Bounteous Bioshock Bonuses

Bioshock's very much back in the news at the moment. And goodness, what a lot of people seem to hate it all of a sudden, if folk in our comments threads are to be believed. You big sillies.

Would being able to play it with new Plasmids help? What about in proper widescreen? Or, and I suspect this will be the clincher, what about with those controversial insta-respawn Vita Chambers turned off?

Yes, the Bioshock patch, promised back in August, is coming at last, and it brings with it free extra stuff. The delay might be more than a little insulting, but nevertheless: celebrate! Sounds as though there'll be other fixes and additions in there too, but no news on what, exactly. I strongly doubt there'll be an option to make the final stage any good whatsoever, unfortunately.

I guess some folk will immediately see the option to deactivate the Vita whotsits as some kind of admission of failure - certainly, they were the element of the game that its critics tended to dole out the most vicious pummeling to. Made it too easy, they said. Not fair for you to come back to life on the spot, but for the bad that'd just killed you to still be missing whatever of his health you'd chipped away first, they whined. One suspension of disbelief too far, they gibbered.

I was fine with it though - better than a gameover or a quickload - and I doubt the option to remove them is any kind of mea culpa. I would imagine it's more to do with introducing a purpose to play through the game again. Once its tale is told, the (faintly disappointingly) linear nature of Bioshock isn't something there's much drive to rush back to, and the as-yet-unnamed new Plasmids wouldn't change that on their own. Without Vita Chambers, it'll be a significantly different experience, I suspect.