Lazy Porting

The pro’s and con’s of Bioshock Remastered

by

I decided to check out the Bioshock Remaster, I’ve been putting it off long enough and figured a rainy day would be the right atmosphere to play a game about being entirely surrounded by drugged out residents in an underwater utopia gone to hell. I’m at the point where I have to kill the second Big Daddy, that’s about the point where my game started being a crashy mess in the original. So far I’ve compiled a list of what I like and dislike about the remaster:

Pro’s:

  • Manual Saving instead of just relying on vitachambers.
  • Better stability, no crashes thus far.
  • Achievements.
  • A museum was added to show off early concepts. (Originally only for people who purchased Bioshock Ultimate Rapture Edition for consoles).
  • Challenge Rooms (Originally an exclusive for the PS3 version of Bioshock Ultimate Rapture Edition, but was later released for the XBox 360)

Con’s:

  • Texturing seems too glossy in most areas, like it’s covered in vaseline. Only things the player notices sooner seem to have better texturing, like NPC clothing and consumables.
  • Less configuration options compared to the original, requires tweaking in the ini. Not an entirely big deal but if you’re making a remastered version of a game it would be nice to have better graphics options…
  • Still running on Unreal Engine 1.5… They couldn’t even bother to port it over to Unreal Engine 3 or 4.
  • No surround sound option (can be fixed in a roundabout way).
  • No mouse acceleration (tweakable in ini), mainly fixates on controller options and key binds.
  • Game keeps launching in windowed mode for some reason.
  • No borderless window option in 2016/2017.

I’m thankful I can actually play the game, however that isn’t going to stop me from pointing out how lazy the porting is. Usually when you do a remake on PC you add more features. Hell, Killing Floor runs on a modified version of Unreal Engine 1 and it has more features than this. While we’re at it I think Unreal Gold has more customization options than this remastered game. It’s like they took the special console edition, changed a few things, ported it over and called it good… Lazy as fuck.

Well, at least it was free. If they made me buy the remaster I probably would have waited for a big sale so I could get the challenge rooms. Other than that it seems pointless.