BioShock PS3: It's Totally BioShock

Last week we took a quick trip up the road to visit 2K's Marin office and see a work-in-progress version of BioShock for the PlayStation 3 and play through the first hour or so of the game. Not having played the game since it was released on the PC and Xbox 360, it was interesting to see how quickly my memories of Rapture came rushing back. As the first time I've been able to play it on the PlayStation 3, it was also interesting to note how A-OK this updated port of one of 2007's most beloved games is shaping up.

In short, the game really doesn't seem very different from the game you probably played last year. And that's the main goal of everyone involved in the project. 2K has had help from both Sony and Digital Extremes to ensure that the quality of the PS3 version is up to par with the others.

That quality seems perfectly intact. The PS3 seems to be perfectly capable of rendering Rapture just as it appeared in 2007. The main changes you'll see with this version include things like Survivor mode, which is a new, harder difficulty setting. By giving the enemies more health and making you able to take less damage before going down, the harder difficulty makes it running up and mindlessly swinging your wrench at guys a less effective tactic. Of course, since you can still easily respawn at the nearest vita-chamber, it's still perfectly possible to just sloppily die your way through the game.

But the game also has all of the downloadable updates that rolled out to 360 owners, including the ability to turn off vita-chambers. This forces you to be better about manually saving your game and play with some more skill. Personally, I found the normal difficulty to be just fine in BioShock--the main idea is to experience the story without being punished over and over again, so all this new "let's make BioShock far less entertaining" content doesn't interest me at all.

Trophies, however, interest me. The game will ship with full trophy support. Ryan and I earned a handful during our time with the game, and 2K reps confirmed that the majority of the trophies are duplicates of the Xbox 360 version's achievements. There will be new trophies relating to the new Survivor difficulty.

The last real question I had about the PS3 version of BioShock related to the control. The DualShock 3 isn't always my favorite controller for first-person games. The sticks are a lot looser than the 360's, and this sometimes trips me up. But that doesn't seem to be an issue at all. The game controls just fine, and no weird Sixaxis tilty support has been crammed in.

A big part of BioShock was experiencing the undersea city of Rapture with no real clue as to what was happening--why are all these psychos living down here? What the hell happened to this purported utopia? And who the hell is Andrew Ryan? Figuring out the answers to these questions is way more important than the frame rate or texture quality of the world. But considering that many of the plot points in the game are now common knowledge, will it be as meaningful for PS3 stalwarts who haven't seen the game elsewhere? Will the PS3-exclusive downloadable content, which exists completely outside the game's main story, be enough to satisfy fans of the game looking for more? We'll get a new look at the downloadable stuff before the game's release, but in all likelihood we'll have to wait until the game's October 21 ship date to know for sure.