Pokey said
Steam has also made a gift of DLC for the game, including Minerva's Den.

What do you mean by that, Pokey? Buying Bioshock 2 gives you Minerva's Den with it or.. I misunderstood? I always wanted to try Minerva's Den but I left the game behind for too long, sold my disc and kind of forgot about it. 

Oh, well if that's true that's pretty nice. I'm sure Gregg would be thrilled to know as well.

Edit: Updates in posts below!

Here's the rub with Bioshock 2: your best bet in my humble opinion is to play the game at v1.0. Not v1.1, not v1.2, or anything beyond (until you play Minerva's Den -- the latest update is required to play the DLC). The reason for this is that anything beyond v1.0 buggers up the sound and trust me, when you've heard the game in vanilla then updated to anything beyond you'll realise how much 2K messed it up. Splicers are quiet, turrets are nigh on silent, certain weapons have little to no punch like they did in vanilla, and worst of all, the Little Sisters are sometimes silent. The sound stage just sounds so broken and empty and it's such a shame. Minerva's Den features some of these issues but thankfully the Little Sisters are audible and the Gatherer's Gardens make noise again (this is one of the glaring omissions in vanilla but it's a small price to pay for the rest of the audio being intact).

You can check the version number in the bottom left or right on the title screen. There's a patch out there that reverts Bioshock 2 back to v1.0 but I've no idea where I found it and I no longer have it. Steam used to revert it back to v1.0 by verifying the game cache (because the game used to update through GFWL) but I assume Steam will auto-update it to the latest now so... you may have to see what you can do with that yourself. I can't emphasis how important it is to play vanilla, the difference is dumbfounding and what's worse is that so so many people are never going to hear it how it's meant to be heard. The poor sound designers.

Regarding Steerpike saying that dialogue is missing: no important story dialogue is ever missing but with the patch some NPC shout outs can be muffled or distant.

So to recap:

Play Bioshock 2 vanilla, no patches, no nothing. You'll miss certain fixes I'm sure but you'll not experience the game how I did.

Play Minerva's Den fully patched.

As for getting Minerva's Den for free: damn you all! I lined Microsoft's pockets for that and now you folks get it for free and without the pain!

If you've any questions, please ask. I spent way too long getting my head round all this, wrangling with 2K Support and trawling numerous problem threads. I'd sooner you folks play it in the best light possible!

"edit 3: Controller support is in as well!"

That's pretty damn cool of them. Here's hoping those radial menus are back!

Anyway, I think I might have to check all this myself to see if the problems still exist. If they don't, you'll be the first to know! I'm positive it wasn't some issue with my last Windows install but you never know. I've since done a fresh install so I'll check.