This review is a strictly enforced spoiler-free zone. It's vital that you don't let anyone spoil BioShock for you, and three words would ruin it. So kindly refrain from reading any forums and the like until you've bought, played and completed the game. Which is something you should do as quickly as possible. Partly because it's a wonderful game, but also because I'm not sure how long I can go without talking about the bit where (spoiler deleted. Sigh. - Ed).
Some of the things that make it so extraordinary are things I can't tell you about without spoiling them, so this review is going to be about the ones that I can. All I'll say about the premise is what they'll probably put on the back of the box: it's 1960, you're on a plane, and it explodes over the ocean in the middle of the night.
It's a spectacularly beautiful opening, from the moment your head breaks the flame-glinting surface of the oil-black water with a spluttering gasp, to when crackly violas groan out a quietly mournful fanfare to your first glimpse of Rapture, BioShock's underwater metropolis.
It was supposed to be a refuge, where brilliant minds could free themselves of the burden of lesser ones. But geniuses are not well-known for their psychological stability, and the extensive self-modification possibilities of their stem-cell technology - 'Adam' - freed them to inflict their delusions and neuroses on themselves. What's left of their utopia is a dripping ghost city of mutilated, murderous freaks. It's one of the most extraordinary places I've ever explored in a videogame.
Once there, you're led through the game's unusual fundamentals: a wrench to hit people with - familiar enough - and a Plasmid. Plasmids are Rapture's techno-magic, and they tend to immobilise, weaken or trick enemies rather than kill them directly. Mixing them with the game's more conventional weapons is a magnificently creative and violent process.
You're also introduced to hacking, the system by which you can befriend any turret, drone or security camera by, er, playing a mini-game identical to Pipe Mania (snipr.com/pipem). Whatever the logic may be, it works: it's tense, stressful and fun. I had my dictaphone recording as I played and at one point you can hear me saying the word "F(lip!)" 26 times during a single hack.
One of the game's more radical quirks, however, isn't obvious until you die. You can't. When you run out of health, you emerge from a regeneration chamber with the game world exactly as you left it. It's a brave and ultimately successful ploy to reduce frustration when you're starved for resources. It elegantly renders quicksaving - the more intrusive way of achieving virtually the same effect - obsolete.
If you're not dying, fighting, taking pictures or playing Pipe Mania, you're probably shopping. BioShock deploys almost all its RPG elements through vending machines, as odd as that sounds. From them you buy Plasmids, their passive cousins, Tonics, and extra slots for each.
Plasmids are essentially spells, so more of them means more options in combat. Tonics are as near as BioShock gets to attribute boosts, in that they improve you character's capabilities, so a few more of these essentially constitutes a level-up.
But one of the reasons this system is so smart is that it's not as simple as that. For one thing, you can switch your choices out freely at Gene Banks all over Rapture, so there's masses of room for experimentation and variety. And because Tonics aren't restricted to dry numerical increments, they get wonderfully exotic. To give you some idea of how distinctive you can make your character with these, I focused my character so tightly on hitting things with a wrench that by the end of the game, I could brain any unsuspecting enemy with a single swipe.
In addition to learning these strange new skills, the main thing you discover during the early sections of the game is Rapture itself. It's an incredible experience, and the first of three big reasons why BioShock is very special indeed.
The sound designers deserve a huge chunk of the credit for this. Think of the first time you set eyes on a game like Far Cry, and imagine the audio equivalent. It's exquisite, not just in setting the powerful ambience of Rapture, but in evoking the crackling, fizzling smack of combat.
And as if for an encore, the acting is perfect - sometimes uncomfortably so, given the gruelling themes. There's even a plot twist that hinges on one voice actor sounding natural when saying something very deliberate, and they pull it off. It's hard to imagine another game being able to trust their talent with a trick like that.
Despite what you'd assume to be a limited visual palette, Rapture's districts manage to be sumptuously diverse. I found myself dreading to leave each area because the next couldn't possibly be as gorgeous - and I was wrong almost every time. You'll trudge through bristling green gardens, rusty wharfs, frosty white ice halls and infernal factories choked with amber smog.
And yet every scene in Rapture has the same three clashing forces. Firstly: the water. It drips from cracks, seeps through ruptures, gushes out of burst pipes, washes in swells across the floor, crashes down stairwells in a flurry of spume. A city under the sea is a defiance of nature, and nature's encroaching response is rendered beautifully.
Then there's the sheer sense of hubris: the neon optimism, the cheery posters and glib commercials. "My daddy's smarter than Einstein," a child's voice chirps from a Plasmid vending machine. "And stronger than Hercules! And he lights flame with a snap of his fingers! Are you as good as my daddy? Not unless you visit the Gatherer's Garden!"
And lastly there's reality: the pain, horror and psychosis of the people who actually tried to live there. Audio diaries recorded on the verge of tears, desperate words scratched in blood on the walls, and disfigured bodies, travesties of the people they once were. Those that still live are no less corpse-like, but they roam the halls nonetheless, mumbling insanities. "I found her like that!" a Splicer protests to an empty room. "I can control myself, I swear I can!"
Splicers are what Rapture's citizens became, once the things they'd done to their own bodies had finally driven them mad. The alarming words they ramble, to themselves and to you, are the centrepiece of Rapture's heavy atmosphere of horror, discord and suffering. Many are unique to the lunatics of a particular area, and you rarely hear the same line twice.
A doctor in the Medical Wing with one blank eye beat me to death with a rake, shouting "It's just... a standard... procedure!", then made a verbal note of my time of death. "You're just jealous!" a hideous debutante screamed as she clawed at my face with a meat hook. "Run!" bellowed a matronly snob with a bouffant hairdo and a rusty machete. "That's all your kind is good for!" A weaselly looking man with blood on his lips smacked me with a three-foot Maglite then shouted "Oh just fucking report me then!" These people hate you, for no good reason, and it's horrible.
