I hated Steam. Note the tense – I used to hate Steam, and I used to be a pirate.<\/p>\n
I’ll explain.<\/p>\n
Back when Half-Life 2 came out, I lived with my parents. I was still at school, and we lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, in rural Wales.<\/p>\n
It was a 4o minute bus journey to school in the mornings. (It could be worse – the fact that I got a bus at all was amazing).<\/p>\n
We lived in a ADSL black spot. Inititally, there was a distance cap on broadband – if you lived too far from the telephone exchange, you couldnt get it. I think the max was two miles. We lived around seven miles from the exchange.<\/p>\n
The next problem was the exchange itself – it was the only one of it’s kind in the country. Back in the eighties, or thereabouts, BT bought a single exchange from some American telephony company, to try out.<\/p>\n
For whatever reason, they put it in rural Wales, where traffic low, and many houses didn’t even bother with a phone – they’d trek a mile or two to a phone box.<\/p>\n
This thing, this obsolete and foreign monstrosity, was not compatible with DSL. The local loop could not be un-bundled, for reasons that I was never clear on.<\/p>\n
Finally, we had a DAC on our line. A DAC was (is? I seriously doubt there are any still around) a money saving device for BT. If BT couldn’t be arsed to run a new line to a new house, or an old house that was only just being connected up, they’d but a digital to analogue converter on the line, effectively turning it into two lines.<\/p>\n
This meant two things.<\/p>\n
Now that I’ve set the stage, I’ll explain my early\u00a0experiences\u00a0with Steam.<\/p>\n
I’d been waiting for Half-Life 2 since it was featured in PC Gamer, around two years previosly.<\/p>\n
I’d built a PC from scratch,\u00a0solely\u00a0for this game. ( I had 1 GB ram. WOW! ).<\/p>\n
I’d preorded the special edition, which came in a biscuit tin and had a t-shirt with it.<\/p>\n
Of course, I already knew about Steam, and I knew I’d never be able to download the game from there. I’d assumed that buying the boxed copy meant that I could just activate it on Steam, then I’d be on my merry way.<\/p>\n
I didn’t quiet get the game on release. I think I got it a day later, or something.<\/p>\n
There had already been a minor patch, a measly 4 meg or something. Damned if I can remember. The point was, that after steam had finished unlocking the game, it wanted to download this patch.<\/p>\n
I’m sure you remember the earliest days of steam. They had server outages, weird connection bugs, and the awesome “This game cannot be started”.<\/p>\n
All of these problems were multiplied my awful internet. Eventually, what I did was pack up my PC, and persuade my Dad to cart me and the computer down to a friends house, who had ADSL.<\/p>\n
The cycle went like this:<\/p>\n
Of course, it wasn’t this bad. It just seems that way. Steam’s offline mode was and is a bit naff – even if you’d tried to force offline mode, it still might refuse.<\/p>\n
Eventually, I gave in. I started to browse the depths of some unsavoury forums, to try and find a no-cd type fix, that would cut out steam entirely.<\/p>\n
When I found one, it was glorious. I could enjoy my game in peace, and none of this idiotic always on DRM to get in my way. I thought I’d never use Steam again – after all, it only had one game I cared about, and I’d cracked that.<\/p>\n
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I hated Steam. Note the tense – I used to hate Steam, and I used to be a pirate. I’ll explain. Back when Half-Life 2 came out, I lived with my parents. I was still at school, and we lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, in rural… Continue reading