BioShock [NO SPOILERS]

[Miasma]

Thanks for the advice, guys. I'll try those tonight.

In other news, people have discovered you can only install the game twice. Ever.

http://kotaku.com/gaming/more-bioshock-shock/bioshock-pc-+-you-only-install-twice-292222.php

Holy crap, I can't believe that.  Now I'm going to have to support pirates if I want to play the game I legally bought in the future.  I sincerely hope they have only implemented this during the initial launch of the game and that in six months they will remove such an idiotic limitation.

Nor can I believe this widescreen hack job, so now I'm going to have to play with everything stretched wide in order to see more?  That's insane, they cheated to adhere to the so called rules of "gaming for windows" about having to support widescreen.

Edit: They are trying damage control for the widescreen decision.

[bhodi]

OK, I was on the fence, but this puts me solidly in the "Fuck bioshock" realm. I won't be buying this game.

I hope to god that the wrath of hell descends on that call support center as a message to other companies who have this sort of "bright idea" -- the cost of having to take all of those angry calls coupled with the bad press doesn't even come close to the amount of money supposedly 'gained' in sales by putting such a shitty limitation in place.

So, in conclusion, fuck them right in the goat-ass.

[schild]

Now I'm going to have to support pirates if I want to play the game I legally bought in the future.

This is a ridiculous statement. You are not supporting pirates. You can't support pirates. Unless you're donating to black-cats each month or something silly.

On that same note, Take 2 is fucking around with what could be one of their best selling games in years.

[Morfiend]

Just buy it on Steam? Then you can have Steam install it whenever right?

[schild]

Just buy it on Steam? Then you can have Steam install it whenever right?

There is a very simple solution to this, which they probably won't do but they f'ing should.

They should let the key from the retail version register the game on STEAM.

[Miasma]

Now I'm going to have to support pirates if I want to play the game I legally bought in the future.

This is a ridiculous statement. You are not supporting pirates. You can't support pirates. Unless you're donating to black-cats each month or something silly.

On that same note, Take 2 is fucking around with what could be one of their best selling games in years.

Support as in "GO HACKERS! Maybe I don't dislike you anymore, fight the power!".  Moral support, not financial.

Just buy it on Steam? Then you can have Steam install it whenever right?

No, steam is also constraining you to two installs but at least there you seem to be able to delete them, sort of like iTunes.

And in that link he says two "hardware configurations" not two installs.  I would be slightly less angry if it locks the game to my motherboard config but lets me reinstall on the same computer as many times as I want, the way the other article was talking made it seem as though a simple format would invalidate the game.

[Comstar]

In other news, people have discovered you can only install the game twice. Ever.

It's a joke right? Or a misunderstanding? Like, that can't be serious.

If I uninstall the game twice, I can never play it again? Ha ha ha. Very funny.


Tell me you're joking.

[Tebonas]

Still the pinnacle of retardedness. I figure I will have to change my hardware configuration twice before the game runs at acceptable speeds and by then I will have to change to a pirated copy? Let alone replaying that game in a few years like I do with System Shock regularly.

[Kitsune]

Wow, good thing I didn't know about that yesterday, or I would've felt morally obligated to not buy it.  Thankfully enough of a stink is being kicked up about this stupid DRM that I'm confident it'll be patched away soon.

As for the widescreen, well, don't care.  The tippy-top and bitty-bottom of the screen aren't holding any vital information in any event, I doubt anyone would've noticed if it hadn't been pointed out to them.

[Sky]

The xbox controller on the pc has the same layout, according to the manual. I was thinking of maybe trying that because having both rather than having to rt click to do the 'one-two' combo was not intuitive. I wish it had been left button = weapon, right button = plasmids.

Nor can I believe this widescreen hack job, so now I'm going to have to play with everything stretched wide in order to see more?  That's insane, they cheated to adhere to the so called rules of "gaming for windows" about having to support widescreen.

Edit: They are trying damage control for the widescreen decision.

It's not damage control. They developed the game in the widescreen resolution, screenshots and art have been widescreen. They make a decision to allow 4:3 folks to play without letterboxing and look what they get. The game is FINE in widescreen, it's better than fine. Stop being stupid.

The two install thing? We'll see how that shakes out. My money is on not pissing off the customer base of a potentially huge game and easing up on that restriction, it's happened before. If not, I'm still quite happy giving my money to Irrational and playing an excellent game. Possibly I don't have moral obligations.