Don't hold your breath for the Splicers you're fighting to escalate into Trigens or the like; BioShock isn't game-like in that way. You're in Rapture, so you're fighting Rapture's erstwhile citizens. It doesn't feel the need to up the stakes or the scale because it's telling a story, not wowing school kids. Splicers are far from uniform in appearance or ability in any case, as are your methods of dealing with them.
Your skirmishes take place in an environment bristling with manipulable elements. Drones, turrets and security cameras are the most obvious, but there are also fuel puddles that can catch fire, and water that any burning Splicer can be counted on to run towards - which can then be electrified. Detritus, grenades, missiles and even fireballs can be sucked up and flung, and your enemies themselves can be subverted to do your work - directly or otherwise.
Only a handful of the standard weapons are really interesting or satisfying when used alone, but mix them with a generous menu of Plasmids in an environment like this and they become spectacular. Even with an element as familiar as the grenade launcher's proximity charge, the scope for impishly inventive violence is overwhelming.
Clump five on a barrel and propel the resulting super-bomb at a crowd of victims with Telekinesis. Chuck one in the nearest pool of water then set your prey alight. Stick one on the ceiling directly above a Cyclone Trap - an invisible springboard that catapults unsuspecting enemies hilariously into the air. The AI for a befriended drone even has some ideas of its own: bolt a proximity charge to the little guy and he'll dive-bomb the next enemy he sees.
It's the same for the Decoy Plasmid - another ability we've seen in plenty of other games. But here you can place it on a barrel to trick melee Splicers into beating their way to a fiery death. If they're packing heat, set it front of a Big Daddy and see what happens. My favourite was to place it just before vanishing with an Invisibility Tonic, then get bonus Research points for all the multiple-subject action shots I took of them beating the holographic hell out of my creepy doppelganger.
The richness of simulation is continually surprising, and the variety of absurd brutality that emerges from it is one of the three big reasons that BioShock is essential. Even when you're not carefully tinkering with it to create deathtraps, it serves as a catalyst for the screeching, brutal chaos of combat. These are gallingly visceral fights. There's something tangibly unkind about setting someone alight, then clothes-lining them with a five-kilo bloodstained wrench as they scream past you towards water.
If you're worrying about the dreaded taint of consolification, by the way, don't. It's clear that the PC team at Irrational are every bit as platform-snobbish as us. There's a PC-only options menu that lets you turn off the quest compass guiding you to your next objective, disable the golden sheen on mission-critical items, and as for auto-aiming, it isn't even an option unless you plug in a 360 pad.
Also exclusive to this edition is a magnificently intricate PC-only quick-switch menu. Because you can have 19 different weapon ammo types on top of your six Plasmids at any given time, using the mouse wheel can get fiddly. So there's also a key you can hold down to pause the game and pick any one of those 25 modes of attack with a single click. Hacking, too, has been designed differently for the PC to make best use of the mouse - it's quicker, slicker and less frustrating than the sluggish Xbox controls.
The final geekily gratifying thing about the PC version is how well it runs. It was dazzlingly beautiful and hitchlessly smooth on a machine with an £80 processor (an Athlon X2 5200) and a single entry-level GeForce 8800 - running DirectX 9. And this was at 1600x900 on max settings.
But you're probably waiting to hear about the Big Daddies, the diving-suited ogres that have become the poster-boys of BioShock. They're less central to the game than we've been led to believe, though; you could complete it without ever attacking one. Each Big Daddy guards one Little Sister - a family tree only MC Escher could draw - and their relationship is bizarre and compelling to watch.
Sometimes the girl will turn sulkily away from her giant friend; he'll nudge her gently a few times for forgiveness, then offer her his enormous metal hand. She'll turn and take it gently, bowing a little, and he pats her tiny head very, very carefully.
There are two or three Daddy/Sister partnerships trudging and pattering around each of Rapture's seven districts, and attacking them is more of a profitable hobby than the objective of the game. Your motive to do so - and it's a compelling one - is that the Sisters are the only source of Adam in the game, the currency you need to buy new Plasmids, Tonics and slots. And so, inevitably, you'll do it.
I shot my first from 30 feet away, figuring that he was tough and powerful but essentially a big ball of metal, and therefore slow. I can now report that Big Daddies are not slow. The instant - the instant - you become a threat to the Little Sister, you're smashed to the floor by their vast bulk, their face-lights flaring a livid red.
This thing closed the distance between us in a fraction of a second, floored me so suddenly that I thought I'd died, then impaled me on a four-foot drill bit before I could get up. They hammer you; the disorientation effects are nauseatingly good, and you can't walk or shoot straight even if you do manage to escape their raging metal fists for a minute. The Splicers are certainly fierce, but I've never seen anything in a game look so angry as a Big Daddy when provoked.
Controlling, containing and defeating that explosion of rage within these volatile environments makes for some of the best boss fights in gaming. But because Big Daddies aren't immediately hostile, you instinctively clear the whole area before taking them on. You're then left with three to take down one after the other, and the prospect is daunting.
Plenty of different ways exist to do so, but any fight with one of these things exhausts: you don't feel like going two more rounds immediately afterwards. It's a minor complaint - you can take them on as you find them, come back later, or leave them in peace - but it's still an odd decision to pack in so many. One per area would have been just right.
The Big Daddy dealt with, there's the much-previewed dilemma of whether to 'Harvest' or 'Save' his Little Sister - there's a dedicated key for each choice. With the former you get more Adam, with the latter the girl survives. And yet surprisingly, the decision is hardly relevant. You don't see what it is you do to the poor child either way (this has changed from the preview demo we saw), and the material reward is ultimately almost the same.
