I guess I'm a bit of an FPS guy at heart, despite my recent fascination with RPGs. That's why I grabbed a copy of Bioshock 2 as soon as I could. It's a true FPS, with an awesome storyline, great characters, immersive environment, and the RPG-like ability to make decisions that will effect the outcome of the game. Granted, those decisions are mostly limited to whether or not you kill the "Little Sisters" for more Adam, much like the first Bioshock, but it still adds a bit to the standard plot.

I thought I'd take this chance to show off how I game. Here's a screen grab of my dual-monitor setup (click away for full resolution):

My left screen is just slightly lower in reality than the center, which is why they are setup like that virtually.

Having two screens gives me access to the temperatures, voltages, clock speeds, and usage stats for all of the devices in the system at a glace, plus my iTunes. I can make sure that everything is running as it should, and if there ever is a problem, I can get right to the heart of it without having to leave the game. I highly recommend a setup like this for any die-hard gamer, especially ones that like to overclock their systems like I do.

But back to the game. I'm not going to go too far into the gameplay aspects of it, simply because I haven't gotten that far into it yet. I have gotten far enough to know that this journey into Rapture is markedly more freaky, with the splicers writing all sorts of craziness all over the walls like so:

If that's not enough to freak you out, I don't know what is. It reminds me a bit of those "The cake is a lie" scribblings from Portal, which always made me a bit uneasy. The game is visually very dark also, which means splicers will be popping out of the darkness at you often. For the full effect, be sure to turn off any lights in the room and crank the speakers up.

But enough gameplay, how does it look? They've made a few adjustments to the engine from Bioshock the first, but nothing amazing really. You still get some DirectX 10 effects which is better than most cross-platform games these days, but we're still missing the ability to run AA and AF. I'm going to play around a bit with the ATI control panel and see if I can force something, but hopes aren't high, especially since this is an NVIDIA TWIMTBP title.

From this shot though, you can see that the water ripples are there and look great, the details are right on, and overall this game is quite nice to look at. Plus, it runs like a top.

On my 5850 card, I never see the framrate change from 60 FPS at 1920x1080 with the maximum settings offered in the game. Of course, I use v-sync when playing anything to eliminate tearing, so this is exactly what we like to see. While I'd love to pop in my old 8800GT to see if there are any performance benefits to my new card with this title, sadly I've donated it to an SLI setup so I don't have access to it anymore. I have a feeling though that anything over an 8800GT will run this title just fine. It's really not demanding enough to have a big write-up on. Needless to say, if you ran Bioshock fine, you'll be good with Bioshock 2 also.

Well, I'm off to test AA and AF modes now, and I'll try to update with a new post once I get to the bottom of it. Cheers!