f13.net

So I had this boycott of Steam I'd been holding onto since it came out. Then you guys are all gushing over steam like it's the new raman noodles and TF2 is your God and Portal is his son. So I figure okay, maybe boycotting something forever because it fucked me over years ago is a bad idea when they're introducing these fun games and have apparently improved. I download steam, all is working. I buy valve complete or whatever and download CS and play it for a bit of nostalgia. Then I go to download HL2 and Steam gives me a big ol' fuck you in the form of sticking my download at 38% and telling me "The Steam severs are currently too busy to handle your request. Please try again in a few minutes."

Fuck you guys and your steam fetish.

EDIT: It also made an ear-hurting sound when I switched back to the error message. My ears are hurt now because of you.

My attitude towards Steam hasn't changed -- I still think it's the Devil's spawn.

If it doesn't go, try restarting Steam.  

After I rebought Vampire my download wedged and I was all like  :ye_gods:  

I waited a few hours and still nothing so  :uhrr:

Then I restarted Steam and  :oh_i_see:

I still think it's better than having to track down antiquated physical media.

Yah, because shelves are hard.

So, you're saying that you have no friends and have never moved. That's cool.

Shelves are easy.  Finding more places to put them...   :ye_gods:

Where would I put the extra clothes racks then?  :|

I see no problem with just burning them.

Steam is still evil, but convenient evil. Sucks for people without broadband.

The shelves are not the problem...

Finding a shelf with years-old games on them? Much more difficult.

One more log for the fire: the retail box of Arx Fatalis just doesn't work right (missing textures, specifically; it was very buggy even at release) but the Steam version works.  Otherwise what rattran said.  I have the same view of GameTap, which is actually better than Steam in my opinion.

Gametap's widescreen monitor support on the 8xxx series of NVidia Cards is poop. Also, does not play nice with a razer sound card.

Just wanted to let you guys know that you're almost forgiven. Portal was damn good, but too short to absolve you. Half-life 2 is pretty good but the first boating sequence was waaaay too long so its worth is going to be decided by how many long-ass vehicle sequences I'm subjected to, but I suspect it wont be enough. Your last saving grace will be TF2. If that's good enough, combined with the fact I didn't need to leave the house to get any of this, I will forgive you all this time.

I know you will anxiously await my decision.

EDIT: Also, derailing my bitch thread into a discussion of shelving is going to cost you some points so you better hope I really like TF2.

You will.

If you don't like TF2, you need to turn in your gamer card, go buy a Wii and start voting on stupid-ass questions.

There's at least one more EVEN LONGER vehicle sequence, in a goddamn dune buggy. The boat was a dream compared to the buggy. I hated the buggy. It went on too long and there were too many damn ant lions. Thankfully, I'm through that now.

And if you don't like TF2, you have no soul. Portal was just the exact right length, IMO.

Yeah portal was the right length, it just wasn't a long enough game experience to validate steam by itself. :P

Half-life 2 was alright, but yeah that buggy was a pain in the ASS. I've never been a fan of vehicles in half-life games and mods, they just don't feel right. I also didn't like the accuracy of the main SMG but oh well, you tend to have enough pulse ammo to use that any time you'd want accuracy for long distances and can fall back onto the revolver if you don't. One thing I noticed missing was a breather between stages, you're basically fighting from the start to the end and it's a very hectic pace. I think I prefer being able to rest up and wander about a town between fights, too many RPGs I guess.

I played Episode One but since I hate the survival horror genre and horror in general at least half of it wasn't very fun for me at all. Is Episode Two more of the same? If it is I'll put off downloading it for when I've run out of games to play.

No, Episode 2 is running around tunnels, driving a shitty car, and firing glass footballs at mobile water towers.

And that fucking gnome.

What gnome?

Episode 2 was pretty good even though the last level of Episode Two was one of my most disliked levels I've ever played in an FPS, and very high up there for a level without jumping puzzles.

TF2 is awesome. I could do without spies though, but I guess that comes form playing medic and engy as my favourite classes. The medic in particular is excellent. I love healing and frankly this type of healing is just about perfect for an FPS and you get congradulated for every kill you make. :drill:

Verdict: forgiven.

