Bioshock: Patched At Last

I would love to go and replay Bioshock right now. No really, I would. But I'm too busy washing my hair/doing my Adam returns/experiencing new narratives that don't involve painstakingly collecting conveniently abandoned cassette recorders that I've heard once already.

But if I did have the time, I would totally play Bioshock with its long-delayed patch. It's with us at last, and it includes the new Sonic Boom (which we knew about already, thanks to careless .bik file whispers in the original game), Vending Expert, Machine Buster and EVE saver Plasmids. Well, it's nice that they're free, but they don't exactly enable the sort of environmental shenanigans we'd have hoped for. I've yet to give any of them a roadtest (I'M WASHING MY HAIR), but in name at least, they all smack of chances to play with added convenience, not ingenuity. Shame.

It is telling that the early rumours we heard of Bioshock DLC suggested it would be paid content, as with former 2K stablemate Oblivion's bonuses - can its ultimate pricelessness be attributed to the months of waiting (as 2K-née-Irrational claim), the relative blandness of the new content, the unsuitability of such a heavily story-based game to receive such new content in the first place, or to the game's creators now having moved on too far to care? Or, indeed, to all of the above.

Grab the patch from here, anyway. Oh, and the prosaically-named Videogamer.com has a bunch of comparison shots of the long-promised widescreen fix also included with the patch, which rather seem to put the lie to Irrational's claims that 16:9 was done proper-like in the initial release.