A Very Short Review of Portal and Steam

Portal: 0/10

Crashes after the Valve logo. Apparently it fails to detect that it doesn’t support my video card. This is the first time I’ve bought commercial software in about five years, and it’s pretty sad that free, open source software has better forums and FAQs and such when I have to grovel around online because something blew up.

Steam: 0/10

Steam is the hoop you have to jump through to get Portal. At no time when installing Steam, running Steam, browsing for games, viewing Portal’s listing, purchasing Portal, downloading Portal, or installing Portal did it notice that they don’t support my video card.

There is room for these scores to be adjusted: for example, I might play Portal at a friend’s house. And Steam’s score could go negative if they fail to give a refund.

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2007-12-12 07:12
Games: gaming, Portal, review, Steam, Valve
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This blog is written by Peter Harkins, a web developer and entrepreneur in ~~Chicago~~ ~~Washington, D.C.~~ Chicago. Much more information about him can be found at malaprop.org. Feel free to mail me.

Sooner or later, all the songs that make you shake will be by me.

If you play any tabletop games (like D&D, Magic, and Settlers), visit my site NearbyGamers to find folks to game with.

Snarky 2007-12-13 01:32

Ouch, that sucks. I’m assuming this is on your Macbook, which as I recall you tossed Linux, as well as Windows on. What drivers have you gotten running in Linux? If you managed to get 3d acceleration, which Ubuntu 7.10 seems to be fairly friendly towards, I’d recommend giving her a go under Cedega. Sure, Cedega’s not the best solution, and of course they should have done better checking under Windows for supported products, but this might be a somewhat easy way to turn that frown upside down. I was able to play CS:Source all summer under Cedega just fine, though newer Steam updates may have broken that, I’m not sure.

–Snarky

James 2007-12-13 10:42

Steam used to be working fine for me under Linux, but recently TF2 has started crashing not long after starting the game. I predict your score for Steam will go negative, unless you request a chargeback. Valve’s customer support is abysmal, to the point of claiming their anti-cheat system is perfect when it banned someone for cheating, when they’d left a Dwarf Fortress UI addon running that poked into the DF process memory.

Snarky 2007-12-13 21:03

My only dealing with them has been ‘proving’ I own a copy of Half-life (the original). It involved mailing in the CD cover and proof of purchase. Of course they promptly lost them… and now I have absolutely no recourse. So, I’m completely agreed their customer “support” sucks, and was hoping Harkins might find a solution without them. But if TF2 is crashing *sigh*, I guess I’m not going back to Valve products.

James 2007-12-14 21:44

Snarky: there’s a slight chance my crashes are due to my sound card, which I’ll investigate when I next reboot. You could pick up a copy of HL on ebay for $5 and use its CD-key. It is slightly shocking to think about how I’ve put ~$150 into my Steam account, which only exists at the whim of Valve, the completely unaccountable account managers.

McKay 2007-12-18 16:44

So, I’m running Vista, and I remember having similar difficulties. I downloaded the latest video drivers, even though I had gotten latest ones a monthish before the orange box release. That seemed to fix the problem. But I’m a huge fan of Portal, and I also hate Steam too.

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A Very Short Review of Portal and Steam

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