Bioshock demo out on marketplace+trailer!!!

yaayaaaaay!!

Even if you break 2 legs from a crab it still runs!
What you gotta do is find its weak spot and do massive damage at it.

Are you serious? I just choked on a drink I was enjoying so it better be there dammit!

I am too lazy to turn my Xbox 360 on. Can someone confirm this besides that little yellow annoying dude from Blue Dragon?

Here you are Joe

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/812/812425p1.aspx

Hmmmm... do I download the demo or the trailer? I can' t decide! While the demo will let me play the actual game, the trailer is so full of useful and highly valuable information! Oh wow. Trailers are so great! Fuck the demo. Trailers are where it' s at.

PS - Trailers are stupid.

Pretty lengthy download. I paused it for a bit while I played a game, but just started resuming. Ahg anticipation.

On a side note I got refunded 800 ms points for a R6 d/l that went free shortly after I bought it.

Whheeeee Im playing it now.

Adjusting brightness as directed and deciding between 2 difficulties:
Easy- You' re new to shooters
Medium- You' ve played other shooters
(eerie as fuck' n music)

1960 Mid-Atlantic...

And my 360 is like half of Sweden away from me! God damnit!

Wow...

there is just to much good to say about this. I' ll let Eddie write up the review cause I can' t do this game justice...

I forgot to download! Honest. Oh well I' ll get it tomorrow (I hope I remember). Anyway Mass X, why did you pause the download the play a game? The Xbox360 is so amazingly powerful, it can play a game and download stuff at the same time. Isn' t that amazing? Oh my god! It sure is!!! Great, now I' m all sticky.

Maybe he wanted to play something online?

I don' t have a problem playing a game and downloading stuff, it just seems the download gets slower.

On topic:
Whoo, will get this one tonight.

Yeah I play online at around the same time every night with a group of friends...I tried putting it off as late as I could but the d/l was just taking too long.

Im gonna give it another go to see if I can find a few more things to do. You get pushed forward quite often, but there are moments of peace when you can explore a bit.

I' m stuck in work...

I' ll be downloading and then giving my impressions later on today. Now where' s our Eddie!?

First of all the demo is pretty long.

And you get 3 weapons and 2 spells.

Electricty spell+fire spell.

Weapons?

Pistol
Machinegun
and a wrench.

one Thing I did relaise was that all enemies are alive and talking,having their own life.
And you can pick up bullet/health items and other stuff from their dead bodies or trashcans.

+ you can hack the computers and bots in the demo.

Even if you break 2 legs from a crab it still runs!
What you gotta do is find its weak spot and do massive damage at it.

Why God, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!

I brought my stupid Ps3 so my friends could test it, therefore left my 360 at home. Cruel world!

Woah. Y' all really like my reviews eh?

Your Eddie stayed up ' till like 6 in the morning watching bad vampire movies & chatting. It' s like 10a.m. over here, so I got about 4 hours of sleep, but no work today, & a brand new demo. I think I' ll get over it!

It' ll be 2 or so hours before I can get something like a review hammered out. 1.35 gigs of goodness takes a while to download.

Alrighty then... how bout them Bioshocks eh?

Graphics
The game is gorgeous. Absolutely no way around it. I only played for about half an hour, but I can safely say that this game tops any title on the market, including GRAW2, and Gears of War.

Now, before I get assailed by a horde of angry fans, I' ll give my reasoning behind this. While Gears of war was a very technically impressive game, I felt that it lacked real depth, real character, which this game serves up in heaps. Rapture feels like a living breathing environment, constantly changing as the demo progressed.

While Bioshock has some absolutely amazing graphics from a technical standpoint, that' s not what makes it amazing. It' s the seamless integration of hundreds of little details across the game that really makes it shine. Dust on the windows picks up light from the ever-flickering bulbs above. Sparks fly from broken electronics. Picket signs protesting the lockdown of Rapture litter the floor, and the archaic looking architecture of the desheveled Rapture itself is accentuated brilliantly by a sort of looming haze that covers the world. A lot of work was put into adding dozens of tiny details to the environment, and it really shows.

Oh yeah, did I mention? Zero framerate hitches the whole way through.

Sound
When I first heard about Bioshock, I expected the standard decent horror-game fare. An eerie soundtrack, a lot of gun noises, and the occasional horror-story monologue... I was wrong. 50' s music croons from the tinny speakers in the walls as your head deeper into Rapture. All of your weapons give a deafening report, making you very aware that every bullet counts (which is good, because extra ammo is pretty hard to come by).

The voice acting is absolutely fantastic. The insane inhabitants are suitably deranged, carrying on a warped and twisted version of their everyday lives. Spouses arguing, a woman singing to a money-wrench in a baby crib, and Little Sister (the girl from the trailers) singing lullabies to herself as she preys on her victims. Projector recordings of Mr. Ryan (the creator of Rapture) hark back to the days of 50' s educational videos, and old reel-to-reel recordings give you an idea of what the world was like before and during whatever it is that went wrong in Rapture.

