Steam Can Only Burn You [Why Steam Blows]

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.

The Woes of Dial-Up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1AQcGGSec

Yeah, it still exists. And I have it. It sucks, and it sucks hard.

Let me elaborate. My parents are divorced. So you’d think that since that means two houses, that means DOUBLE the chances of ONE of them having high-speed internet. Yeah, well, not when one moves into the woods and one into the boonies. [Dad in the woods (he just got his first deer of the year this morning) and Mom in the boonies (my primary parent)] So, I don’t really use it anymore, but that’s because I got my wonderful Droid phone. I can use my phone’s internet on my computer, which is WONDERFULLY faster. 3G, baby. Not quite good enough for (most) gaming, but it makes audio streams like MySpace [or My_____ or whatever] Music possible, and YouTube videos…kinda possible. It’s become very nifty, nevertheless.

However, it’s still not good enough for some things. My dial-up download speed tops at about 3 kb/s, and my phone can go anywhere from 20 kb/s to 120 kb/s, depending on the day and time. This isn’t quite good enough for, say, updating games on Steam [stupid service in the world, I’ll do that post another day…], running large updates on Ubuntu, or for that matter, downloading any Linux distro. iTunes needs an update? Well, iTunes is a 90mb update. Not really great to do on either of those connections.

So basically all of these things pile up, and then I have my best friend, whom I shall refer to as Trogdor.



One of our favorite old videos, that was. He uses the moniker on various games [you can guess what mine is]. So anyhow, I stay over at his house occasionally and always lug over my wonderful computer so that I can mass-update basically everything. Anything high-speed that needs to get done gets done at his house. I did this just last night [which explains my lack of posting for the past 24 hours], and did quite a bit. Updated Ubuntu and upgraded it to 10.10, updated my Steam games [and now that I realize it, forgot to set Steam back to offline mode… crap. (I’m on my dad’s laptop because my computer is sitting on the floor, waiting to go back to mom’s to be hooked up.)], updated iTunes [which I like, by the way]… You name it. Watched some Pure Pwnage. Played some Urban Terror.

So anyhow. I am one of the 37 people who still have dial-up, basically. It’s not enjoyable in any way, shape or form, except for nostalgia. I’m a sucker for nostalgia. The ’90s = greatest decade ever. But now’s cool, too.

Anyhow… Yeah. What fun. Oh, and I showed Trogdor my Minecraft world. He was impressed with my Skyboat; it wasn’t as sketchy as he thought it was going to be.