Pretty cool - I hope it works out for them. The early publisher/developer support they've already received is encouraging.

I never claimed some people didn't like Bioshock. You certainly get worked up about any game not developed in Japan getting any type of recognition, don't you?

You damn Fallout 3 and Bioshock and then praise one of the many sequels/clones from Japan about invading demon hordes - yeah, that's very original. I'm glad that the industry (well, the Western industry) has moved away from the long cutscenes/dialogue trees with endless, nonsensical exposition and constant employment of Deus Ex Machina to get out of the plot dead-ends most Japanese developers amateurishly put themselves in over and over again.

There aren't many games which effectively portray philosophical concepts, such as those of Ayn Rand in this case, the way BioShock did. If you found the gameplay to be a simple shooter, you weren't playing it correctly. The variety of plasmids allowed gamers creativity in tackling the challenges they were presented with - if you were creative enough to utilize them.

Not that this happens very often, but periodically a game goes on sale for one system but not the other - it's nice having the choice and picking up the cheaper game.
Otherwise, I always get multiplatform games with strong online functionality for 360.

Bioshock is just System Shock 2 - you say that like it's a bad thing! I disagree - Bioshock 2 offered an evolutionary improvement in terms of mechanics, story telling and immersion justifying all of its praise. EVERY game is just an interation/evolution of what came before it so why single out that one?

I agree that Deux Ex and Ico deserve to be up there (I would include Thief, for being the first game to get sneaking right and it's phenomenal voice acting and story telling), but completely disagree about the others. As much as I tried to like Shadow the controls and navigation were an absolute disaster, offsetting the potential charms of the game. Mario, Metroid, FF must be a reflection of your generation because there's hardly anything innovative about them unless you were young enough that those were the first games you started playing so thought they were fresh.

While MS certainly has plenty of over-priced accessories, a free headset bundled in the $199 SKU can hardly be considered over-priced. It doesn't matter if PS3 supports BlueTooth headsets. Since Sony doesn't include one in the box hardly anyone uses it, or even worse, has a very bad one that ruins the experience for everyone. At least the voicechat experience is consistent across Live! since almost everyone uses the one included in the box.

Private party chat (even if you're playing different games) with your friends takes away the problem of listening to annoying strangers on the service. As far as wireless, I have my PS3 plugged in - so I essentially paid a premium for a feature I neither want nor need.

One look at the leaderboards for any multiplatform game makes it abundantly clear that if you're into online gaming, 360 is the console to get. Even the biggest release of the year for PS3, Uncharted 2, struggles to have more than 15K users on at any given time (I've only seen more than 10K once). PS3 is perfectly fine for single-player games, but is still a pale imitation of the experience you get on 360 for online gaming.