Blog - Otreum

0 comments by Otreum on Oct 12th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

So i've come to a great amount of frustration yet AGAIN with steam and it's stupid features.

This time, i'm going to complain about the damn auto update that steam uses.

I have been playing Empire: Total war a fair bit since it was released, and although I couldn't install Empire specifically to where I wanted to install it, I had an enjoyable experience with the game minus performance problems, random crashes etc.

So i've been playing on the 1.4 version of the game since 1.4 was released and i've been pretty damn happy, it ran better, there were no sound problems with the game, and no crashes (oh my!), but then a very annoying event occurred....STEAM AUTOUPDATE!

Little did I know that Empire: Total war patch 1.5 was a complete and utter failure, the patch finished, I tried to play and noticed that the game was kindof like it was when I first got it when it was unpatched; it took ages to get to the menu.
I then decided to try and load my save games and BAM!......CTD....I tried again, BAM, same spot, CTD, ....restart computer, tried playing again, BAM!, same problem, my saves games were kaputt.

I figured I was in a crap spot in the campaign anyway and wouldn't mind starting again as the Russians, so went to start a new game and BAM!.....CTD.
No matter what, I just could not get IN GAME, it only allowed me to browse the menu....which brings me to another note.

The menu has some annoying bloody advertisement that sits in the bottom right of the screen telling me about this new expansion that has come out. Not only that but my Empire: total war background video has changed to what you would think would be the background menu for the expansion, not the vanilla version.

I spent a while trying to restart and play the game, reinstall, repatch and so on, but no matter what, the game just would not run.

I then checked out the forums and it seems i'm not alone, it seems the 1.5 patch has messed up the game for anybody with a nvidia card using a certain driver, and there was a "fix" on the page.
The "Fix" was "update to the latest beta driver", so I did that but nope, same problem!

So I figured maybe I could just download the 1.4 patch and turn off autoupdate or something.
I checked around and ....oooooh yeeeeah, steam keeps games up to the LATEST patch, you can't pick any previous patches to update to, not only that but developers who use steam don't have external/manual patches, because steam is so l337 and all.
Now both because of Steam's piece of shit auto updater, combined with Sega's woeful 1.5 patch release, I can't play Empire: total war, and my save games are pooped.

So yeah, great work Sega and Steam, you make a horrible couple!

1 comment by Otreum on Aug 4th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

Yet another rant, however this is not about steam (thank goodness!).
This rant is focused on Borderlands, a new and upcoming title for PC, Xbox360 and PS3 that pits players into a post apocalyptic world very much like Fallout 3 (not a bad thing) however adding a wee bit more to the elements of gameplay.
When I first heard about Borderlands in a brief magazine snippet, I really liked the idea and was really looking forward to seeing a game of it's magnitude come out. I also had faith in the developers that they could create something so large scale and ambitious.

Not long ago, I saw a video of Borderlands, it came with developer commentary and it looked pretty cool and looked as though it was really living up to it's expectations, so my excitement level for this game went up.

Then, just today, I see an updated version of the game on gamespot in a video and boy o boy was I dissappointed.
The first thing I noticed was the distinct and disgusting looking Cel-Shaded rendering....what the flying hippo's were these developers thinking!
YES, cel shading is COOL!....but only in games with a comical and colourful feel to them, and also if it's done correctly.
The problem with borderlands is that it's a post apocalyptic world, meaning that everything is pretty much mono-tone in terms of colour and landscape, so why the hell would the developers make the graphics even more uninteresting by adding cel shading? It's disgusting, and i'm not the only one who shares this opinion.

Of course, there are those few who really love cel shaded games, which is fine; each to their own right? I'm one of those people who love cel shading, however only when it's appropriate...in this case, cel shading in Borderlands is not appropriate and will make or break the game for alot of people.

These are some examples of games where cel shading works well, and why:
Zelda: windwaker - The game is a childs game, it is colourful, it is cartoony, it is fun, and really brings the game to life, making it a memorable experience for all who played it, this is by far the only game I have seen Cel-shading done perfectly.

XIII - While I only played a demo of the game, it was still colourful and interesting, it also held that comic book style which put the game into it's own little spot on the shelf.

Team Fortress 2 - While I really don't like TF2, I do think that the cel shading and overall artistic style of the game was well done, because the game was yet again...COLOURFUL. The characters were colourful, the gameplay was erratic, fast paced and varied, and the visuals were colourful, therefore making the gameplay as a whole...a colourful experience, making cel-shading more than welcome.

