Remember when Wayne Campbell would skulk outside the music shop, eyeing that guitar and covetously whispering “it will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine.” That was me and any plus-size Hi-Def TV. Then a review copy of BioShock arrived in my mailbox and I had no choice but to buck up and buy the damn thing. Ain’t no way I was gonna use a standard set to play this instant classic.

Yep, I said it. Maybe I’m weary of all the half-ass summer games (Vampire Rain? Yeesh!) but BioShock is simply awesome, in both the slang and biblical meanings of the term.

Reportedly turned down by several publishers, including one who dubbed it “just another fucking FPS,” 2K Games’ fucking first-person shooter has proven to be so much more than that.

Though the usual FPS fundamentals are indeed in place, BioShock feels like the most fully realized digi-world since Oblivion but designed with even more depth and originality. How many art deco underwater utopias have you played in before? Or rather, it was a utopia. Slap a “dys” prefix on that because its founder, a millionaire industrialist named Andrew Ryan, had a plan to create a community free from the constraining ethics of the surface world, where people could experiment with their own genetic code so that mankind could reach its full potential. It has not gone so well.

You arrive here quite by accident. Plane accident. As with Lost, your transoceanic flight has gone awry. Landing somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, you swim through curiously beautiful oil-slicked water towards a lighthouse of some sort. There’s a strange submersible craft inside and soon you are descending many fathoms under the sea to a city dubbed Rapture.

The stylized art deco design is big part of the appeal--I’m a huge retro-futurism fan--and the claustrophobic atmosphere here is consistently deep, from the advertisements and propaganda broadcasts to the building structures and neon signs.

It’s also creepy as hell with little girls and grandmas both equally likely to gut you. Then there’s the Big Daddies, the game’s trademark villain in full Jules Verne deep sea diver regalia. But with a drill. This is a society that’s collapsed from scientific folly, personal greed and civil war. The centre did not hold.

Created by the developers formerly known as Irrational Games, creators of cult fave System Shock II, this “spiritual sequel” is inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and is ultimately about exploitation and ethics. There are a lot of philosophical thoughts percolating about the twisty narrative and body-strewn underwater passageways and that, more than anything else, is what makes BioShock more than just a game.

It’s a game-changer.