Rated: 93.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...Bioshock seems to be Marmite
khenry
Bioshock is the first game I’ve bought in its launch weekend since Half Life 2. I’d forgotten the excitement of waiting for that pre-order in the post or going out to a chain like Game or a Virgin Megastore to pick up a copy on the first day. For reasons of time and playing other games the tin sat on my shelf. Then I recognised that I’d want to play the game at night to appreciate the atmosphere.
Putting aside my apprehension about performance, I installed it and…
Shock horror, the game just worked. I haven’t been affected by any of the widely reported problems and the game remains at v1.0, no added patches if any exist. It also depends on whether being plain slow is viewed as a problem because my machine won’t go above 25fps nor would I expect a single-core machine to manage it. I’m on the last WHQL before the Bioshock-friendly Beta drivers on a jurassic 6800GT. Enemies have no problem rushing up to me and giving me a battering with the same camera blurring effect on more powerful GPUs. For the game to stay at number one, there must be a multitude of users out there who have had a similar straightforward PC installation and are making their way through the game. Either that, or it’s only the Xbox 360 version that’s selling to keep the title at the top of the charts.
So what’s the secret to having a PC that’ll just run something without it, as Adam has already reported, killing your machine off? All I did was run Disk cleanup and defrag my hard disk before bothering to play. How many people just slap on a game and don’t clean up their Windows installations before doing so, before cursing the devs for every problem that they have?
It also seems that the knives are out for Bioshock now that it’s number one and doing well, a particularly British trait. Phil mentions Doom III and its hype, but there’s a much more recent example out there: Command and Conquer 3. Giving a game 90% in the mag and then slagging it off in subsequent podcasts for being “the same old thing” was confusing. If what was really meant was “neither C&C 3 nor Supreme Commander are as good as Medieval 2 in the RTS world”, then that should have been made clearer.
We can never get away from price in debates like this. C&C 3 fell to my preferred price recently £18-20. Had I paid the full £25-30 for either C&C 3 or the Bioshock tin, maybe I’d be echoing Phil’s disappointment. However, EA has been putting out full-price games with at least one flaw since the Mega Drive era so I was better prepared for C&C 3 being a bit of a retread. Getting a bargain and not playing on a supercomputer has taught me to manage my expectations.
On balance, maybe the real point at which the public can be failed to the worst extent by the games press, is during development. Declaring my interest, that’s why it’s so much easier to report that a demo has been released, allowing gamers to download for free and make up their own minds. It’s a tough balance for magazine writers: critical previews could be perceived as unfair, whilst even a neutral stance could be seen as cosying up to the publisher. Buying into any kind of marketing hype will cause a gamer or viewer to lose any mystery to the game/film/TV prog anyway.
Maybe I don’t see the same faults because I just didn’t want to read or hear about anything other than the finished article. That made anybody else telling me Bioshock was “great”, “buggy” or “c**p” less important than for once in my life, playing a game when it’s brand new instead of waiting the usual 3-6 months it takes for the price to drop, and making up my own mind.
I recently installed Bioshock on my less than 2 month old computer, and it worked straight away too. I think that shows the developers have thoroughly tested it, which is, unfortunately, too unusual these days.
I’m surprised price makes such a big difference to your opinion - for me it’s more to do with whether a game actually lives up to its promise, and the thing with Bioshock is that it promises so much - and, in my opinion, does a lot well - but falls so short in other areas (combat, especially)…
As for the C&C3 thing - being reviewed favourably in the magazine and called the same old on the podcast - it’s always a danger with something subjective such as a game. Unless it’s a total turkey (which C&C3 isn’t), you’re not going to have five or six opinionated people sharing the exact same opinion, and in the discussion on the podcast, differences are going to come out. I think they’re pretty minor though - C&C3 is a good game, it’s just not an original one, and your reaction to its probably going to be tempered by how much (or how little) you value innovation in gameplay…
Cheers Alex, there’s another blog post in there somewhere, I’ll have to think on it some more.
I love Bioshock and rate it very VERY highly. But this is beacuse…..
I play it on Xbox360! Thats right. The only thing I have to worry about cleaning up is the couch and performance isnt an issue either (with all detail on full in HD and 5.1 digital lol)
I really love my PC but thank my lucky stars for having a decent Xbox setup too.
I love Bioshock and rate it VERY highly. But this is because…..
I play it on PC! Thats right. The only thing I have to worry about is why you think playing it on a PC wouldn’t rate it VERY highly, (with all detail on full in HD 1080p and not upscaled 720p, 5.1 digital EAX, (lol.. ?))
I really love my PC and thank my lucky stars for not having a decent Xbox setup too.