*might contain spoilers for Bioshock*

Well, I've finally got into my Bioshock copy and pounded it out and easily got all the achievements for the S-Rank.
 
It took me awhile to get around to it. Unfortunately Bioshock was the game that I had to scratch in order to learn not to move the 360 while it was reading from a disk, way back in 2008 when the game was released. I did find another copy of the game later in early 2009, but by then I had lost my save files (On my first run through of the game, prior to destroying the disk, I had gotten up to just before killing Andrew Ryan and leaning the truth about Atlas) and the gameplay aside from the exploration and discovery was not compelling enough for me to break through until that point. I tried again almost exactly a year ago (about a week off, according to my save file dates) but by then I had already had the storyline spoiled for me and, due to other games to play, was unable to get farther than Fort Frolic, where I had already been.
 
My Bioshock copy has been taunting me since then. Always it lies there among my game cases and I leave it there, unable to get back into the game. For whatever reason though I decided to play through it again and pound through the game. I checked the achievements, having had gotten into them because of Giantbomb primarily, and decided to S-Rank the game as a motivation, considering that I could do it all on one playthrough. I downloaded the DLC for the new tonics and achievement, turned off the Vita Chambers, checked which achievements were potentially miss-able, and played through the game on Hard, beating it and getting all of the achievements.
 
My thoughts on the game now that it is finished: The vita chambers were done poorly. When I played the game in 2008 they made the game much too easy to exploit and offered little reason not to. Now, playing it with the Vita Chamber off, the game still didn't seem challenging, since, instead of having respawn points at certain points, you would restart where you saved last, making it necessary to save often. Upon death, you were not presented with a clean option to load the last save, instead you were unceremoniously booted from the game to the main menu where you could choose to reload. Had there been a game over/death screen with a quick load option it would have been much better. Or, preferably, the Vita Chambers could have been done better in the first place and served as auto saves where you would respawn while losing progress beyond that point. Combat was difficult in the beginning, especially in regards to taking down Big Daddys, but became much easier as I upgraded weapons/plasmids/etc. Also, there was no incentive to use anything beyond Lightning, Fire, Ice, and Telekenisis as these were always helpful instead of the others which were extremely situational and not particularly better in those situations. With the weapons I used little other than the wrench and shotgun for the splicers, and included the grenade launcher in the fights against the Big Daddys.  I did very much enjoy the atmosphere when I first played through the game circa 2008 and did get a certain amount of chills when seeing the confrontation with Ryan this time around, but the staggered way in which I played the game took a lot of it out for me. I'm not a great reviewer however, and others have elaborated on these points more succinctly than I have. 
 
Maybe in the future I will play some more Bioshock. I am now curious about Bioshock 2, but I have heard less than impressive things about it, and will definitely be looking forward to Infinite (though it is debatable as a Bioshock game). The game was good but it was unfortunately ruined for me to ever place it on a personal favourites list.