BioShock PC problems, widescreen "distortion" and two install limitation

Now that BioShock is out and has been lauded as the best game of the decade, possibly century, selling out at several retail and online stores, its problems are coming to be known.  As with all things, the issues are not as bad as they first appear but are still worthy to note.

The widescreen problem

Many people were complaining about the demo version of the game limiting the field of view when played on a widescreen monitor (16:9 ratio) as opposed to a normal monitor (4:3 ratio) ratio.  It would be one thing if this were in the final version of the game (some claim it may be in the Xbox 360 edition) but this does not appear to be an issue with the final version of the PC game (that *I* have personally noted).  Now, I could be wrong but even if it is present, I still had a hard time telling the difference.  The complaints surrounded about portions of the health bar and cash monitor being cut off which I have not seen, everything appears fine to me but I will make a note later and update this post should it be warranted.  It’s a minor inconvenience at worst and seems to affect the demo version, so?  Alright, gamers, settle down, it’s only the demo, this was way overhyped in my opinion and I’m relegating it to the “non-issue” pile.

The activation problem

Then several problems have hit the game itself that really do affect how you enjoy it.  The activation system was down for a better part of yesterday (August 21) which meant those that purchased copies of the PC game could not play it, on launch day, which doesn’t make much sense to me.  You are REQUIRED to activate the game online or use a rather cumbersome offline activation system.  I ended up using the offline method which involved sending my serial key and provided activation code to 2K Support and wait for another code that I had to use to override a system that didn’t work in the first place.  Basically, I was required to wait 24 hours before I could play a game I purchased.  This was compared to a car dealer allowing you to buy a car and not providing the keys for a period of several hours while you wait helplessly.  My advice to 2K is to avoid the partnership with STEAM.  Both retail and download copies were affected by this horrible activation scheme but the retail buyers got the worst of it.

I don’t know if the activation system is working properly yet or not and now that my copy is working, I’m certainly not going to tempt fate to check.  If it’s still down, just contact 2K support with the information I mentioned and they’ll (hopefully) get back to you with the override code (which is unique to each copy).

The two install limitation

Lastly something was floating around about only being able to install the game twice, this is not entirely true.  It is true you can only install the game twice at any given time, say to play it on two different computers.  But once you’ve used up your two installs, that’s it, until you uninstall one copy of the game which will then grant you another install.   If you decided to upgrade your hardware, you may also be require to reregister the game or uninstall and reinstall it again since there appears to be some kind of pairing detection between the game and the hardware it is running on.

If you want to install the game on another system, please make sure to uninstall the game first then you will have no problems, otherwise you may have to wait for a new serial key or code from 2K.

These issues aside, BioShock is still a great game, expect a full review later (if our editors can manage to stop playing it long enough to actually write it).

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