskey hidden in bathroom stalls and lavishly decorated offices help support the sense that you're exploring a place, not dinking around in a video game. It's also one of the creepiest games in recent memory, with fantastic ambient audio effects and a palpable sense of gloom. Enemies whisper and conspire off-screen, shriek nonsense when approached and die with horrific screams-all while water drips in the background and pipes groan ominously.

Basically, when it hits stores in August, you may want to shut off the lights, draw the blinds and set aside a good block of time to experience BioShock. We're excited to learn even more about the game-there's more to the world of Rapture than can be contained in a five-item list.

SweetTooth

Gears Of Wars

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Could someone give me some tips? I'm a below decent player in that game. I average about 4 kills a game if not less. Any tips?

Damn it.

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My phone fell few minutes ago and the screen is broke. I still can see and carry out most of the things except it's not touch screen phone anymore.

My second 1000 achievement points.

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I just finished the game and got all of the 9 achievements that are worth 1000 points. I played "Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie"

You know for a game that was made based on a movie it isn't really bad. It actually breaks the curse of the myth that "All the movies that got turned into games will flop". As much as that sayin' is truth for almost all of the games. The only two that I think broke that curse were King Kong and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay which was on Xbox.

This is why Rakim is one of the greatest

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For this song Rakim - The Mystery Who Is God.

Show me one rapper or MC now-a-day that can spit somethin' like that? I swear their mind would explode. There are other song that Rakim shows why he's the greatest MC to ever hold the microphone.

Better recognize.