Welcome back to the underwater world of Rapture, the nightmare that merges Art Deco, Citizen Kane, Ayn Rand, and the best computer generated physics and graphics seen in a video game in a decade.

Ithad been a very long time since a single player video game drew me in the way BioShock did two years ago. The premise? Your plane crashes in the ocean in the 1960s near what appears to be a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere. Instead, it’s a marker for an Art Deco underwater world created by a Citizen Kane-esque capitalist tired of taxation and government rule. Of course, things go horribly wrong when his scientists start manipulating genes to give Rapture’s citizens super powers for a price using injectable drugs.

The price, it turns out, is your humanity. “Little Sisters” become evil soul-sucking zombies and their “Big Daddy” turned into robot-like men in turn of the 19th century deep sea diving suits, loaded to the mechanical gills with weaponry to protect them.

Ifyou play the game to completion, you manage to get out of the underwater hellhole. Now in BioShock 2 you return, and this time you’re one of the bad guys.

Will you adopt the evil little bugger and risk death later, or harvest her life force to save your own? Bioshock 2 revisits this moral cross-roads that, based upon your decision, changes the game play as you go.

Asthe father of a young girl, the creepiest angle in the original BioShock was that you had an option: kill the evil little girls and take their life force to save your own, or save them by removing the evil within.

Of course, I opted to save the little girls. The physics model of their bodies was spine chilling: as you “pulled” the evil out of them, their limbs flailed exactly the way my daughter’s do when I’m scooping her up to haul her to the Naughty Corner.

In BioShock 2 your role as Big Daddy is thwarted by the introduction of Big Sister, one of the girls you’ve saved in the first game. 10 years later, she’s back and isn’t pleased that you’re messing with her plans.

Onething that made the original so fascinating was how advanced the artificial intelligence was. The game truly changed depending on how you reacted to the world around you — both physically and psychologically. The creators of BioShock 2 promise more of the same in the sequel.

I’m also a sucker for Art Deco, and this franchise makes great use of this fabulous time in American architecture.