In Firefox and IE, you get the same text:

Make note of the first paragraph. Now if you open up the same javascript window within Google Chrome, you get this:

Once again, note the first paragraph again.  Within Google Chrome it mentions the Safari menu. Safari is not installed on this computer so there is no reason for Safari to appear there other than Google Chrome being related to Safari in some way.

Also take note that yesterday, typing Google Chrome in to Google search, the results were very different.  In less than 1 day Google appears to have got it’s Chrome site to #1.

PC

After downloading the demo which was over 100MB bigger than the Xbox 360 counter part, it installed fairly quickly although it had to be extracted from a WinRAR archive which meant that the install time was greatly increased but file size was smaller than it would of been without it.

The game launches with the absolute minimum settings. Resolution is set to 640×480, all graphics settings are either off or on low. The audio setting is set to low rather than high. This also caused a problem with having the settings this low, the game started up extremely slowly and it wasn’t until I put all the settings to maximum that the game ran smoothly so I could actually race.

I first did the Speed Challenge, which is basically going as fast as you can through checkpoints every so often. This is situated on a rough road with cracks surrounded by dust and lots of metal poles (the poles play an important role on PC, I will explain later on).

Graphically the game looks very good, equal to it’s Xbox 360 counterpart at top settings. The 1 thing I did notice was that out of the 4 races that I did, only 1 race smoke came from my wheels. On the Xbox 360 every race started with a screen full of smoke with the brake lights just appearing through.

My first attempt at the Speed Challenge was actually on the Xbox 360, so this is more or less the problems with the PC over the Xbox 360.

First off, I tried with the keyboard. Not too bad, I finished the race and the car pretty much did what I told it to. So I plugged in my Xbox 360 controller to my PC, installed the latest drivers and the problems started.

I will state this first, I have never had a problem with any games on PC and the Xbox 360 controller. The first problem came from the menu system. Pressing up, resulted in going down, pressing down resulted in no response. I pressed every button on the controller only to find none of the buttons were assigned the button to select, so I wasn’t actually able to progress to the race from the menu without resorting the keyboard.

Once getting in to the race, I pressed A which is normally the button to continue, but turns out to be the back or escape button. To which I had to use my keyboard to get back to the race and actually start the race.

I was now at the race screen and reving up the car using the RT button like usual. Finally something worked. It wasn’t until I got to the first slight bend where I found a problem. The sensitivity was off the scale with no visible way to change it (although I didn’t look too hard, because I was already pretty pissed off with EA’s shitty development again). The handling felt arcady all of a sudden. A slight nudge on the analogue stick sent the car going across the road and I ended up drifing most of the race banging in to the metal poles (see I told you) that border the road more or less all the way. I eventually finished the race with my smashed up BMW M3 E92.

Before people start suggesting that it is in fact me that is a bad driver, I disagree. I finished the Speed Challenge without a scratch on the 360 on King level and got 1st place.

The second race that appears on the demo is the Grip Race. A lapped race around an inner city circuit. First across the line wins. Here you are driving the Nissan GT-R, nice car, but makes the race a bit too easy as it is much faster than the other cars in the race.

I didn’t finish a lap on Grip Race on the PC, I just couldn’t use the 360 controller on it. I haven’t got any other controllers to try on NFS ProStreet but I assume they may all suffer the same problem. The popularity of the 360 controller for PC should make it a priority for games developers especially ones that are doing driving games. Who on earth plays driving games with a keyboard?

EA need to pull their finger out and get cracking on the PC version of the game. I have pre-ordered Pro Street, but I have preordered for the Xbox 360 instead, and a wise investment it looks.

Xbox 360

Perfection. Well compared to the PC demo it is anyway. Zero slow downs on 1080p, graphics look the same as max on the PC demo with what looks like only 2xAA, but I may be wrong.  The handling is a lot more realistic and you don’t end up drifting round the tracks.

Conclusion

If you liked the PC one then I advise you to get the 360 version if you have a 360 of course. You will enjoy the game a lot more and there is nothing extra that you will achieve by getting the PC version whereas with the 360 version you will get achievements to make you feel better about yourself while your gamer score increases.

For those who haven’t played the demo yet, you can download it from GamersHell.

Mirrors:

• NFSUnlimited.net FTP 1
• NFSUnlimited.net FTP 2
• FileFront
• FilePlanet

Upon recieving my copy of Bioshock, I installed which all went fine, then the installer tried to download a patch, so I allowed it. The patch failed to download properly, so I retried….and retried.

At this point I clicked cancel, which resulted in the whole installation being cancelled.

I restarted the computer and tried again, same thing happened again except this time, rather than closing the installer down, I went to the start menu and tried to run Bioshock.

STOP!!

AVG has spotted a virus.

Obfustat.JXR to be exact.

Turns out AVG is throwing up all Securom games as virii.

I had then disabled AVG and let the installation continue. This time it went through fine and the game was installed.

Upon the successful installation of Bioshock I re-enabled my virus protection and run Bioshock.

STOP!!

Bioshock.exe is a virus.

Not again. Right so now I can’t play a game and have my anti-virus running.

In the end I resulted to adding the 2K games folder to my AVG whitelist so it wouldn’t scan files in there.

Perfect.

So who is to blame for the problems?

So who really is to blame for problems.

Is it Sony for making a shitty piece of DRM software that is seen as a virus and detected by Microsoft’s own root kit detection program?

Is it 2K Games for fault for paying for this shitty DRM software to put in to their game?

Is it AVGs fault for detecting a problem that could cause serious problems to your security?

I think the 2 former options are the 2 most likely. AVG is a brilliant piece of software and correctly see’s the threat to the consumers PC. Sony on the other hand have made a devious piece of DRM software. They should of learnt their lesson from their music DRM problem a while back. I would of thought 2K Games would of researched about the different possible DRM solutions.

ID Software and Epic both release their games with just a serial number and requiring the DVD to be in the drive. A couple of patches later and the need for the DVD is gone. That is what I like to see. Oblivion has no DRM and sold like hot cakes because it was a brilliant game.

Bioshock is a brilliant game but it has had too much negative publicity caused by some bad foresight in to the future.

The only thing that will kill PC gaming is companies insisting on putting DRM in to their games. They will be cracked so it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on trying to make them so they can’t be cracked. People that buy the games legit are the ones that get fucked because of it. Is it the pirates fault? Well slightly, if there were no pirates there would be no need for DRM….yarrr.