Promise is possibly the most powerful weapon in videogames. The promise and possibilities that a title like BioShock dangles tantalisingly in front of us keeps us all hanging on in there, keeps us believing, keeps us pre-ordering. Even when the shelves are awash with me-too pap, cheap knock-off lice...

Bioshock is set in 1960 in a secret, undersea metropolis called Rapture. The city is the magnum opus of entrepreneurial genius Andrew Ryan, a man who rejected the socialist tendencies of both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the judgmental morality of the church. Ryan sought to con...