BrianSim: Hi, is it worth buying Bioshock 1-2 Remasters if you have the originals? A friend of mine has them here and they do nothing but crash every 15-20 minutes and take ages to start. They don't look much better either.
The Remastered versions are notoriously more buggy / less stable than the Originals and reviews were way down at Mixed / Negative on Steam even before they came to GOG. Some people say crashes can be reduced by starting the game with -dx9 command line switch, but that seems to depend on individual hardware. The games seem to crash at certain scenes / actions (eg, opening the map) which is definitely game-related. You're also not missing much with the "Remastered" textures:-
Classic : https://i.imgur.com/AM5DZju.jpg "Remaster" : https://i.imgur.com/ejFnWfi.jpg ^ Aside from the walls, etc, looking better on the classic, they actually forgot to redraw in Andrew Ryan's moustache! Alternatively, play the Classic versions. I've never had a single crash on the originals with the only tweaking needed to run is setting compatibility settings to "Win XP SP3". For some reason, the GOG versions of B1-2 are indeed the slowest of all at starting up (both Classics & Remastered). I've no idea why that is but several people have guessed it's due to Galaxy integration. My favourite build for B1 is still the Humble Store's Classic version (starts instantly, rock solid stable and no Steam / Galaxy dll's) but that's only for B1, and if you want DRM-Free then B2 is only available from GOG. It's just a shame that 2K didn't treat the Remasters better from the start.
Tip : There are game-specific forums here that will usually get you more answers to game-specific questions (if you search for game at bottom of main forum page, you'll see sub-forum
like this). And welcome to GOG. :-)