I didn't ask for a game that lets you kill children, but if you're going to make one, I think you have a duty to make the player face the grisly reality of his choice. Glossing over the consequences seems almost to condone the act. But I'm not here to preach, and the truth is that it couldn't be less important - the game would be exactly as good if the choice was removed entirely. I just want to make sure you don't play BioShock expecting a game about tough moral choices, because it's not and it doesn't need to be.
A lot of fuss has been made over the fact that you can't just shoot the Little Sisters - the sea-slug parasite inside them heals the damage instantly, says the game fiction. But in practice, you get used to the idea very quickly. I mean, hopefully your desire to headshot a toddler is fairly low to begin with, so discovering you can't do it anyway is not exactly the end of the world.
The choice that really is emotionally affecting comes before this. Do you kill the Big Daddy? You're usually desperate for Adam, but these gentle giants are the only things in the game that mean you no harm. Once you've watched them hammer a few Splicers, you develop a real fondness for the big guys, and their death is far more disturbing than the mysterious vanishing act a harvested Little Sister pulls. Their tiny charge patters barefoot over to the enormous dead hulk, wailing and sobbing. "Mr Bubbles!" she cries, "Please get up! Please!"
BioShock's main plot isn't about the Little Sisters, but it does have a sequence that gave me a Schindler's List pang of guilt for killing them all (what? I needed the Adam). And Schindler's List isn't a cultural touchstone that comes up a lot when talking about games. There's a richness to BioShock's fiction, a conflicted complexity to its characters, and a humanity in its themes that we're wholly unaccustomed to in gaming.
But it is uniquely a game: its most powerful moments play directly on the conceits of gaming itself. Where others try to contort film scripts around interactive shooters, BioShock uses violence as a bloody foundation for its real stories. While the relentless onslaught of the murderously insane continually rams home the horrific nature of what Rapture has become, two other threads tell the story of its past and future.
The story of its past is something you have to investigate: it's in the audio diaries left by Rapture's citizens when they still had some marbles to lose. They tell their personal stories in instalments scattered throughout the game, so if you actively hunt them out, you end up following each person's story to its (usually sticky) conclusion. Most of these are grim, some are achingly sad, and one or two are utterly nuts (look out for The Wild Rabbit). And one contains a harrowing twist to the main plot that's revealed nowhere else.
As for what's going to happen to Rapture, that story is the propulsive force of the game, and it comes to you over the wireless. Irrational don't like to let you meet sane people in person - they can't be simulated realistically - so don't expect any Black Mesa East chapters. But there is one moment, in dealing with the few still-vaguely-cogent people of Rapture, that's simply staggering to experience.
BioShock had already made me physically gape several times by this stage, but here my mouth fell open and stayed open, only widening further as the scene became more extraordinary with every passing second. I'm going to suggest to Irrational that they patch the game to activate the player's webcam at this moment, because the gormless visages it elicits must be hilarious.
Again, it's BioShock smartly exploiting its status as a game for a psychological sting. That single scene casts the whole game in a new light, even your own actions within it. Irrational have somehow become such masters of game storytelling that they can toy with the very process, mock it, and bend it to their will.
So that moment, the dark contortions of the plot at large, is the third and final triumph that makes BioShock an instant classic. But it also precedes the third and final problem. This is a short sequence, and not a very difficult one, but its mediocrity is hard to stomach because of when it occurs. It's the end.
After a game so singularly smart and beautiful that it makes others seem laughable, we get a final level that could have been pulled straight from the tripe BioShock puts to shame elsewhere. Imagine Citizen Kane ending, after you find out what 'Rosebud' means, with zombie Orson Welles fighting a giant Agent Smith made of smaller Agent Smiths. It doesn't negate how wonderful the preceding experience has been, but it does rather spoil the mood.
Regardless, BioShock is a dark and astonishing masterpiece. It might not be as flawless as Half-Life 2, but it bites off so much more and accomplishes it all magnificently. Even if you've soaked up every preview and trailer with relish, you haven't scratched the surface of how deep this unsettling meditation on hubris and insanity actually goes.
If it were just a thrilling ride through a twisted and remarkable plot, BioShock would eventually get old. But there's a physicality and openness to its richly systematic combat that suggests it'll stay fresh for a very long time.
This is the really bewildering thing about it: it succeeds so stunningly on three different fronts. Not esoteric ones, either, these are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades: narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as BioShock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful.
I spend my career, and my gaming life, waiting for a moment when a game just astonishes me, when I can't believe what I'm seeing, what I'm doing. BioShock has five.
I am not very good with PC technical stuff and probably this game wont run on mine but just to make sure I will ask anyway.
my graphics card is radion x600 is that better or worse than this? processor says that it is athlon but I don't know which one, is the one mentioned the newest version? I am going off the assumption that my computer would have a heart attack trying to run this game.
»I am not very good with PC technical stuff and probably this game wont run on mine but just to make sure I will ask anyway.
sorry mate, that x600 is a mega crappy card by todays standards( no offence ), 8800 is the top of the range series of gfx cards for the PC. Id suggest a 1950pro or 8600 at least to play this
You should be grand if you had a faster processor( dual core ), the AMD's are cheap as chips at the moment anyway, unfortunate if you have socket 939 though( difficult to find decent 939 processors now ). Ill be running it on my Core 2 with single 7800GTX, recommended specs start at 7900GT and the 7800GTX matches that, although it did say 512Mb, but im sure 256 will be fine, medium textures or something
hmm, well you can get a 4400+ dual core for it( or an Opty and oc it like crazy lol, heres a like to the 4200 - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-183-AM&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567 theyre getting harder and harder to get ), are those gfx cards AGP or PCIE? otherwise you could get a Core 2 an ASRock mobo, use that DDR1 ram with it
You should be fine as long as there aren't any SLI compatibility issues - I would have thought SLI 7800GTX would be reasonably comfortable with this. Processor might be a bit dodgy, but if you've got £50 and a motherboard that would recognise a dual-core then you could do worse than get yourself one of these. If you overclock it a bit then you should be perfectly happy with games for a bit yet.
