Be Excellent To Each Other

There is a good question. I don't think i'm too bad, but it is still rather crazy to have the following.

71 games in my steam library, of which I have played (as in installed and started at least once)
21 games, of which I have played more than once
13, of which I have completed
3

Pleasantly surprised to see that I have 51 games in my 'recent' list, so at least I've played some of them I suppose. As for completing them..

Safecracker
Puzzle Kingdoms
Peggle & Peggle Nights (I did this on the Xbox too.. sucker that I am)
Bejeweled 3 (as much as it can be completed at least)
Bookworm Adventures Vol. 1 and 2. (Not exactly difficult though)
Puzzle Agent (Had to cheat a bit on that as I didn't think a couple of the puzzles were particularly well explained)

I notice Scratches runs under Linux so I might give that a go - it runs horrendously on my Windows partition.

Have you enabled steam beta, or something? Or maybe it updates and I don't notice, as it's running every second my PC is.

I hope this summer sale ends soon or I'll be bankrupt. So far I've picked up:

Portal + Portal 2
Bioshock + Bioshock 2
Counter-Strike GO
Fallout New Vegas Ultimate
Fez
Surgeon Simulator 2013
I Am Alive
Deadlight
Doom 3: BFG Edition
The Swapper

I'm incredibly choosy with the Steam sales these days, I went a bit nuts one year and ended up with a massive list of games I've never even installed, much less actually played.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter how cheap a game is, if you're never going to play it you've still paid far too much for it.

Free time is the limiting factor for me, not cost, so I buy games based on an honest assessment of, 'Am I going to install this and play it through, ever, or not?'

Can someone answer this, whenever I play a game on Steam it loads up like it's the first time I've ever played it.

For instance, last night I clicked on Hotline Miami. The initial screenshot said that I'd played it for 50 odd minutes already but the pop up box said something like "initialising Hotline Miami for the first time. Step 1/4"

It then went on to install Direct X amongst other things but when the game eventually started, it had all my saves intact so it clearly knew I'd played it before.

What's going on?

The steam sale isn't that great, in the sense that the daily deals are the same titles with different discounts depending on the day.

Although I must admit to picking up:

Scribblenauts Unlimited
Darksiders
Darksiders 2
System Shock 2 (£1.74!)

And I keep getting these pointless electronic trading cards, which I sell instantly on the community market and then get 20 or 30p off my next purchase.

Your Steam install is probably corrupt. Try reinstalling?

Or get a 360.

I was going to buy Deadlight and then when i was about to pay i noticed that i already had that game. That was the turning point for me. I guess the only games i really "need" this sale are Dark Souls and Rogue Legacy.

A quick Google shows me that loads of people are having this problem too and it doesn't look like there's an easy fix.

That shouldn't happen, there's no way around every game installing DirectX the first time you play it, explanation here - http://www.geek.com/games/why-does-ever ... x-1558718/

But thereafter you shouldn't get it for that game. Possible fixes abound if you have a Google, usually involves deleting stuff out of the Steam folder.

Is it doing a full reinstall of DirectX for you, or just sort of a 'check'? Dishonored for me for example, looks like it's kicking off the installer again and shows step 1/4, but it disappears after literally one second and doesn't actually install anything, and just launches the game normally.

In the times when this has happened to me this is what I get; it does the check every time but then realises it doesn't need to do anything and moves on. In the past, for some games, it has taken a good few minutes to do the check though which is teeth-grindingly irritating. I've never cared enough to go looking for a solution as it'll no doubt be a horrible combination of general Windows installer bullshit and the extra fun Steam sometimes brings to the party.

It goes through the whole process of checking, downloading and installing every time.

I've seen that I should delete some things to get it to work. I'll give that a go later and see what happens.

It's pretty annoying. I wanted a quick go on Hotline Miami last night but it took at least 5 minutes to get into it I reckon.

So, I keep getting all these cards that mean fuck all to me. Apparently you can combine them to get more "XP" or something like that. This past weekend I got around a dozen cards for doing stuff that I was doing anyway, I did have them all in my inventory doing nothing, but I figured why not sell them.
Currently I have just over £1 in my account after putting them all up for sale this morning, and another couple of quids worth sitting on the market waiting to be sold.

Not a bad return for nothing!

I got all ten different Summer Getaway ones, so combined them together to make the badge and got an emoticon and a background image - wowee. Sold the rest.

