So. Bioshock. Before I can talk about that, I have to talk about BootCamp. In concept, Apple’s BootCamp is awesome. It lets you nondestructively partition the drive, burns a disc of Windows drivers, and lets you install Windows. In reality, the repartitioning is not quite up to quality. It seems that if your drive is fragmented, BootCamp is not able to set up partitions. In fact, the solution it proposes to you is: back up the drive, reformat it, then restore from backup. Hardly helpful. This was eventually solved by booting from an OS X disc, running Disk Utility (which detected and fixed issues), then booting from iPartition’s CD to defrag and partition. After that, the installs were relatively painless.
In a word, Bioshock is awesome. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s set in an improbable underwater city (“It was not impossible to build Rapture under the sea. It was impossible to build it anyplace else.”), built in the 40’s, but you’re playing in the 60’s. It’s the idealistic Atlas Shrugged utopia, only a couple of decades later, after the idealism wore off and the place turned to crap. It’s full of smart people who are physically and mentally f’ed up. I love how you can hack things–using games of logic under pressure to do so — like the little helicopter gunner things that sound like lawnmowers and look like apple-crates (they’re so cute when they’re on your side) and the gun turrets cobbled together from office chairs.
The story and atmosphere are completely engrossing. Kim and I have been playing the past few nights — and by that, I mean I’ve been controlling the action and we’ve both been taking in the scenery and saga. Since I completely suck at shooters, I’m glad they have a super-easy “I am a baby-man” difficulty setting. All-in-all, it’s a great experience and worth the pain and embarrassment of installing Windows.
It’s also worth noting that Steve pointed to the soundtrack/score, which is available for download. It’s pretty short, but if you’re into creepy period music, I’d suggest a listen.
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What sort of Mac are you using? I’d be lying if the ability or inability to run BioShock isn’t influencing my impending MacBook Pro purchase, especially since my 3-year-old desktop PC certainly can’t.
Ooh, thanks for the soundtrack link! I didn’t know about that.
It’s the 17″ MacBook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of memory. I couldn’t get it to run under Parallels, but dual-booting to Windows gave it GREAT performance. It was the top-of-the-line about 6 months ago, but I’m sure has to be obsolete by now.