After playing BioShock on the Xbox 360 (the game is a marvel on the console, by the way), I got the PC version to see how it plays on “the other platform”. Under the right circumstances, the game plays wonderfully, but has serious stability issues, and there’s of course the widescreen issue, both which 2K Games promises to fix.

But another, major issue, is the DRM BioShock infected my computer with. The SecuROM copy protection system has been criticized for every single game it managed to infect. SecuROM installs a rootkit on your PC (which is quite difficult to remove), in order to verify if you have a genuine version of the game. But in order to install the game in the first place, I had to disable my anti virus program, which gives you an idea of what sort of work SecuROM does.

Not only that, even the demo version of the game installs the DRM rootkit (use Microsoft’s RootkitRevealer to reveal it) as well. The BioShock forums are flooded with complaints over the DRM (and a ton of other issues).

This is a sad progress in PC gaming, many companies like 2K Games are now directly mistreating their honest customers in order to “prevent piracy”. In this case, the pirated versions of BioShock that are available, successfully bypass SecuROM, and on top of that they don’t install the rootkit. So if you do own the game, like I do, the pirated version is the only way of avoiding the DRM rootkit. I don’t support piracy, but I certainly do not support what 2K is doing either, which is the kind of crap that promotes piracy in the first place.