You paid around £1.50 for that background and emoticon, I hope they are suitably epic...

From now on I'm just going to put every card I get on the marketplace as soon as I get it.

Depends how much I can sell them for in a few months time, I guess.

What are they worth at the moment? The individual cards are around 15p each right now.

3p each.

I'm playing the long game.

Only 4 items left to sell now, they seem to go pretty quickly.

Who are the people buying this shit?

I have got a Skyrim background on my Steam profile now though.

One of the people buying them is apparently my husband
(not yours specifically obv.)

I think people buy them as instead of emotions you can get vouchers for games?

I came here to ask about these Steam cards and see there's a bit of chat about them at the tail end of this thread. Is there any more compelling reason to collect them now than there was a year ago? I wouldn't mind swapping them with people if that's something anyone here does? I know it's likely totally pointless but it's a harmless frippery. My Steam id is bryanjrobertson if that's required?

i sell them. I've made quite a bit of money by doing so.

Keeping them is pointless. Apart from the ability to leave a mark on your profile saying "I (probably) wasted money to get a stupid badge. Aren't I smart"

The amounts of money involved are so low I wondered if there was any other reason to keep them; I've only got about fifteen cards altogether and none of them are worth more than 9p.

If you get an unusual game or a new game, they can be worth quite a bit more. Even at 5p each they do add up eventually. Looking through I've made ~8 pounds from them. Which has been enough to get me a free game and discounts on others. (And for whatever reason, booster packs are worth more than the cards you'd get from them...)

About the only reason to keep them is for the large artwork of the badge that you get, as far as I can tell. (Or somehow being sufficiently sentimental that you don't want to sell the sad hugbot card for a pittance. It's gone. Along with al the other tower of guns cards I had sold in my market history. So another reason to sell them before they disappear.)

Out of curiosity I tried the new Steam game streaming feature the other day. My specific setup was:

<Host desktop PC>---<homeplug>---<router>---<homeplug>---<shitty laptop>

It worked...okay. I first played DLC Quest which is a very simply 2D platformer and it was plenty playable as you'd expect. There was a little bit of jerkiness noticeable in the scrolling but I was sitting right up at the TV, had I sat further back in a more normal position I doubt I'd have noticed. And the responsiveness of the controls was bang on; I barely noticed any lag at all.

Next was Portal 2 which was quite a different experience as you'd expect. It was still playable and all but the graphics looked a bit odd in an undefinable way and there was some control lag. Overall it wasn't that pleasant an experience and I certainly wouldn't like to have played the full game that way.

Bear in mind though that my network is generally a piece of shit and I just copy stuff around on USB sticks rather than watch files crawl painfully over the network, so there's that. Also the laptop in question is pretty crappy. I've played older stuff like Portal on it before but it can't handle HD Flash/Silverlight streams at all and newer stuff, even 2D stuff like The Cave, is unplayable. So, yeah, your mileage may vary massively depending on those factors.

On the upside it's pretty simple to use. After updating the Steam client on the old laptop and logging on it genuinely did automatically pick up all the games on the desktop and add them to the library for streaming. The only oddity was that Portal 2 had to be started up locally on the desktop and only then could you pick the stream up on the laptop; though Steam did tell me all that when I first tried so it wasn't difficult or anything, just weird that the two games were treated differently.

There have been times when this would've been useful to me in the past, playing Gone Home for example, so I might use it for very specific games and I'd be very curious what other people's experience of it is; but I don't think it's something I'll be using very often. Although, looking at my list of unplayed PC games right now, The Walking Dead might work quite well so I might set it up properly and give it a shot with that at some point soon.

I gave it a whirl last week streaming from my PC to my MacBook Pro. In this instance, the host PC is a decent-ish gaming PC cabled in to a router, and the MacBook Pro is only 6-months old and connected wirelessly, so both okay machines.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game worked perfectly using a controller, but the mouse sensitivity was way off. Which is weird, because I only play it with keyboard and mouse on the host PC.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was so jerky it was virtually unplayable - yet it runs beautifully on the host PC.

Elite: Dangerous Alpha 1.1 (added manually to Steam) ran absolutely perfectly.

I briefly tried a few other titles too, but don't have much installed on my PC at the moment. I was impressed by what I saw though.

