Now, this is one place where we never expected to see Jack with his wrench. After stomping their way through the Xbox 360 and the PC, the Big Daddie’s are all set to arrive on your cell phones in all it’s pixellated glory. IG Fun LLC, the international publishing arm of Indiagames Ltd made an interesting annoucement today at the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, Spain. According to the annoucement, IG Fun has secured the rights from 2K to bring the multi-award winning world of BioShock on to your cellphones.

Sean Malatesta, the CEO of IG Fun had the following to say on the subject,

 We’re trying to do great things and BioShock on mobile promises to offer a whole new gaming experience and unmatched excitement amongst mobile gamers the world over. BioShock is a special game in its genre; it brings an element of conflicting morals which has an impact on the storyline, and, among other things, on the difficulty of the game itself.

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(UPDATE: GamerTagRadio is reporting that the 100 GS Secret Achievement is “Bulletproof - Complete the game on Hard difficulty without using a Vita Chamber”. Great, like I’m going to be going to be getting that anytime soon. Not dying even once on Hard, pfft, yeah, sure, why not.)

BioShock seems to share a lot in common with the city it’s set in. What started out with a vision ended up blowing up in their faces somewhere down the line. With fans screaming bloody murder over the activation fracas, widescreen display issues and broken patches, it looks like at least one of those problems will be going away for good. In an update that’s been promised to come out soon, 2K Games will fix the widescreen issue once and for all, which we assume, was serious enough to render one of the greatest games ever made totally unplayable.

But wait, that’s not all. It looks like the game will also be seeing its first DLC along with the update, since we’re now seeing that the gamerscore for the game has been upped to 1100, with a new Secret Achievement being listed for 100 GS. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether the DLC will be free or not, but we should at least get a couple of new plasmids that were cut from the original.

PC owners who are still ripping mad about the activation issue, you still have to march some more in front of the 2K offices to get what you want. Hey, at least be thankful you’re not in the PS3 club, clutching at straws and marching day and night by the big cooling tower.

They dropped multiplayer gameplay, and vehemently shot down hopes of seeing a System Shock 2 style co-op mode, but it looks like Irrational 2K Boston isn’t about to let BioShock sink to the bottom as Halo 3 and The Orange Box fight to stay at the top. PC gamers who snooped deep into the game when it launched had unearthed a bunched a new Plasmids that were marked off as DLC.

Talking to the Games for Windows magazine in a post-release interview, Ken Levine said that he preferred expanding a game experience with replayability, instead of just slapping on some new content or more narrative.

Diablo II, to me, was a great model for an expansion, because it enhanced the original game, but also extended the game, too. I’m not a really big fan of expanding things just by linearly adding to the experience, adding a new campaign, as much as I am of enhancing the original experience and adding replayability to that experience. I think that certainly BioShock’s combat experience is great, but it could be broader. I’m a little more confused as far as how to expand the narrative experience.

Since the team had to cut a lot of Plasmids down during development, it’s quite possible that we’d soon be seeing new Plasmids and Tonics in a DLC rather than filler for the game. With PC owners already screaming bloody murder over the activation fiasco, it’d be nice to see how they’d react on the Cult of Rapture and TTLG forums if this was made a paid or an Xbox 360 exclusive download.

For those that were ripped at 2K for putting in those awful, awful installation limits into BioShock, relief is finally here. Temporarily, at least. Caving in to enormous pressure from the PC community, 2K Games has released a revoke tool that promises to free up one of your activation credits for reuse, provided your hardware hasn’t changed in a major way since the install.

In an FAQ at the Cult of Rapture community website, 2K promises users that they can uninstall and reinstall the game as many times on their systems as they want without using up any more activation credits as long as the hardware hasn’t changed. But the real catch here is that this only works as long as the old license information is still on your PC. If you’ve had to reformat your hard drive or reinstall Windows for any reason, you’re still boned and have to reactivate the game all over again. Worse, it still doesn’t remove the SecuROM dependency that’s built into the game, so people who were looking for a way to get past all of this have to wait all that much longer.

Definitely not the solution we were looking for, but at least it’s a step in the right direction to make sure people still don’t run around pirating the game just because of this. A reminder: this works only on the retail versions of the game, not on the Steam and Direct2Drive versions.

Download the BioShock Activation Revoke Tool
Download the BioShock Revoke Tool Guide
Visit the Revoke Tool page at 2K Games

Yeah. ANOTHER Bioshock post, as if there weren’t enough of them already! But this one’s special. At least to me. Because Bioshock friggin’ BROKE my console!

It all starts off with me waiting for the game to come out, telling my retailer to hold on to a copy for me - no matter what, finally getting it and applying the patch!