EDIT: bollocks, that was @MIPhantom. Stop posting while I type stuff, you gits!
Also: now ridiculously excited about this game. Why can't it be next Friday already? Waaaaaaaaah!
no offense taken my pc is about 3 years old now and I have never been bothered with an upgrade as it still plays many games that are released today some on the highest settings, if it needs a big upgrade then I don't think that I will bother to be honest.
"playing a mini-game identical to Pipe Mania (snipr.com/pipem)"
Better to use a PC example: Covert Action by Microprose and the phone tapping system.
"When you run out of health, you emerge from a regeneration chamber with the game world exactly as you left it."
Surely affects the violence and threat factor that this game seems to thrive on based on the rest of the review? Surprised the reviewer didn't talk more about that rather than glossing over it!
"I just want to make sure you don't play BioShock expecting a game about tough moral choices, because it's not and it doesn't need to be."
Hasn't making tough moral choices been the central theme of all the hype?! And now we find there really aren't any?!
Finally, talking about a chip as £80 and an 'entry level card' being an 8800 shows how magazines like PC Zone are out of touch with reality and disingenuous to boot. The CPU may cost £80, but surely it is only that if you have a motherboard it can slip into? It is a complicated subject, and again they glossed over it, like they always do. As for an 8800 being an entry level card - who the hell do they think their talking to? No wonder games like this get lauded to the heavens and then don't sell - who the hell has all this 'entry level' hardware?! Where is the information real gamers need, like what are the minimum requirements? How well does it play on average PC's?!
This review was aimed squarely at that small group of very hardcore gamers that have uber PC's. It was, in effect, a sales pitch to them.
As great as this game may be, if it's short, with a poor ending, and requiring hardware that the average PC gamer doesn't have, this will be another System Shock II, fantastic reviews and awards and low sales.
Such a shame. Such a shame.
But if you are one of these hardcore gamers and you do have the hardware - enjoy! I will just wait until I have a PC I can run it on and can pay a price that is fair for a short game.(Funnily enough we weren't told how short, we're we? Are we talking 12 hours gameplay? 15? 20? PC Zone wouldn't be saying it was a short game if it was more than 20!)
When you consider that System Shock 2 in some ways was more accessible in terms of hardware requirements, which were closer to the average PC back then, unlike Bioshock, and subject matter, standard Sci-Fi, versus this more 'mature/adult' story, it makes you wonder how Bioshock, on PC, can even sell the quantity that System Shock 2 did!
It will be just as interesting to follow this game after release as it was to follow it before it! :)
Thnx for replies I was looking at Oc and saw they had the same cpu. It will however be the first time ive replaced a cpu. Im off to youtube to see how much thermal compound is required :)
Do you know - I had been ignoring this game because I thought to myself: "Just another FPS" and I am so bored of FPS's. However, I only got half way through reading this review and I was sold!
I'm off to Amazon to order it...and a new graphics card! :)
Maybe you should worry about getting yourself a net connection instead of ripping on people here with older PC's just cause you think the game wont run at all on a PC thats not as good as yours.
The minimum requirements for Bioshock are pretty modest meaning most ppl with a PC 2 years old or so should be able to run the game somewhere between minimum and recommended settings. So while it may not be all bells and whistles at full force the game should look ok with a decent framerate.
Its not that dificult to find AMD 939 CPU's these days. I see lots of AMD X2 939's on ebay and you can still get 7900 and 7950 AGP video cards too.
Well I'm getting it for 360, cos my PC is getting to be little more than a means to get on the internet. It's only 3 years old but the specs were modest to say the least even then!
Played the demo last night though and By Thunder! What an incredible game! It's not very often you say "Ohho ho ho! I'm buying this!" within 5 minutes of launching a game.
There's been a lot of love poured into this game and it shows. Big time. 8)
WiiFuelee - I think the point being made is why do we need on-line activation at all?! And to that extent, I agree with the guy.
As to how cheap and easy it is to get hardware. You have to remember that if you need to buy hardware to play this game it changes the whole dynamic. Spending the £200 or whatever you need to spend becomes the core decision. The game, however good, falls into a secondary position. PC gaming especially, given the lack of AAA titles on the format i about immediacy. If someone hasn't upgraded and bought this game in the next couple weeks, many will not end up upgrading and buying the game at all, at least this year.
This has got a touch of Deja Vu about it with regard System Shock 2. The key question, as always with PC gaming, is how many copies this game sells, not how high the review scores are and how many awards won. SS2 did all that, but still didn't sell and ultimately caused the closure of the developer. Sales are dependent on cost, amount of gameplay and hardware requirements. This review pointed out the game was short and gave very little information about how this game would play on an average PC, instead implying that if you don't have an 'entry-level 4200 and 8800 card, you don't deserve to be a PC gamer, or some such. Reviews always used to tell you how a game played on the recommended and on the minimum. That seems to have disappeared in the race to hype AAA PC games to the heavens!
There's a lot to be said about what wasn't mentioned in this review, and what was glossed over. Even if you have a PC that can run this game easily, you should be pondering this lack of info as much as anyone else. You owe it to the hobby.
Oh, by the way. Official minimum/recommended system requirements from the developer:
Hey guys,
We have the finalized PC specs for you. More PC information is on its way, but I wanted to get this out to you as soon as possible.
