Half Life 2/Steam rant
 

The game is unbelievable. I haven't gotten very far yet, but I am so impressed by the visuals, the physics, the AI, and the gameplay - amazing.

The install/Steam experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired. I purchased the retail package for various reasons. When I went to install it, I chose not to install CS:S (I'm not a CS player). When I got to the fourth disk, the install exited because it couldn't find a particular file - it turns out it's in the CS package even though it's needed by Half-Life. Valve's helpful suggestion on their support page is "Make sure you install both Counter Strike and Half Life!" - thanks. I didn't really need that extra gig of HDD space, anyway.

Then I finally get it installed and updated, so I go to play the game. "No CD inserted'... WTF? Doesn't Steam collect my personal information, make me authenticate each time I play, and sit like a resource-loving little goblin in my system tray all the time? Why the hell do I still need to put the CD in to play? That's the ONLY benefit I could see to Steam, honestly, and now I'm a little pissed off about it. I can't even get a no-CD crack like I did for my other games, because that will break Steam.

So then I get into gameplay, and after a bit I'm thrust out into a dark alley. And by dark, I mean I can't see anything. At all. OK, that's all right, I'll just adjust the brightness settings... Hmm. "Move the slider until you can see all three lines of text below." Well, I've moved the slider to the brightest setting, and I can't see ANY text below. And I can now make out a few outlines in the alley, but I can't really SEE anything. This is even more fun when I'm being chased by cops and I have to find my way up a black staircase in a black room to a black hallway. Fun! And HL2 doesn't seem to respect any sort of external brightness setting, either....

Argh.

Bingle

uhh, dude....flashlight.

He doesn't have the flashlight at that point. What kind of video card do you have? And have you tried increasing the gamma or brightness through your vid card controls?

A lot of games authenticate themselves via the cd. Hence why there are nocd cracks out there.

If you're just looking to play the game without the cd, try looking at www.gamecopyworld.com

Yes, that's what I've done for my other games. However, Half life 2 authenticates over the internet - theoretically making the CD authentication useless. In fact, if you buy Half Life 2 on Steam, you don't ever even have to own a CD. The side effect is, though, that the Steam server can detect when you're using an altered binary, and I want to have access to Steam.

Yes, I tried changing the ATI settings around, and didn't see any difference at all in-game. I'm going to play with it a bit more right now...

Edit:
Although it's less of a big deal now because I got a flashlight. It was just an obvious bug that stood in the way of my enjoying the game,

Bingle

Lol, reminds me of one time when I was watching Coppertop play Max Payne. He was in the training area, but the screen was entirely grey. He could see his HUD icons, but nothing else. When he walked backwards into a wall, the proximity of the camera to his back allowed us to see a faint outline of Max's back. Turns out he had to turn off the fogging effects to progress through the game. Made the dream sequences total easy after he did that. :D

Yeah, that was a workaround with an unforseen bonus. I didn't even realize it was a bonus until I watched others play and noticed that their screens in the dream sequences looked very different from mine.

But about Steam, I think it's a great innovation for the industry. Hopefully more studios will adopt a distribution system similar to Steam.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20041015l.jpg

Steam, is annoying me. I bought the game via steam. The day release came out I could not see any of my games in steam. To include my old games. Steam/Valve neither have a fix for this. Every thing seemed find the day before release.(I played day of defeat daily) After release steam had there log on problems then BAM! When I do long in nothing can play none of my games.

I guess I am one of a few who finds Steam to be one of the greatest things in a long long time. I havn't seen nearly any of these bugs that a select few complain about, and many are just really weak arguments.

People just dont like change.

Ah, the place to vent my Steam rant. I'd love to post my thoughts on the game...if I could get a goddamn Steam account! I've become fairly livid over this bullshit.

Install Steam, attempt to create the account, get an error that says and I quote, "SteamProcessCall(CreateAccount)(0xab0004,0x18cfc04,0x18cfd0c) failed with error 200: Failed to connect, WinSock Error 10061 "Connection refused".

I've checked my router settings, open ports, killed the rest of the traffic, ran a winsock fixer that Steam recommended...and I'm still sitting here sans account.

Mercifully, my friends got me a copy of Metroid Prime 2, that I've been playing in order to calm my rage.

Any ideas?

Steam Rules. I d'led the game at over 1MB/s on my 1.5 Mbs DSL line and it took all of 2 minutes to unlock the game. Steam is good.

