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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."
Actually, the demo is important for ensuring that the game will run properly on one's computer before laying out $50 for it. For example, the system requirements claim you have to be running WinXP, but is it possible to coerce the game to run under Win2k?
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.
I was pretty skeptical about the game before I tried the demo, I thought it looked like Doom 3 meets Half-Life 2 meets F.E.A.R, but I was wrong. I really like the 1950s theme mixed with an underwater world. I like the fact that you can loot corpses among other things, it gave the game more of a RPG feel than a straight FPS to me. Of course there's also the plasmids which is a nice touch. Before playing the demo, I thought it was just another over hyped FPS, but I now see what everyone else was talking about.
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.