Friday
PCSteam : Redemption
As is obvious, I haven’t been a fan of Steam and as said in previous posts I didn’t much care for Empire Total War either. Following the logic so eloquently set up by those two points, I decided to reinstall ETW and Steam last night. I’m sure that decision makes sense, I just haven’t figured out exactly how. Bad decision making aside, I downloaded Steam from Steampowered.com … which makes me want to go off on a tangent.
<tangent>
Who is this “Clifford Skolnick” person that owns steam.com and how much did he want for the domain name? I assume it was a lot to force a company like Valve to end up with “steampowered.com” for what was supposed to be a a revolutionary game delivery method and the core of their business model. I bet there were some heated discussions between Mr. Skolnick and Valve. Clifford Skolnick vs Gabe Newell. Battle of the century there. Clash of the titans. I bet offers were made, accepted and broken. I bet names were called. I bet it all ended poorly as evidenced by the curtly worded, “This domain is not for sale” on steam.com.
</tangent>
So I downloaded Steam, installed it and begrudgingly acknowledged that nothing caught on fire. I looked at my options and saw that I could download ETW in about 8 hours (estimated) but since I bought it on disc I figured I’d install that way, since the disc install only takes about 6 hours. *ahem*. With disc one #1 in the drive, I was committed and sat there watching the bar grow. As I have the attention span of a three year old with ADD I soon grew bored with this and started browsing the net, eventually reading about ArmA2 (yet again). Shortly after that I’m tinkering with nHancer and my ArmA2 shortcut. Shortly after that, I’m starting up ArmA2 to mess with the settings a bit… yes while the ETW install was still going on in the background. Shortly after that (you guessed it) ArmA2 crashed my computer. Awesome, but not unexpected. I reboot, thinking that I’ve really screwed the pooch here. With all the Steam troubles I’ve had I just took part in willingly crashing my system during the install. I say “willingly” because by simply running ArmA2 you are agreeing the small print which clearly states, “this game will crash your computer”. I reboot.
I’m staring at my desktop. Steam has been started. All is quiet. Nothing is on fire. I double click on ETW disc 1 hoping that it will restart the install with no further difficulties. I feel like calling the developers and saying “look man, I don’t want any trouble here”. Disc 1 whirs as Steam gets involved. Then, unbelievably the install picked up from where it left off. If Jesus Christ himself had walked in and offered me a ham sandwich I wouldn’t have been any more surprised. It picked up where it left off, and within a minute or so it asked for disc 2. Not long after that it was installed, updated and all was well.
Considering all of this I have to publicly upgrade my opinion of Steam from “steaming pile” to at least, “sweaty guy in a steam room”. I’m willing to go as far as “steamy sex tape” provided things don’t go to hell in the next couple of days but time will tell on that. For now I am content to revisit ETW while eating ham sandwiches. Praise the lord.
Post Tags: empire total war, etw, gabe newell, nhancer, reinstall, steam, valve
