I am of course talking about the marketing monstrosity that was Halo 3. For those of you who are not familiar with parts one and two, Halo plays out against the backdrop of humanity’s expansion into space and its subsequent collision with a vastly superior foe known as the Covenant. The Covenant consists of several alien species organised in various hierarchical ranks and held together by a militaristic religion that does not include the survival of the human race as one of its tenets. Upon meeting humanity, the Covenant decides that negotiation is not the way forward and instead launches a series of devastating attacks upon its technologically backward opponent. As the first game opens, the resulting war is reaching its final stages. One of humanity’s last major colonies has been reduced to ashes and its lone surviving defender, a ship eloquently named The Pillar of Autumn, has executed “The Cole Protocol”. In order to avoid the discovery of the location of Earth, the ship makes a dangerously random jump, in the hope of shaking off its determined pursuers. This leads to the discovery of a vast and ancient alien artefact, the ring-world that the game takes its name from. Unfortunately, the aliens prove to be exceptionally tenacious in the chase and arrive shortly afterwards. Knowing that their chances of survival are slim, the captain of the Autumn takes the decision to wake up the Master Chief. A genetically engineered killing machine, he is the last of his kind and it is predominantly from his viewpoint that we will experience the events of the series.

After crash-landing on the Halo, the refugees discover that the world is in fact an installation that hides a menace far greater than the Covenant. It comes in the form of a parasitic life form called “The Flood”, which the Covenant unwittingly releases. The Flood infects other life forms, mutating them into its own grotesque image. It is a seemingly unstoppable threat. At the conclusion of the first game the Master Chief discovers that the Halo is in fact a weapon created by the Forerunners, the extinct alien race that the Covenant worships. This particular armament is designed to eliminate the flood by depriving it of the resources it needs to replicate itself. It accomplishes this by wiping out all life in the galaxy. The Master Chief decides this is not a desirable thing and proceeds to find a way to destroy the ring, parasites and all. I could go on, and therein lies one of the problems of Halo 3 that I believe certainly effected its reception in some quarters. The plot of the third game relies on prior knowledge of the series and focuses on the Master Chief’s efforts to save the Earth from total annihilation at the hands of the Flood and the Covenant. Starting off with Halo 3 would be like reading Return of the King before The Fellowship of the Ring. You might find some things to like but you’d definitely be left feeling a little confused.

For those who have devotedly ploughed their way through from the beginning though, it provides a satisfyingly grandiose conclusion to the epic narrative, with the stakes placed just about as high as they can get: the survival of everyone.

Well, nearly everyone. After all, the Master Chief does achieve his goals mainly by killing people. Quite a lot of people. For Halo, like the majority of games I will be examining, belongs to the genre known as the first person shooter, or FPS. You experience the game through the eyes of the protagonist, providing an immediacy to the experience that is difficult to replicate through other styles of game. You then proceed to obliterate anything that walks, talks or squeaks until you achieve your objectives. It is all so tremendously cathartic.

As shooters go, Halo 3 is quite traditional, eschewing the stealth and puzzle elements that other FPS’s adopt in favour of straight forward, no questions asked destruction. The triumph of the series is in the finely tuned gameplay which is still virtually unmatched in the field. From using the Warthog’s vehicle mounted cannons to clear a path through hordes of rampaging grunts to the spectacular assault on the giant crab-like vehicles known as Scarabs, Halo is rarely less than brilliant. When it does fall below these standards it does so in style; one Flood based level in particular will make you weep tears of bitter rage. Also, it’s a little too short to truly be regarded as an enduring classic. For fans of straightforward space opera though, it’s the title that will fulfil all of your cravings for brightly coloured starships and adventures in which you know who the bad guy is and what needs doing to them.

You may notice that I have not mentioned the highly vaunted multiplayer modes of Halo 3 that allow you to go online and engage in endless competitions that involve blowing away the digital avatar of some kid from Alaska whilst shouting insults at them through a headset. This is because I care less about multiplayer modes than I do about the quality of Dubya’s retirement years. If there is no plot, I’m not interested and I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the same is probably true for the majority of our readers.

Finally I come to what I believe to be the most important SF game, not just of the last year but also of the twentieth century so far. This is a game that no lover of the fantastic can afford to miss, whether they’re a confirmed console junkie like me or have never felt the sweaty grip of an overused gamepad in their hands before. The game is Bioshock and once you’ve played it your view of the medium as an art form will be forever changed.

