Hey guys, question for ya? I’ve been avoiding Steam because my former system wouldn’t run it well, and I heard a lot about headaches with installation, memory and CPU usage, and other issues.
Now that I have a shiny new PC with plenty of RAM and what not, I’ve been considering it. This is coming from a guy who got bored with Half-Life 1 eventually, though.
So, in your honest opinion, given the mods and what not available, would Steam be worth getting these days? Have they overcome the hurdles they had when they first launched?
I look forward to your opinions, and thank you in advance. :)
Well, I was looking at it as a whole package, and just mentioned half-life 2 since it seems to be their flagship product and was curious to try it since I can probably run it fairly well now :)
You know, when I first installed HL2 along with Steam, I didn’t have any technical problems during installation, verification, or actually running the game. I did have a lot of extremely irritating stuttering though.
But then when I installed the game again later to replay it, and I installed it on the exact same PC, but after a clean format and defrag, everything worked out wonderfully.
Don’t know about any specific issues with certain systems, because the stuttering was the only problem I really faced with Steam. But that’s a specific HL2 issue. I don’t get all the hate directed at it to be honest, but of course everyone will have their specific issues with it.
It’s fine. I’m willing to believe the many gamer fatwas issued against it were justified at some point and I simply experienced it after that point was simply past, but it’s still fine now. (This is the part you quote when you want to rebut that it isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t, I can’t get it not to start with my system and that Ringu kid keeps appearing in my monitor now and it installs things that I don’t tell it to and I can’t get it to quit when I’m not playing Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 sucks anyway and I can’t sell my used copy of Half-Life 2 even if it didn’t suck anyway and fuck you Valve apologist you’re like Hitler.)
What point did you get bored with the first Half-Life? I don’t much like first person shooters, and HL2 held my interest longer than the first one did overall. Good setpiece battles, although with the kind of triumph of game design that guarantees that everyone can find their own favorite least-favorite part of it. (I’m in the Airboat Too Goddamn Long and I Can See Why You Don’t Go To Ravenholme camps, myself.)
Second the “you have to want the games” sentiment. I never had problems with Steam at all. But you said you got bored with HL. I really loved the first, but got bored with the second. Too much of it felt like repetitive filler (I never finished it, gave up about 2/3rds of the way through), but it does look pretty and starts off strong.
I can’t stand counter-strike but maybe DoD is worth getting steam for? I don’t know. There’s nothing on Steam I’d want to play personally, so I don’t have it installed at the moment.
Version 3 of steam came out late last year and is now a working product. So if you want to play games that are chained to steam, its not going to cripple your system like earlier versions have if that is what you are worring about.
Half Life 2 is a much more straight open FPS than the original. Its more linear, weaker AI, and fewer puzzles to get in the way of the action. Its also very light on story and narrative. However if Half Life felt like a drag, the second game moves are a faster clip so not to interupt the run and gun. So since they are so different; if you didn’t like the original Half life, you might like the second one.
Installed it but I don’t let it out to play very often. The first thing I did was deny it permission to load with Windows, then I fed it my original HL serial so that some keygen kiddie wouldn’t snag it first. You get an amazing amount of content with a single HL serial: HL, the expansions, DoD, counterstrike, & more. Then I fed it a HL2 serial from a $20 retail purchase. That opened up some more stuff. I still won’t buy anything from them, but Steam functions very well as a launcher/updater for Valve’s games. No disc in the drive, uninstall and reinstall as you wish.
Maybe Sin Episodes will change my mind about buying online, maybe it won’t.
It’s taken awhile and generated quite a bit of bad will and Valve hate along the way, but right now I think it works really well, and depending on the content package you can get quite a bit of goodies with it.
Seems to work real well as a info and content delivery system with secured purchase and everything else.
There are still issues though. I hadn’t run into any when I got HL2 originally but many did and some of the stupid crap that happened just can’t be ignored (like wireless networking issues).
Welp, I tried it (and I did turn off that silly window loading option) and it’s pretty cool. I like how seamless it is. Oh, and the HL2 demo scared the CRAP out of me, but it looked great. :)
Steam turned out fine with me. Very annoying, however, was the fact that I would only play a steam game once in a while, so every single time, I would fire it up but have to wait 10 minutes for stupid updates before I could play the game. That kind of highlighted that once this stuff gets started, you will never own a game properly again, but I know I’ll get used to it eventually.
At Fry’s yesterday, I looked at the retail package of Day of Defeat. Nowhere on the box did it tell you that it required an internet connection or involved Steam. I don’t even recall the box saying that it was a primarily multiplayer game. Seems a bit sloppy.
As of this week, the Steam “Friends” list is now working, although labeled Beta. It’s not of much use to me, as I rarely fire up a Steam game unless I want to check out improvements with new hardware I’ve purchased. It’s there for those who want to check it out. My Steam tag is Mono. I’d suspect you’ll find me offline.