It took me about 3 hours, because of various problems and other bullshit to install the retail version of the game. Steam is on shaky ground with me. However, I do understand why they did this.

steam is a decent idea... but it's too "heavy" for me too feel positive about it. shaky server conditions, some software bugs are just part of the problem.

i can't really explain it, but it reminds me of why i dislike installing real player. it's just too nosy and seems to require installing a huge amount of data for seemingly simple applications. i work, listen to music, watch movies, read my news and talk to my friends on my PC... steam just seems to be too visible, intrusive and sticky for me to like it's current iteration. i guess i feel that valve takes too much liberty in controlling something i've already purchased from them.

sorry for the vague statements... it's been a couple months since i removed it or else i'd give you some specific reasons why the program bothered me.

I created an account with Steam 2 nights ago, downloaded Half-Life 2 (along with other games) and have been playing for the last day without any troubles. I find it to be an excellent service. I look forward to more companies using this method of software delivery. Plus, no sales tax! w00t!

Can you play Half Life 2 Single player without an internet connection, or do you have to have an active one to authenticate through Steam?

You have to authenticate through a Steam account at least for the very first time. You can apparantly rig it afterwords to play singleplayer in offline mode... Which means it will TRY to load Steam everytime, and upon failure, go into offline mode. At least I think that's how offline mode works.

Actually, when I first heard of Steam, I thought it was a great idea. I still do, really. I'm just annoyed that my experience was not ideal. And really none of it is Steam's fault; in fact things would have gone a lot smoother if I had used Steam. But all these bugs in an otherwise fine product make me angry. And they're not weak arguments in my eyes, they caused me a lot of frustration and lost me a lot of time.

Bingle

I have to say Steam was better. Now, browse games takes an age to load, with all the adverts and crap.. i just want a window to browse games so i can see what's going on without starting HL!
I haven't had any bugs myself and do think Steam is generally a good idea. But, Valve aren't very good at preparing for the worst. The HL community is so big, you need to triple check stuff before unleashing it, or your just asking for problems.

i think steam is a good idea that needs a bit of work. i bought the game in the store because i wanted the pretty box, and i probably will continue to want pretty boxes. as much as i'm for the anti-pirating and verification parts of steam, i just don't see the digital download aspect appealing to people like me, unless they send me the box in the mail. i'm the same way with cds and movies .. i could rent or download, but i like having something to show for it on my shelf.

Im kinda ambivalent about Steam. I think its a damn good idea, and has many merits--but also has huge potential for abuse and quite frankly needs a bit of work. Valve hasnt been abusing the power it could give them, but I would hate to see what happens when a large publisher adapts a similar system that is even buggier and starts locking people out of all manner of games or just deciding to stop support certain games (preventing people from playing them at all) alltogether.

In short: good idea, still needs work, and the idea has troubling implications, though Valve doesnt really worry me in terms of those.

It you buy it through steam it should be cheaper...plain and simple...Gabe Newell said it himself...they make like 30 dollars or more on every game they sell through steam where as the would only make 10 or 15 through retail stores...i say, if you cut out the middle man you should cut out some of the price and i'm talking about more than the 5 dollar difference between retail and steam versions.

They would be sued by VU for making the price lower then what the retail price is.

Lose-Win situation.

This is correct. At FngKestrel's LAN yesterday I played HL2 in offline mode before we had our switches hooked up. Simply choose offline mode and you can play to your heart's content. If you want to play online later (as in CS:Source) you have to exit Steam and then reopen it.

Use some copper instead of going wireless! :D

Blessed copper, I'll never forsake you again.

And yes, this game is truly the most awesome game...ever.

I haven't really had any problems with steam, besides the fact that once I bought my HL2 package, it seems that I lost my old HL install, and DoD. I don't really play HL orig anymore, but I did play DoD quite a bit. I haven't since because I haven't bothered to redownload and install. I thought I would just wait for DoD:S to come out. Hopefully that will happen soon.

If you don't need the CD, why the hell does HL2 tell me "Wrong CD inserted" every time I try to play.

I have to eject whatever I had in earlier and put the first HL2 disk in. What's the point of Steam authentication if it doesn't make life easier for the player? Grrr


Mr Mephisto

mr mephisto, it makes it easier if you didnt buy the cds or dvd.