BIOSHOCK PC SPECIFICATIONS
Operating Systems: Windows XP (with Service Pack 2) or Windows Vista
Minimum System Requirements: CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz Single Core processor
System RAM: 1GB
Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 128MB RAM (NVIDIA 6600 or better/ATI X1300 or better, excluding ATI X1550).
Sound Card: 100% direct X 9.0c compatible sound card
Hard disc space: 8GB free space
Recommended System Requirements: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo processor
System RAM: 2GB
Video card: DX9: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT or better) DX10: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or better
Sound Card: Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ series (Optimized for use with Creative Labs EAX ADVANCED HD 4.0 or EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 compatible sound cards)
Important Note: Game requires Internet connection for activation
All we have to find out now, through User Reviews, is is the minimum requirements true, or are we looking at another Oblivion, that totally fibbed about the minimum requirements and gave you a slide show if you have above minimum!
It's hardly unique for the player to come out of a regeneration chamber when he dies. That's exactly what happens in both System Shocks (well, once you activate said chambers).
It'll sell well enough on the 360 which is the lead format. Not a pc gamer,nor will I ever will be (far too much work for too little reward) so I had the benefit of reading the review as a game review and not a hardware sheet.
I can understand the concerns though, and that is why I keep my gaming on consoles. (and I'm a technotard)
maybe you should read my post properly and see that i said no offence was ment when i said wont be very good for playing this, i have no interest in playing my PC is better than your PC rubbish and i never said anything to that effect. Not only that but an x600 WILL NOT run i, the minimum specs are DX9.0c and an x1300, therefore its shader model 3, the x600 is shader model 2 only.
So you needent go on an attacking buzz in the future for no reason, as for my net connection, thats my problem that ive just sorted an hour ago, my point was as humourguy stated was all these PC games requiring a net connection, when sometimes thats not available, and theres no alternative unlike windows activation
For the socket 939, yes they are difficult to get, they were difficult to get last year when i got my 4200+ never mind now, ebay will have them of course and they'll have everything possible second hand, 939 mobos and cpus arent made anymore thats why theyre hard to find
AGP is easy to get simply because there are so many AGP users out there but you wont get any newer top end cards in AGP
judging by the PC gamer review that they could run it maxed at 19xx x xxxx( whatever lol ) with an 8800 320Mb GTS that i would say it will run very well with an 8600GT @ 1280x1024 with medium to high settings
I only went on an attacking buzz because you seem to think you know how well Bioshock is going to run on older systems but you dont really have a clue.
Guess its a good thing my rubbish PC has a shader 3.0 card in it then isnt it!
And yes i do realise you wont get any newer top end cards in AGP, that wasnt even my point. I only said that as there are decent enough AGP cards to run Bioshock at recommended specs.
If i wanted any more top end then that id go buy a brand new PC which i wouldnt do just to play Bioshock on. And besides i'll be waiting until theyre are a lot more Direct X 10 cards out before i build a whole new system.
In defence of the review I agree that a 8800(GTS?) is an entry level card as you can get them from OC for £180. That is only £50 than what my old 5600 cost, which was a mid-range card to the expensive/crap 5950. I actually think that graphics card manufacturers have got it spot on with the prices/performance.
8800 cards are really good cards( cant say the same for some of the unoptimized crap out there thought ), and relatively good value, 9800 is out in November though, bad time to pick up an 8800
In defense of the review, he said an entry level Geforce 8800. Note that there is at least 4 versions of the 8800, being 8800gts 320mb, 8800gts 640mb, 8800gtx, and 8800 ultra. The reviewer did not mention which of these he was talking about, so the phrase "entry level" most likely means entry level card of the 8800 series (being the 8800gts 320mb or 8800gts 640mb). He probably did not mean to imply that an 8800 was an entry level card as a whole, so I think you misunderstood him.
I would also like to note that given the hardware he mentioned, he ran the game perfectly smooth at max settings and 1600x1200 resolution. It is doubtful that if you don't own some of the newer hardware on the market, that you would own a monitor capable of displaying 1600x1200 or higher resolution. So if you are concerned because you don't have the hardware mentioned in the review, keep in mind that you will most likely run the game at a lower resolution (1280x1024 or 1024x768) so that will greatly reduce the need for top of the line hardware. Also keep in mind that this is at max settings, and I'm sure many people are willing to turn down the settings a bit to in order to run the game well if their hardware is not top of the line.
Besides, if anyone should choose to upgrade their pc to play Bioshock, it's not like they won't enjoy the benefits of a faster pc for other pc games. Bioshock is just the tip of the iceberg, and it's as good reason as any to get your pc ready for the avalanche of AAA pc titles coming later this year.
People seem to be getting caught up on computer specs on this thread. So I thought I'd share my thoughts with y'all and hopefully some find it helpful.
I've been a hardcore pc gamer for about 10 years now. I'm currently due for another updade because my over-expensive AGP card and 3Ghz CPU just can't cope anymore.
I'm guessing there are A LOT of people like me out there. It's hard to keep current and play the latest games... unless you are loaded. But who can afford spending 1 or 2 thousand dollars every year?
So I said stuff it. I'll spend HALF the money I usually spend on an upgrade and instead buy a console. I've never looked back. I can play all the best games and worrying about specs and framerates are a thing of the past. Luckily I bought an Xbox so I'll be playing Bioshock very, very soon. but if I were to play this at the same level of detail and resolution on a PC I'd have to spend upwards of $1500 at least, nearly four times that of a new Xbox 360.
Things might change when Crysis comes out, but for the moment there isn't a single game I want to play that I can't get for Xbox 360.