The soundtrack itself is breathtaking in it' s scope, especially for a videogame. The brilliant orchestration really encompases the " trapped " feeling you encounter during the demo. It' d easily hold it' s weight against almost any game soundtrack in the last 5 years.

Yes boys, Harry Gregson Williams is going to have a hell of a time topping this one.

Controls
Won' t dwell long on this one, beyond the fact that they' re incredibly easy to pick up on. Unlike some games, changing between your powers & your conventional weapons is an incredibly simple task. They work great... ' nuff said.

Gameplay
The game' s primary element is first-person action, of course, and it succeds wonderfully. It' s a well balanced game, their difficulty settings are done really well. If you' re terrible at shooters, you set it to easy mode & you' ll still have a decent challenge. I played through on both, and I have to say, if the harder of the two is Medium difficulty, I' d love to see the mode they didn' t include in the demo.

Your first run in with an enemy pits an insane resident up against you and 5 pounds of crecent-wrench. All of the fighting itself is pretty gratifying, as they do carry around a plethora of random junk. Health & Eve (mana) boosters, cash and very small stashes of ammunition are plentiful in both difficutly settings. It never feels like getting rid of the enemies is a chore, as there' s always some incentive to do so (actually progressing through the game being one of them)

We only got a very small taste of the main " feature" they' ve been pushing in Bioshock. Using your environment against enemies. About half way through the demo, you run into 2 enemies in a large pool of water. They don' t notice you, and your Irish buddie on the other end of the radio instructs you to electrocute the water. They convulse satifyingly, and I (being the idiot that I am) followed right on into the water to finish them off with my wrench...

Bad idea. (Bzzzrrt!)

Final Impression?
A-freaking-plus. This game absolutely blew my socks off, no question about it.

I was apprehensive about OXM' s 10 out of 10 review earlier, but if I had one major complaint about the demo now that I' ve played it, is that it didn' t go on for a bit longer. The 20 or so minutes in game flies right by.

I' m heading out as we speak to put some more money down on my copy.

Hope the review helps those who haven' t had a chance to play it yet.

Great review Eddie! I can' t wait to play it now!

I loved it except for the spell attacks (they' re called something else, can' t remember what). While they do add to the fighting they didn' t feel like they belonged. Maybe I' ll get used to it once I play the full game... I hope so anyway.

Wii DSLite
Nintendo
Playing = Believing

Sounds really great... I just don' t see a huge single-player adventure fitting into my schedule any time soon, though. All due respect to it, I know it would suck me in for more hours than I can spare.

Plasmids feels cool,but come on,I throw the spell with one hand right and left trigger,why not let me hold a pistol with the right and shoot too.

Annoying to have to paus the game and switch weapon.

ofc the comabt was still really good.

Even if you break 2 legs from a crab it still runs!
What you gotta do is find its weak spot and do massive damage at it.

But theres hardly is a pause at all between switching. LT for plasmids RT for weapons. Instant switch upon pushing either or. Then again Psi-Ops did allow you to go about playing like that, owell, a very very minor gripe.

Here is my Eddie-esque review, only better since it is by me and according to myself I am great!

BIO SHOCK

STORY:
The game starts and I find out I am a smoker. I suddenly feel like my character won' t get very far in this game because you can' t be in shape and smoke, too. But later I find out it' s the 50' s and everyone and their pets smoked in that era. What a stupid decade. Anyway for absolutely no reason whatsoever, my plane crashes and I' m swimming around like some asshole. I get in a pod which is designed to trap and kidnap humans to a huge underwater city. I give myself drugs and I' m able to shoot fireballs ' n shit. Those are some good drugs! Now I' m supposed to rescue the family of some wanker. Pffft. Also, I have tattoos on my wrist. Sure, these days everyone and their babies have tattoos, but this is the 50' s. Tattoos were still considered retarded back then. I must be some sort of crazy mofo.

GRAPHICS:
Looks like Doom 3 for the Xbox, all dark and stuff. Also it has things that are shiny, just like Doom 3. You can adjust your brightness, but it will always look like Doom 3 with more resolution and better-looking water. Otherwise it is Doom 3 with a few more lights turned on, though not too many. Textures and all that crap are pretty good, and the game runs at a solid 30 frames per second. I eventually did get a bit of motion sickness, but it wasn' t too bad. Basically it looks like Doom 3 for the Xbox with HDTV resolution, a bit more light and more stuff onscreen. Did I mention that it looks like Doom 3? Well, it does.

SOUND:
Also like Doom 3. You turn around and the sound spins around you. However the sound isn' t designed very well. People in a room way down the hall will sound like they are standing right next to you when they scream their insanities. They should be quieter and more distant-sounding. I really don' t remember any music at all (and I am a huge game music fan), so I guess it' s fairly ambient and unnoticeable. There was a part with a little girl singing something, though.

