“Bioshock” Meets a Shopping Cart

I love this Photoshop job in which Rapture (the setting of the game BioShock) propaganda replaces the standard “Do not leave child unattended” message on grocery shopping carts:

The line is derived from the philosophy of game character Andrew Ryan (whose name and backstory are rearrangements of Ayn Rand). You hear it in an in-game recording in Ryan’s own voice:

I am Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.

No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.

No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible.

I chose…Rapture.

A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

If you’re looking for a gift for someone with an XBox 360 or a PC with enough horsepower to play modern first-person shooter games, you might want to consider BioShock as a gift. It’s an excellent game that blends gaming action with a very rich backstory — quite possibly the richest since Myst. Better still, it’s can be finished in an amount of time that still lets you have a life: at the “easy” level, I finished it in a about a week, playing a couple of hours a day, and I’m a relatively casual gamer.

Links

• 2KGames’ official BioShock page
• BioShock’s Wikipedia entry
• Bioshock review in MetaCritic (where it’s the highest-rated game in the XBox 360 section)
• SomethingAwful’s review of BioShock, complete with SomethingAwful’s trademark irreverence
• The Escapists’s video review of BioShock (worth watching!)