Of course, only about 50 people worldwide played Shock2, and they're both Irrational products, so I can't really fault Ken Levine for the creative recycling, but it's a little weird to see people throw roses at the man's feet for re-telling a narrative that he first put together almost a decade ago.

I actually got to play around with OSXS1 (AKA "Rhapsody") a few times back circa 2000. Having done so, I have to say that I'm in complete agreement with Jobs: the UI completely blew. It mostly looked like the Platinum OS8/OS9 themes, but the way it acted was an unholy mix of MacOS and NeXTSTEP UI behaviors, usually picking the most annoying of the two if ever there was a conflict. If Apple had tried to foist that abomination off on their userbase, they would have probably gone bankrupt by 2001.

I've been looking for something like this product for over a year now; pending some reviews, I'll happily fork over the $100.

Both of them got lucky enough once to be associated with one brilliant game, but is that any reason why we should have been required put up with hearing about their self-absorbed idiocy for the next 15 years?

Then again, 15" lcds are getting pretty cheap.

It can't actually be the case that there are only 25 competent UI designers in the world and that they all work at Apple, but it sure seems like that sometimes.

Still annoying, but it's not like your windows partition is going to suddenly evaporate.

Why? Because the world was in fact created millions of years ago, and for the last few thousand of those years, the human race -- armed with pens, paper, scrolls, clay tablets and the internet -- have been recording the events of the past. So we remember little details like how Valve licensed out HalfLife for the Mac back in 1999, and then killed the project after the port was finished, giving completely B.S. excuses about how it was impossible to make online play compatible between PCs and Macs (a bit of a surprise to the players of just about every other Quake engine-based game that shipped for the MacOS) that were never substantiated by the porting company.

Valve is Newell's company to run as he sees fit, of course, and he's far from the only person in this industry who doesn't like doing business with Apple: but I'd have a lot more respect for him if he'd just own up to it instead of indulging in this kind of pettifogging.

In re BioShock's play mechanics and innovation or lack thereof, reading all of the comments here makes me very sure of two things: none of you all played System Shock 2, and all of you should. Because as much as I'm liking Bioshock, it really is SS2 dressed up in a much prettier suit, and with some of the rougher edges filed down.

(For the uninitiated: because the Jaguar had no memory cards, save games were limited to what they could fit on a tiny bit of NVRAM on the cartridge itself. As a result, any time you restored a game, ALL the enemies on a level respawned in random locations. So if you saved a game at 2am when you were down to your last health and ammo, and then tried to pick it up the next day, you were inevitably toast.)

The texture is pretty much carpet-like, but the problem is that they really don't work very well. I had to run my finger over them multiple times, pushing pretty hard, to dim the light it was connected to in the exhibit. Unless you're the world's richest raver, you should probably keep hold of your old mechanical rheostats.