PC Bioshock Demo Now Available

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."

Where's the torrent?

[eagl]

Why isn't anyone hosting a torrent yet?

Re:Where's the torrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

The torrent has been around longer than the links in TFS

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3778797/BioShock_PC_De mo [thepiratebay.org]

Re:Is demo DS9-able ?

[TychoCelchuuu]

Easily. You need Vista for Bioshock like you need a third leg for fishing. Like, you don't need it.

Re:Is demo DS9-able ?

[Bieeanda]

According to garbled reports, DX10 just gives you prettier water effects, and possibly FSAA.

According to my eyewitness report, it runs on XP, with a 7600GT, 2 GB of RAM and a 3700+ processor.

Re:Already Released

[samwh]

Actually, there is an interesting story behind the torrent. Someone from 4chan.org discovered that a modification to a html file on fileplanet allowed people to download the demo almost a day ahead of time. Fileplanet removed this exploit, but there was already a torrent by then.

Bioshock Demo

[Anonymous Coward]

Great looking game, Runs great on 2 year old hardware amd 3700 and 7900gtx with 1gb ram, also runs great under XP. I haven't updated the NVidia beta drivers likey they suggest but i get very playable frame rates without it. As soon as i get cash, it's going into this game.

Re:Online distribution shouldn't be based on regio

[RogueyWon]

This is probably tied into highstreet store release dates and sales deals. For reasons connected with the distribution chain, most US games releases happen on either Mondays or Tuesdays, while pretty much all UK (the most important European market since Germany effectively closed its borders to many games) releases happen on Fridays.

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.

Re:No thanks

[ADRA]

I've been working on getting it run under win2k for a while now:

'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

Same here, but ... [spoilers of demo]

[antdude]

Very nice game indeed, but I am not going to get the full game...

I also got to play it tonight (I actually had free time and not in crunch mode?) for about 40 minutes (yes, it is short). The previews, screen shots, video clips, and trailers didn't excite me for this game. I kept hearing and reading very high scores from Xbox [xbox.com] 360 port (demo and the full game that was sold earlier). Everyone was raving how scary, addicting, and pretty the game was. Now, I know why. The audio, graphic, special effects, etc. were very nice.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS: This 3D surrealistic first perspective shooter (FPS) game and story theme was an issue for me since it didn't hit me to excite me. It takes place in 1960 in an underwater city (it reminds me of Atlantis, Titanic, Blade Runner [imdb.com] movie, etc.). The demo started out with an introduction that reminded me of Lost [go.com]'s Oceanic Flight 815 [oceanicflight815.com] jetliner crash in the sea/ocean, but at night time. Wow, looking at the water was LOVELY and seeing the water splashes and droplets on my screen! While swimming to the lighthouse near by, I heard the flames, explosions, me coughing out water and breathing, etc.

The fun start begins in the lighthouse when I travel down to the underwater city named Rupture. At the same time, I met a guy helping me over the radio. You can hack robots to be on your side and protect you, security cameras, sentry guns, etc. There are various life spawn spots if you die. If you played System Shock 2 [irrationalgames.com], then you would recognize that this is the same people who worked on this game. The whole game system is based on it, but on a different game engine. The game still had scary parts, beautiful graphics and effects, objectives/missions, etc. It also reminded me of American McGee [americanmcgee.com]'s Alice [wikipedia.org] 3D FPS game for the surrealism and weirdness.

Check out the game if you have a decent gaming system or a Xbox 360 (heard it was good on the console as well and there's a free demo). Enjoy the graphics, special effects (check out those neat water falls, leaks, etc.), cutscenes, sounds, music, and horror. I was surprised it ran well on my not super fast system even without the beta NVIDIA [nvidia.com] driver that is supposed to be supported for this game.

Circuit City weekly ad/advertisement [shoplocal.com] shows it for $39.99 for this week. So one extra copy for you to buy since I am not buying it due to above reasons and lack of free time (got other games to play and finish). If it was a sequel to System Shock 2 game, then I would be all over it just for SHODAN (I miss her harassing me like saying "Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?")!

Re:No thanks

[Dachannien]

Thanks for the info. The hex edit of xinput1_3.dll (which, coincidentally, works to get any version of the XInput DLL to at least load under Win2k) causes that DLL to call the wrong function if ever it were to happen to try to call TraceMessage. The results would almost certainly be a crash, but since I've played other games with this hack present with no problems, I suspect that it would require unusual circumstances to cause this to happen (and that's assuming that the XInput DLLs actually call TraceMessage anywhere at all). Keeping the DLL in the individual game's directory greatly reduces the chances of this hack being used as a security vulnerability.

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)?