1) The PS3 is good for something.

2) A teaser trailer for Bioshock 2: The Sea of Dreams is an unlockable tucked away on the version of the game recently released for the thing.

Obviously, this is the best news of the day. After watching, I would swear the air smelled a bit sweeter, the sun seemed to break through the clouds outside just a bit more, and the dulcet tones of something like birdsong wafted through the room. Here, for your all your day-improving needs, is the video:

First thought? It looks like they’re going for a proper sequel rather than the original idea of telling the story of how Rapture went from glittering utopia to the smashed and leaking wreck you explored in the original game. It’s a good idea – thanks to the audio diaries scattered throughout the city, we already know how things fell apart, and while a prequel game could be done well, it couldn’t possibly live up to the escalating tensions and eventual war at the bottom of the sea that exists in my head. As interesting as it would be to see what came before, I find the idea of what comes next for Rapture far more interesting, if only to see which ending to the game they continue on from. As the thing is most likely at least a year away, there’s plenty of time for speculation before the inevitable drip feed of information building towards the game’s release starts up.

Also: squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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.

It’s strange when a game that excels on so many levels ends on a misstep. After a week of spending some of each night in Rapture’s wonderfully crafted world, for things to finally come to a head in the form of a by-the-numbers, “wear the boss down, force him to recharge, hit him when he recharges, repeat” boss fight is a tremendous curveball – you don’t expect a game that so expertly defies so many videogame conventions to end on one of the biggest ever, and rightfully so. It doesn’t take away from the rest of the experience, or from the horrifying journey of self discovery (and more than a little self mutiliation) that makes up the last fourth before the big fight, though, and as generic boss fights go it was a good one – I even got to use the l33t hacker skills that saw me through so much of Rapture’s challenges one last time. That said, it was still just a generic boss fight, and it’s presence in Bioshock is genuinely puzzling.

The denouement immediately after was wonderful, though, and completely in keeping with the rest of the game’s dark sense of justice.

There’s at least more than one ending to Bioshock, and which one you get depends largely on how you handle the Little Sisters. To answer the question I sorta-kinda stepped around in my first post on the game: I harvested all but two of them, trading any hope they might have had at being normal again for the maximum amount of ADAM. The two Little Sisters I spared lucked out due to morbid curiousity a brief flutter of guilt after the game’s big moment, respectively, and I like to think they’ll remember me fondly for that. The downer ending I received says different. I’ve no complaints, though – I knew what I was getting in to from the beginning, and sealed my fate with that first push of the “X” button with only the tiniest bit of regret.

The final verdict? Game of The Year, hands down. Quite possibly Game of The Next Several Years, as it’ll probably be a good long while before anybody comes out with its equal. It’s not perfect – there are a few jarring moments story-wise, and while they’re eventually explained (mostly) some exposition from the voice on the other end of your radio wouldn’t have hurt. The hacking mini-game is something you’ll either love, put up with, or hate. It struck me as odd at first, but the more time I spent turning Rapture’s various security devices into my own robot guards of death the more I grew to like it. There are a few other things that could probably be picked at if you wanted to be well and truly annoying, but why would you? It’s a brilliant game, the sort that, in a perfect world, would silence all “games are art/not art” arguments once and for all. It makes me proud of the industry I work in and a little embarassed at the same time, and I hope it leaves a lot of other developers with the same feeling. Should all games be Bioshock? God, no. But in its wake there’s no excuses not take chances, to build on mechanics players are familiar with in exciting new directions. For all it’s art, this isn’t an “art game” like Rez or Shadow of the Colossus – it’s a shooter. The story is there if you want to engage with it, the consequences of your choices there to be weighed if you want to consider them, but if none of that interests you then hey, you still get to shoot stuff and brain folks with a wrench.

Irrational have a lot to be proud of. A company couldn’t ask for a finer swan song, and (in a just world) its universal acclaim and robust sales should help ensure that their new life as 2K-Boston/Australia will provide them with the support they need to pursue future projects without taking away any of the freedom they need to get there. In the meantime, there’s always more of Rapture to see, alternate endings to discover, and different play styles to try. I have Metroid Prime 3: Corruption waiting in the wings as the perfect shooty pallet cleanser, and then it’s back to Rapture for another go.

I genuinely can’t wait.

You spend a lot of time in Bioshock looking for things to keep you alive. The most useful items for this are pretty obvious: first aid kits fill your health bar, and EVE hypos give you more juice for using Plasmids. But there’s more to it than that – in a lovely stroke of world building, the developers have filled Rapture’s ruins with all manner of other things to help you along. Bags of chips, cakes, and bread fill your health while candy bars and coffee up your EVE levels. Cigarettes take away from your health but boost your EVE, while any of the many bottles of liquor lying around cost you a small bit of the Plasmid juice in exchange for health and game world going wobbly for a bit. Drink enough and you can become very, very drunk, stumbling into walls and debris as the room swims around you. Combined with the loss of EVE, it’s a nice bit of balance to keep players from freely imbibing their way to full health meters as they make their way through the game. Or rather, it was.

While running through the caberet-gone-mad area known as Fort Frolic, I stumbled on to a Plasmid called Booze Hound. With Booze Hound equipped, your body learns to process alcohol better, meaning you gain EVE instead of losing it. You can still get drunk, which leaves you extremely vulnerable if any Splicers show up, but who cares? You can still get drunk.

