Bioshock - Daily Wrapup

After a confusing start, the Bioshock demo is in general release. If you don't have it yet, grab the 1.84Gb file from Gamer's Hell, Worthplaying and the usual mirrors.

Don't forget updated drivers - both nVidia and ATI have new (beta) drivers with Bioshock optimisations.

Respected journalist Keiron Gillen has an interview with Ken Levine - apparently initiated by Ken, which is rather unusual - on his site Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

RPS: The other thing about the Spiritual Sequel line is that I think it confuses people. I see lots of Shock 2 in there, sure… but I think it’s closer to Shock 1, in many ways. Being based on the equipment rather than actual statistics - that it’s more of a shooter with a lot of things piled on top…

KL: Absolutely. It’s funny, as when we were making Shock 2, any time there was any deviation from Shock 1 there was a lot of very angry people. And now people are forgetting that Shock 2 really added all those RPG elements and character growth stuff that wasn’t in Shock 1, which was more of a clean FPS. There may be some more similarities, in that regard. And hey! I’m cool with that.

On that note, they also have a short feature on the original System Shock.

...and Worthplaying has a review with a score of 9.2/10:

If Bioshock has one notable flaw, it lies in the game's difficulty level, or lack thereof. On the normal difficulty level, it's just a bit too easy. It is still fun, but once you start getting a solid number of plasmids, you can tear through every Splicer in your way as if they were nothing. By the end of the game, I was using the default wrench on every enemy, not because I needed to save ammo, but because my plasmids made the Wrench so ridiculously powerful that it would have taken me longer to kill Splicers with a gun. I was rarely using many of the plasmids or alternate weapon types available to me — only the wrench, Electro Bolt and the occasional grenade and armor-piercing bullets for the Big Daddies. A game being easy isn't a tremendous flaw, but considering the wide variety of options available to you in defeat foes, it's rather wearisome that the straightforward smash-and-grab technique is the most effective. The game does offer a hard mode, however, for those gamers eager to up the ante a bit, but the differences between the modes are not quite enough to give experienced players a much harder time, although it does encourage the use of some of the lesser-used plasmids.

...while GameSpot says 9/10:

While on the surface it might look like little more than a very pretty first-person shooter, BioShock is much, much more than that. Sure, the action is fine, but its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters, who convey most of the story via radio transmissions and audio logs that you're constantly stumbling upon as you wander around. All of it blends together to form a rich, interesting world that sucks you in right away and won't let go until you've figured out what, exactly, is going on in the undersea city of Rapture.

...and Tom Chick says 5/5 at Yahoo!:

Roll over, Half-Life. BioShock is the best single-player shooter out there. It's one of those rare games that comes along every five or ten years, sucks you in, knocks your socks off, and haunts you for years after you've played it.