At the same time, is it so terrible that I feel glad to have a reprieve from AAA gaming, a tidy excuse not to move on immediately from the exhausting emotional wringer that is BioShock 2‘s Rapture? Speaking of which, here is my review of BioShock 2, which I think encompasses the things I think are stronger than the original versus weaker.

I think probably the biggest open issue I have with BioShock 2 is that harvesting Little Sisters feels so irrational that the option to do so seems excessively heavy-handed — as if it existed to support the game’s messages about choice, rather than to contribute to the gameplay. The sheer variety of options BioShock 2 gives you to take out your enemies makes it wholly unnecessary to feel so desperate for ADAM that you harvest Little Sisters.

So does the fact that, as a player, you feel more familiar with Rapture now. It doesn’t lose any of its compelling qualities, and its advanced state of decay actually makes it more breathtaking in places (my favorite moments of the game were due entirely to certain arrangements of its scenery). But you don’t have that sense of being lost, of being desperate, that you had as Jack in the first game. Not only do you know your way around now, so to speak, but you’re wearing a Big Daddy suit.

The effect of being a Big Daddy is twofold: You feel more powerful (and the other Big Daddies feel wonderfully lonesome and tragic, not so scary). But beyond that, you feel more of an attachment to the girls. Big Daddies and Little Sisters were introduced to us via inseparable imagery, and now we’re expected to conceive of killing one — especially within the context of a narrative that asks us to risk everything to get one “back”?

This obviously is not a deal-breaker for me, not by a long shot. Even if the option to do the irrational simply exists as a way for the player to experiment with the game’s philosophical framework, rather than to feel immersive and genuine, I’m glad it’s there. I’m not sure I’d mind if “Harvest or Rescue” were part of the BioShock framework for future sequels.

Which brings me to something else I’ve just written! I promised I’d explore the idea of sequelizing games that don’t “need” sequels in the context of BioShock 2, and I’ve done so over at Gamasutra. Check it out!

Finally, I really believe that whether a “flaw” is a deal-breaker for you or not depends on what your motivation is for playing video games. My latest Kotaku feature investigates how different kind of games scratch different itches, and how a certain weakness in one type of game might not be as big a problem in another.

Meanwhile, while I wait for Sony to fix whatever this PS3 problem is, I’ve been playing Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands on DS for hours and hours and hours. It’s like crack to me. Bonus Material: My original Aberrant Gamer column on gender identity and Harvest Moon marriage.

I feel like I’m not even done talking about BioShock 2 yet. It never fails to amaze me how we as audiences demand increasingly complex and sustaining experiences, and yet every game we get, we bang through as fast as possible so we can get to discussing the next one. Sucks.