Ordering Disorder » steam

Left 4 Dead 2 – now with more zombies

Dan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:10:35 +0000

I don’t want to repeat everything I said in my review of the Left 4 Dead 2 demo, but there’s a lot to talk about.

The weather effects in the Hard Rain campaign are quite well done, and the hotel fire at the beginning of the first campaign actually makes you feel like you’re in a hotel fire – you feel the urge to run through as fast as you can to escape the flames, though they don’t actually ever cut off your path (at least not that I could tell).

There are two types of ammo that you can deploy: explosive, which stumbles special infected, and incendiary, which sets things on fire. That’s the fun one

There are also laser sight upgrades, which increase your weapon’s accuracy. They only apply to your currently equipped primary weapon, so if you change weapons you lose the upgrade.

As for the Infected, there are obviously the new Specials that I mentioned before – the Spitter, the Jockey, and the Charger – but there’s also a female version of the Boomer. I haven’t confirmed this, but the word on the street is that the female Boomer can move while she, uh, vomits at you. (She’s also supposedly louder, making her easier to locate.)

I mentioned the armored CEDA agents when I talked about the demo; there are also clowns (who make noise and attract more common infected), there are mudders (who crouch low to the ground and like to hide in muddy water), and there are guys in fireproof suits.

The new Scavenge game mode is extremely fun, and Survival and Versus are still just as awesome; Realism mode is extremely involving. I was so immersed that I actually ducked in my chair when a Tank threw a chunk of concrete at me.

My only gripe thus far is that today when I logged on, my achievements had been reset (I had 20-some already). It’s not too big a deal, but I guess that’s what happens during launch week. Maybe there were some cheaters and Valve couldn’t tell who had cheated and who couldn’t. I have confirmed that the reset was widespread, but I don’t know if it was global.

I’m going to echo Ars Technica’s review – Left 4 Dead 2 is well worth the money.

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L4D2 Launch woes

Dan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:35:38 +0000

The official release time of L4D2 is 2.5 hours from now, but Valve intended to release it 3 hours early; at least, that’s true if you go by Pacific time.

So technically it’s 30 minutes late but 2.5 hours early still. I think someone’s having trouble configuring the release:

At least, I’m pretty sure there aren’t seven editions of Left 4 Dead 2…

Edit: A few minutes later, there are still seven copies, but the date has been changed to Nov 16, 2009. And of course the duplicates were removed just as I typed this.

Edit 2: And of course, now the single listing has Nov 17, 2009 listed as the release date. They really shouldn’t do this stuff on a production server…

Edit 3: It ended up coming out just one hour “late”. The nerd rage literally crashed Steam’s forums. It was definitely worth the wait, though; I’ll write a post later this week about it.

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The real cost of gaming

Dan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:46:53 +0000

There’s an article on IncGamers in which the author adds up all the money he and his wife have spent on World of Warcraft over the years, and then complains about how expensive it is. Now, I’m not a fan of MMOs, but I happen to disagree with his conclusion, for one very important reason: cost per hour.

If we assume he and his wife each play World of Warcraft ten hours per week, then his $1700 over four years and eight months works out to $0.35 per hour of play time.

Let’s compare that to some other games. You know those $50 games you play once and never look at again? The ones where the whole game lasts 10 hours if you’re lucky? Those cost upwards of $5 per hour.

So realizing this got me thinking. How much have my favorite games really cost me?

Counter-Strike: Source cost me $19.99. I’ve played countless hours, surely more than 200 hours. Heck, just in the last two weeks I’ve played 14 hours. If we pretend that’s accurate over three years, that’s just $0.02 per hour. In reality, I used to play CS:S a lot more than I do now, so the cost is likely much lower.

I bought the Orange Box (with Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and TF2) for $49.99. According to my Steam account stat tracking, I’ve played TF2 a total of 34.7 hours (half of that in the last two weeks). I only played through Episode 2 once or twice; I’ll call it 10 hours (though it may have been more like 12). Portal, while entertaining, probably only racked up 8 hours of gameplay. So the Orange Box has cost me $0.91 per hour, but as I ramp up my TF2 gameplay that cost will slowly go down.

I preordered Left 4 Dead for $44.99 last year. Steam tells me I have a total playtime of 96.25 hours, putting its cost at $0.47 per hour.

My dad bought StarCraft for me years ago. I’d guess he paid $49.99, because the game was still fairly new. That was over a decade ago. I have played a lot of StarCraft. During middle and high school, I’m sure I played something like 8 hours a week (more during the summer, less during school). Looking at those six years, that’s just $0.02 per hour; I’ve played a fair amount since then, too, so the price is lower. (Seems like more of a bargain now, doesn’t it Dad?)

Obviously, I can’t go over every single game I own; the list is too long. I’ll also admit to buying some games and never playing them (or only playing through partway). But overall, it looks like gaming costs between $0.01 and $1.00 per hour, depending on the game – and despite both up-front purchase costs and monthly fees, MMOs are nowhere near the worst offenders.

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Boycott Eidos Interactive

Dan — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:09:07 +0000

This is something that happened around May 2008, but I thought I’d share it with you. There are several incidences of idiocy in this story, but at least it has a happy(ish) ending.

This is one of those posts that’s kind of long. You may want to grab yourself a snack before you read any further.

I was looking through Steam’s game offerings one day, when I noticed the Commandos pack (containing all four Commandos games) for a relatively decent price. I bought it, and happily downloaded my four new games.

Figuring I’d start at the beginning, I started up Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines and played the first mission. Halfway through, I had to leave the computer, so I attempted to save and quit.