Yeah, the patch. Now this isn’t a rant about the patch itself, but the utter disgust I’m feeling at the lack of proper testing before a release for a patch to a game that isn’t as impressive as it promised to be. Yeah - I can tell that after playing the 1st 3 levels.

Which brings around another observation. Gears of War used the UE3 engine, and it had problems. Bioshock uses UE3 and it has its own problems. No - not just the annoying bastard corpses that keep twitching like a dead frog’s leg being electrocuted, but I also was subjected to torn textures and clipping when viewing a certain surface at an angle! Hey 2K (wherever you are - Boston or Oz) - the last time I saw something like that was on my Diamond Monster Fusion 16 MB 3D accelerator card!! Whatever happened to “next gen”?

So now I’m pissed off because I pre-ordered Halo 3 : Collectors Edition, I’ll have you know - but now all I can do is just sit and read the manual over and over again till I manage to figure out the ending. That, or I get my replacement console by the 26th of September – which seems highly unlikely!

So if you’re reading this because Bioshock broke your console too, then here’s all I have to say -THE DARKNESS kicks ass! On a more constructive note, if you don’t already know, then here’s what to do in case you downloaded the Bioshock patch on Live. To clear the patch from the system’s cache, hold down both RB+LB (that’s the bumpers - NOT triggers) on the controller right from the second you boot your console till the 2K logo finishes. Bear in mind that you’ll need to do this EACH TIME you play the game.

Time for me to go and curl up in a corner while I sob uncontrollably.

Ahoy thar me harties!

Aye, before you start readin’ this post, I’d recommend headin’ o’er t’ har and read up a bit on the most important day (okay, it isn’t but my mind likes t’ imagine it is) o’ the entire year: International ‘Speak like a pirate’ day, shiver me timbers! (not t’ be confused with the International ‘Speak Like the Goddamn Batman’ day or the far more local ‘Walk like I’’e been kicked in the balls by M$’ day which Enoon has been celebratin’ for the past few weeks). Due t’ the utter awesomeness o’ Pirates, I was goin’ t’ ask for a guest speaker t’ come in today, but it seems the Pirate-ninja feud sort o’ intensifies at this time o’ the year meanin’ their all out busy kickin’ ninja ass. So fer now its all me! YARRR!

*coughs as he’s kicked in the nads by several TAP members*

Okay, okay, fine! Onto more serious matters then. I’ve been rather quiet recently for several reasons. I finally got an Xbox 360 and my recent time has been divided between working, studying, writing and playing GoW, WiC, SoTS, PGR3 and a few other games.

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If you haven’t heard of it already, news is buzzing around about the yet-another-new-controversy with BioShock; this time pertaining to fact that it apparently carries SecuROM - a rootkit that installs itself onto your computer and is used as copy protection for the game. News articles pertaining to the full details can be read here, or any other of the major gaming sites - the entire Internet’s abuzz with it from the looks of it. Currently, SecuROM is confirmed to be in both Steam and retail versions of the game, as well as in the PC demo (both Steam and independent executables), so there’s really no escaping it for PC users.

To clarify: SecuROM itself is not entirely malware. From the company’s site one can gleam that it doesn’t snoop into your computer past the CD protection. However, considering that Sony’s the one really providing the technology, such claims are at best, ambiguous, considering they have already had their asses sued over this. However, due to its nature, SecuROM can be extremely difficult to remove - it’s nearly impossible to delete it from the registry using the Registry Editor, while anti-virus programs can’t remove it either. For a quick lesson in rootkits, one can go here. For those that may want to remove the rootkit, there’s a somewhat easy method here.

Although I have several negative opinions on this move, I’ll refrain from posting it in favor of putting up pertinent information. Regarding the install issues: it appears that each individual can have at most two installs of the game running simultaneously. To install BioShock on more than 2 PCs is apperantly not possible, since you’ll have to uninstall the game, and then reinstall on the new PC. However, there have been reports that uninstall ‘credits’ aren’t working properly, creating issues for many gamers. Even worse is the fact that many can’t even install, because the 2K servers that monitored the SecuROM installs (yes, you need to be ONLINE to install the game) went offline due to the heavy load and usage. Worse still, was 2K customer support directing those that would enquire on the issue to SecuROM, while SecuROM customer support is directing them back to 2K, which is just shitty, IMHO.

Thankfully, though, it looks like 2K is doing something about it. As mentioned in an interview here, they apparently intend to get rid of the online activation eventually (although when is another matter altogether) as well as up the number of installs from 2 to 5.

However, this still does not address the issue of the rootkits in use in the first place; to mention nothing of their lack of effectiveness and the number of people its driving away instead. When, or if they’ll issue at all is something that remains to be seen.