Shades Of Twilight

I don’t know whether to be happy or sad.

I completed Bioshock in just 33 hours. For an RPG, it’s a damn short one.

Seriously.

The screencapture is taken from my profile page at Xfire. Eversince I joined back in 2004, it has been tracking every game I have ever played since, and it tells me how long I spent playing each.

33 hours for Bioshock is actually somewhat of a let-down for me. I had expected more. After all, it’s billed as an RPG, and RPGs aren’t 30 hours. Even Neverwinter Nights, which I thought had a short campaign, lasted 60 hours.

On hindsight though, it wasn’t much of an RPG. No skills (other than the plasmids), no attributes, no character classes. What it is, is more like an FPS with some RPG elements like customizing your character. Even so, it’s not a pioneer in this – Deus Ex and Deus Ex 2 appeared years before Bioshock and had done this.

Well if I take it as an FPS, 33 hours is typical. Half Life 2 took about the same amount of time. COD4 took the cake though, I completed it in only 5 hours.

I didn’t rush through the game. I attempted to explore everything I could. Many times I even ignored the glowing arrow which points me to my next quest objective, and started exploring places.

Yet, it ended in just 33 hours.

Well I might try to re-play this again, but I doubt so. Somehow it doesn’t have that incentive for me to run through it all again. No character classes for example. Even right up to the end in Bioshock, where I had opened all 6 slots in Plasmids, Body, Technology and Combat attributes, I still had some unused skills stored in the Gene Bank and didn’t put them into use. I don’t think I will want to re-play this game just to see what those unused skills would have done for me.

However, the “good news” is that after playing through Bioshock, it made me want to re-install System Shock 2 and give it a go again. For one thing, I have never completed System Shock 2. Yes, surprising isn’t it? I don’t know why I didn’t complete it, but I think now I should. I do remember however that I got pretty far into SS2 before I stopped playing it and never got back into it.

Well the next post you see might very be on System Shock 2!

Yeah yeah I know I’m really late. Bioshock was released almost a year ago. They have even removed the install limit back in June!

Now I’m only just starting to get into it.

The reason why I stopped Bioshock last year, was that there was a slew of games released at the time – COD4, Crysis, Bioshock etc. Since Bioshock is a RPG I thought I should stop it for awhile and play COD4 or Crysis since they’d be shorter games than an “RPG”. I just never got back to Bioshock till now, sigh.

Since I’m reinstalling (reformatted my PC early on this year), I took the time to also download the latest patches for Bioshock. I was pleasantly surprised they removed the install limit (was 5 installs if I remember right) back in June 2008.

Anyway, somehow this time around it feels “easier”. Previously, I remembered that I shudder whenever I think about taking down a Big Daddy. Now, I don’t. Also, my recent “upgrade” by cleaning out the CPU heatsink and fan might have helped. Now I don’t get jerks in Bioshock anymore. I remember in the past I used to get slight 1 second freezes whenever the action gets heavy. This time around, they’re smooth! Amazing!

What is even more amazing is that in the past, whenever I tried to use Xfire to capture video, my framerates will plummet. After the CPU heatsink cleanup, it seems to have helped this too! The clip below is captured using Xfire, and there’s very little drop in the framerates. Certainly nothing that is obvious actually.

Yes it’s a very short clip, and you can see that the framerates are pretty much smooth (except I might suck a little at taking the Big Daddy down). No jerking, no freezing. If anybody’s interested in my 5 yr old gaming rig configurations, look to the right side of this page in the sidebars – it’s listed there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• BioShock PC install limits removed, DRM remains
• BioShockers delivered from DRM hell

Well there goes another week without me playing any game (damn is this going to be new the story of my life?). I couldn’t believe it – the only thing I played this whole week was the Call of Duty 4 Demo, and that was IT!

Ahh I could remember the days when I would be stuck forever at the PC, completing “just one more quest” before I go to bed. Or before I go eat lunch.

Back then, games gripped me. I just couldn’t tear myself away from them.

Now? Something’s happened to me… I’m more pre-occupied with getting my domain up (oh yeah I bought a domain on the spur-of-the-moment) and now, I’m seriously thinking about doing something I have thought about back in 2004 – re-doing my website up with new templates.

As of right now, there’s nothing much to look forward to except Crysis and Call of Duty 4. Geesh, and I still haven’t finished Bioshock yet!

Ok I better get off blogging and start on Bioshock….