The game allows you to play as one of the iconic Big Daddy characters on a quest to escape Rapture, which has recently been repopulated with Little Sisters following the kidnapping of multiple little girls from communities nearby the undersea city.

The Mac version of the game also features the multiplayer mode found in the console and PC versions of the game, where players take part in the civil war that ultimately tore Rapture to pieces before the first game.

“BioShock 2 shows Rapture in a completely new light,” said David Stephen, Managing Director of Feral Interactive. “By allowing players to be a Big Daddy, it explores the emotional consequences of the Rapture project.”

The game will be available through Feral’s online store as well as the Mac App Store.

On an official PlayStation-related article from Sony, the console-maker noted that 2012 release BioShock Infinite will get its own special Move peripheral.

Of course, this note didn’t stay up on the site long — here’s the current incarnation — but Videogamer managed to snag the interesting part of the original text:

A special PS Move peripheral is being produced that will draw you even deeper into this stunning vision of a parallel future.

Of course, the bigger question here is…well, what on Earth (or off Earth also works in this case, I suppose) is the peripheral for Move going to represent? Guns have been done to death, but that’s the likely end result here. I guess an older gun that Booker uses would be cool enough, right?

BioShock Infinite‘s Move integration isn’t a secret — Ken Levine himself announced the game’s support during E3 2011.

The game currently has no release date outside the very vague “2012.”

Here, we see a little bit of revisionist history (in that all of a sudden Booker and Elizabeth are in the 1980s), the fine art of bringing a horse back to life, and exactly what those “tears” are all about.

We also see more skyline usage, and if this comes anywhere close to what the actual game will be like (I know, it says this was created using in-game footage, but I’ll be seriously amazed if you’re able to flip around the entirety of Columbia as Booker does), my jaw can just live on the floor the entire time I play.

Once again…it needs to be 2012.

Art by arnie00 at DeviantArt

“The Art of Video Games” is a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit that will be on display from March 16, 2012 to September 30, 2012 in Washington, D.C.

Among the titles that will be showcased? Irrational Games’ BioShock.

“When I worked to put together the list of games, with input from the advisory group, for ‘The Art of Video Games,’ I looked for games that ran the gamut of art, social commentary, storytelling and artistic license, and BioShock combined these elements in new ways,” said exhibition curator Chris Melissinos. “Ultimately, the fans got the final say regarding the games they believe best represent the medium and we’re extremely pleased with the results.”

That final list includes a whopping 80 titles, ranging from five Legend of Zelda titles to Minecraft in addition to the underwater classic with objectivist themes. (Five titles will be available to play, and one of these will be World of Warcraft. I have no idea how that’s going to work out.)

Irrational’s president and creative director, Ken Levine, is obviously pleased.

“The thought of seeing BioShock on display next to Georgia O’Keeffe and Thomas Hart Benton is, well, humbling,” said Levine. “The fact that gamers put us there makes it all the better.”

To see the full list of titles that gamers put there, visit the exhibition’s website.

RENT

Raven Software’s latest game Singularity has come down from a long pedigree. They hatched Hexen, which I played back in the early ’90′s, and more recently Wolfenstien which looked good and also has some of the same elements found in this game. Time space phenomenon, and telekinesis gone wild. In a familiar plot device, the artifact known as the Time Manipulation Device or (TMD) is pivotal in the game.

It is nicely detailed right from the start. The Raven logo and the interface show attention and effort. The menus move horizontally with a liquid sound effect that make the motion feel slick. You are inside of some type of ship. Things outside look wrong. The ship is hit by an EMP and then you find your character ship wreaked on a burning dock. Russian scientists have attempted to make a singularity. Time shifts and there’s more fire. You have to save some guy. Time shifts again, you’ve altered the time line somehow. What is going on?

The game is derivative, in a good way for a change. It has many devices similar to Bioshock. There are the taped messages from a despot. The pseudo scientific meltdown of a ranting genius going way over the edge. The capsules that are used as weapon lockers look like that now iconic art-style. Even the color palette is very similar to the first Bioshock. But then you have your horror genre added to the mix. In a way there is a feeling like you got Silent Hill, when you are coming around corners you’ll have no idea what you are going to face. It could be mutants, ghosts, or who knows what will be next to go at you. Some of the enemies have enormous blueish heads and they look like aliens.

This monster mashup has the eeriest soundtrack going. If you turn the music down the ambient sounds has enough moaning and groaning and shrieking screams to keep your all hallows horror thirst satisfied. I immediately recognized some familiar voices from Anime as well. Liam O’Brien from Bleach, and Steven Blum from Cowboy Bebop lend their special masculinity to the voice acting.

The overall theme is done well. It has a story line that is good enough to have come from the old X-Files TV series. It’s dark, the physics is plausible, and it does what it sets out to do. With the lights turned down you will really feel your spine tingle with this game.

