The Problem with Steam, or, Why the Steam Box won't Kill the Console.

There seems to be a huge amount of love for Valve and Steam. Although the Steam sales are quite nice, a lot of this love seems unwarranted. Steam is a bug riddled, archaic and bandwidth hogging piece of software, that hasn't had a true overhaul in its lifetime. Steam may be the best at what it does but it wouldn't take much to topple it from its position, especially if they don't have something planned for it soon. Some people have claimed that the Steam Box will destroy videogame consoles as we know them but of this I am sceptical too.

Firstly Steam crashes more than any other program I own. It doesn't matter whether I'm in Mac OS or Windows and I imagine Linux is much the same, Steam will find a way to stop working. It doesn't crash everyday but I can't think of a program that is less reliable than it. Next the fix for every Steam issue according to the forums seems to be uninstall and reinstall it. This is one of the reasons the Steam Box will never kill consoles. A console needs to be a much more reliable experience (no Xboxes don't count), a console never expects you to fiddle about with a .ini file just to get a game to work, nor reinstall its key piece of software.

Steam loves to update, it will update your games but more than that it loves to update itself constantly. You can't stop it from updating itself and if it doesn't want to let you in because it is updating there is nothing you can do about it. Steam doesn't even officially support background updating. When you are playing a game you have to get out of the game, right click on the game you want updated tell it to pause, then tell it to resume updating. The Wii U got a firmware update allowing for background updating where is the patch for Steam?

Steam lacks options. You have the choice between auto-playing videos or having auto-play turned off. I prefer auto-play turned off, so when I click on a video I expect it to play with sound. Why is the sound muted every time when auto-play is off? It makes no sense and why is there no option to stop this? Also it is basically just a glorified browser so why can't I have multiple tabs open? I want to be looking at a couple of games at a time instead of clicking on one, going back, clicking on the next etc. Steam is dated in this regard and it makes it very slow.

I hope the Steam Box brings with it a large update to Steam, as it is in dire need of a refresh. It was once cutting edge but now even Nintendo seem more up to date. The new card system is stupid and if they thought that was going to help them, I think they are in for a big shock. It's time to fix the boring stuff, make it a solid, reliable platform and most importantly give the gamers what they want.

Company of Heroes 2

Company of Heroes 2 was a tough game for me to review. Its intense, complex action is a load of fun, especially with friends but things like the AI bugs and the relentless march of DLC, take away some of it's lovable-ness.

The campaign's story and cutscenes are terrible but I had a lot of fun playing the missions. It starts you out fairly basically and gets you up to speed if you haven't played the previous game. I found the middle of the campaign was a little boring, due to the game throwing similar missions at you in quick succession but then the final few missions mix it up and got me interested again. Things like racing against the clock, or commanding a team of snipers sent to assassinate officers, help make the campaign interesting. The theatre of war mode expands on the campaign with a lot more single player scenarios and even a couple of co-op missions. These are great fun and well worth playing through as they teach you a lot of skills for playing online.

There are a bunch of things that let the game down and keep it from feeling like the true sequel it should be. The game was released a little too soon and there are a bunch of sloppy bugs that really show this. There are odd graphical issues with objects disappearing and things like the repair icon missing at times. There are also a bunch of AI issues that are just straight up disappointing. Just after an update to AI I played a 2v2 game with an AI partner. I watched as the AI forgot to build the Infanterie Kompanie that is so crucial to the Germans and then it sent out it's squad to capture a sector only to retreat it back before it finished capturing. I can't believe how dumb it can be. Path finding features a lot of the old problems you would be used to from the original. Retreating units seem to take odd paths at time, especially when they have added the jump the fence ability to squads, why not implement this to retreating? Make it new interesting and work well. None of this is game shattering but a lot of it is problems from the old game. These should not be a sequel, not one that wants to score highly anyway.

Floating binoculars?

Multiplayer is the best part of this game. Some people love the intensity and focus of a 1v1 match but I prefer the chaos of the 2v2, 3v3, or 4v4 matches. It's hard to explain the pure joy I have experience in this game but perhaps it is best exemplified by a 4v4 match I played online with a friend. So much happened in that match that it's hard to remember but there are a few key moments that stand out. Telling my friend not to send in his scout car to a heavily defended point on the map and watching it explode and everyone inside in one second. Ramming the massive German Elefant tank with my T34 and watching as my team picked it apart afterwards was the most exciting moment in the match for me. But the greatest part was that we had not taken a single victory point from the enemy until we were down to 70 points. We managed to fight back and take all 500 points with out losing another. It's the stories you get and the fact that you can fight back that makes this game so good.

There is a lot of value in this game, it gives you a campaign, the theatre of war mode and multiplayer modes but it has taken some odd turns. They have spent a lot of time on making DLC for the game a lot of which was available as part of pre-ordering the game but if you missed, out or didn't buy the collectors edition, there is plenty that Relic and Sega want to charge you for. I think instead of selling you paint jobs for your vehicles at outrageous prices they, could have focused on the included content a lot more. The game could have launched with another nationality or two to play as, it seems a little undercooked in this day and age. They haven't even explored any of the other Axis powers such as the Italians of the Finns. They will probably make a series of expansions for the game that include all of this but it almost makes it worth waiting for the complete boxed set to come out. By then you will own a PC that can handle this power hungry beast of a game.

All around it is a solid title but there are a bunch of disappointments. I know Relic went through a lot with the collapse of THQ and subsequently being bought up by Sega but I think they could have chosen to release this a few months later, to fix a bunch of these issues. If you liked the originals or like any form of tabletop warfare set from the invention of tanks, to say about 40,000 AD, you will like this game, it just doesn't have the widespread appeal they could have achieved with a more concerted effort 8/10.