Steam is pissing me off tonight. No big suprise there. Apparently the majority of the Steam login system is down. Again, no big suprise. I really like playing Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. Those games still rock after all these years - even with all of the cheaters with their wall hacks and aim-bots.
But I hate Steam. Steam is Valves idiotic approach to Content/Digital Rights Management. Unfortunately it sucks. It is not user friendly, when it works. When it doesn’t work, it is just painful.
I’m just glad that I have’t bought (nor will I) any of there standlone games like Half-life 2 or Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, because even though they are “stand alone”, you have to log in to Steam (which requires internet access) to play. How stupid is that? You cannot play the game you paid $50+ bucks for unless you are on the ‘net. Wow.
I would love to have sat in on those design meetings, just to see the other boneheaded thoughts they must have come up with before settling on this one:
Designer 1: “How abouts we make the computer shock the player a certain number of times before they can play?”
Designer 2: “No, that won’t work… what if they have their shoes on?”
Designer 1: “Oh, yeah…”.
Designer 3: “I know, we won’t allow them to play unless they have logged into our servers, which we will make sure don’t work, say… 43.5% of the time”
Designers 1&2 together: “Perfect!”