At least BioShock's cinematic and narrative qualities are as compelling as we'd hoped, so you'll get to fully enjoy the impact of each of those secrets you uncover. Like System Shock 2, you'll occasionally see ghostly afterimages that play out often-macabre previous events for your grim viewing pleasure. As mentioned, those audio logs that were so effective in establishing System Shock 2's storyline are back here. Again, they'll run the gamut from Rapture's most brilliant (and often twisted) scientific minds to Ryan's inebriated socialite consort whining about the excesses of Adam at a New Year's celebration. You should also expect lots of tense scripted events to occur within the gameworld. (The savage first appearance of a big daddy is one moment in particular we aren't likely to forget soon.)
The development team is in the final stages of balancing gameplay and applying artistic polish to BioShock. The game is looking incredibly rich, thanks to the Unreal Engine and Irrational's own modifications to it. Currently, the game is slated to hit both the Xbox 360 and PC in August. For those of you wondering how BioShock will straddle PC and console interfaces when similar past games have famously failed to do so, Levine offers a novel but simple solution: Two separate teams of designers are working on the controls and interfaces for each version. And after the extremely impressive first bit of BioShock we've tried so far, we may just have to play through both of them.