The weapons are great. They feel right in your virtual first person hand.  One thing that I thought was odd, but isn’t exactly a flaw, is that at one point you get captured, and loose all your weapons. But shortly later you come across one of those over grown thermoses they call weapons lockers, and low and behold there are all the guns you have unlocked so far. There is a way decent shot gun, and a sweet rifle too besides the machine gun and pistol. You get points to use for upgrades, again like Bioshock.

The weapon controls are good and solid so are the targeting and aiming. It feels balanced. The inventory system is a bit non existent but at least it is better than the one in the last Resident Evil 5. The shooting is very important, it is what makes these games fun, along with the spattering of the shotgun. I would have liked more compass and map views in this game. If they are there I didn’t see them. A toggle for third person would have been nice too. The game is pretty linear. There are tons of locked doors everyplace. It doesn’t seem right. You should be able to shoot your way through where ever you want and blow up the doors with a grenade. The level design could be much better. The environments don’t look bad. The graphics and lighting are good, but it’s patchy as to where it looks that good. It is a shame that the buildings and other features don’t react to the weapons more and destruct.

Why isn’t there a playable female avatar in single player? This is very disappointing. It wouldn’t have taken much to make the choice available for a playable female avatar. Since you don’t actually see your character that much. If they wanted to be stingy with extra programming code that isn’t the right place for developers to choose to conserve on pixels. An alternative would have been to make the slight effort to make the avatar genderless and apply to anybody. Shame, shame.

There maybe lots of borrowed code in this game, but the point is, that it works. If you take and use the Unreal engine, then the rest of the game better look good layered on top of it because you have one of the best sets of tools to start with.

It didn’t hold my attention for long with the multiplayer. It is there and it is standard stuff. You would play as either the Soldiers or the Creatures. There’s the Team Deathmatch, or the Extermination mode.

This game was good, perhaps not in the way it was intended to be. I’d like to see Raven Software get out of the cold war games and just go over to the survival horror genre all the way I think they have the potential to rival Resident Evil, if they would just go for it with a fresh new IP. I’d suggest that you give it Rent as a Halloween season game.

This, my friends, is the first ten minutes of Bioshock Infinite. Your first few moments in the world of Columbia are rocky ones, but before long you’re armed and dangerous, with Elizabeth by your side.

A few recognizable plasmids show up in this game already, with a couple of creative mixes shown here. I shudder to think what gamers will be able to come up with when they actually have the whole game in their hands (and I mean that in the best, most loving of ways).

Let us all lament that this game isn’t out until 2012. I may shed a tear. But first, the video:

Instead, we’ll be exploring a floating city in the sky known as Columbia, set in 1912, 47 years before that underwater New Year’s Eve catastrophe.

After a launch celebrated by the American public, Columbia has experienced some sort of an “international incident.” What that incident is, we don’t really know yet, but it has to have been pretty bad, since Columbia was forced to hide amongst the clouds. Based on what we know about Columbia and its version of “American exceptionalism,” which seems to have an emphasis on interesting racial views and a very extreme form of patriotism that borders on complete xenophobia.

You play as former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, and unlike the original game’s Jack Ryan, who was, for all intents and purposes, a pretty “blank” guy, you really get a sense of character from DeWitt. He’s brought to the Columbia following whatever happened on board in order to rescue a young woman named Elizabeth, who has apparently been imprisoned there since childhood. Naturally, the residents of Columbia are none too pleased about a new person in their midst.

Elizabeth isn’t just a damsel in distress, however. She actually works with Booker, and not in an escort mission way. DeWitt gives her some of his abilities, and they fight together in epic Sky-Line battles (the Sky-Line connects parts of the floating city) as well as indoors and outdoors.

Irrational Games built an entirely new engine for the game, added new animation and AI systems to the gasmeplay, and they’ve also expanded the BioShock arsenal. Now, it’s not necessarily just shooting bees out of your hands, but crows. Irrational’s creative director, Ken Levine, was able to tell us one thing we could be certain of: “…the rules of the BioShock universe are about to change.”

The rules of the universe itself are about to change, but the highly-stylized nature of the game will definitely be loved by everyone who’s loved the historical science-fiction series so far.

So far, it looks like BioShock Infinite has only one flaw: it’s not out until 2012. A trailer is below.

In Minerva’s Den, you’ll play as a brand-new character who is working with Bridgid Tenenbaum to bring down a dictator in the Minerva’s Den area of Rapture. This is a self-contained narrative that 2K president Christoph Hartmann considers a “fitting conclusion to the BioShock 2 saga.”

In Minerva’s Den, you’ll explore Rapture Central Computing, wield new weaponry and a new Plasmid, and take on even more new Splicers. Adding to the fun, you’ll also face a new Big Daddy type and upgraded Security Bots that throw rockets and lightning bolts (ouch).

No word on pricing or a release date yet.

Well over 300 titles are on sale, from Silent Hill Homecoming (currently $9.99) to a 2K Games pack that contains 27 games, including Borderlands, its expansion packs, BioShock and BioShock 2. Altogether, buying those titles new and the expansions would run you more than the price for all 27 games – $89.99.

So there’s some good deals out there. But the question is – are you going to wait for a price to drop even more, or is it time to act like a kid in a video game candy store?