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BioShock is definitely the best 360 shooter on the platform. Most of my friends are probably tired of my story revolving around it, but people on the internet have never heard it, so here you go:
I hated first-person shooters, I played Halo, I played Golden Eye 64, but for the most part I could never really get into them. Conversations around FPSes equally frustrated me, if first-person perspective was supposed to be the most immersive gaming perspective why the hell did I hate playing in it so much. I always felt a natural disconnect in FPSes, but until recently never knew what it was. It’s that FPSes don’t give us great peripheral vision, or realistic looking peripheral vision. The edges of the screen always slam that 4th wall back into place.
When Bioshock came out though, that wasn’t the issue for me. The issue for me was that I didn’t know how to play FPSes. Oh sure, I could get through the game, but the audio files, the turrets, electric plasmas, communicating with Atlas, the pounding steps of a Big Daddy, it was all so overwhelming. I was used to cut scenes and I like cut-scenes.
After 20 minutes of the game I decided that I wasn’t enjoying myself and that it wasn’t the game’s fault, it was my fault.
Having gotten myself to play Portal, and loving it as much as everyone else, I decided that I’d have to play more then Portal from The Orange Box to justify having bought it at full retail price. So I was going to go through the Half-Life series. This meant dragging myself through the original Half-Life on the PC, which if you know me, a keyboard and mouse just doesn’t click for gaming. It did though and I had a great time. Thank god for PC gaming’s save systems.
So I went through the games one by one, learning along the way the terminology of a FPS. I learned to judge what kinds of strategies to use in certain kinds of confrontations, I learned how to assess which jumps I could and couldn’t make, something that always irked me in first person, and by the time I finished Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the perspective and the action came naturally to me.
When I finally got around to playing BioShock again, for the second time, I could listen to Atlas, gun down enemies, and avoid turrets, without thinking about it. With so much more of my brain power available to me, I could appreciate the aspects of BioShock that really brought it together, the atmosphere, the crazed enemies, the eclectic personalities, the richness of the world. Rapture was truly defined.
When I’d explore and search Rapture I never got lost like I would in other shooters, because in the corner of my screen I'd catch the sight of something glittering gold. Drawing my attention further into Rapture.
