The sequel: The BioShock games are that rare think in contemporary, big budget game production. Critical darlings that are also commercial successes...although, not quite successful enough, since despite Infinite being one of the biggest games of last year, it failed to turn a profit for its developers and Irrational Games shuttered their doors not long after its release. Woops. Anyway, let's not dwell on that, and instead celebrate one of the most interesting, inventive and daring series of recent years (in terms of narrative, anyway). Not content with making another simple FPS, Irrational chose to bolster their games with interesting mechanics - the plasmids in the first two games and vigors in Infinite, which let you wield special powers along with shooting things - and stories which drew on more diverse sources than dumb action movies (Ayn Rand in the first game, the dark beginnings of American history in Infinite) and featured some pretty gnarly plot twists along the way. You might still have been running and gunning, but the BioShock games felt smarter than the average. The original: A trait they share along with a very similar name. System Shock (and its actual, legit sequel) were both developed by Irrational Games, too, and directed by Ken Levine to boot. Both were first-person shooters which favoured story and suspense over just letting you kill a bunch of people, as they let you explore a seemingly abandoned space ship and piece together what happened through journal entries on computer terminal. Which is pretty much the exact same as how the first BioShock works, as you wander around the ruined remains of underwater city Rapture and listen to audio recordings on reel-to-reel tape. The games even have an almost identical twist: the first BioShock has the reveal that the friendly Irish man who's been guiding you via the radio is actually the Big Bad, and System Shock's friendly AI turns out to be anything but. BASICALLY IDENTICAL.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