[sigil]

I could see a moral reason for the DRM issue.

But, if you want to miss out on one of the best games you will ever play, with enough tension excitement and Story to fill a Supertanker, because you can't see the  ceiling and the floor as much as some schmuck who has a square monitor or TV? By all means , knock yourself out.

[schild]

Enough story to fill a supertanker is questionable at this point. Very questionable.

[Miasma]

It's not damage control. They developed the game in the widescreen resolution, screenshots and art have been widescreen. They make a decision to allow 4:3 folks to play without letterboxing and look what they get. The game is FINE in widescreen, it's better than fine. Stop being stupid.

The whole point of using a widescreen monitor is so that you can see more of the image, not less.

This is stupid.  As said by the people that you constantly link to whenever widescreen comes up.

But, if you want to miss out on one of the best games you will ever play, with enough tension excitement and Story to fill a Supertanker, because you can't see the  ceiling and the floor as much as some schmuck who has a square monitor or TV? By all means , knock yourself out.

Yes, that's exactly what I said.  I've burned the disc and its packaging in anger.   The game is still great I just don't agree with two of their decisions, the widescreen one being a minor nuisance.

[Kitsune]

That image demonstrates just how insignificant the cropped portions are, that's less annoying than it would've been if they letterboxed the widescreen picture onto a 4:3 monitor with black bands on top and bottom.

[pxib]

I downloaded the demo and played it... I found it depressing rather than frightening. Beautiful, mind you, beautiful and technically spectacular (water effects, yow!) but it made me feel grim and weary. Maybe I haven't run into the plot points required to start hating these people enough to beat them with a wrench, but I can take no joy in slaughtering a bunch of psychotic drug addicts. It's like killing brownshirts in the original Wolfenstein3D. I could only gun down so many before I felt sorta sick.

Self-defense? Sure, in context... but I'm choosing to play the game. Sadness is not an emotion I seek from my entertainment.

[Miasma]

Apparently if you properly uninstall the game it will free up one of your two allowed computers, so if you plan on playing again on a different computer in the future just be sure to uninstall bioshock before you give your computer away or format the hard drives.

Edit: This has proven to be false, it was supposed to but doesn't.  They say they will release some new tool to unlock copies...

[Kitsune]

That's kind of part and parcel with the whole horror package, pxib.  In System Shock 2, you spend 99% of the game killing innocent people/robots who have committed no greater crime than being victims of a malevolent force.  The fact that the real bad guys are taunting you from safety as parasite-controlled zombies rush at you while begging you to kill them is part of what makes the situation a terrible one.  It's not supposed to be, "Yay, I just shot this guy in the face, he deserved it 'cause he was a fucker!"  It's supposed to be, "This place is fucked, these people are fucked, I'm fucked for being stuck in this place and surrounded by these people..."

[Murgos]

.. but I can take no joy in slaughtering a bunch of psychotic drug addicts. It's like killing brownshirts in the original Wolfenstein3D. I could only gun down so many before I felt sorta sick.

You have many deep and serious issues.  Every normal, sane person killed brownshirts in W3D and loved it.  Pixels painted like people aren't people.  They aren't even really representations of people, they are opportunities to exercise game mechanics.  They could be orange balls for all the difference it makes to the game.  The only reason they look like people at all is to make story telling easy (or, in reality, non-existent).

[Kitsune]

Pixels painted like people aren't people.  They aren't even really representations of people, they are opportunities to exercise game mechanics.  They could be orange balls for all the difference it makes to the game.  The only reason they look like people at all is to make story telling easy (or, in reality, non-existent).

Whoa there, I dissent.  Pixels painted like people and walking around while crying, gibbering, giggling, and insanely ranting are definitely meant to invoke the emotional response of being people, not orange balls or cardboard cutouts.  I don't go overboard like Jack Thompson and claim that shooting pixel people in any way enables someone to shoot real people, but in this case the pixel people are very intentionally meant to be as people-like as possible.

[pxib]

The parasite-controlled zombies beg you to kill them. It's euthenasia.