Thats true, if you only use a PC for gaming better off with a 360 or PS3, i need a PC for other stuff though, oh and Battlefield 2 :) and im sure others use PC for other things too. Even if i didnt have a PC i wouldnt get one just for Crysis though( lol, you'd wanna be a serious hardcore gamer to do that ). I prefer the PC for online FPS games, and for me that wont change for a long time, i much prefer arcade type games on the consoles
PC demo is probably gonna be out on monday, ill wait for the full game
wzhu85 - very reasonable comments, but ANY 8800 is not an entry level card. Tell me there is an 8800 or equivalent in any 'entry-level' home PC being sold in PC stores - or in fact even in their most expensive home PC! I think you'd be lucky to get a 6800 or 7200 equivalent, never mind an 8800!
And of course, it's only coincidence that we know pretty much KNOW what is needed to play it maxed, but we have NO IDEA (other than maybe making educated guesses like you did) what it will run like on the minimum requirements as stated by the developer because, presumably, PC Zone doesn't give a toss about 90% plus of PC gamers, but just the 10% or less that always have the latest greatest PC.
This review was for them and them alone. Not to the whole PC gaming community - and I resent that! I can't resent it too much though, because no there Bioshock PC review I have seen talks about the technical aspects at all! All the want to be is just like a movie trailer - tell you about the acting and the art direction and the story and the camera angles, etc. Problem is, you don't have to ask yourself 'but will my PC run it adequately?' for a new movie, do you?!
So for someone who still doesn't know if I can run it adequately, what has all this hype and reviews and interviews and movies and trailers done for me - and the millions like me?
Is it any wonder at all with the level of 'service' most PC gamers get from it's media, that more and more are digging out their old games and going over to console to avoid all this crap - just because you don't upgrade your PC every 17 minutes!
Well, I do and it would've been good to read a bit more about the game's performance. Maybe on different machines too. :roll: This is the only part that I'm interested iin right now. I won't read the whole review yet, I don't want any surprises to be ruined for me.
"One of the game's more radical quirks, however, isn't obvious until you die. You can't. When you run out of health, you emerge from a regeneration chamber with the game world exactly as you left it. It's a brave and ultimately successful ploy to reduce frustration when you're starved for resources. It elegantly renders quicksaving - the more intrusive way of achieving virtually the same effect - obsolete."
It also renders any idea they may have had regarding how tension builds up in a scene - it's pointless if you know you can't die.Fighting a big daddy for example is not going to be as terrifying as it should be knowing you will simply respawn again - bearing in mind that everything is left how it was when you died including enemy health.Surely.
I like the game alot but this system is terrible for a game like this that requires tension.
this game looks toss. it may play well etc but from looking at the screenshots it looks like a mad fantasy game.. hate that shite!
why are there no fps games with realism and grit?? eg soldier of fortune that was dripping in grit considering its an old game, but has great settings like the underground train station, u could go into the bogs and blast a thug taking a piss on an innocent! great game. we need more shooters like this: shoutguns, pistols, rifles and machine guns. and not a zombie/alien or phaser gun in sight!
While i agree with you that Soldier of Fortune is a classic and should be updated, you can hardly call Bioshock toss, it may not be your type of game but it does look excellent
Which leaves the question: If you can't die and you are respawned in this pod. How do you get there and who puts you in it and why? Still this game is goin to be awsome. I love FPS and my favorite happens to be CS but i already pre-order this game when i saw the Big Daddy beating the crap out of you in a cut video. Man did that get me fired up. The other question that gets me is what will be the result of saving or killing the LS in the end of thegame, but i guess to find that out is play it when i get it and finding out. I still like the fact that the game will never play out the same for people who get this game so many strats and be used against one enemy. The fact that you can booby trap health kits is saying one thing, Higher level in AI. The last game i played that the AI relized they was being attacked was RE4 and that was a great game. If they are attacked in this and and they go and heal themselves since you can booby trap health then thats telling me the AI in this game is goin to be very good and thats what i want. AI that is willing to give me a challange and not just stand they and get shot at.
Given how huge installs are, and how long they take, I think a: 'do you want to install the A)'save any time' version, B) 'cannot die because of respawn' version or the C) 'save whenever you see a weird sign on a wall' version? (All versions have the auto save inbuilt)
Please press A, B or C.
Would be a great way to deal with the dying problem. It would just be a routine or two that would get installed, but you would have to reinstall to use one of the other versions and the saves wouldn't be compatible.
That would get around being forced to have all the tension in this game gone because of the no dying option built in whether you want it or not!
I agree with humourguys earlier posts about the specs needed for this game, and the fact an 8800 is not entry level. My PC is four years old and I have twice upgraded the RAM and GFX card, but it's an AGP card, so I'd have to now get a new mobo, RAM, CPU and GFX card to play Bioshock in anything close to high detail...many many people simply don't know how to do this, and won't even attempt it, and until hardcore PC gaming can be made cheaper it'll never take off like consoles...
This is why I decided to dip out of the rat race, and buy a 360...Bioshock was the reason for my purchase of the 360 initially, but I've been really enjoying lots of other games I wouldn't have bothered with normally..console gaming is so much less hassle...I spend more time playing games now, than fiddling with settings and tweaking configs.
Let me cut through all the bullshit & say this right now: The game is playable on my system. I have tried the demo & it defaults to high on almost everything. Though it's not silky smooth, my system handles it quite admirably. A modest upgrade to my graphics card (£100ish) would enable the game to be played flawlessly.