If you don't know about the gnome, don't ask. You're better off not knowing. I wish I didn't know. It made me do things. Unspeakable things.

I liked the car before the gnome. Post-gnome, not so much.

I found out about the gnome right after I beat episode 2, I promptly uninstalled it to stop me from doing somthing I'd later regret.

You are very wise.

So I FINALLY picked up the Orange Box and go about installing it last night. Installs alright and starts patching everything up. Portal says it's done and I'm itching to play, so I fire it up and promptly receive a message that the data is no good, redownloading. I have a really crappy ISP so this does not surprise me. Shortly, it says 100% done and go to play, to be greeted by the same data problem message.

Now, I'm starting to get concerned. I got to the HDD I've installed Orange Box on, it's a second HDD in my laptop and sure enough, the \Games folder cannot be opened. I reboot and CHKDSK does it's thing, finding corrupt files all being of the ilk steam.dll etc etc. As it's going through that it locks up for around 30 minutes, not doing anything. I'm very impatient so I hard reboot and now my 2nd HDD is making bad noises and I the BIOS is telling me to insert bootable media, meaning my original HDD with Vista (<-- culprit? Who knows) installed on it is not be recognized either. I power down yet again, pull out the 2nd HDD and reboot. No problems, Vista fires up quickly and smoothly. Power down, reinsert 2nd HDD and a few grindy noises later I'm greeted with the 'Please insert bootable media' message again.

WTF, I'm assuming that doing the hard reboot when CHKDSK frozen up did something VERY VERY bad to my 2nd HDD, but it went from one corrupt folder, to no worky in pretty short order.

Kiss all my MP3's, images and videos good bye I guess eh?

So right now, I'm a little concerned about retrying to install Orange Box on my 1st HDD. Not a happy camper this AM.

That's happened to be before. From what I figured out it was just that the hard drive chewed itself apart on reboot when it does the initial read. Steam did nothing wrong aside from just being the write that finally did in your HDD. Computers are a beautiful thing.

Sad thing is it was a brand new HDD. OH WELL. That'll teach me.

Was it maxtor?

Seagate

Infant mortality. :sad:

If a drive is going to fail, it's likely to be either very early in its life or later on.

It was a double-whammy since I was REALLY looking forward to playing Portal.

I had a Seagate drive completely cluster-fuck itself in a similar fashion not too long ago on my machine.  I'm going 100% WD from now on until one of their drives fails.

Quantum's, Maxtors, and Seagates have all failed me in fascinating ways.  Western Digitals on the other hand have never done me wrong. 

I bought a new Maxtor drive once. It failed on Windows install. I was absolutely astonished at how fast it went.

I will never talk about my luck with harddrives. That is how one fucks themselves.

Every brand has failed on me. That's what warranties are for. Seagate's 5 year is nice, though I've only had to use it once. And WD's cross-shipping is good. And Maxtor used to be a pain, dunno how they are now that they're a division of Seagate, I'd stopped buying them a few years back due to a series of bad drives in a row, and an incompetent RMA dept.

I wouldn't blame steam directly, it's just that it failed during a long write.

HDDs are a scarey thing sometimes. :oh_i_see:

Odd, Seagates have never failed me while all the others have.  They are my HD maker of choice.  Maxtor has always sucked, but WD went from good, to shitty, back up to good again it seems.  I still rank them lower than Seagate, as I and nobody else I've known has had problems with them, but WD's reviews have gotten good again over the last several years.

Then again, I have an 8 year old IBM Deathstar that still appears to run fine to this very day, so maybe I just have weird luck.


I don't get the steam hate.  I hated it when it first came out, due to Day of Defeat being pushed over to it and all the servers running like complete shit.  So I can understand old feelings.  However, they listened, and have fixed it up greatly over the years.  Now I love steam and think its an awesome piece of software.  I never have any problems with it what so ever, I get great ping on servers, and its really nice to be able to play any game I own on any computer I want without the need to drag my huge binder of disks around.