(Presenting – just over a month late – the last installment of How I Spent My Thanksgiving Vacation, the epic tale of four days spent indoors with the latest and greatest in videogames. Catch up on parts 1 and 2, if you like.)

What else is there to say about Rapture, Andrew Ryan’s wrecked and wasted utopia at the bottom of the ocean? You would think after filling countless blog posts, word docs, emails, conversation lulls, and friends’ ears with my incessant babbling about it in the weeks after the game first launched that I’d have run out of ground to cover and sing the praises of. That there’s still aspects of it to pick apart and hold up to the light says a lot for the experience Irrational Games put together, perhaps even more than it does about my not-so-secret love for bludgeoning friends, family, and weary passers-by over the head with the things I love.

My second dalliance with Bioshock was prompted by Mario Galaxy, a game so good it through all my thinking in terms of Best Game of the Year into complete disarray. I’m happy I went back, and not just for the opportunity to restore sanity and balance to my internal world gone mad. Revisiting Rapture with an idea of what to expect this time showed me just how much I missed – despite my best intentions, there were a few parts I’d rushed through in the interest of survival, which lead to a number of the game’s subtler details being overlooked in the resulting hail of gunfire and bioengineered lightning. This play through was different, though – I gave each of Rapture’s districts the time it deserved, staying in an area until every room on the map was explored and I was satisfied I’d seen everything. I’m sure there are things I missed, and that nagging doubt (and the free downloadable content released the very day after I finished the game for the second time, including new plasmids and ways to alter the difficulty to your liking) ensures I’ll be up for a third go-round in a few months or so.

I don’t know if it was my slower pace through the game or a streak of lucky rolls on the part of the AI in charge of enemy behaviors, but the denizens of Rapture were much more save and intelligent than last time, more prone to taking swipes at each other or forming loose bands to take down a Big Daddy. Little else in Bioshock compares to the floor show of a pack of ADAM-crazed Splicers attempting to kill a Big Daddy. At one point in the Farmer’s Market, I heard a roar from nearby only to have a door open a few seconds later to reveal the hallway up ahead engulfed in flames. Two Houdini Splicers packing the Incinerate plasmid were fighting a Big Daddy, teleporting around him while tossing fireballs. A stray round hit a gas tank, causing a chain of explosions that killed the assailants in a fireball almost too bright to look at. Seeing a Big Daddy come stomping out of it, gun ready, ignoring the flames still covering his body as he scanned the room for remaining threats. Many game characters look scary enough, but it’s the rare one that puts action to attitude so effectively.

Then there’s Sinclair’s Spirits, a liquor store turned mausoleum for it’s deceased owner watched over by a handful of Sander Cohen’s “living statues” – bodies arranged in just the right position and covered in plaster that are scattered throughout the superb Fort Frolic. The secret of the statues, only revealed if you can find the shop’s secret room and the treasure inside, leads to one of Bioshock’s purest (and completely incidental) moments, as well as one of the only times I’ve screamed at a game out of fright. While it’s true that the Splicers inhabiting Rapture lacked true variety, the efforts at creating a sense of community among some of them (see also the truly creepy Saturnine cult in Arcadia, or the bickering dancers in Sander Cohen’s apartment in Olympus Heights) go along way towards reinforcing the sense that this is a real place.

Still other moments linger on. The genuinely sweet sight of a Little Sister and her Big Daddy protector arguing over the girl’s bedtime before she finally conceded with a yawn, put her tine hand in one of his giant paws, and trundled off in search of a hidey hole. Seeing the same pair later on when they were ambushed by Splicers, and watching as, after killing the first two (is there another game out there offering the chance to see someone killed in a fight by getting punched in the face with a drill the size of his head? If not, why not?), he grabs her arm and swings her onto his back where she rides as he bull-charged the remaining thugs. There’s real tenderness in the way protector and charge interact with each other, and at times it’s enough to make me hesitate before attacking. Even though I chose to save all the Little Sisters this time, it didn’t make me feel like any less of a shit when they burst into tears as their Big Daddy died.

I could go on, but at this point I feel like anything else I have to say will lean more towards careful analysis of actual mechanics (possibly more to come on this later, game design fans) or just ruining more surprises. Kieron Gillen wrote a very long, very good defense of the game in response to the inevitable backlash against it kicking around the internets which is well worth a read, particularly the bit about how, as much as it’s about anything else, Bioshock is a game about videogames. I recommend reading it even if you love the game, though it may be best to wait until you’ve played it for yourself.

What else is there to say about Rapture? A lot, really. No other game in memory has taken over so much real estate in my head, to the point of still haunting my dreams a month on and coloring every other gaming experience I have. For all of Mario Galaxy’s joyful wonder and Portal’s acid wit, neither of them leave quite the same impact as the sad fate of Anna Cullpepper unfolding via audio diaries left throughout the city or the gravity of Andrew Ryan’s last vow bellowed at Atlas as he tries to bring his city down around him. In what was easily the best year for new games I’ve ever seen, little else showed as clear an image of the potential for the medium as Bioshock, warts and all. The future for games is remarkably bright, and it all starts at the bottom of the sea.

Filed under: Bioshock, talk about games