Whatever the pros and cons of Steam, it’s clear that it (and other similar methods of online content delivery) are going to play a big part in gaming’s immediate future. There will always be some who prefer having their games in boxes, but there’s no doubting the convenience of being able to buy and download a game rather than popping down to the shops – particularly when most chains are more concerned about having space for 10,000 more copies of FIFA 2008 than stocking budget or lesser-known titles – or bidding on eBay.
Such was my thinking with Introversion’s understated hacker sim Uplink – rather than buggering around on eBay for a week, six quid and around ten minutes later, I was up and running with the Steam version. And, as is generally my wont, I played with it for an hour or so and then went and did something else, leaving it (metaphorically) on my pile marked ‘games to play later’.
Clearly, I must have left it quite a long time, because when I double clicked on the icon this week I was confronted with the following:
If you visit the support site, you basically get a message saying “You’re using Windows 98 – you’re buggered!”
I can appreciate that not many people are using Win 98 any more, and believe me, I’m not holding onto my current setup because of some misguided suspicion of new technology, but the fact remains that I’m suddenly without access to something I paid for.
You can’t argue with progress, and obviously there’s a valid technical reason for removing support for my ageing O/S, but it has to be a bit of a black mark against using Steam to boost your collection. I’ll be sticking to boxed copies for the time being…
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Argh! Has it been quite a while since you last played? Microsoft themselves ceased support for Win98 around July last year; that’s probably what spurred Valve to give up on it. They don’t want to write software for an obselete OS.
Still I can see why this is annoying; effectively the game you purchased (or bought a license for or however you put it in legal terms) has changed into a different form that isn’t useful to you anymore.
So anyway are you still really not bothered about upgrading? An OEM copy of XP home will set you back about £55, dunno if that’s an acceptable expense for you right now.
November 25, 2007 @ 2:07 pm
They can’t hold back new developments just to appease a minority of users using an outdated OS, and I understand that. Still, I feel like there might have been a relatively hassle-free way around it – could an older, unsupported version not have been retained rather than just pulling the plug in this way?
The fact that this can happen, as well as the finality of it all (no workaround, no suggestions about what to do except ‘upgrade now’) has to be a bit of a black mark against using Steam to boost your collection. However much farting around you might have to do to get hold of an oldie and get it running satisfactorily, there’s usually a way to do so.
Once you’ve got a boxed copy of a game, unless you put the CDs in the toaster, you’re usually in with a chance of getting it working. If not, you can still whack it on an older PC (if you have one lying around for such eventualities) and play it quite easily.
I could buy XP, but it’d be another temporary measure to try and squeeze a bit of extra life out of my PC. I’d rather put the £50 towards a new rig and get XP or Vista bundled with it. 2008 could be the year I get a new computer – it won’t be anything too flash though.
November 26, 2007 @ 2:09 pm