You know what? I feel like doing that Steam rant right now. Two quick posts in a row.
Steam. Valve’s little baby. Good god, now I hate this service. Let me explain for those who don’t know.
Valve. They make video games. Good ones, too, like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, etc. Their computer games can’t just be installed. Even if you buy the CD. They have a service called Steam, for which you make an account and it keeps track of all of your installed Valve games, and you can buy and download games through it. Sounds alright. But like I said, you can’t just install a game, even from CD. The CD just tells Steam that you bought it, and allows you to download it from the internet. So me and the other… was it 36?… dial-up users are completely shafted, because we have to DOWNLOAD the entire game. Yeah, that could be anywhere up to 4 gigs in size. Which would literally take weeks.
I just opened up the calculator. 4 gigs at 2.5 kilobytes/second would take you between 19 and 20 days. Fun, fun.
So that part sucks [the good part: the CD is no longer needed to play the game. That’s about it.]. Also, Steam automatically checks for updates to the game. And if there is one, you can’t play it until you get the update. Well, guess what? Updates must be downloaded, and can be quite large. So until you wait out the download, you’re shafted.
The only way to avoid this is keep Steam in offline mode, which means it can’t keep track of your achievements and whatnot. Which is what I do. That way, it can’t check for updates to keep you from playing.
One convenient thing they tried to do was to make it so that it’s easy to install a game across multiple computers, by logging into Steam on the same account on the different computers. It would download and install whatever games you wanted that you had previously purchased. Cool and all, but not worth it, sorry.
Steam also offers an in-game friend service and such, providing chat rooms and voice chat, which is nice and all because it’s integrated into the game. They got that part right.
Wait, no they didn’t. Half-Life 2 crashes instantly on my computer when I have the in-game Steam Online service running. I have to turn it off in order for it to work. Sorry, strike 3, Valve.
So, Valve, you make some of the best games I’ve ever played, but you sure do make me suffer a lot to be able to play them. You deserve a Gordon Freeman crowbar to the face.
Steam. Valve’s little baby. Good god, now I hate this service. Let me explain for those who don’t know.
Valve. They make video games. Good ones, too, like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, etc. Their computer games can’t just be installed. Even if you buy the CD. They have a service called Steam, for which you make an account and it keeps track of all of your installed Valve games, and you can buy and download games through it. Sounds alright. But like I said, you can’t just install a game, even from CD. The CD just tells Steam that you bought it, and allows you to download it from the internet. So me and the other… was it 36?… dial-up users are completely shafted, because we have to DOWNLOAD the entire game. Yeah, that could be anywhere up to 4 gigs in size. Which would literally take weeks.
I just opened up the calculator. 4 gigs at 2.5 kilobytes/second would take you between 19 and 20 days. Fun, fun.
So that part sucks [the good part: the CD is no longer needed to play the game. That’s about it.]. Also, Steam automatically checks for updates to the game. And if there is one, you can’t play it until you get the update. Well, guess what? Updates must be downloaded, and can be quite large. So until you wait out the download, you’re shafted.
The only way to avoid this is keep Steam in offline mode, which means it can’t keep track of your achievements and whatnot. Which is what I do. That way, it can’t check for updates to keep you from playing.
One convenient thing they tried to do was to make it so that it’s easy to install a game across multiple computers, by logging into Steam on the same account on the different computers. It would download and install whatever games you wanted that you had previously purchased. Cool and all, but not worth it, sorry.
Steam also offers an in-game friend service and such, providing chat rooms and voice chat, which is nice and all because it’s integrated into the game. They got that part right.
Wait, no they didn’t. Half-Life 2 crashes instantly on my computer when I have the in-game Steam Online service running. I have to turn it off in order for it to work. Sorry, strike 3, Valve.
So, Valve, you make some of the best games I’ve ever played, but you sure do make me suffer a lot to be able to play them. You deserve a Gordon Freeman crowbar to the face.
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