What I remember the most is the first time I saw it.

In the opening moments of 2K Boston's BioShock, the protagonist, after a plane crash over the Atlantic in 1960, finds himself in the water, with a lonely lighthouse his only chance at rescue. Clambering into the lighthouse, you discover a bathysphere leading to an underwater portal. That portal takes you to the city of Rapture.

Rapture. Created by industrialist Andrew Ryan in the 1930s as an Objectivist paradise, where businessmen, scientists, and artists could roam free without the constrictions of government, religion, and socialism. The initial shot of the city, as the hero inside his bathysphere floats his way towards the entrance, is one of the most breathtaking scenes I've ever seen in a game. Bioshock doesn't have any cut scenes so the player is experiencing the introduction of Rapture in real time. The architecture, the sights, the sounds, the strange beings you can see through windows and walkways, it's all so beautiful, but the recording by Ryan that introduces you to it is... off somehow. Ryan's a John Galt/Howard Roark type figure, and he comes with the usual Randian snark tinge that seems bitter when it's meant to be wondrous.

It's when that bathysphere finally docks you find out why. Rapture was founded on human achievement; but it's crumbling under the weight of human avarice. And it's one of the most memorable places you'll visit in gaming.

It's taken me a very long time to get around to playing BioShock; long before I was even considering buying an XBox 360 I had discovered The Twist- you know that game changing event everyone had hinted at in review after review. I figured that since I knew about it, that the game would be ruined for me. However, last summer I downloaded the demo on a lark, and found I couldn't stop playing it. The way the game grabs you  from moment one, using the same immersive, no cut scene technique perfected by the Half-Life games.

Once the sole survivor Jack makes it out of the biosphere and into Rapture proper, the city is in complete chaos. Violent, mad citizens called "Splicers" attack the player, and each other, for an elusive, Rapture developed subtance called Adam,  which are stem cells mass produced harvested from sea slugs implanted in the stomachs of young girls. Adam powers Plasmids, which rewrite the user's genetic code to give them powers of telekensis, pyromania, and plenty of other first person shooter- ready super powers. Initially the game gives you lightning shooting powers, but the more you progress, the more varied the Plasmids come, and you'll want to try them all out. Aside from the Splicers, strange cyborgs called Big Daddies roam the streets and hallways of Rapture, protecting "Little Sisters"- the strange, spooky girls who are carrying the Adam within their bodies. Not to mention all the other denizens of Rapture who have carved the city up into fiefdoms of the mad.

With the radio he acquires at the outset, Jack is guided by Atlas, a worker inside Rapture who's trying to escape with his family and who also had something to do with the revolt against Ryan that preciptated Rapture's collapse. Atlas guides you througout a good chunk of the game, providing a tutorial of the basics of the world. Not long after your journey begins, however, you encounter a Little Sister brimming with Adam. Atlas says you can just harvest her Adam, killing her, but another mysterious figure, Dr. Bridgette Tenenbaum, who implores you to use your powers to cure the girls at the cost of far less Adam than you would get if you harvested them. BioShock, as Yahtzee memorably complained in his review of the game, errs on the side of just a little to easy, so unless you're playing on hard whether to have more Adam or not isn't really an issue. Yet, the game does make the choice compelling, since it soon becomes clear that both Atlas and Tenenbaum don't exactly have Jack's best interests at heart, and aren't telling him the truth about what's going on. And what of the little sisters in all of this? Are they soulless monsters, or can they be redeemed? The Little Sisters are protected by the Big Daddies, which look like monstrous diving suits with drills for right arms. Battling them are some of the toughest fights you will have in the game; and it's hard not to feel affected when you vanquish one of them and the Little Sister it was guarding weeps, imploring them to get up.

Tons of recordings are hidden throughout the city of rapture as Jack stumbles his way through, trying to survive. These recordings provide a portrait of a world created with good intentions but done in by human nature. Soon you'll be hunting for the recordings just as much as you want to get to the next area, because each morsel of story paints an increasingly grim and horriying picture.

