Bioshock demo available on steam

Pretty good. Don't forget to install the new beta drivers -- both ATI and NVidia put out new releases. Easily improved the framerate on my 8600GTS.

I just put up a link for the Bioshock Artbook on the Visual Arts forum, highly recommended.

Hmm, beta drivers = scary.

However it's kinda late for the demo, considering you can pre-load the full game and play it in the same amount of time it would take to get the demo :) That's assuming that you're the type to buy a game sight unseen... Bioshock seems like that kind of game to me.

At 1800MB, I think we've reached a new high in PC demo sizes. I'm not sure why I'm even downloading the demo --- I don't have an SM3 graphics card --- but I'm somehow hoping there will be SM2 paths despite everything I've read.

If you've already played the 360 demo and are fairly confident that the PC version will run properly on your box, there's no need to pick this demo up as well before you go and buy the PC version of the game.

There are, however, some notable changes between the demos, but they're mostly limited to what looks to be higher-rez texture maps, extra little details and proper 16:10 support (screw you, Microsoft).

I'm considering trying this, but since I haven't actually played modern games for a long, long time I don't even know what Steam does. Will I be able to download this demo freely without giving any personal info, etc.?

It looks sweet but I don't know how well it'll run on my machine. She's showing her age now. I don't really want to ruin the experience by playing it on the lowest settings and still playing like crap. I was planning to get an upgrade especially for Bioshock but I've wasted all my money.

i just upgraded to 2 gigs ddr2 at 1 ghz, a quad core at 3.4 ghz, and an 8800 gts... so i may just try the demo to see how it runs :)

Quote:

Original post by cowsarenotevil I'm considering trying this, but since I haven't actually played modern games for a long, long time I don't even know what Steam does. Will I be able to download this demo freely without giving any personal info, etc.?

Yep.

Quote:

Original post by Sneftel Quote: Original post by cowsarenotevil I'm considering trying this, but since I haven't actually played modern games for a long, long time I don't even know what Steam does. Will I be able to download this demo freely without giving any personal info, etc.? Yep.

Not strictly true. To get it via Steam you will need to set up an account and install the client and that will require an email address at least but there's certainly nothing to worry about on that front.

Alternatively you can always get it from a number of download sites listed here on bluesnews

640x480'd to get it running on my machine - its very pixel shader heavy. I wasn't really impressed by the demo, was a little short - but its a demo, what the hell can I expect. I WILL be buying this game, and probably buying a new machine to pump the graphics up a little!

My systems specs for others:

128MB GF6600gt AGP,
A64 3000+ @ 2.1GHz
1GB of RAM, DDR400 if I remember.

We should probably create a new thread (with spoilers) for the full version: it's oh so good.

Downloading the game as I speak...

Can't wait to play it! I've seen a couple of the game play videos, and it looks very realistic!

=D Gotta love U3 technology!

So I actually tried it yesterday. It ran very, very well on my new laptop (if anyone remembers my laptop thread I actually did get the Sager NP9260, my only regret is the lack of DX10 support but the speed more than makes up for it, at least in the short term).

I'm not really sure what to think yet. It wasn't that scary (but then again I only tried it on "easy") but it was overall fairly enjoyable. Not that I have a better, but it always feels weird when you can play a game and kill like ten people without dying yourself. I'm sure on the hardest mode it's more realistic in this sense, but still in order to make one of these games possible it's kind of a requirement that your character somehow be more powerful than all of its enemies, which seems kind of odd given that you'd think people who live in this city would be more used to killing people than the player (again, I don't actually know the back story).

Graphically I thought it was quite good, but not totally consistent. I'm not totally sure what I'm missing without the DX10 stuff, but my experience was that some of the graphical effects were absolutely stunningly realistic while others didn't look nearly as good.

Very pretty game. For what little I could see. Aside from the horrible audio stuttering, the crashes to the desktop were the most realistic I've seen yet.

I said it to Rav earlier, and I'll say it here, this game will require some serious patching before I even flick one dime in its direction (oh and never mind about the friggin demo having SecuROM... for the love of fuck, just give up with these invasive and horribly written protection schemes). After a lot of googling around this evening I found that I'm not the only one in this boat. I tried many suggestions, nothing worked and in some cases it only got worse.

It's too bad, there was a point earlier in the evening where it actually ran well, without audio stutter, without crashing... And I got to play a little, it's quite beautiful, it... please forgive me for saying this... reminded me of Myst. But the good (were there any?) aspects of Myst. Most notably the atmosphere. And of course, it reminded me of system shock. Once they fix things up, I'll gladly grab another demo and try it again and only then decide whether to buy it or not. Until then, I'm bioshockless. [crying]

Wow, this is the first game that has my computer stuttering. Most of the time it ran fine, but some parts it just froze for a few seconds, then a short slide show, then back to normal. Ran with default settings.

Geforce 7900 GS
AMD athlon 64+ dual core 2.9 ghz
2 gig RAM
800 mhz mobo

As for the impression of the game, like the above poster said, it felt like Myst. Which is good cuz I loved that game. It gave me the feeling that I'm exploring something. The AI is good, and it kept that feel of System Shock 2. However, what I'm not so fond of is that it felt like it's waiting for you. If I stand here while the door's about to "break in" or the room to flood, it won't break, or won't flood. I just felt like "Ok, we gotta wait for the player to do that, then we can do this, then wait again". Maybe it's just the demo, I haven't finished it yet though.

Regarding having problems running it, surprisingly enough it worked perfectly for me, and it even gave me a warning about my video drivers not being up to date (I'm using the newest ones from my laptop's manufacturer because SLI doesn't work on any others).

I actually was hoping it would remind me of Myst, and I must say I wasn't entirely disappointed. I wonder if the full game has any good puzzles in it, because then I'd probably actually go ahead and buy it.

looking very nice art direction wise
im gonna have to buy a pc mag with this on the demo disk

Some of you might be curious about how Take Two destroyed BioShock.