Friday

Steam : Redemption

This image may be NSFW, though I guess it's too late for that.

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. Continue…