Update: Since people are wondering, here are my computer’s specs:

MSI P6N SLI Platinum Motherboard
Intel Q6600 Core2 Quad, 2.4GHz CPU
2 gigabytes of Muskin eXtreme Performance DDR2 1066 RAM
ATI Radeon X1900 XTX PCI-E 512mb video card
On-board RealTek (7.1 capable) Audio, analog mode

Bioshock was released today for PC and XBox 360, receiving a 97 out of 100 over at Metacritic. That’s a pretty excellent score. So of course I decided to purchase the game via Steam. When I went to play the game, that’s when things fell apart.

Firstly, the game’s SecuROM protection would not let the game start. It claimed the activation servers could not be found. Huh? You’re telling me SecuROM is dialing home to make sure my copy is legit? That’s a bit scary.

So I check the forums, and find that if you retry running the game three times, it eventually works (who knows why three is the magic number.) Whaddya know, I’m in! The Bioshock logo appears, my screen goes to black, appearing to load the game, then bam, back to my desktop. Huh? I check my taskbar— yep, the game’s still running. But why did it kick me back to the desktop? On a whim, I exit out of Vista’s sidebar, and I’m able to bring the game fullscreen again without a problem.

Okay, finally.. I’ll be able to play! I see the intro movies. First one shows a list of copyright mumbo jumbo for about 15 seconds. Can’t be skipped. Ugh. Second video is a short Unreal technology logo. Third one is an nVidia logo, also can’t be skipped. Finally, we’re shown a 2k games video, and we’re able to hit escape to skip it. Totally lame.

At the main menu, I go into options to fix my resolution (the game started up at 1024x768, my monitor is natively 1680x1050.) I change the resolution and apply the settings. I go into the sound settings, and change it from stereo to 5.1 audio. Says I’ll have to restart the game. No biggie, I guess. But that means sitting through those logos again.. so I bite the bullet and restart the game anyhow.

Back to the main menu, I finally choose new game. It starts to load, and I’m forced to watch a cutscene rendered by the engine. No hitting escape (can’t even get a button to go back to the main menu!), etc. The cutscene looks decent, but has a “fake” antialiased blur to it. This isn’t spoiling anything for you, but the main character (you) gets into a plane crash in this video. You wake up rising to the surface, surrounded by burning plane wreckage. Guess what problem I run into now?

There’s no surround sound. At all. And the sound coming out of my two front speakers is way out of wack with where I’m at in relation to the sound sources (the fire burning, the ocean, etc.) Huh? I double check my options. Yep, 5.1 sound is set. What gives?

I decide to keep on trucking, walking into a building in the middle of the ocean. Staircases lead me down in front of a bathysphere. There is some “art” on the walls, and banners and such, and they look great. The textures on the bathysphere and the rest of the walls, however, is absolute garbage. It’s like I’ve gone back in time to Quake III-era textures. I suspect that 2k Games made Bioshock to look/work best on the XBox 360 console, and not the PC.. Huh?

I give up and save my game, bailing out to Windows, and hopping on Steam’s forums as well as 2k Game’s forums, to search for solutions. There are none to be found, but plenty of other people having loads of problems. The last time I saw a game launch with this many technical problems, it was called Enter The Matrix. It was a total joke, and nearly unplayable. That’s just about how I feel about Bioshock right now.

I learn nothing from the forums, so I jump back in the game and load my save game. I wait for it to finish loading. La la la. When the save game is fully loaded, I see the screen come up, but all the textures are very very blurry. After a few seconds, they clear themselves up. What the heck? I’m not on a console! I’m on a PC more than capable of handling the game.

I should also chime in that I’m getting tired of Unreal engine based games completely sucking on the PC. They all suffer from the “mouse lag” problem, or 3d audio problems, or 3d video problems, etc… more than any other games I’ve had to install and run. They usually require you to get down to .INI hacking just to play the basic game. Dumb.

I recommend that everyone learn from my mistake: stay away from this stinker, unless 2k Games releases a major update to fix ALL of the problems.

These packs were leaked in beta a few weeks ago, but today Microsoft released the full final versions. You can find more information (and download it) at Microsoft’s website, under KB 938979 and KB 938194.

The fixes? Check it out:

• You experience a long delay when you try to exit the Photos screen saver.
• A memory leak occurs when you use the Windows Energy screen saver.
• If User Account Control is disabled on the computer, you cannot install a network printer successfully. This problem occurs if the network printer is hosted by a Windows XP-based or a Windows Server 2003-based computer.
• When you write data to an AVI file by using the AVIStreamWrite function, the file header of the AVI file is corrupted.
• When you copy or move a large file, the "estimated time remaining" takes a long time to be calculated and displayed.
• After you resume the computer from hibernation, it takes a long time to display the logon screen.
• When you synchronize an offline file to a server, the offline file is corrupted.
• If you edit an image file that uses the RAW image format, data loss occurs in the image file. This problem occurs if the RAW image is from any of the following digital SLR camera models:
• Canon EOS 1D
• Canon EOS 1DS
For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
932988 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932988/) Files from a Canon EOD 1D or 1DS camera may be corrupted after you use Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, or Windows Explorer to edit the file metadata in Windows Vista or in Windows XP Service Pack 2
• After you resume the computer from hibernation, the computer loses its default gateway address.
• Poor memory management performance occurs.

