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PC Bioshock Demo Now Available
Posted by
Zonk
on Monday August 20, @10:06PM
from the hummina-hummina-hummina dept.
from the hummina-hummina-hummina dept.
Dr. Eggman writes "Valve announced today that their digital distribution system, Steam, is now hosting Irrational Games-turned-2K Boston's soon to be released title, Bioshock. The game will appear on Steam and the US August 21st and in Europe on the 24th. If you don't enjoy pipes, perhaps you'd like to utilize the tubes at 3DDownloads, Worthplaying, FilePlanet, or Gamer's Hell."
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Political Ideology in BioShock 62 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Julian Murdoch at the usually-excellent Gamers With Jobs has a preview of BioShock up today. Far from being a normal piece on the game's graphics and gameplay, it delves deep into designer Ken Levine's attempts to include some extremely complex and controversial political ideologies as the baseline for the title: 'The point of BioShock, the raison d'etre, is really the story, and the messages and intellectual content that Levine tries to deliver as a payload. "Look at Lord of the Rings," he challenges. "Why is Lord of the Rings more interesting than random RPG story number 507? They're exactly the same thing. They have orcs and goblins and demons and trolls. But Lord of the Rings is a meditation on power. And it's really interesting because of that. It's what gives it it's heart." And with undenied hubris, Levine's trying to do the same thing with BioShock.'"
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Bioshock Previews Abound 34 comments
The much-anticipated spiritual successor to System Shock 2, Irrational Games' Bioshock, is finally starting to emerge from the depths of secrecy. The 360/PC title is due on store shelves at the start of August, and a bunch of sites now have previews available for perusal. Eurogamer, CVG, IGN, Team Xbox, and Gamespot all had hands-on experience with the title recently and now can report back. From Gamespot's writeup: "As you investigate Rapture's sprawling, doomed infrastructure, its crumbling art deco facades, and leaky corridors, you'll uncover the secrets of what went wrong. Stepping out of the diving bell, you'll see signs of a struggle ... We'd barely set foot onto the first platform of the city proper before running into a splicer, which is one of BioShock's common enemies and one of Rapture's former residents. As Atlas will quickly fill you in, it seems that overuse of Adam turns the subject into a crazed monster that fiends for--what else--more Adam. Imagine a crazed junkie dying to get his hands on a fix; only this junkie can throw fireballs out of thin air and move large objects with his mind. And those are just the basic enemies." For a more visceral experience, 1up has a video preview of the game, which looks as creepy as it sounds.
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Ken Levine On The Background of Bioshock 23 comments
GameSpy has up an interview with Ken Levine of Irrational Games. While Levine has spoken previously about Bioshock's ideology, this piece discusses a number of the elements that went into creating the game. He touches again on objectivism, but expands on the title's connection to its spiritual predecessor System Shock 2 and the process of actual developing the game. "Sterling: Segueing away from storyline a little, what sorts of hardware limits did the team encounter from pre-production leading up to this point of near-completion? Ken Levine: As a credit to my programming team, honestly, I didn't hear much about them. There was some hesitation on the part of some of programming team in pushing a level of physical simulation in the world, in part because they knew how much work that was. To their credit, I'll say, not only did they do it, they knocked it out of the park, because I've never seen this level of simulation ever in a shooter."
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Irrational No More 50 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Cory Banks at Gamers With Jobs has an interesting look at Irrational Games becoming '2K Boston'/'2K Australia' on the eve of the Bioshock release. It's not just about 2K and Irrational, publishers re-naming independents to generic studio names has obviously been going on for a long time. 'Rockstar Games is often credited with the Grand Theft Auto series, but the games were developed by Scottish developer DMA Designs, who were bought by Rockstar in 2002, shortly after GTA III came out, and quickly renamed Rockstar North to build up the brand recognition associated with the mega-blockbuster. Rockstar isn't even a development company at all, but a collection of development studios owned by Take-Two, sharing one brand name. The general public hardly knows the difference.'"
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No thanks
(Score:2)Re:No thanks
(Score:5, Insightful)(Last Journal: Monday January 30, @05:35PM)
Irrational has been pretty sensitive to the plot-relevant details of their game being ruined by spoilers, so I'm hopeful that the demo won't spoil the full game.
Re:No thanks
(Score:4, Informative)'Release' folder == Progra~1\Steam\steamapps\common\bioshock demo\Builds\Release
1. dbghelp.dll must be downloaded from 'dll download sites' on the internet and dropped into 'Release'
2. You must hex edit xinput1_3.dll in 'Release' and replace the String 'TraceMessage' with 'GetUserNameA'. It simply forces the debug messages to be dropped on the ground, I think anyways.
Thats where I'm at so far. Right now I can load up and start the demo, but I have two issues:
1. The mouse is not drawn
2. When you start the actual plain crash sequence, textures are missing and it looks like a big pile of crap. Since I have really old drivers installed, I'm going to attempt one of the 'non-ati' bundles or maybe the hotfix driver (if it works with 2k) to see if any of them work out for me.
