Today only Amazon.com are selling NCAA Football 08 for the Xbox360 for $49.99, reduced from $59.99 with free shipping.

A shave off the top of the price for this deal, but the game is only 2 monhs old and a pretty good football game.

Today only Amazon.com are selling Stuntman: Ignition for the Xbox360 for $39.99, reduced from $59.99 with free shipping.

A little delayed today, but a great deal on a fun game, if you don’t mind the heavy trial and error.

Today only Amazon.com are selling Xbox 360 Power Charger Combo (Charge Station, Power Kit) for the Xbox360 for $19.99, reduced from $39.99 with free shipping.

Play and charge kits for the 360 are the only way to fly if you have wireless controllers

Today only Amazon.com are selling Spider-Man 3 for the Xbox360 for $19.99, reduced from $39.99 with free shipping.

Spiderman 3 isn’t a bad Spiderman game, and the web swinging can be fun for a while. A good deal since it’s $10 cheaper than last week

Today only Amazon.com are selling Xbox 360 120GB Hard Drive for $139.99, reduced from $179.99 with free shipping.

This is a great deal for those who are tired of constantly going back and deleting files on their 360 HDD just so they can get the latest demo. Although the image shows a black HDD the reviews on Amazon do point out that it’s grey like the existing 20gb

Today only Amazon.com are selling FIFA Soccer 07 for the Xbox 360 for $19.99, reduced from $29.99 with free shipping if you add another $5.01 to your cart.

I do loves me some footie, but these games drop to practically free in used game stores in 1 year.

Today only Amazon.com are selling WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007 for the Xbox 360 for $19.99, reduced from $29.99 with free shipping if you add another $5.01 to your cart.

The latest in a series of wrestling games now for just twenty bucks on the 360. Definately worth it… I you like that kinda thing

Today only Amazon.com are selling Spider-Man 3 for the Xbox360 for $29.99, reduced from $39.99 with free shipping.

Spiderman 3 isn’t a bad Spiderman game, and the web swinging can be fun for a while.

Just a single game this week, but it rocks

• Sonic The Hedgehog 2 - 400
  Sonic 2 with online co-op and Vs modes. I can’t see why anyone should miss this, Sonic 2 still stands up well to todays standard and is a total blast.

Today only Amazon.com are selling Prey for the Xbox360 for $11.99, reduced from $19.99 with free shipping.

360 owners have been preying for a deal like this. Ho! Ho!

Today only Amazon.com are selling All Pro Football 2K8 for the Xbox360 for $39.99, reduced from $59.99 with free shipping.

A decent 360 football game, but most reviews seem to say that this is just ’same old, same old’

So Bioshock hit the stores a couple of weeks ago and the hype on release was immense, the game was expected to be popular since the dramatic trailer. Bioshock has surpassed expectations when it was snatched up by a game hungry public that had just been through a long gameless drought, you’ve undoubtedly heard much about this game, and now you’ll hear a little more

The game isn’t totally without humor, but you’ll have to look around to find it

Bioshock tells a story of the rise and fall of the great underwater city of Rapture created back in 1946 to hold the best and the brightest people without being suppressed by world governments, the city was made to exist without any contact with the outside world and be totally self sufficient. You enter the city in the year 1960 which is under a year since the city collapsed and fell into complete anarchy and chaos, you’ll see plenty of evidence of this as you walk through the waterlogged metropolis. The whole story of the city is told through a series of audio diaries which play out much like in Doom 3 except thankfully you don’t have to stop to hear each audio message, you can continue to progress while you’re being fed back-story. These diaries do a great job of story telling, you may be following a series of diaries about one woman’s struggle in the city, only to find the last document next to a female corpse, it’s all quite moving and splits up the action yet things still flow smoothly.

Looking through the screenshots, Bioshock could be mistaken for another run and gun first person shooter, although there is a surprising amount of in-combat depth while keeping an easy to use and simple control method. Switching weapons is as simple as holding a button and moving a control stick around a dial, as you do this the action will freeze, it may seem like a small point but when you are up and fighting a big daddy you’ll be glad you can switch quickly between your firearms. The weapons here are pretty run of the mill; wrench, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, crossbow, chemical thrower and grenade launcher. Their mundane nature is forgiven thanks to weapon upgrades that can be performed at any of the 12 (single use) weapon upgrade stations throughout the game. Each weapon can be upgraded twice with features such as faster reloading or dealing more damage, you’ll find yourself hunting out these locations so you can get the most powerful arsenal available. The thing that really adds interest to the weapons is the three different types of ammo that can be inserted into each gun, have your grenade launcher fire rockets, or your crossbow shoot flaming arrows and electric traps. This gives the weapons some much needed appeal as they are outclassed by the games other offensive ability, plasmids.

Bioshock earns its M rating

Over the course of the game you’ll be harvesting Adam which essentially behaves as a secondary form of currency, this currency can be spent at gene banks to upgrade your body in various ways. These come in several flavors; plasmids, physical tonics, engineering tonics and combat tonics. Combat tonics improve your ability to deal and resist damage, Static discharge is my favorite here, giving off a powerful zap and often killing anyone who performs a physical attack on you. Engineering tonics, unsurprisingly improve the way you interact with machines, these generally make the crazy “pipe dreams” hacking minigame much easier. Physical tonics improve your strength and make you more powerful, easily confused with combat tonics, these can increase the healing effects of food, or give other useful benefits. Often these ability’s can be found throughout the game, or even researched by taking photos of creatures with the research camera, most abilities also have different levels of effectiveness, Static Discharge II does more damage than Discharge I.

For the majority of the combat you’ll find yourself using Plasmids, these are the major element that makes the combat fun. Unlike the tonics plasmids aren’t a passive ability, which means you’ll have switch and use plasmids in the same way as weapons and activate them to take down any serious opponent Bioshock throws at you. The first plasmid you’ll find will be the electro bolt, fire it at the door to short a fuse and open it, shoot at a puddle water to shock everyone inside or just shoot at an enemy to stun him. Other plasmid examples are fire and ice, you can use the fire to unfreeze a door or use the ice to slow down the liquid in the hacking mini game, or you could just fire the plasmid straight at your enemy to get the expected effects. Getting creative with plasmids proves 2K’s point of many people will play through the game in different ways and hearing how others use the environment and plasmids in different ways sets Bioshock above the rest.

The large variety of plasmids and smart AI elevate the quality of the combat compared to your average shooter

On the Whole, Bioshock is an immersive and highly entertaining game with only a handful of drawbacks worth mentioning. The worst problem I experienced was a degree of tedium near the end of the game, much like I experienced towards the end of Doom 3. Although the level designs are great and highly varied, your just attacking the same handful of characters over and over. The creative AI prevents this from being a huge problem but the variety here felt a little lacking. The only other thing worth mentioning is the infinite lives and respawns, you see, every time you die you re-appear at one of the very frequent Vita-chambers (checkpoints). This removes the tension of death, when a huge big daddy starts charging towards you fear should be at least slightly on your mind. Instead caution you can just go all out, die, then run straight back to the battle where the Big Daddy will still be weakened from your first onslaught. These drawbacks are noticeable, but minor, Bioshock should be experienced by anyone who’s looking for a different FPS experience

Check out Bioshock reviews 1 & 2 from Jim and Charlie

Graphics 10 Gameplay 9 Sound 9 Length 10 Overall score 9

Lots of variety on ways to approach a battle Beautiful atmospheric graphics Just the right length Story flows and advances well Little variety in enemies to encounter Infinite ‘lives’ kills the tension