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In august of 2007, a little known game developer named Irrational Games brought to the video game world a new game called Bioshock. Bioshock was a combination first person shooter/survival horror.
The game introduced players to the fictional city of Rapture, a city located beneath the ocean. Meant to be a utopian world whose inhabitants would be able to live in peace, Rapture was a city whose inhabitants could escape from the corruption and politics of the world above.
Players step into the role of Jack, a passenger who was on a plane that winds up going down over the Atlantic Ocean in 1960. Miraculously for Jack (and for the player) he’s the only survivor of the crash and he somehow makes his way to nearby island that has a lighthouse on it.
Jack enters the lighthouse only to discover that the lighthouse is a gate of sorts to get to the underwater city of Rapture, a city where strange things are happening on a regular basis. Jack has to survive in this undersea city long enough to discover it many secrets, but that won’t be easy because Jack’s trying to survive attacks from mechanical drones and strange mutated creatures that live in the city.
Both of the games in the series were very popular. The first game sold in excess of 400,000 copies, spawned its sequel in Bioshock 2 which also sold copies in excess of 562,000 units on the X-Box 360 alone.
Now get ready for the third edition of this popular video game called Bioshock Infinite. This time the game parts ways with its predecessors. Bioshock Infinite does not take place in the city of Rapture.
In this game, you play the role of Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, and your goal is to rescue a young lady named Elizabeth who finds herself trapped onboard the floating city of Columbia sometime in the year 1912.
The thing that is most impressive about the Bioshock series isn’t as much about the game play, as it is about the game’s fantastical environments that the characters (and of course, we the players) find ourselves in. Underwater utopian cities and cities suspended in the clouds via giant air balloons and blimps, and the actual ideals that are a part of the game are just as an important part of these games as the actual aspects of game play and adds a depth to the game that is lacking in many of the other games in this genre.
