Nice box edition indeed!
Or how to fight piracy with tons of useless but very enjoyable extra stuff.
Still disappointed to see so good artistic work used to make just a basic shooter though...

Girl is 2K's community manager Elizabeth Tobey BTW. 2K Elizabeth on 2K forums.

Why basic?

Yup. She's fantastic too. Really went the extra mile to field everybody's DRM queries.

Because Bioshock's universe could have been exploited way better, with a pure adventure aspect. It was so frustrating for me to play the first one, where you had basically just to shoot everything you see on screen.
The second one doesn't seem less basic.
Cause, yes, shooting and use "magical" powers is basic.

Oh, I see. Yeah, that's a valid complaint. Less shooting, more adventuring would've been nice.
If you're rating it as a shooter I think it has a nice bit of depth. Certainly more depth than most shooters. But it's no System Shock. ;)

Agree. It's surely the main reason why it was so frustrating that it doesn't have a real adventure aspect, the game has depth indeed.

It's true that a bit more of adventure would have been interesting in Bioshock. But frankly, I prefer a well-made "one style" game (and Bioshock was an excellent FPS) to a poorly balanced adventure/fps/whatever game...
Balance is very difficult to achieve, i think...

Very true.
Still, would like to see really different things mixed in a future BioShock game. They've said they may make up to six games...if they all played like the first two I think I'd get bored.

When I first played the original Bioshock, I immediately felt they wasted a great opportunity. Such a great backstory should have been reserved for an RPG. Fallout style RPG in Rapture would have been awesome but what we got was a very weak console shooter with a few twists and great locations.

It'll either make you feel better or enraged: they call it an RPG sometimes. I think it's about as much of an RPG as Dark Messiah (and I think of that as an RPG, just not a very deep one). Interestingly, they're both very alike in terms of gameplay.
Anyway, that's what System Shock is for. We'll get it here sometime. :)
I've never played but can't wait to dive in.

Has a conclusion on that been reached yet?

This particular backstory actually was in RPG already. It was called System Shock 2.

Yup. SecuROM for disk check. One time activation. 15 activation limit w/Games for Windows LIVE (standard). Further details here.

I must have one of those. I'm a sucker for big CE boxes with loads of shiny-looking, if useless, goodies in them. It will stand with my WAR, FO3 and WotLK CE boxes, and I will gaze upon it proudly.

This box may be even bigger than the Hellgate London box, but I may be wrong about that, because I threw that damn thing out a long time ago, after it was closed down.