Tryzon said:
Moving on from title formats, what we've got here is 2007's game of the year for 97% of the planet's population. Folk at the time went on and on about the cool powers, the non-linearity, the "surprising" twist and the fact that various themes rarely touched on in games make prominent appearances. What all these people were apparently unaware of is that very nearly everything BioShock does well was pioneered in much the same manner by System Shock, which I've never even played but can still easily tell you from secondary data deserves all the praise its prettier, more mainstream successor got and continues to get.
Couple things...
First, I did not read all of the way through your laborious wall of text. That was astonishing. I actually RESPECT the laborious wall of text. I respect that you love games so much you have a ton of opinions on them and you spent that much time spilling them out. Unabashed enthusiasm is an admirable quality. But, as an editor, that was horrifying. Consider your audience. If you're going to put that up for public consumption, you need to find a way to whittle it down into a more digestible format. You're not writing the next great American Novel here. You're writing capsule reviews summarizing why you find certain popular titles overrated. I can tell you there is a healthy population on this forum who would find this paragraph I'm writing right now to be grotesquely overlong.
Second, in reference to the quoted above:
A) Dirty pool. If you're going to put sarcasm quotes around "surprising" you need to elucidate why you thought the much celebrated twist was worthy of scorn. Just tossing some quotes around it is lazy criticism.
B) You what now? Half of your Bioshock rundown was comparing it unfavorably to a game you never even played? If you were here, I would slap your face. Don't get me wrong, I ADORE System Shock, and I'm THRILLED to see it get recognized, even by someone who hasn't even played it. Was it better than Bioshock? Eh...I dunno. It was definitely years ahead of its time, though, which is something Bioshock cannot as readily lay claim to. Still, condemning a game as overrated because it dared to follow up on one of the most criminally under appreciated titles of all time (And did you know they WANTED to make System Shock 3, but EA wouldn't let them? Did you? I bet you didn't), a series Ken Levine himself was the lead developer for...well, that's just silly.