Good luck
Re:No thanks
(Score:4, Informative)(Last Journal: Monday January 30, @05:35PM)
The demo ran fine for me under Win2k taking the steps mentioned in the parent post. I had installed the nVidia drivers that were also released on Monday. The only problem I had was an annoying tendency for the game to momentarily freeze up when loading new textures, resulting in a disorienting turn to an arbitrary direction if I happened to be turning at that moment.
Anyway, the ease with which a person can get these games to run under Win2k (Overlord was the same way, minus needing dbghelp.dll) makes one wonder why it's not supported directly out of the box. Having the game decline to load the XInput DLL, for instance, unless you're actually using an XBox360 controller on your PC, would eliminate one source of seemingly arbitrary incompatibility that was introduced by Microsoft. The dbghelp.dll file is a good bit different between the two versions of Windows, but the new version seems to function as a drop-in replacement if you add it to the executable directory for whatever game you're playing. Is the incompatibility purely unnecessary, created artificially by Microsoft to induce sales of XP or Vista (perhaps as a strategy that took longer than they expected to start working, due to game manufacturers being reticent to abandon Win2k users for several years)?
ok it is weird.
(Score:2, Interesting)(Last Journal: Tuesday April 17, @03:55PM)
A very immersive and artful environment. Water effects are indeed beautiful, but beyond that the graphics remind me of Doom3 (even though the engine is Unreal's). The combat is classic FPS like DoomIII, but the devious AI and funky weapons give it a sandbox-ish twist. You can hack (via mini-games) other drones and shit to get them to help you.
Kind of a freaky story though... kind of encouraged to kill zombified 10 year old girls as part fo the struggle you are dropped into.
Online distribution shouldn't be based on region
(Score:2)Re:Online distribution shouldn't be based on regio
(Score:4, Informative)(Last Journal: Tuesday February 20, @09:36AM)
Obviously, retailers would kick up a fuss if online vendors were selling the game in their region before they had it in their stores. For this reason, they tend to insist on contractual obligations ensuring that "online" releases don't pre-empt titles hitting their stores. Of course, given how easy the region-checks on most online sales of games are to defeat, I'm not really sure that this policy is getting them very far, with the generally technically savvy PC gaming scene.
Where's the torrent?
(Score:2, Informative)(Last Journal: Saturday August 11, @11:40PM)
Demos
(Score:3, Insightful)(http://www.enderandrew.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 04, @12:44AM)
Wow, Crappy Story
(Score:2)(http://www.terminus-discord.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday February 01, @06:32PM)
Already Released
(Score:2)(http://xptical.org/)
Another great release for BT.
BTW, I downloaded it a few hours ago and just about maxed my 15MBPS connection.
Is demo DS9-able ?
(Score:1)Obligatory...
(Score:2)(http://www.redorbit.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 10, @08:30PM)
Dancing Matt sex, "It Rocks"
(Score:1)(http://mattozan.net/)
"Two days ago, a demo went out on Xbox Live for a game called Bioshock. It's the best demo I've played in years. The game is actually literate, which is a quality I stopped hoping for long ago. The situation they drop you in is absolutely riveting and the quality is at a level that no amount of money can produce. Having worked in games, I know all forms of bodily fluid were excreted in its creation. A lot of people put a lot of passion into making this game great.
"One of those people is Garry Schyman, who makes the music for my dancing videos.
"Playing Bioshock makes me really glad I don't work in games anymore, as I wouldn't be able to derive any pleasure from it. Just envy and self-loathing."
Bioshock Demo
(Score:1, Informative)Great Demo!
(Score:1)Hmmmm
(Score:1)demo earned my purchase
(Score:5, Interesting)(http://www.mrtwig.net/ | Last Journal: Friday May 05, @06:04PM)
I was a bit worried about performance before hand, but it ran very well on my year and half old system (AMD X2 3800+, 2 gigs of ram, Radeon X1900XT 256mb). I had it running at 1680x1050 with maximum detail settings and 4xAA/8xAF and I only noticed a brief frame rate slow down at one point near the end of the demo.
The demo was good enough that I plan on buying it tomorrow (PC version of course). I think this is probably the first demo that I've tried all year where I actually want to buy the game instead of just uninstalling the demo and being thoroughly disappointed afterwards.
Torrent
(Score:1)(Last Journal: Tuesday February 18, @08:06AM)
360 demo
(Score:2)(http://thefirsthour.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 21, @04:30PM)
played the demo last night...
(Score:2)i will say it ran pretty decently on a E6400 (2.13GHz per core), with 2GB ram, 7900GS vid card (my only possible stumbing block for a full graphic experience), 1440x900 reso, on XP. a few frame skip issues here and there, but nothing drastic that made it unplayable.
ZAP 'EM THEN WHACK 'EM!
wow
(Score:1)(Last Journal: Monday July 09, @07:38AM)