That's interesting, I'd assumed it would only work with native Steam titles and didn't even try it with manually added stuff. Thinking about it though it makes sense as it's just a remote desktop connection of some kind* so there's no reason they couldn't mirror non-Steam stuff, especially when they already embed non-Steam games in the overlay (the thing you get if you hit Ctrl+Tab) if you launch then from the Steam.

*I know this because when I quit out of Portal 2 there was a moment when I got the full desktop of the host PC for a good five seconds before Steam cut the connection.

Due to someone mentioning a Steam sale I was over there having a poke around on my account. Out of the nineteen games on my wishlist at the moment sixteen of them are currently on sale. The numbers of emails I've had from Steam telling me about this: big fat fucking zero. Is they're notification functionality equally useless for everyone else or am I getting special treatment here? I think Saturnalian had mentioned having a similar experience at some point recently?

It certainly notifies me. Whether it notifies me about everything I can't say.

I didn't see this at the time, but I read on another forum that someone had managed to add Windows Explorer to their Steam library, and streaming that did indeed give them effectively an RDP connection to their desktop.

Also, no idea why I said I had problems with Arkham Asylum when it was actually Arkham Origins I was playing.

Presumably they'd just add it by the normal method you add non-Steam stuff to Steam. Steam's got no way of telling what's a game and what isn't so it pretty much just shows you all the exe's on your PC and lets you add them. And when you actually execute something it's not like it's going to know that you're using Explorer rather than just playing the most boring game on the planet so it makes sense it would work. I suppose it might filter the stuff you can add by excluding certain directories (i.e. the Windows folder) but you could probably work round that by stick a shortcut or full copy of the exe into Program Files or where ever.

Couldn't think of anywhere else to post this, but I guess it kinda fits into this topic. - Is there any way to speed up the download speed of Steam and Origin (mainly origin)?
I get about 1mb/s on Steam, and 300kb/s on Origin, yet when I'm downloading other things from other sources I often get up to 2mb/s.
Any ideas on how to speed it up a little?

I can get 12mb from Steam, so I don't think it's their fault.

I think it depends on the game. I used to be able to download most games really fast, but Company of Heroes would crawl down at 50k/s or something.

Contention, maybe?

I managed to increase origin to about 1mb/s using something I found online.
(Puts Origin into "R&D Mode", so you're probably not really meant to - but, meh.)
I'm going to assume my internet is just rubbish and thats why Steam or Origin can't get above about 1mb/s.

I don't believe that's true; Steam's a distribution platform (amongst other things of course), its not like each game is being downloaded from its developer's own website or anything. There are likely to be regionalised servers for download, and temporary issues that affect download speeds across the board on these servers, but the idea of download speeds being specific to individual games seems incredibly unlikely.

Games will be spread across CDNs though, with certain games on certain servers, and if the one you're game is on its getting hammered, you might get a slow download.

I've never known it happen though, I must say.

It definitely used to happen all the time with Company of Heroes. I suspect that's because when the COH devs changed a single file Steam would redownload the entire 3GB game :/ And there was something messed up with the expansions, so all 3 would download. I imagine whichever content server supported that publisher doing COH just got hammered every time they put out a patch.

ps: Dimrill broke my steam. He sent an offline trade request and before I could see it cancelled it (presumably he traded with someone else). But now Steam keeps telling me there's a trade available, and I can't make it go away

The current sale is killing me So far i have bought

The Stanley Parable
Skyrim : Legendary edition
Prison Architect
Gone Home
Dark Souls : Prepare to Die edition
Saints Row IV
Spec Ops : The Line

For a sum total of around £35

If you don't already have it, I would recommend running this plugin for your browser
http://www.enhancedsteam.com/

Why haven't you bought Kerbal Space Program? What's wrong with you?!

I have enhanced steam -- I installed it the day before the sale. Once the sale started I stopped noticing it's effects, at least on the front page ;(

I've only purchased Gunpoint so far. I see that the next choice vote includes Kentucky Route Zero for 50% off though so fingers crossed that comes up.

All of .

Because it wasn't on sale when I posted
Fixed that though, so add that to the list!

I nearly bought LEGO Marvel Super Heroes again and it didn't warn me I already have it in my inventory. Even changing the options to "highlight Items stored as gift" it doesn't warn me.... It tags Batman as being in my inventory though, but that's via a tiny brown tag on the thumbnail, not on the item's page.

Actually -- it seems to thimk "item on wishlist" is a more important thing to alert you about than "already in inventory"...

it works fine for me on the default settings! All the games on the sale screen that I already have are highlighted green.