What do all of the above games have in common I wonder? hmmmm, THEY'RE COLOURFUL!...Borderlands is just browns and greys and whites, THERE IS NO COLOUR!
Not only that, but the characters are far too serious for the whole Cel-Shading deal, serious characters are "grey" or some other uninteresting colour, therefore making them dull...not colourful.
The whole game is one big giant brown - grey bland gameworld, and while there are MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of different weapons (more like 50 weapons with millions of different stat combinations), those weapons so far look just as boring as the rest of the game and if anything, have overcontrasted particle effects like strong icey blue electrical colours and so on, which is just gross and feels out of place.

Next I want to point out the games next MAJOR flaw, which the developers SHOULD have learnt about after playing games like Vampire: the masquerade, Morrowind and Hellgate: london.
FPS + Roll of Dice stat based gameplay = failure.

When I aim at someones head in a game with a 50cal sniper rifle, I want their head to POP!, I don't want to get a stupid message telling me "MISSED".
What the hell is the point in an FPS game if accuracy with a mouse really isn't required? This is garbage, this is where developers get carried away and start throwing shit together without realizing what it's really doing to the game.
I WAS going to get borderlands regardless of it's cel-shading, but when I saw "MISS", "CRITICAL HIT", "+10" and garbage like that, I was turned off immediately.

If I ever do play borderlands, it will only ever be to try it and hopefully be impressed, but from what i've seen so far, I've gone from enthusiastic to repelled in relation to Borderlands...

This is an example of when developers go too far with their games and fuck them up.

0 comments by Otreum on Jul 8th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

Sure the topic has been used several times before for several rants about steam, but it just goes to show how true the statement is. STEAM is a steaming pile of shit.

The only reason I am writing this blog (which people probably won't read for years) is because I need to vent my frustration as to just how useless steam is as a requirement to install retail CD/DVD games.

Now sure, I understand the positives of steam, and they are good things, such as how it has an online store which you can easily buy games from, but hey whoopee fucking doo, there are other digital distribution software out there such as D2D (Direct 2 Drive)....
Steam also has a friends list, which you can easily press shift + tab while in a steam game to chat to those people on the fly while in game, but so what...really, how many already existing programs out there do this with ANY game, not just steam specific games...that answer is ALOT, some favourites of the gaming community being Xfire, teamspeak, and ventrillo, which do more and use less memory, ...should I also mention that they only take maybe 3 seconds to load as opposed to the 15seconds to the extreme of several minutes or even just freezing like steam...

Steam is also a nice accessible and popular platform for indie game developers to start earning some dollars for their indie games, steam is like the retail indie game hub, but really, your average gamer doesn't give 2 shits about indie games, nor do they care about buying games online and not having a physical copy of their game....
I personally dont buy from steam because:
A- I use paypal..it takes about a week for the money to clear before I can start downloading.
B- I live in Australia, where internet service providers are shitastic in price and quality, I'm on a 1.5mb connection, with 3 computers on the network, with 20gb on peak limit before being shaped, and 20gb off limit before being shaped (40gb per month total, but really only 20gb total since nobody is on the net in the off peak hours). So to the point, with that crappy internet, I could really only download a game per month, even though there tend to be several games per month that grab my interest...so stuff downloading via steam!

Now, what..that's not many good things is it? especially in comparison to how much CRAP goes on with steam.

Firstly, it takes forever to start, sometimes it takes about 10-15seconds (far too long for a fucking software application like steam), other times, it can take up to over 1minute and even appear to be frozen..or ...actually be frozen.
Now I dunno about the rest of you, but when I want to play a game, I don't want to wait that long before I can even click on the game to play it.
I am not sure why steam takes so long, but everyone i've asked about steam...has the same problem, except 2 people specifically think that 15-30 seconds is acceptable......
Anyway, I would put this lagging start down to the annoying bloody advertisement updates that show things that I don't give a flying fuck about, such as Luxor on steam or lucas arts now on steam....like god damn... at least make this an option to turn off! it's so intrusive!.

Next up is auto downloads and updates...this drives me up the fucking wall to no extent. I logged into steam the other day, and suddenly...steam wanted to update, so had to wait the usual 30 or so seconds for steam to start, then probably another 10-15 seconds for the "updating steam" (whatever it's called) box to come from it's purely white form...and finally then had to wait for steam to update..which didn't take too long, but why have a progress bar when it sits at 0% for a few seconds before suddenly going to 100% and asking you to restart...hell they may aswell just have a red and green light...it'd probably take up less memory and cut the bullshit out.
So after updating steam, I noticed that I have a bunch of mods and games trying to update, but I didn't know this at first, I was just chatting to someone on steam, and also trying to look at youtube videos, and noticed that youtube's home page was taking about a minute to load....

