BioShock (PC) | (Xbox 360)
Matthew Rorie
Game Guides Editor
Add to My Tracked Games >>Platform: PC, Xbox 360
Rlease Date: Q2 2007
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Irrational Games
It's been almost eight years since System Shock II, the spooky trapped-in-a-space-station shooter role-playing hybrid from Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios, hit store shelves and sent many gamers into all-night playing sessions. It was a gripping adventure, appearing on plenty of "best of" lists at the end of 1999, and had an ending that left plenty of room for a sequel. Unfortunately, the series has been in limbo since Looking Glass Studios went out of business in 2000.
Thankfully, Irrational Games is still around and kicking, and though the studio isn't developing a true sequel to System Shock II, it has gone one better and is revisiting the "suspense shooter" genre with BioShock, an exceedingly good-looking and atmospheric game that, while unrelated to the plot events of System Shock, is an attempt to re-create the mood and gameplay design of those titles.
BioShock takes place in Rapture, a completely underwater city that was developed as a colony for artists and scientists to take refuge from the cares of the world and work on their pursuits in peace. Unfortunately, something has gone horribly wrong, and most of the inhabitants of the city are dead. Remaining beings include small girls known as "little sisters" who harvest genetic material from the dead bodies, and "big daddies," huge, lumbering constructs that protect little sisters from anyone who wishes to harm them--along with other genetic mutants and robotic defenders.
While the plot of the game is still wrapped in mystery--you apparently play as the survivor of a wreck on the ocean's surface and somehow manage to survive by entering Rapture--one thing is abundantly clear from the demos and trailers for BioShock: This is going to be one of the creepiest games of 2007. While the retro "art deco" style of Rapture lends the game a delicate kind of beauty, the violence inherent in your struggle to survive (which may even involve hunting the little sisters for their stores of genetic material) and the gameplay that evolves around it seem like a heartening return to the haunted-house atmosphere of System Shock II. It's not a stretch to imagine that many of the same storytelling devices of that game will reappear in BioShock, such as piecing together story elements from audio logs of frightened citizens, journal entries, and the like.
BioShock already won our Best of Show award for E3 2006, in the face of some pretty tough competition, so I'm personally hoping it manages to deliver on the high expectations I'm building for it. We won't have long to wait, though, as the game is scheduled for release this spring.
Phil Elliott
Editor, GameSpot UK
Will Wright. SimCity. The Sims. The Sims 2. Expansion packs. World domination.
The missing word in that logical progression is Spore, a game that I, for one, am looking forward to finally playing. It seems as though we've been reading about this game forever, watching Wright's demonstrations and barely contained enthusiasm for a pliable, open-ended, original experience.
Later this year the hype will climax, and we'll all be designing weird-looking creatures from blobs of amorphous matter, setting them loose on an unsuspecting world, and watching to see if they survive. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Perhaps they'll flourish and begin to develop--and if they do? Game on.
But this game isn't about having fun with weird little creatures and trying to get them to mate and populate a world. Most games would be happy with a potentially vast set of objectives that such a game design could hold, especially when you consider the sheer number of different combinations of creatures you could design. But not Spore.
Once your creatures establish themselves, they evolve. They get smart, eventually, and allow you, their god, to design tribes, then cities, and even advance to space travel, which lets you take your little civilizations and put them in real perspective against other creations happening elsewhere in the universe. It's not a game that simulates life; it's a game that simulates everything--past, present, and future.
It's a grand ambition, and one that I'd be a little skeptical about if this game were being designed by anybody else. After all, the complexity must be horrible, right? Wrong. From what we've seen, it's actually as simple and accessible as The Sims. Using the game's creature creator to make your new species can take less than 10 minutes, even though you might be tempted to lose yourself there for hours. And the rest of the game seems to follow this simple design ethic.
There are still some areas that are a little hazy, of course. For a game like this, the logical conclusion to events might see you take your civilization online and trade or battle with other civilizations, form alliances, cross-breed your species, and so on. Well, that's not the plan for Spore just yet, but who knows what the future might hold?
In the meantime I'm expecting to see Spore sell, if not as well as The Sims franchises, then something close to it, and when the game is released, I'll be first in line to start uploading my creations for others to marvel at. Or maybe just laugh at.
Randolph Ramsay
Editor, GameSpot AU
Mario zooms off to the final frontier in 2007 with Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii, and if the demo level Nintendo's been showing off since last year's E3 is anything to go by, it'll be a welcome return to form for the world's most famous princess-saving plumber. While the last Mario platformer for a Nintendo home console--2002's Super Mario Sunshine--offered only marginal improvements to the genre-defining Super Mario 64, Galaxy looks set to push the franchise into new territory thanks to the game's use of the Wii controllers and its gravity-bending outer-space setting.
Few details have been confirmed about the game's story so far, but we do know that--surprise, surprise--Princess Peach gets herself kidnapped once again, and it's up to Mario to travel into space to save her. The demo level we played contained plenty of recognizable Mario features, such as coins to collect, goombas to be stomped on, and Bullet Bills to be smacked, but it was the game's new additions that had us most excited. Galaxy's controls, while feeling initially strange, quickly become second nature. You'll use the Nunchuk attachment to move Mario, and the Wii Remote is used to jump and interact with objects. Pointing the remote at any floating jewels (which Mario will apparently hoard in this game, like the classic gold coins from his previous adventures) will instantly collect them, for example, while pointing at enemies will freeze them in place. And that's not the end of it. Nintendo promises plenty more new moves for Mario--moves that can be performed by either tilting, pointing, or shaking the Wii Remote.
Galaxy's unique take on gravity also promises to give gamers some tasty new challenges. The demo we played had Mario blasting from small planet to small planet, where he was able to run along the top, sides, and even upside-down on the planets' lower halves. It can be a tad disorienting, but we're expecting Nintendo to come up with some unique puzzles to take full advantage of the wacky physics.
Innovations aside, perhaps one of the most compelling reasons why we're looking forward to Galaxy is that there haven't been any new console Mario platform games for almost five years. Let's face it--a Nintendo console, even one as unique as the Wii, just doesn't feel right without a Mario platformer available on it. Any chance of pushing the release date forward at all, Miyamoto-san?
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