The game starts in the early sixties as a plane crashes into the ocean, with you as one of its unfortunate passengers. You swim to the surface, debris from the plane raining down around you, and as you fight to keep yourself from drowning you see a lighthouse. Swimming towards it you find a doorway and as you make your way into its dark enclosure it lights up around you like an old machine frightened back to life. An odd-looking diving bell lies ahead; your only choice is to enter it. You ride it into the depths and in these cold and forbidding waters you discover a secret hidden from the outside world: a city underneath the waves, a city named Rapture.

Rapure was built in the forties by Andrew Ryan, a man who sought to create a utopia beneath the waves where artists and scientists would be free to pursue their goals without fear of censorship or unwanted interference in their work. He created a magnificent world filled with beautiful art deco architecture and enhanced by advanced steam-driven technology created by its skilful citizens. When we first enter Rapture though, it becomes obvious that something has gone horribly wrong here. The buildings are falling to pieces, signs of neglect are everywhere, and its delicate processionals are crumbling like a week-old wedding cake. It’s not long before you meet one of the city’s few remaining inhabitants. The encounter is not a pleasant one. This is the opening of a story that will reel you in like a suicidal fish. The plot evolves slowly before you, relayed by the audio recordings that you find scattered throughout the city, which contain the thoughts of the people who lived through Rapture’s final years. You soon find out that they somehow found a way of altering their genetic structures, allowing them to conquer their physical ailments, change their appearances and augment themselves with unnatural powers such as telekinesis. The ones who survive to greet you took these alterations too far and have ruined their bodies and driven themselves insane in the process. They wander the rooms and corridors, muttering madly to themselves of lost chances and of the desperate hopes they still cling to, hiding their disfigured countenances behind the party masks they wore to the last great celebration. They are derogatively known as “Splicers”, and they are lost to the world and also to themselves.

The makers of the game stated that they wanted Rapture to feel as if it were inhabited, whilst still retaining a sense of isolation. They have achieved this admirably, by leaving you primarily alone except for these deranged creatures whose only reaction to your presence, when they notice you at all, is a homicidal mania bourn out of their own delusions. The few remaining sane individuals are only ever met at a remove; they speak to you though radios or television screens or barriers of glass and metal. The game never allows you to feel safe or comforted by the presence of others. The one exception to this comes in the form of beings perhaps even more unsettling than their lunatic counterparts. The process of splicing was made possible by the discovery of a sea slug that produced a substance called Adam. In order to enhance the refinement of this substance, young girls were genetically altered to hold the slugs within their own bodies. The girls, known as “Little Sisters” were then harvested for the Adam, with their deaths being an unfortunate side effect of the procedure. These children wander the hallways, collecting Adam from the corpses of former residents, protected by giant shambling men in old-fashioned diving suits. These are the “Big Daddies”; like the Sisters they have been altered, but their purpose is the protection of their diminutive charges from the avaricious desires of the inhabitants of Rapture. These children present a moral dilemma to the player. Do they choose to harvest the Little Sisters in order to obtain the maximum yield of Adam, thereby aiding their own genetic progression, or do they save them from their condition for a much slimmer reward? The trick that the designers play on you here is in making you actually care about the outcome of this decision.

It is difficult to fully get across just how truly wonderful this game is. The narrative is deeper and more fulfilling than many of the best works of fiction in any medium. It is one of the few games to have a work of philosophy as one of its main influences, this being Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. The dialogue is intelligent and realistic, with a convincing array of characters from the megalomaniacal Ryan to the labourers who built and maintained the city, whose voices we hear in the abandoned audio recordings. The setting is remarkable and unlike anything previously seen in games. The city of Rapture soon becomes a character in itself, its grand edifices echoing to music from the forties and fifties. These songs seem somehow much more menacing here, despite their familiarity; perhaps because, like the bars and dance halls the player encounters, it reminds you that this place was once alive, was once somewhere that somebody called home.

My message to those who have refrained from involving themselves in the world of games until now is simple: would you kindly go to your nearest store and pick up this title, you owe it to yourself to do so. 2007 was a good year for gaming and Bioshock was definitely its highlight.