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.