No, beyond the ending, Bioshock was every bit as good as most people said. I will say it got a little repetitive before the end of the game, but even "perfect" games aren't perfect.

We should thank them for bringing Intellectual thought into a video game.

How awsome is Citizen Kane?
How much better is it after you know about William Hearst?

Note: Citizen Kane makes Bioshock look like monkey scribble on paper. but you get my point.

All the surrounding elements are there with back story, This could be
"1984" - George Orwell
"We" - Yevgeny Zamyatin
The only thing missing is the main character (because it's an FPS), and Yes thats big but for a video game this is a big step in the right direction. Also I think RPGs (with text, or too many choices) break immursion so i'm glad the didn't do to much of that.

Note: Some secondary characters would needed as well.

Note 2: This wasn't really directed at you rocketpig 

I totally agree with you on Mario Galaxy.  That was the whole reason I bought the Wii - played it for a few hours and was totally disappointed.  The game was pretty good, but not nearly as good as I thought it would be.  So, I sold the system and the game on Ebay.

Mario Galaxy and Bioshock - two most over-rated games so far this generation.  You can throw Mass Effect in there too.

I found bioshock was lacking in the story telling, i felt they should of expanded on the whole city more. I wanted to know more and their should of been CG videos all over the place instead of little tapes.

No way. It deserves every single bit of its praise.

It was a good game no doubt, but not nearly the golden ray of gaming goodness some might have you believe. Honestly in most years it would have deserved GoTY but last year it was easily outclassed in just the nominations phase.

A lot of folks have said that the story was great and the gameplay was mediocre and when I hear that I keep thinking how can a game with mediocre gameplay be considered for GoTY? Personally I think both CoD4 and The Orange Box (as unfair as it is to group it) were far better in the genre and if you can't win best in breed you don't get a shot at best in show.

Just my 0.02 VG$~

 FFVI has terrible (broken/unbalanced) gameplay yet it is considered by most as the best FF game and is on a good number of peoples top 10 list.

TB RPGs are the ostracized sex offender of the video game genre family, though.

All TB RPGs actually HAVE is story, so it's no surprise that people who play them overlook gameplay because they're playing for the story anyway.

Using it as an example when compared to a FPS RPG isn't a sound comparison. FPS RPGs are expected to have solid gameplay because otherwise the whole "FPS" part just makes zero sense.

For the record, I thought Bioshock was a great game, but it didn't blow the doors off storytelling or gameplay. I've seen both done better by the same group of devs. 

 RPG's can actually have good gameplay, FFVI's just sucked because it was horribly unblanced and just not that good.

It's great that the game had 13 characters each with thier own story but not all those characters were equal.  Characters like Terra and Celes with their strong magic, Edgar with his good magic and insane tools, Sabin with his no drawback blitzes, and Locke with his super fast speed grossly overpowered characters like Strago, Gau, Relm, and the worst of all Cyan.

Strago and Gau could become good characters but they required so much work to get good that by the time they got good others were already better.  At least when building up Strago you got experience.  With Cyan, his abilities were good but you had to wait for what felt like an eternity.  During this time enemies are killing you (unless you're playing non active time battle, pussy) and you're just sitting there watching a bar fill.  For the time it takes for that bar to fill I could have killed the enemies with stronger characters.

And then there are espers.  Those were a great start but micromanaging those things was just painful.  You had to keep track of who had what esper because at level up each esper would give characters various pluses.  So if you wanted to be able to get a 99 magic rating, speed, strength, or any of the other ratings, you constantly had to plan ahead and switch around these espers.  It just wasn't a lot of fun.

There are more things like evade just not working (which I don't think they even fixed in the GBA version) but all in all the gameplay was just bad yet still it's a very highly respected game.

With Bioshock, it has the basics of a good FPS and it does those things well at least, but some plasmids and weapons are overly powerful.  I could easily kill Big Daddies at the end of the game without taking a hit just by shocking them and then having them run into explosive crossbow bolts (or whatever the crossbow traps were).  Since the game relied on being different all the time and just having splicers randomly wander throughout the city there were rarely any actual encounters.  This is a cool idea and all but it destroys any idea of pacing in the game.

Then of course there's that horrible pipe game and the fucking fetch quests.  Actually, lets not go into those because just thinking about doing a pointless fetch quest in the end of the game just pisses me off.

Anyways, I'm rambling and pretty much forgot my point.  Bioshock is fantastic for its atmosphere and storytelling but not its gameplay.  I think that was my point.  I don't know, I want cereal. 

when i still had my 360, i dled this demo and i hated it.

but then again, it was only a demo.