BioShock PC Demo Released

The game itself is of course great, but I still have some technical nits to pick:

- The gamma is cranked up to 11 by default, no doubt to avoid a flood of "omg, it's as dark as doom 3, where's the flashlight" posts. Not a problem if you know to adjust it, but it does mean a lot of people are also going to be playing with washed out colors (defaults matter). It also highlights the second problem...

- Color banding. Not something I usually have a problem with, but for some reason it's really apparent in Bioshock. I'd guess they're pushing the number of simultaneous pixel shaders to the limit and are therefore constrained by the limited shader precision (for the record I'm using an Nvidia 8800)

- No mouse filtering (or too much filtering? I can't really say). While the action and animations are silky smooth, the mouselook isn't. Particularly small movements of the mouse are jumpy, as if there was a initial threshold to overcome.

- The textures are quite low res. I particularly wish they'd used higher resolution textures for the posters and paintings in the game, now they're slightly blurred making them annoying to read (16x AF, 1920x1200 res, all details maxed). For comparison, I just recently picked up Vampires: Bloodlines, not that great a game visually but occasionally you will come upon super-detailed paintings that just look brilliant.

- No anti-aliasing, the biggest nit in my opinion. The game could really use it too, obvious aliasing breaks the immersion. The game runs so fast I'd say I'd guess I could easily add 4x or 8x AA without a noticeable hit to the performance. AA also makes a game somewhat futureproof; HL2/Bloodlines still look great to this day with 16xAA and run at a zillion frames per second on todays high-end machines.

TLDR; the game looks good, even great at times, but like most things it could be better still.