So there you have it. Let the bullshit cease. You don't need to spend £1500 on a new computer to play this game
Also it requires internet access to activate, not sure if it requires contineous net access or not( if it does i wont be buying it ) 2 Activations is complete bollox, i dual boot, so thats both gone, ill be getting a new gfx card in November so ill need another 2, having said that, ill really enjoy pissing them off more and more for more activations :twisted: Im sure the review didnt mention anything as they usually review pre-release versions and that activation crap gets added later
With a 7800gtx, E6400, 4 gigs ram, i can play on max settings without VSynch @ 1280x900( some form of widescreen as my LCD is native 1680x1050 ) and i get 25-50FPS with x8AF in XP. I can also play @ 1680x900 but i have to drop some of the settings and get 23-40FPS
The game should be rescored everywhere due to the inconvenience of only 2 a activations, i wouldnt mind but steam in itself is a security measure
Stunningly good game judging by the demo, but if it needs to be online to play i wont be getting it, i might get a 360 in a few months but i definately wouldnt get it for that if the PC wont work without net access after activation( nearly double the price, lol ) :)
Mogs - of course, for your system, you only need to upgrade the card, but that's you thinking the world revolves around you! So now every single person who cannot run Bioshock just needs to go out and get a card, eh?
Well, no, of course, it's more complicated than that! For a start, I have seen on a 2K support thread (not that 2K goes on and actually gives answers, of course!) that someone said, "I have read that my card is better than your minimum card", and someone else said - "the card mentioned in the minimum spec is known to be worse than your card, but it has 3.0 shader capability, your card does not!" So there you have it. The general consensus is get card A) when card B) should have been bought! It's just not as simple as you make out.
I much prefer the way STALKER works than Bioshock I am afraid. A sub 20 hour linear game with very few different types of enemies, a bad ending (all negatives given in 90%+ reviews!) as well as magically flying to the nearest Vista tube to be re-born is not my cup of tea. I also think the 'big moral question' is not a moral question at all....
Do you think bringing a 'sister', an 8/9 year old girl, back to normality and then letting them go into that murderous, drug infested killing field of Rapture a good thing?! As opposed to doing the kind thing and killing them (ignoring the ADAM benefit)? I think they are two equally bad choices, not good and evil. Logically, bringing them back to normality and letting them go free to roam Rapture could be seen as much worse than humanely killing them! It's just a bad/bad choice, not a good/evil one as mentioned everywhere!
So on quite a few levels, I don't think this game is for me, STALKER Clear Sky, Mass Effect, White Gold and Precursors are much more up my street, and all with 100 hours plus gameplay, much better value for money! Let's hope they end up as good as the pre-hype says they're going to be....! :)
You're not a 'glass half-full' person are you? :lol:
My computer is nearly 3 years old and I could, if I wanted to, happily play it without any upgrade. If you have a PC older than 3 years, you have no grounds for complaint. It's always been the case that you need to upgrade after a few years. :wink:
humorguy - i think youre being a bit harsh on the game tbh, you really should try the demo, even if its on a mates PC or 360. Honestly all the reviews/moral questions are rubbish compared to actually playing it, the story is well freaky as are the enemies and the sound. I played the demo through last night and thought id killed all the enemies in one part and it scared the bejebus out of me when i was doodling and got whacked over the head with a wrench. Seriously, play it at night with the lights down, crank up the surround sound and i guarantee you you will jump more than once. I played FEAR like that and it doesnt even come close on any level
Anyways, just giving you my pov, i wasnt expecting much from Bioshock but was very plesently surprised, but of course i know it wont be to everyones liking, but should be tried definately
Anyway, rumour has it that a continuous net connection isint required( otherwise im fubar ) so im picking it up tomorrow and activating it on someone elses net connection. Some tard on the 2K forums posted a thread with a stupid name and gave away the ending, fecking idiot, had it read before i knew what was going on, grrrrrr :x
lmimmfn - I HAVE downloaded and played the demo, a 4+ hour download then half an hour to get it unzipped because my anti-virus didn't like it, then another 5 minutes unzipping it, then another 2 minutes installing it, then another 15 minutes playing it. So a total of over 5 hours to play a linear game with the same enemies and three times flying through the air, round corners, whizzing by splicers to get to a canister that brings you back to life when you die - an explanation for that as well as why you would inject yourself with a syringe within 2 mins of arriving is sorely needed to show how 'immersive' the story really is?!
And once, dying right in front of a canister with 3 splicers surrounding me and getting into a loop where I would get my life back with a little health, leave the canister, be attacked by the splicers and then back in the canister, etc. Had to quit the game (no saves allowed) and play through it again. The intro was good, the voice work was good, but no better than any recent game, the artwork was good, but no better and quite like the artwork in Vampire: Bloodlines (not that you had much chance to admire it anyway, during all the fights) but I could see me getting bored of the splicers and the over dramatic tape recordings (done much better in the first System Shock!), etc, and I already knew the powers were going to be what you needed, not the weapons.
I also thought the Little Sister thing was a nasty sick gimmick to hang the pre-hype on for months on end that the game would force you to make 'moral choices' when the reality was it was something to shock to make people think the game was going to be full of moral choices when it isn't. As mentioned above, the Little Sister thing is a bad/bad option, not a 'selfish or selfless' option (as 2K put it).
As to originality, well it had System Shock 2 written all over it, with the ghosts and the canisters to bring you back to life and a world that had collapsed into anarchy because of scientific experimentation. The photography thing was straight out of Beyond Good and Evil as well!
In addition to playing the demo, I have watched it all the way through on different YouTube video's, in case I missed something, but I didn't.
This is a standard FPS, with some ideas taken from other titles with, according to the reviews, a not too good ending and about 20 hours of gameplay. Based on all I have seen and read I would say a solid 85% game with a lot less originality than the hype proclaimed, a lot less moral decision making and enemies that look the same throughout but magically take more hits as you get stronger weapons.
When all this hype dies down and people look back, they'll be a lot closer to me than those 100% gushing reviews proclaiming it as the second coming.