The “save” option was grayed out. A few hours of googling confirmed it – Commandos does not work properly on Windows XP, and there’s basically no consistent way to fix it.

So, I e-mailed Eidos tech support, explaining where I bought the game (Steam) and what the problem was (the Save option is grayed out and unusable). Their auto-response on May 10 read “we’ll assign a tech to this as soon as possible.”

Two days later, I got the following e-mail: “You can quick-save by pressing Control-S. This is on page 4 of the manual.”

Besides the fact that their “solution” completely ignores my problem, quicksave didn’t work either. What’s worse, I bought the game on Steam, and therefore didn’t get a manual – they’d know that, if they had actually read my initial e-mail.

My reponse was lengthy but polite; I explained these two problems, added that my Googling found that tons of other people were having the same problem, and further remarked that they should not be selling broken games. Finally, I requested that they actually look in to the issue rather than copy and paste a scripted reply.

Their response was a request that I send them a DxDiag diagnostic file as an attachment, which seemed to me to be progress towards a result. I promptly sent them the file.

Unfortunately, they closed the ticket after a few days without no explanation.

I opened a new ticket, providing the same information. The first set of e-mail exchanges were repeated almost verbatim; finally, I sent another DxDiag diagnostic file.

They closed the ticket again, this time mentioning that they never got the dxdiag file. After several exchanged e-mails, we found out that their e-mail system blocks attachments.

If their e-mail system rejects attachments, why would they tell people to send them attached files?

Anyway, I copied the contents of the dxdiag file into an e-mail directly, and sent that to them.

In response, several days later, they sent me PDFs of the game manuals. This was not even remotely relevant, and I sent them an e-mail stating as much.

Several days later, I got an e-mail message containing the following (and here I’ll copy and paste from the actual e-mail):

“I spoke with the development team, who said there are a couple reasons you might be experiencing problems with our games.” (No, really?)

” – Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines was released in 1998, and only supports Windows 98, not Windows XP.” (Unfortunately, Steam explicitly prevents you from running games in Win98 compatibility mode.)

” – Laptop configurations vary too widely to be able to support them all, so we don’t support laptops.” (Desktops are even more varied than laptops.)

” – Many laptops are limited in their ability to be used as gaming machines. This is because of memory configurations, their micro-channel architecture, port configurations and sound systems that are primarily designed to be used with productivity software.” (Besides the obviously inaccurate technobabble, there’s no reason a modern 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB DDR2 RAM and a GeForce 7300 Go should have trouble with a game from 1998.)

” – The other common problem is that laptop systems will attempt to compress the traditional version of the standard 101-function keyboard (found on almost all desktop systems) into a much smaller keyboard configuration. This is usually done by relying on multifunction keys that allow the user to assign different functions to the same key. Unfortunately, this has been known to cause problems with our games.” (This is, of course, theoretically possible, but ridiculous nonetheless.)

” – Sorry, we can’t help you. Contact Steam for a refund.” (Steam’s policy is that they don’t give refunds, and they make this abundantly clear every time you make a purchase.)

I was kind of taken aback at this point; they were basically saying “we don’t care, go away.”

Rather than give up, though, I replied that the issue was also present on my desktop computer; I referred them to three forum threads on three different sites (one of which was on Eidos’ own forum) in which various users were having the same issue; I pointed out various other bugs people have with the games under Windows XP, including an “OUTPUT” folder being missing (manually creating it fixed some issues for some users; this folder was not missing on either of my machines).

I never got a reply.

In the meantime, I decided to make a phone call to Valve’s tech support. (Dr Kleiner’s voice greets you, which is kind of nifty.) I spoke with a first-teir support guy for a few minutes; he agreed that the situation was ridiculous, and told me he’d get back to me later that day after speaking with his superiors.

I then called Eidos’ tech support on the phone. She asked that I send in a dxdiag report from my desktop and a summary of what had happened so far.

Later that day, the guy at Valve called me back saying that they had approved a refund of my purchase (which, again, is something Valve officially “never does”); I asked if I could wait a bit to see if Eidos would fix the problem, since I really did want to play the games. He agreed, and gave me his direct number.

Moments after I got off the phone with Valve, Eidos responded to my e-mail with “Make sure the folder named ‘OUTPUT’ is being created when Steam installs the game.” Sound familiar?

I responded by saying “That’s not the problem here. You seem entirely unwilling to help, you’re selling a game written for one OS on a platform incompatible with your game, and you refuse to fix it. Valve has offered me a refund, something they claim to never do, so I’m taking it.”

I called the guy at Valve – I wish I still had his name, so I could praise him directly – and got my refund.

So I had my refund, but Injustice (TM) was still being perpetrated. The guy at Valve said he couldn’t get them to stop selling the broken game, but he’d bring it up when he got the chance. (Last I checked, Steam no longer sells Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines or Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty, so apparently SOMEBODY got something through the red tape.)

That’s my happyish ending. “ish” because I wanted to play those games, but happy because I got my money back and they don’t sell the broken games on Steam anymore.

There are a few things I left out of the above account. I tried calling other people:

- The reception voicemail at Eidos HQ was always full.

- I tried calling other people at Eidos (whose direct numbers are readily available online), including their VP of marketing, and I left messages on their machines since they never answer their phones, but I never received a reply.

- I sent Gabe Newell at Valve an e-mail about the issue, but never got a reply, though honestly I didn’t expect one.

- I sent the Consumerist an e-mail about it, but even I’ll admit it’s not interesting enough for them to pick up the story.

So.. that’s it. If you managed to read the whole thing, I’ll buy you a cookie if we ever meet in person

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