While waiting impatiently for something else to download over the weekend, I booted up BioShock 1 for the first time in years, curious to see how it held up a half-decade on. I’d forgotten how remarkable and how magnetic its first few minutes are: whatever else you want to accuse the game of, the work it does in so quickly and so assuredly building a world and a mountain of intrigue around it is something we see all too little of. The vast majority of mainstream games open with enough dry exposition to choke a rhino, but this grabs your total attention with a bare minimum of talk, a steady flow of unpredictable spectacle and a spinetingling cocktail of awe and anxiety. Irrational are, I think, right to leave Rapture behind – but, for no particular reason other than ‘why not?’, let’s remember just why they built it in the first place.(more…)