Maybe the case is ultimately the same in Bioshock, and it will be revealed that I'm working towards destroying something so terrible that it will somehow justify the moral choices my character is making but... right now it's not like Ive been turned into a cyborg against my will. I'm just some soldier who survived a plane crash. There's a man on the radio who says his family is in danger somewhere, but there are many other human beings in the way. Worse yet, I'm totally certain that I will find his family has been killed. In fact, that sort of inevitable disappointment is all I have to look forward to until the end of the game. I'm not making progress, I'm just going through the motions.

I need some motivation to keep wading through the bloody corpses of these sad, broken people.

Zombies I can kill in great numbers. Demons? Aliens? Monsters?  No problem. I'm just lousy at dehumanizing humans. I couldn't get through the second-half of Half-life where I had to start killing soldiers. In Half-life 2 I had no problem because those soldiers were the agents of a destructive, oppressive regime. In the first game we were theoretically on the same side, trying to take control of a bad situation... they just didn't know it and I COULDN'T TALK TO TELL THEM.

I guess it's just my version of "Why did I just inject myself with a syringe I found in a vending machine?"

Who am I to decide whether these trapped, twisted people deserve to die? Brutally. With a wrench.

[Prospero]

Well you could opt not to beat their heads in and see what happens. I suspect you will be done with the game much sooner than the rest of us. Personally, the moment they start shooting me I tend to lose much sympathy. I did feel bad about nuking the woman with the baby carriage before she attacked me, but once I got close enough it was pretty clear she was a splicer. The rest of the fuckers trying to eat my Adam or whatever; toast.

[Morfiend]

Look Mr. Bubbles its an angel.

[Kitsune]

I consider the splicers to be just as much a lost cause as the worm zombies, just with a different mechanism behind their doom.  They're all very clearly insane and hostile, so there's little alternative but to fight when you run into them; these aren't people that you can sit down with and have a reasonable chat over coffee.

[Murgos]

Maybe it's because I started playing video games when the closest representation to a person looked like this:



Or that I have created and rigged 3-D models in 3D studio max or that I know pretty well exactly whats going on at those 1's and 0's move through the graphics pipeline to make them look the way they do but I feel no connection to the images put forth by the computer at all.

People, on the other hand, I have a pretty hard time even getting upset with when they serve me beer out of a tap that tastes like it hadn't been cleaned in 4 years.  Which should probably merit summary execution in any civilized locale.

[pants]

The only thing I think need to upgrade there is your vid card. an E6400 should handle it fine, but a 6800gs is two card families behind.

Oh yeah, I realise the bottleneck is my video card.  I'm just finding it hard to justify spending any money to upgrade my gaming PC when it seems these days all the cool games are either coming out on console only, or both.  Thats just what I'm trying to come to grips with.

[LK]

Enough story to fill a supertanker is questionable at this point. Very questionable.

Well, I've noticed that...

Ha ha.  Nice.  Baited me right into a long discussion on the story elements I've experienced thus far.

[trotski]

Mine arrives in the mail today. I cannot frickin' wait to get home and throw this in the 360. Sooooo excited, i'm almost giddy.

[sigil]

I take back the story part,which wasn't directed as much tio the people here as the jacktards on other forums. I  do know something's up. and  . . . I'll leave it at that.

[Nonentity]

Too symmetrical.

[WayAbvPar]

Which one of you bastards is going to patch this thing so I can play it?

[hal]

I am now the proud owner of both xbox 360 and PC versions. I may end up hooking my wired second controller to my PC. I like using the controller but the image quality of my 360 suffers. At least compaired to my PC. Oh well, I can pause the game and cruse the forums. Well I have 2 PC and xbox360 so that was lame.

[Montague]

Enough story to fill a supertanker is questionable at this point. Very questionable.

Please elaborate. Do I detect disappointment?

[LK]

Enough story to fill a supertanker is questionable at this point. Very questionable.

Please elaborate. Do I detect disappointment?

I'm not far enough along in the game to say anything extremely conclusive, but if I did, I'd probably want to put that in the Spoilers thread.  Hence why I didn't go into it in any detail earlier in this thread.  All I can say is I understand schild's position.

[JWIV]

Look Mr. Bubbles its an angel.

Speaking of the little sisters - I can't bring myself to harvest them.    I made the mistake of rescuing the first one and that ruined me. 

[schild]

Yea, that goddamn music. Heh. It makes you feel really nice, it's a moment of peace in that awful world.