Steamworks’ waiting line

I wouldn’t say, that I’m a completely busy person, but to some degree, my spare time is limited and I hate wasting it. As some of you might know, Steam’s making the holiday sales these days and one can find a lot of great deals to get some excellent games. Like I did…

…but the bad, not to say the worst thing about it, is the terrible overload Steam servers have to suffer. I’ve recently bought “Test Drive Unlimited 2” and it took almost two days to download the game. Actually, this is not totally correct, to download the game that I’m able to start it. After hitting the start button, the game itself started an update procedure with a 1998-like speed of 14KB/s.

patience

Almost every larger game I’ve bought suffers and struggles on the correct usage of bandwidth. I “only” got a 16MBit/s connection, but I rarely hit a download peak of 200KB/s on average. This is totally exhausting, especially when you want to play a game on Steam while you also want to download. Each download gets suspended or paused after starting a game, which can be reversed, but you always have to do it manually.

I had the same problem during last year’s holiday sales even with a 100MB/s connection. Steam is one of the leading platforms, not to THE leading platform in digital game distribution. Why the sodding hell are they so way behind to provide proper bandwidth? It wouldn’t cost that much to and it also will save a lot of my rare free time.

Game of the week #2/2011 – DeathSpank – Orphans of Justice

This weeks game of the week is something special, a game created by a living legend. It’s “DeathSpank” by game designer Ron Gilbert. You might remember this name  from the legendary “Monkey Island” one and two, the good old “Maniac Mansion”, the ingenious “Zak McKracken” or the amazing “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade”. This man created so many great games why shouldn’t “DeathSpank” be as good as the previous games? Well, first of all, “DeathSpank” is obviously a great game, with the typcial sense of humor that you can expect from Ron Gilbert and the design is something really special, but it can’t follow in the footsteps of the previously mentioned games.

DeathSpank - Orphans of Justice

In “DeathSpank” you play the homonymous hero DeathSpank who is looking for an artifact simply called “The Artifact” for his entired life. DeathSpank finds the artifact during the game, but it gets stolen by the henchmen of a guy called “Lord von Prong”. You might have already guessed what comes next, yes, DeathSpank has to get the artifact back and has to defeat the evil Lord von Prong. The game itself is a simple hack and slash RPG with a focus on a good told story. The character customisation is mainly done by getting new items that improve your attributes and by chosing cards on each level increase that improve thing like melee/range damage or the speed of the character. You don’t have to think too much and that is good because this game is perfect after a long exhausting day when you feel like getting easy entertainment but you still want a nice story to be told.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB_OQDAaX-0[/youtube]

I played this game with mouse and keyboard first but I personally find that playing with an Xbox 360 controller is much easier and faster to handle. You also don’t have to switch between two weapon sets when you play with the Xbox 360 controller and moving the character feels more ‘logical’. The combats are not too easy and not too tough and if you ever come to a situation where you find it too hard or easy you can chose a different combat difficulty. The co-op mode in this game is, let us say, okay but it’s not what you want to play the whole time because the second player soon starts to feel like the fifth wheel of the wagon. The second character can’t loot or improve his skills and equipment, he’s just walking beside DeathSpank, does some damage and heals from time to time. Besides these minor issues “DeathSpank” is a game where you can’t do anything wrong if you like hack and slash RPGs, loved games like “Diablo” or “Torchlight” and if you feel comfortable with the sense of humour from games like “On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness”. There’s a reason why this game is finally the “Game of the week”, so go and get it or you will be spanked.

Links:

Official website

WikiPedia entry

A BITS too complicated

Though I didn’t want write so much about computers, software and all hardware related stuff, I have to write something related to these topics anyway. What happened is the following, I’m still in a progress of, let us say, upgrading with no mercy. As you might know, I replaced a lot of my graphics cards, silenced a few of my PCs (the media centre is still left). I also had some weird problems with my gaming system that just didn’t want to start, finally it was just an empty battery and a new one rescued me from paying another 600 Euro to fix this PC. This PC welcomed me with a new problem, Windows Update and Windows Live do not work any more under the gaming OS (yes, it’s dual-boot with an “editing OS”, too). The problem is pretty complicated and I haven’t found a real solution for that, it’s that BITS is no longer to found in the service menu. It’s just lost – disappeared. After some checking I came to the conclusion that some of the needed files for this service are corrupt and the hash differs, too. It’s barely possible to replace the files without going deeper into the crypts and vault of the Windows system itself and I made a decision. DELETE.

I wanted to get rid of the “editing OS” anyway and the whole dual-boot sucked, because it simply takes too much space and the maintenance is too intense in time. Before I go by and start a complicated software surgery, I simply format the whole RAID and install a complete, new, fresh system for gaming only. The editing one moved to “internet PC” because this one will soon (actually today) be upgraded with a new six-core CPU which is going to kick ass. I’m not sure if I should install a small 32bit OS, too. The thing is, that I’ve found a lot of games (well, three to be exact) with a stupid copy protection that I wanted to play again, that do no longer work under Windows 7 64bit, just because of this stupid protection. I already did a backup of my complete Steam game collection so that it will not take too long to “rebuild the game library”. Right now there are around 180 listed in the Windows Game Explorer and a few additional ones in Steam, too. That’s a kind of a lot of work.