And that’s why, when I was low on health and EVE, I ran for one of Rapture’s bars. Reprogramming the nearby security system to attack any one that wasn’t me, I settled in to the bar’s well-stocked storage room and started grabbing bottles. Somewhere Bobby Darin played on a record player, and from a small window I could watch fish swim past a lonely corpse on the ocean floor. Even with the occasional sound of gun fire as some poor Splicer stumbled in front of one of my security cameras, it was the most relaxing time I’d had since coming to the city.

More, including spoilers, after the jump.

So where to start? Tempting as it is to do a sort of road journal of play through the game, I’m less interested in talking about the game as I encountered it than I am in holding up specific moments for a closer look. So let’s start with one of the nastier, more subtle layers of Bioshock’s experience: addiction.

“ADAM changed everything,” intones Atlas through the radio, referring to Rapture’s unique genetic currency that opens up the doors for genetic modification. And it’s true: while syringes full of EVE power the Plasmids that allow you to upgrade and change your body, there’s only so far you can go down the road of personal improvement before you run in to ADAM. Want to use more than two Plasmids at a time? You’ll need ADAM to buy the extra slots. Want to grow armor plates over your skin to defend against attacks, become invisible to the city’s security cameras, or fry anybody that strikes you with a sudden electric shock? It can all be yours if you’ve got the ADAM needed to create new slots in your genetic code for Plasmids to fit into. And there’s the problem, of course: you don’t.

The concept of ADAM is kept vague at first – it’s something referred to occasionally by Atlas, the disembodied voice guiding you through Rapture, as the root of the city’s immediate problems. It’s implied that there used to be lots of the stuff, allowing anybody to modify themselves to their heart’s content, until the city’s founder choked off the supply in a desperate move to retake the city that was slipping out of his control. The Splicers you encounter in the game are the result of that – citizens so warped by their addiction to self improvement, so driven by the desire to be just a little better, just a little more that they’re just as likely turn on each other as attack you if it means getting their hands on more ADAM. Yes, it’s a critique on blind Objectivism and the dangers of making the individual all-important at the expense of the community. But it’s also a warning to you, the new kid in town and so far untouched by the lure of ADAM: The difference between you and the monsters running through the city is little more than a need.

And it’s not long before you get your first taste of that need. Bioshock, as developers Irrational have always said, is a game about choices, the major one being what to do with the Little Sisters, the genetically modified little girls with pink dresses and glowing eyes that roam the city harvesting Adam from its abundance of corpses. However, before you ever get to that big choice you’re confronted with a smaller but still important one: You can only carry two Plasmids at a time, and when you discover your third one, something has to get left behind. Which gets cut? One you definitely need to progress, but the other you decide to keep depends on your playing style – go with the more precise Electrobolt, or the more dangerous (to you and your enemies) Incinerate? While your choice will have an interesting affect on the next leg of the game, what’s more important is the realization that only carrying two Plasmids at a time just isn’t going to cut it. All alone in a city gone mad with no help and very little hope, leaving any sort of weapon behind can be stomach turning. Clearly, something will have to be done to up the number of abilities you can use. And while you don’t know it yet, the only way to do so is with ADAM.

So flash forward to your first real encounter with a Little Sister. Her protective Big Daddy, the hulking brute in deep-sea diver gear that constantly accompanies each girl has just been killed by Splicers, leaving her all alone in the world. You’ve seen what Little Sisters do, watched as one stabbed a wicked looking syringe into a dead body while softly singing to herself. As Atlas explains, “Someone took a precious baby girl and turned her into a monster,” stripping away her humanity to make her a living storage device for Adam. Only now the monster is defenseless and scared, crying over her dead friend and scared of you, the stranger with a wrench. As you approach her, two options appear on the screen: “Harvest” or “Rescue”. You’ve got Atlas yelling in your ear that there’s nothing human left to them and that harvesting them will get you maximum ADAM, and a strange woman shouting that they can still be saved and that if you help them she’ll make it worth your while. And then you make Bioshock’s big choice. And one way or another, you get your first taste of the potential that ADAM opens up to you.

Like all the other choices available to you in the game, what you do with the Little Sisters has consequences that reverberate through the rest of your time in Rapture – some obvious, some less so. As you move forward and the enemies become harder, the number of Plasmids you can buy and equip with ADAM increases, offering a way of evening the odds. But they aren’t cheap, and what seemed like a lot of ADAM at first turns out to only go a little way. It’s here that the real choice at the heart of Bioshock presents itself – can you survive with less ADAM, or do you give in to the temptation of instant gratification that comes with harvesting? Just how badly do you need to be better, to be strong enough to get out of Rapture alive? The difficult decision is compounded by what it takes to get the girls on their own in the first place – a long, painful fight with her Big Daddy that will likely cost you plenty in ammo, first aid kits, and EVE. Killing a Big Daddy often leaves you hurt and vulnerable, and you have to quickly choose what to do with your prize before the Splicers come to collect her.

So which way do you go? Hero or addict, savior or Splicer? Addiction colors every aspect of Rapture, from what’s left of its people to the crumbling, leaking architecture, and not a choice goes by where you can’t feel it clawing at the edges of your reason. It’s just one of many ways in which Bioshock reveals the true weight behind its shooter game play, by showing players how hard it actually is to maintain the black and white separation of good guys and bad in a world gone gray. This isn’t a game with a clear cut arch-villain, stroking his mustache and patiently waiting for you to try and save the princess, it’s a world gone to ruin that you’re caught up in and now must survive. It’s what you are or aren’t willing to do to survive that matters, and even then those choices don’t make you the hero of the piece – they just make you you. Bioshock is a game about choices, both yours and the ones made by the citizens of Rapture, and what it means to live with them. Or put another way, it’s a game about us.