So then I thought "STEAM! ><" and looked down to see the tray icon showing that it was downloading, but hell, instead of cramming fuckin ads in my face, why not just tell me "such and such games are updating"....at least I want to know that information so I can stop those updates...

The most important thing I want to talk about is something I will leave until last, but I will just rant about my little experience I just had with FEAR 2...

When I bought fear 2 on release, I wasn't expecting it to require steam, I figured it'd just use securerom as per usual for FEAR releases, but whats this? I go to install and it loads STEAM!?!?!?! ...the hell!?
Anyway, I got this same reaction from every other retail game I bought that apparently needed steam too...shame the little steam icon on the box was so small I didn't even notice it when I was reading it in the game store....

So ok...it loads steam on install, I put in my cd key and.......what.....the.....fuuuuuck!
I get a message saying that the game cannot be installed as it is not yet released?!?!?!?!? wooooooaaaaah, mind trip, I guess that because I live in Australia, i'm about 7 hours ahead of the US or something, so technically i'm living in the future but what in the fuck....I have a physical game which I bought in store....which was RELEASED ON THE RELEASE DATE IN AUSTRALIA....yet it says that I can't install because the game hasn't been released yet.....ooooooh my.
Well...I waited 2 days like the patient person I usually am, and tried to install again...hooray it installed, I go to play and oh it needs to update.......ALREADY -_-
Now I know steam needs to do a little update to varify the game or something, but this update was taking a loooooooooong time....but lucky for me I had to go out for most of the day..however when I got back, I came back to a black screen.....the game had crashed,...ok so I know that's not a steam issue, but that was pretty fucking funny.

So I restarted steam and the game and got myself playing for many hours, no worries, hooray.
I had been too busy with my games development work for the next few days to play it , and ended up forgetting about the game for a few weeks....came back and oh...it needed to update already....so I updated, played, and cool, all is well, but due to other reasons I lost all my save games :( and thus I gave up on fear 2.

A while later....current day (today) my father wanted to play fear 2, so I figured I would uninstall fear 2 and it would revoke the registration from my steam account allowing me to install fear 2 to my dads computer on his steam account, but NOOOOOOOO, "this key is already in use, blahblahblah!"...
Any non steam game it would be easy, but due to steam, this became an issue.
I did research and found out I needed to contact steam support to transfer the key to my dads account.
Instead of doing this (which would take days because steam support blows arse), I just logged into my account on his computer so he could play fear 2.
So he installed it fine, it didnt ask for the cd key, and it didn't have a problem installing at all.
However it DID have a problem starting.
The game had that stupid updating bug where the percentage of completion was erratic and random and not really doing anything.
After a while of trying to fix this with the useless help in steam support, I decided to download the patch manually from filefront.
The patch downloaded and I tried to install it, but it says the game is not installed on the system O_O
.....once again probably not entirely related to steam, but i've never had a patch cause this problem before, and since I also tried to play fear 2 in offline mode getting the error saying the fear 2 wasn't ready, I could only assume that it was a steam problem.

Anyway, finally, after yet another reinstall, the update appears to be updating correctly, but I havent been keeping a close eye on it so for all I know, it's probably stuffed up again.
*goes to check*
Ok, so it seems to be going as planned...however one thing i've always noticed with steam is the gradual degradation of the download speed....what should be downloading at 160kbs was now downloading at .02kbs ...... and probably has been at a low speed for a while since it's been downloading for about 3 hours now...where as the 300mb or so patch should only take about an hour tops.
Yet again, steam being shit.

Now after all that ranting I feel a little better inside, but the bottom line is this.

WHY THE FUCK ARE WE BEING FORCED TO USE STEAM FOR RETAIL PRODUCTS THAT WE BUY PHYSICALLY!

If I want to buy something from steam, and use steam, I WILL BUY FROM STEAM AND USE STEAM!....FFS!

If games aren't becoming victim of consolization (the term used for PC games that feel more like a console game), then games are becoming victim to the necessity of using steam-ing pile of shit.

Why is this? most likely because developers use steam for anti-piracy....does steam work as an anti-piracy measure? lol, absolutely not, in fact, steam games are of the most highly pirated games to date.

Developers should take note of what Bohemia Interactive did with ARMA and ARMA 2 with their FADE copy protection system...they should also take note of what EA (even though EA suck big time) did with "The Godfather" game for PC.
Instead of forcing the average end user to install bullshit onto his/her computer, punish non legit users with deliberately subtle but high impact game bugs that no cracker can bypass without actually being a modder as well.

Ok...now i'm sleep, and my rant is over, excuse the informality, the swearing, and the anger, if you don't like this blog and you agree that steam is the bee's knees, then good for you, but this is my opinion and it isn't changing until steam is fixed!