Ken Levine and 2K Boston do take a lot of inspiration from the works of Ayn Rand, as I've mentioned. While the author is never mentioned, Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, and how it would work if applied in the real world, along with dollops of the plot of her novel of Atlas Shrugged, take a pretty damn severe beating throughout the game. I've played games with political commentary before, but never a game as well thought out in what it wants to say as this one. While Ryan's idealistic utopia where we can all run free created the beautiful city of Rapture, the sheer need to keep that liberty absolute damned it. There aren't just paralells to Atlas Shrugged, there are paralells in Rand's real life story- Atlas at times feels inspired heavily by Rand acolyte Nathaniel Branden. While it's fair for me to say I don't like Objectivism as a lot of people practice it, not one bit, take the following with a grain of salt if you're too politically sensitive: BioShock's politics, for a video game, are not only admirably well thought out, they're downright subversive. Interestingly, fans of the Marvel series Weapon X will also find that Malcolm Colcord, Andrew Ryan, Frank Fontaine, and Brent Jackson have a bit in common with each other.

Rapture is such a beautiful place, you keep wanting to see more and more of it, and the game guides you through, on an extremely linear path, but you never feel like you're missing anything and it never gets boring. And then you reach The Twist. Now I actually have one or two issues with The Twist- if you really think about it, it's not entirely necessary to the plan of the game's antagonist, for one thing. But even when you know what's coming, it's still a kick to the gut, and it's not some kind of "Oh, by the way, the final boss fight is next!" sort of thing. The game still has a lot of story to go, allowing the player/Jack to deal with the revelations and how it makes you feel about what your final goal is. One of the story's few disappointments is the moral choice system, which is  weak-ass binary thing- a good or bad ending depending on whether you harvest little sisters or not. But overall it's one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had with a game's story.

The voice acting is impeccable. Armin Shimmerman- well, he's general Skarr. He's Quark from DS9. He's Principal Snyder. We KNOW he's awesome. But Andrew Ryan is possibly one of his greatest roles. Ryan is haughty, nasty, self-absorbed- but there's something about him, something about the way Shimmerman carries the character that shows just how and why everyone followed him to Rapture, and that maybe, just maybe, inside the hyper-materialistic wretch there once resided a genuinely hopeful soul. Greg Baldwin is terrific as Atlas, and if I could determine who voiced Tenenbaum, I'd mention her name too, but both Wiki and IMDb fail me.

All of this singing of the story's praises would mean nothing if the game didn't have awesome play to go with it, and BioShock does, with a vengeance. BioShock is the most impeccably designed game I've played since the first God of War game back in 2005. The game gives you so many options to take down your enemies. You can use the typical varied guns, or the Plasmids. And the Plasmids are amazing. One of them makes you shoot bees from your hand. BEES! How cool is that? And they actually work! It's fun working out which one works best for a given situation or battle with the game's many freakish enemies.

The FPS play is broken up with short puzzle segments, called hacking. Whether it's to hack a vending machine to give you cheaper items, hacking a video camera so it won't detect you, or hacking a turret so it'll fire on your enemies, you enter a single screen riff on Pipe Dreams, and have to hack the water in time to take control. Hacking isn't particularly deep but it's addicting.

The one minigame that doesn't work for me is  the research part. Early on you get a camera that you have to use for some parts of the main story. BUt mostly, you're supposed to use it to take pictures of enemies and fully "research" them to gain added damage on them. With so many enemies bum rushing you and so much chaos going on in some fights, this really is more of a hassle than anything else, and unless you need the achievements, the results are pretty negligible, because as said, the game can be really easy.

Easy though it may be, BioShock is a riveting experience. In case you haven't figured it out already, I freakin' love this game. The controls are tight and precise. The graphics are incredible. It can be challenging despite the little penalty for death, but never frustrating. The game makes you think about the decisions you make, and care about the world of Rapture. It's rare- extremely rare- that I'm emotionally affected by a game (one of the few games in this category is- no lie- Kingdom Hearts) but when I reached the conclusion of BioShock the first time I had a real lump in my throat. So yes, if you haven't played this, or think you don't need to, don't worry- it really is that good.