Massive Issues with BioShock (Xbox 360) Title Update - Updated

Shortly after I completed BioShock last Labour Day weekend, 2K Games released a Title Update (a patch) via Xbox Live to fix a few things in the game, including overall performance. While I was taking my time to play through a few other titles, I read about people complaining that the Title Update actually broke the game, but that this could be fixed by clearing your game's cache.

Last Sunday I loaded up BioShock to begin my second play-through, and I did download said Title Update. The result:

DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE BIOSHOCK (Xbox 360) TITLE UPDATE

This is without question not only the worst Title Update I've ever experienced on an Xbox 360, but also one of the single worst patches I've ever seen on any platform period. How this game-wrecking patch ever got past QA is beyond me.

Before evening playing, I quit back to the Dashboard and rebooted the game, holding down the LB and RB to clear the game's cache as 2K Games recommends, and even with that, the game would pause itself roughly every 15 seconds, making the game near unplayable.

I ultimately deleted all BioShock content from my HDD (and backed up the Save Games to my Memory Unit), and cleared my HDD's Cache and Title Updates via an undocumented method. This fixed the pausing issue, but introduced Audio stuttering, particularly when listening to logs or being contacted via your short wave radio. I know BioShock is set in 1960, but the broken record audio issue I was experiencing was a little too much.

I tried various ways of clearing the cache and tweaked this and tested that, even called 2K Games Support, however after about 5 days of this, I ultimately decided to permanently delete all BioShock Content from my HDD, clear my HDD's cache and Title Updates via the same undocumented method, and simply not download the Title Update.

Thus far, this has corrected the issues this poor Title Update has caused at the expense of not being able to be connected to Xbox Live while I play; I minor price to pay.

So, in short, I advise that you _not_ install the BioShock Title Update, and wait for 2K Games to release an additional Title Update; you'll thank me for the lack of headaches later.


Update: Not sure if this is related or not, but as I was re-downloading all the title updates for my other games, I noticed that my Gears of War Checkpoint would no longer load, and all unlocked levels were now locked. Since I had completed the game at last play through, this wasn't such a bad thing, but what does suck is that Insane difficulty is once again locked, and I'll need to complete the game again on a lesser setting just to unlock it.

Even my backed up Checkpoint on my Memory Unit was useless, and I strongly suspect that clearing my HDD's cache and Title Updates via that undocumented maintenance feature was the cause. Not a major issue, but a slight disappointment non-the-less.