• The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
932539 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932539/) The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver on a Windows Vista-based computer
• The computer stops responding, and you receive a "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" error message. You can restart the computer only by pressing the computer's power button.
• The computer stops responding or restarts unexpectedly when you play video games or perform desktop operations.
• The Diagnostic Policy Service (DPS) stops responding when the computer is under heavy load or when very little memory is available. This problem prevents diagnostics from working.
• The screen goes blank after an external display device that is connected to the computer is turned off. For example, this problem may occur when a projector is turned off during a presentation.
• A computer that has NVIDIA G80 series graphic drivers installed stops responding.
• Visual appearance issues occur when you play graphics-intensive games.
• You experience poor playback quality when you play HD DVD disks or Blu-ray disks on a large monitor.
• Applications that load the Netcfgx.dll component exit unexpectedly.
• Windows Calendar exits unexpectedly after you create a new appointment, create a new task, and then restart the computer.
• Internet Connection Sharing stops responding after you upgrade a computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP to Windows Vista and then restart the computer.
• The Printer Spooler service stops unexpectedly.
• You receive a "Stop 0x0000009F" error when you put the computer to sleep while a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) connection is active. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
931671 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931671/) Error message when you put a Windows Vista-based computer to sleep while a PPP connection is active: "STOP 0x0000009F"

I’d suggest running out and installing them ASAP. I was mainly having the “slow wake from hibernation” problem, and I believe everyone was having the estimated time remaining problem… but updated performance and reliability can only be a good thing!

This has had me stuck for the past hour. Give me a break. I really hope this is just a bug in the “beta” of Safari.. because it’s extremely dumb.

This Javascript method takes a passed in SELECT element (via ID) and the value you want selected, and will loop through all of the SELECTs options, and select the one whose value matches:

function selectOptionListValue(psElementId, psValue) {
    var OptionList = document.getElementById(psElementId).options;
    
    for (var i = 0; i < OptionList.length; i++) {    
        if (OptionList[i].value.toLowerCase().trim() == psValue.toLowerCase().trim()) {
            OptionList[i].selected = true;
            break;
        }
    }    

                        
    return;
}

Looks simple, right? It kinda is. Works great in Opera, IE, FireFox, etc… but in Safari, nothing happens. Your SELECT gets nothing selected. It turns out, you need to specify the SELECT’s selectedIndex in order to get it to work properly— adding this line before the “return;” fixes it on Safari:

OptionList.selectedIndex = i;

Talk about retarded. Any “Safari developers” out there want to throw in their two cents?

Of course Microsoft does this, right after I sell my XBox 360 on eBay. Well, the bidder hasn’t paid me yet, and might not. So maybe I haven’t officially sold it yet.

But yeah, a few weeks ago I got the dreaded three red rings of death on my XBox 360, while watching an HD-DVD with Heather. If you know me, you know I hardly touch my XBox 360, except to watch DVDs or play arcade games. And I keep it flat (not standing), and not locked inside some entertainment center. For all intents and purposes, the game console should’ve lasted me years. The fact that it just failed watching a movie was unacceptable, but there wasn’t much I could do.

Before calling Microsoft’s support line, I found a forum post online from someone who had fixed the problem by just blowing out the dust with a can of air. I took it outside and did that, and quite a bit of dust was released from the box. Brought it back in and turned it on, and I was up and running again. Heather and I watched half of King Kong, and then shut it off. Looks like the problem was fixed for now. Well, it’s not my problem anymore technically, since it’s sold on eBay, but yeah.

Before today, if I had kept my XBox 360, the next time the red rings came up, I would’ve had to shell out like $150 to get my console fixed. But now, Microsoft’s extended the warranty to the consoles from the past three years. There’s even an “apology” letter of sorts from Peter Moore.

But in my opinion, it’s far overdue. When the console launched, I didn’t want to listen to all the people having problems. I just assumed they were being dumb, and using the console without ventilation, etc… but then I started to hear about friends having the problem, and then myself… it’s obvious there is a core hardware problem with the XBox 360 itself, either involving cooling or the placement of components inside. It’d be great if Microsoft went the extra mile and gave full disclosure about their findings. It’s ridiculous that retailers and the public were both complaining about the return rate of the console, and Microsoft kept saying that the returns/etc. were well under the industry standard. Riiight.

Via Gizmodo. ‘nuff said.