Cathode Tan - Games, Media and Geek Stuff
logo design by man bytes blog

Friday, December 15, 2006

Did Your Gordon Freeman Just Get Snowed Out?

Talk about proof of the fallibility of Steam. Remember, this means even if you were trying to play offline ... a storm somewhere else in the world is keeping you from your game.



tagged: ,

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I bought Rag Doll Kung-Fu about a year ago off Steam, I needed to log-in to play the thing single player. It was shite. I can imagine the anguish of not being able to play a single-player game because of server difficulties on the other side of the country.

Winkyboy said...

That is THE specific reason that I don't buy Steam games. I found that problem first day with HL2, when I needed to wait at a car dealer for repairs & thought I'd get a few moments of gaming in... until I was, as everyone knows, DENIED because I was offline.

No more Steam for me. No matter how cool the game.

Josh said...

Well, shortly after completing Half-Life 2 (about a week after getting it) I moved some stuff around on my hard drive and managed to confuse the hell out of Steam. It couldn't find the login prompt anymore. I tried uninstalling, reinstalling, whatever. It must have been on the registry level because Steam was hosed.

Good thing I didn't want to try that Counter-Strike thing I kept hearing about...

What I love though is that guys like Doctorow go all Wang Chung on Apple for being unfriendly to consumers. I use iTunes all the time. I use it even when my network is down. I play my iTunes library on my radio. I burn it to CD's. I listen to it on my very un-Apple Nokia phone.

But if Valve gets caught in an ice storm, anything you ever bought off Steam is kaput. And as far as I know - there's not anything you can do about it. I bet there's more than a few lines in their EULA to protect them in cases like this one.