A week ago, I wrote a fairly critical assessment of the multiplayer in Bioshock 2. I insisted I wasn't going to be playing much. Well, I lied. I couldn't stay away. Which is too bad, because now I get to witness the slow painful death of what should have been a fantastic mulitplayer game.

After the jump, read the grisly almost-post-mortem.

I have been waiting three hours to get into a multiplayer game of Bioshock 2 on Xbox Live. I don't mean that as in "fifteen minutes, but I was so impatient that it felt like three hours". I mean, quite literally, three hours. And here's the kicker: I never even got into a game.

It's not like I'm trying some weird funky mode. I'm just standing by to join the vanilla deathmatch. I'm not the only one, because occasionally, someone joins. He hangs out for a bit and then leaves. Is he getting into a game after he leaves? Is he just giving up?

My connection is solid. My NAT is open. Just to be sure, I boot up Modern Warfare 2 and easily play a match. My kill:death ratio is 3:18. I am called a faggot. Its not at all what I want to play. I want to play Bioshock 2 on my Xbox 360. It's a wonderful game. I've grown really fond of how the trapping and hacking add a new risk/reward dynamic. I love the appearance of a Big Daddy, even when I'm at the receiving end of his rivet gun. The character models are so lovably funky and distinct. The canned taunts are so charming. I smile when I get killed. And as for the gameplay, dear lord, do I love the interplay of all the weapons and plasmids. The developers at Digital Extreme designed a stellar multiplayer component for Bioshock 2.

The maps are so atmospheric, but I wonder why Home for the Poor never comes up in public matches. Literally never. It's a wonderful layout built around an open courtyard in a three-story building, similar to Grace Holloway's apartment in the Sinclair Deluxe, itself similar to the Bradbury Building in Blade Runner. But you won't get to play Home for the Poor online unless you set up a private match that disables advancement and therefore seems pointless and hollow in a game about advancing to unlock new weapons and abilities.

Meanwhile, I can get into multiplayer Bioshock 2 games on the PC with no problem. The "getting in" part is easy. The "playing" part is a whole other kettle of fish. Rotten, stinking, franchise-killing fish. The PC multiplayer is afflicted with insufferable lag. I jump down from the second-story balcony of the Kashmir Restaurant and open fire on the guy hacking the turret, but then I'm suddenly back on the second floor again. I try to walk through a door, but it won't open. I turn a corner and suddenly I'm staring at the wall ten feet short of the corner. What the hell is going on? It's like having a 2400 baud modem.

There are also the little things. The tab key that calls up scores doesn't also close the scores. Even though I've downloaded and installed the game through Steam, I can't use Steam to invite friends or join games. Unlike the Xbox 360 version, I can't skip past the intro logos when the game loads. I repeat, what the hell is going on? And was the patch I just downloaded supposed to actually fix anything? Because I'm pretty sure it just made everything worse. Far, far worse. Maybe I'm better off playing something popular and reliable, where I have a 1:6 kill/death ratio but can at least get into a working game.

I'm angry and sad. As of two weeks after its release, Bioshock 2 is one of the worst case examples of a fantastic multiplayer game undone by sloppy connectivity issues. I'm reminded of Rise of Legends, an ingenious bold real time strategy game that never found a multiplayer community, partly because it had so many connectivity issues when it was released. Those of us who loved the game were stymied again and again by technical issues. By the time they were ironed out, everyone else had moved on. Here's to hoping this isn't what happens with Bioshock 2, where I can already see the signs of rigor mortis and smell the overwhelming stench of technical failure.