Yet again a game has promised everything. As real life levels of realism, vast explore able areas filled with living characters whose every action affects the game. A rolling objective or GTA mode as I like to call it, where you can simply wander in another world free from the obligatory "My wife and kids are near you chosen one! You have to save them because I can only just manage to breath by myself." All the hype was a lie and I feel as though the people at 2K have stolen from me... Nothing about this game suggests any original thought was placed into the project. The enemies are just a swarm, they survive multiple headshots as you progress and they are totally 2 dimensional they are nothing but a meat shield and an extremely annoying one at that. I really felt intimidated by the first splicer you meet in the diving bell. Why couldn't they all be like her? If they were to have depth to them like silent stalkers in the shadows of a once great place they would be far more terrifying. Humorguy, your too right. I thought you had been generous giving it 85% it gets a poor 45% - 50% from me. I have actually quit out of the game before finishing the first area. Warhammer 40k Fire warrior was the only other game i have ever do that too...
Personally I want my money back, and as if that wasn't bad enough its got Starforce’s second coming on the disk wtf?! Why copy protect it, if people are going to crack it as hard as you make it they will... why not stop being retarded why not just have the software validate and that be that. Activation limits only serve to annoy. Everyone but mainly me.
I’m so angry with 2K for this piece of mediocrity they veiled so well as a game to be made legend. If I had known that you had made "Ghost Rider", "Fantastic Four" and "Jade empire" I would have waited until Bio shock was a budget release!
Arghh! I hate being lied to! I’m done.
Wannabe_uk
edit:
Oh yeh the damned enemies respawn too! Ahhhh! And why does everyone have a protective outer layer of mucus?! Why does everything look wet all of the time. Its that horrible shine i hated in doom 3... God this game annoys me more each passing second!
Regarding specs and framerates, I have the following:
amd x2 4600 2gb ram 2 x 7600GT 512mb cards in SLI
and my framerate?
well let's just say I've bought myself an expensive frisbee in a shiny box til I can afford to upgrade, it's unplayable. <10 fps most of the time, takes several attempts to get through doorways etc and that's with everything off, running at 800x600.
I don't care what (some of) you saying, this game is f*cking awsome
there are currently bags under my eyes and i can barely focus, but.. i ... need that ADAM
It looks beautiful and it runs superb (admittedly on my 8800). I'm shocked that wedgeth is saying he's getting a bad framerate with such powerfull kit. This game isn't ridiculous spec, I'm only running an X2 3800+. So it must be some other issue, not that you need an upgrade.
Why the hell does everyone complain when a game really lives up to the hype?
Anyways I better get back to the problem of how I'm gonna take down my first Big Daddy, I don't think I will be getting much sleep tonight :)
Because it falls so far short if it were doing a long jump it would land on the tarmac
I gave the game another try thinking from the presective "I've bought it so i'll choke it down if i have to" and also ignoring everything the hype said. As a straight run and gun defacto first person shooter its ok, its not one of the best games i have ever played and i have no desire to play it again but it's ok.
I found the best way to kill big daddies is to get some other sucker to do it for you... Security cameras are the undisputed king of big daddie slayage imho. They wont see big D as an enemy by default though so you will need to goo him first but a couple alarm trips and he'll fall down...
Highlight below to read (Posible spolier though i don't think its huge - No actual plot revealed etc):
Also there seem to be two ending i wont say what they are about etc but they are linked to what you do with the sisters (a cheap replay our game tactic imho).
Having finally gone through the nightmare of activation, the wrong code was printed on my manual. I finally got the thing running and yes it looks fantastic, runs really smoothly, just one tiny problem, no fecking in game audio. Sound right through intro until into game proper then nothing. Apparently this is an issue on some Vista machines. Contacted 2K several days ago but they seem to be as quiet on the subject as ther damn game. :(
"The Items Game" otherwise called bioshock is the number one game that the player can carry a bag that can fit like 10,000 items, hey guy if i could only look at the player in third person view and see how big is that bag where he carries half of Rapture with him, u 80% of the game draging ur head looking down searching for items and hacking machines all the same way. do you know what will happen in the end of the game? u can open a mall from the items u kept picking all the game but u must change ur keyboard, because the "E" bottun has been disappears because of the times that u press E when ur walking in case threre is any item u miss. the graphics are good, more physics will be more fun, i'de that game 60/100 just for the nice audio.:)
Isn't it funny, that in this game, being able to be resurrected is an innovation and 'works', with hardly any debate about it or mark-down, and yet, in Two Worlds, a fantasy RPG, having the same thing is seen as game-breaking and a terrible thing to do, and how it takes all the tension away, etc!
A chunk of your journey through Rapture puts you at the mercy of a deliciously derranged Sinatra character, Sander Cohen. His realm, Fort Frolic, is liberally decorated with people posed like statues, mummified alive in plaster then garrotted. The art direction is so brilliantly dark it makes you physically jump, and the writing - not to mention voice acting - brings to life one of the most magnificently unhinged characters in gaming.
The things Cohen makes you do can't help but unsettle. At one point he locked me in a theatre, blasted Tchaikovsky at full volume from the soundsystem and sent dozens of homicidal ballerinas dancing towards me. Each went down with a wrench-blow, but as I twisted aside to dodge lunges from every angle, I realised I was dancing. Not just a dance, but ballet. I was doing twirls and flourishes between beatings, while my assailants cartwheeled around me. Eventually I had to pause the game because I was laughing too much at how beautifully mad it is. I'd unwittingly collaborated with Cohen to create a piece of cinematically macabre performance art. And I had, I realised, actually lost it.
I left Fort Frolic thinking that at last, someone had made a level to rival The Cradle in Thief 3, and complimented Ken Levine on the section. "Oh yeah, that was made by Jordan Thomas," he said. "He did that level in Thief, what was it called.... The Cradle?"
