Multi Latest Steam & General Gaming Bargains: Read first post!

Of course anything can happen. The only threat I can think of tho are; some PSN type scandal. Or if the US politician$ who wish to end net neutrality were to get their way. Tho even in the event of the latter, I think Steam is big enough and sufficiently well established now to trust your money with.

 

Or Valve getting greedy and slapping a subscription fee on Steam accounts (pay up or lose every game purchased). This has been discussed elsewhere and (to a lesser extent) applies to many other digital retailers (GamersGate, Impulse, Direct2Drive, etc).

 

Won't happen. Maybe I'm being a bit naive but Valve really do seem to be a company with good moral values.

In Valve we trust!

 

And the weekend deal is: Serious Sam.

Now I've never played any of these games before - any good?

Serious Sam HD: Gold Edition
Includes Serious Sam HD First and Second Encounter, plus the original versions from 2001 and 2002!
£7.49

Serious Sam HD
£2.99

Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter
£4.49

Serious Sam HD: Double Pack
Includes 2 items: Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter
£5.49

So the best deal seems to be the last one.

Would you really pay extra to play the old non-HD versions?

Over to you Serious folk for some proper analysis.

 

Just get the HD versions. Great games, proper old school mental FPS.

 

I'd have bought the Gold pack, had it been available at the time. Sadly, you cannot get the original versions on STEAM without buying the Gold pack and you cannot gift the HD versions from the Gold pack if you already own them.

 

Given that such a move could raise in excess of £1.5 billion+/year (US$2 billion+/year, assuming £5/month fee and a conservative 80% acceptance rate over 30 million accounts) with little extra effort on Valve's behalf and that they've made specific provision for this in section 4B of the Steam Subscriber Agreement, I'd suggest that viewpoint is, well optimistic (Steam's EULA being called a "subscriber agreement" in the first place could be seen as a clue here).

How does having "good moral values" equate with Valve's procedure of routinely disabling Steam accounts during financial disputes? The majority of cases so far have been Paypal related but shouldn't a "moral" company limit sanctions to the items in dispute, rather than holding peoples' entire Steam collections hostage?

Getting back on topic, GOG are holding a week-long Moto Racer promotion (Moto Racer 1, 2 and 3 at 50% off - individual titles 30% off) to celebrate its re-release following their successful fix of Moto Racer 2's DRM.

 

There must be some law that states that if they implement a subscription fee, they have to allow you to still have access to all the stuff you bought before its activation. I refuse to believe they could suddenly hold your games to ransom. Let's just hope they don't, eh?

Routinely? It seems to me this only happens very rarely, and you're basing the 'majority of cases' on one Paypal dispute. However, you're right about how sanctions should only be imposed on the game(s) in question.

Apologies for the off topic!

 

Are you sure about that? I bought the gold pack last time it was on sale and there's a copy of SS1 HD in my gift folder as I already had it.

 

Just finished building my new rig (i7-2600k, 570gtx), haven't PC gamed for about 5 years. Whilst food shopping noticed Dawn of War 2 was on offer for £4, looked pretty on the back of the box so thought I'd give it a go. Never ran steam before but oh my god, what an absolutely crap piece of software. I created a new account whilst installing the game Monday gone. Tried to play and it says a 6.4gb download is required. Hadn't got time to do that there and then so waited till Tuesday. That finally finished downloading, steam has encountered an error. By the time I'd finished pulling my hair out it was wednesday night, turns out after some searching I needed to verify the install. Problem solved or not, it needs another 470mb download. It's now Thursday night, finally I can play. Nope. Steam servers are too busy, an hour later steam needs an update. Grrrrr! I still haven't played the game!!

Is this how games are now? What happened to install from the disc and play?

 

If you have a disc, you can always force steam to install from disc
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=5357-FSQM-0382

and im guessing the 470mb update was because there have been several stand alone expansions which allow you to play multiplayer across these stand alone versions.
Had you bought the game on release, this wouldnt have been required (because such an update wouldnt have been available), although you obviously wouldnt have the bargain price of £4.

 

Well, I'm not 100% sure since I didn't go through with the purchase (didn't want to waste 10€ just for fun ), but I did try to buy the Gold pack and was at no point made aware of the fact that I already own part of the games (the HD versions).

 

I can understand your annoyance but.....

Yes, it is how it is now, but give it a chance, Steam is an absolutely fantastic piece of software! A lot of people (inc myself) don't use disks at all anymore thanks to steam. The Sales are amazing, as well as the autoupdates (no more patches).

When you buy a game in the shops, it'll ship at v1.0 with all the bugs that got through beta testing, and once activated on steam, it will just download the latest version of the whole game. Yes, its annoying, but its far less annoying than having to patch things over and over.

You've had a bad run, to be fair, but 99% of the time it just works! Go out and pick up Battlefield Bad Company 2 and come play!

PS: I have a feeling your about to get more annoyed, since you haven't even got into Dawn of War which uses Games for Windows Live - which IS a terrible piece of software, and will make you update and restart your game about 15 times before you can even play.

But don't worry, its not always like this.

 

Pretty much what Parge said.

 

Take it they still haven't solved the bug with it preferring to download than install off the disk. Took me 12 attempts to get Fallout New Vegas to install off the disk.

 

Plus, dawn of war 2 retribution doesnt use GFWL, this makes it infinately more better, still not as good as dawn of war dark crusade mind you.

Still brilliant.

 

Another option is to do a clean install of Steam off the internet before adding in any games.

Like others have said, I appreciate your frustration, but do try to persevere.

Here's my tip for Steam - once it's up and running happily on your rig.

Unless you absolutely, totally must have a new release - never buy a new release.

Steam is a goldmine of sale items - some old, but many newer releases as well.

There are weekend deals, midweek deals, pre-release deals and seasonal deals (eg Easter, summer, Christmas) that let you save (and spend!) a fortune.

Happy times ahead.

 

Guess I was just frustrated, my PS3 seems to constantly taunt me too by continually downloading updates whenever I fancy a quick half hour blast. I must admit I was tempted to uninstall steam/Dawn of War 2 and bin the disc.

I'll perservere then, I did notice a couple of bargains on the stor front whilst waiting for stuff to download.

Fingers crossed I'll get chance to play some point tonight after I've battled with Windows live.

How do you force steam to use the disc rather than download then?

 

Glad you are mate! Steams great! Its your gateway to cheap games and keeping in easy contact with playmates.

 

it was with the link i gave earlier

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=5357-FSQM-0382

obviously dont do the below if you have just downloaded 7GB