GAMEPLAY:
You can use two hands to attack instead of just one. And of course you can get a gun so don' t worry. Apparently the first amendment applies in the underwater city. Like many other FPS games, there is some all-seeing dickwad who talks you through the game. I have no clue where he is, but he sees everything you do at all times, no matter where you are. I hate that guy. He called me a " boil" or something like that. This game game would be a lot better if I could shoot that guy in the face. Nobody calls me a boil. Other than the left hand which can use magic, this is your typical FPS game, like Doom 3. The jump button is located in a different spot, but you don' t jump much so it' s not really an issue. You end up wandering around looking for new places to go, picking up items (including alcoholic beverages which make you drunk for 3 whole seconds... just like real life) and defeating the occasional enemies. Not action-packed, and there is a lot of wandering around. Pretty damned boring, but if you like FPS games, you' ll probably eat it up. I still don' t understand what is so great about this genre. I would have killed the designers of Wolfenstien 3D before they completed their game if I knew what the result was going to be.

It' s people like you who builded the berlin wall.

Even if you break 2 legs from a crab it still runs!
What you gotta do is find its weak spot and do massive damage at it.

I won' t bother with the demo, I' ll just wait for the game next week.

Screw the Berlin Wall, that' s for pussies. The Great Wall of China is where it' s at. Plus you know the China wall probably has lots of unrecalled lead in it.

I remember seeing a documentary about the Great Wall of China ages ago. Apparently, those slaves who died while working on it were buried and sealed within the wall itself.

A similar thing happened to some of the programmers of Truxton. That' s why when I' m rollin wit tha Truxton dawgs we pour a sip of champagne into the cartridge slot of our MegaDrives.

I suddenly want to take apart the Great Wall of China to find dead bodies.

I found a severed finger in my Genesis once... it was probably from a Truxton programmer. I wonder what part of the code that finger typed?

WOOO! My aunt just paid me a fiver for ' looking after' her son last Saturday. Who knew you could earn money for watching Austin Powers?

I' m almost there baby... Bioshock, here I come...

Woah, double post, mine' s 2 down.

It' s good, it' s really good.

I have little to add over what others have already said, but I will say that the games atmosphere was a particular strong point (I might even go as far to say that I was a little spooked whilst playing) and I really enjoyed incinerating and frying enemies with my magical attacks. This demo has made me even more excited about playing the finished product, I guess its served its purpose then!

Here is my Eddie-esque review, only better since it is by me and according to myself I am great!

You put my piss-poor reviewing skills to shame good sir. I' ll go back to my cave drawings and show-&-tell chalkboard scribblings henceforth.

Graphically the game has the best fire and water effects so far this gen, along with fantastic lighting and particle effects including awesome volumetric smoke and mist. The framerate is a solid 30fps with zero drops and the texture quality is more than acceptible, excelling is some areas but falling short of matching Gears in many others.

I wasn' t keen on the opening like most others. I was impressed by the water, fire and sinking tail fin but it felt like you were being pushed along a little too much. Somebody og GAF likened it to the Half Life/2 intro' s but you don' t have the kind of freedom that both of those games give you illusion of having in the first 10 minutes. The demo is obviously how the game starts and while i' m sure it' ll open out nicely later on i did feel like i was being funnelled through the place.

One thing i' d like to note regarding the graphical side of things is how awesome the hands are. Not important to some but many developers have failed my hand modeling test and i' ve abused them for it. Irrational have modeled and animated them extremely well, and when the only part of " my" body i can actually see is the hands i like them to look right.

The art direction is pretty refreshing. It' s nice not to be battling it out in streets, trenches or space statons for once and the NPC design looks to be straight out of TimeSplitters. Not exactly a bad thing.

The plasmids are a bit meh but i' m sure once we' ve seen the non-generic ones we' ll all come to love them, and the weapons feel and look great.

The sound is fine, but like Joe noted, sometimes when it should be muffled and distant because the enemy is on the other side of a wall or too far away to be realistically heard it sounds as if they' re standing right infront of you.

The demo is pretty short but it gives you a good idea of what to expect. It' s easily going to be the best fps, if not best shooter available for next-gen consoles when it hits stores next week. I just hope it' s not only 6hrs long...

Im still mad for no mix of pistol+plasmids at the same time ;)

Even if you break 2 legs from a crab it still runs!
What you gotta do is find its weak spot and do massive damage at it.

This game rules, makes me wonder wether i should get this or halo 3,

But i think ill grab Bioshock for PC instead. why are pc games cheaper anyway?

Maybe because they are so much easier to pirate.

PC games are cheaper, because you are not getting the whole game because it won' t fit onto a DVD disc. Don' t get the whole game, don' t have to pay for the whole game.

LOL

Sarcasm at its best people.

Anyway, enough of the sarcasm. Here is a link to let you know how to unlock hard difficulty.

LINK

I' ll try the demo on the pc and laugh at the 12fps I am getting and then play it on the 360 and think its alright but dosent really deserve the hype its getting.

Change is inevitable. Except from a vending machine.

Viva La Revolution! erm, I mean Viva La Wii!