OK, so I was bored on Saturday night. The net result is, I bought this game.

I remember when I first installed HalfLife 2. I remember waiting 
multiple hours for the hundreds of MB of data to download over dialup. 
That was not fun.

I particularly remember buying Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and 
waiting for TWO GIGABYTES of data to download from THE INTERNET! Jesus, 
unless Internet speeds increase beyond 2 mbit/sec, this "digital 
distribution" mumbo-jumbo is never going to take off...

...I have a 40 mbit/sec Internet connection today. I've watched as games 
slowly get bigger - 3 GB, 4 GB, even on occasion 5 GB. But Bioshock 
takes the biscuit - 14 GB. (!!) Even on my absurdly fast connection, 
that still took multiple hours. (Rage! only took 15 minutes, by 
comparison...)

It was 9pm by the time the game was ready to play, and next time I 
looked at the clock it was midnight. I then spent all of Sunday playing 
the game, to the point that next time I tried to move, my eyes hurt and 
my legs refused to work properly.

I guess I'm getting old or something.

Most of the game is relatively easy. At least, it's easy to NOT DIE. 
It's rather more difficult to figure out what the HELL you're supposed 
to be doing - and more particularly, which way you're supposed to be going.

Having said that, I've now reached what is, I presume, the final battle. 
I presume that because the difficulty level just skyrocketed to the 
point where I can't make any progress at all. Yesterday I spent roughly 
2 hours repeating the same 3 minutes of gameplay over and over and over 
again. I'd like to see how the game ends, but this is just an exercise 
in tedium.

The mission is simple. You're on a sky-ship with a giant weakspot on it, 
and you have to repel absurd numbers of inbound hostiles bent on 
shooting said weakspot. Try to not die.

The problems are many. The main one is probably the extreme lack of 
ammo. (Probably not helped by the fact that I started the mission with 
naff-all ammo in the first place. But once you get there, there's 
nothing to pick up.) Then the game does that thing where it spawns 
enemies which aren't in any way difficult to hit, but simply take an 
absurd number of hits to do any damage whatsoever.

It's infuriating to have to hit an enemy with 25 sniper bullets when you 
have to reload after every 4 shots, and the total ammo capacity for the 
sniper rifle is only 12 shots. You see the problem here? You have to 
find 2x lots of ammo from somewhere, and reload no less than 7 times to 
take out one bad buy. Meanwhile, there's 18 of these things, and they've 
shot the ship to bits.

You do have access to a giant flying robot demon that you can command to 
take things out. But only one hit every quarter of an hour, and you need 
that to take out the giant airships that your puny little pistol isn't 
going to touch. So you can basically forget about that.

And this is Bioshock, so it's not like you have grenades or anything you 
can job down at the enemies below. Really, all you seem to be able to do 
is watch the ship's health bar inexorably decreasing as you wait for the 
sniper rifle to reload yet AGAIN!

I'm sure it must be *possible* to beat this game. Indeed, many of the 
walkthroughs I've read make it sound *easy*, so perhaps I'm just doing 
something wrong. But it's sure becoming tedious replaying this same 
battle over and over...

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