Standard practice for all games that include shooter elements: play up the shooter elements (since everyone understands them, and they show of them thar fancy particles), and downplay/ignore everything else.
Making a stealth game? Show off how you can sneak up behind an NPC, slit their throat, and toss their body over the railing to demonstrate the physics. Ignore the patience elements: hiding in shadows for 15 minutes listening to guard patrol patterns.
Making an RPG? Show off the combat, the monsters, fireballs, spell-casting animations, etc. Ignore the character interaction and all those hard-to-read words
in the dialogs.
Making a mindless shooter? Show off killing things, blowing stuff up, and explosive headshots. Ignore... Well, there often isn't anything else to ignore.
Previews of games all too often focus on the killing and explosions that you find in virtually every game. Those are easy to show, and make for great "demo movies" (pardon me if I think the word "demo" should only be applied to an EXE I can download and play for myself).
Then they ignore or downplay all of the distinctive elements that don't show well, require patience, or require a lengthy background explaination for you to understand what's going on. But these are the elements that I consider most important in making a judgement whether a game is a "must buy" when it's first released, or whether I ignore it and reconsider after the fact if it turns out to be worthwhile after all (re: Stalker dot dot dot).
And it's the parts they ignore that are most telling. If they don't show something, we can't know if it's even in the game, whether it's stripped-down or "streamlined", or whether it's normal fare for the genre. Although if it is something the devs consider impressive, it will be shown. Absense isn't necessarily a bad sign, but it is seldom a good sign.
All of the preview material I've seen on Bioshock has focused on blowing things up, killing stuff, and how plasmids can be used to explode and/or kill stuff. We're told there is a story. We're told you get to make meaningful decisions. We're told -- often on the side through message boards -- lots of side details.
But we don't get to see them. That's the part that is making me cranky. About this game and all the others coming down the pipe. I don't care about killing and explosions. That's a given. It's a tiresome cliche, so far as I'm concerned. But I understand that's what sells the most games.
I want to see more of the other things. The details that are going to distinguish this game from any other flashy, unsatisfying shooter. But they're not showing any of that (and if they have, I missed it, someone please post a link). We're told that this is a game that will appeal to fans of Thief and SS, but I haven't seen anything to convince me this will be more than a generic, performance-hungry shooter.
Meanwhile, Ken keeps chanting, "It's an FPS! It's an FPS!"
I loved Thief. And Deus Ex. And Bloodlines. But not SS2. Sorry, but it tried too hard to be an FPS.
Mr. Levine, please, show me something that will convince me this is a game I will enjoy. Show me, don't tell me.