Okay, maybe I've been living under a rock for the last few years, but I'd never played the Half-life series or anything from Valve for that matter, and I was intrigued when I heard about the Orange Box. 5 games in one seemed like such a good deal, so I asked for it for Christmas. When I opened it this morning, I couldn't wait to try it out...However, my computer isn't connected to the Internet due to no phone jacks in my room and that I don't play many online games anyway. The only computer with a connection is my parents', which is several years old and slower than a turtle smoking pot.
So, I was disappointed to find that I'd need an Internet connection before I could even install the games, presumably to download updates or whatnot. So I popped it into my parents' computer and Steam installed just fine, and came up with a window to download the five games on Orange Box. Wait a minute, though. If I've still got to download the games, what the hell is the purpose of having 2 DVDs in the orange box? What happened to buying a game on a disc, popping it in, and playing it??? I started downloading Portal at about 1 pm today, (I've got 1 Mb DSL) and by 9 pm it was finally done. Now I could play the game on my parents' computer, except that it crashed on the first loading screen. So I searched for the folders containing Portal, to transfer them to my computer. But what do you know, they couldn't be found on the computer, by the built-in search engine anyway...
Hmmmm. So I clicked the button in Steam to "Backup the game file" and another window popped up asking where to backup, etc. Then I initialized that and it started "compressing and saving" the files...Time remaining: 39 minutes.
So about 45 minutes later, I check it again. It's made some progress, about halfway across the bar, but time remaining is now 43 minutes. What the hell.
So here I am. With a game hidden somewhere on a computer that can't play it, and its too late at night to wait for it to finish backing up so I can transfer to my computer. And even then it might not work, since Steam apparently needs Internet access every time you try to play a game.
Does anyone else have The Orange Box and has had these problems? I think it's the most ridiculous system for gaming ever thought up...I mean who would think of selling a disc without a playable game on it, and requiring all users to connect to the Internet to play even single-player games?!
Well, I'm going to sleep now. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow...
Modelled and rendered in Blender. Free software ftw.
