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.

Infinity Blade II for a dollar

Infinity Blade II is a dollar until the end of this month. If you liked the first one, you are bound to like this one. It looks even more detailed than the first one and it's prettier to boot. Parrying is a lot easier this time and the fights are more varied and interesting. It is definitely a worthy sequel.

If you didn't enjoy the first one though you are probably going to hate this. Although it is a better experience the same things are here to annoy. Sometimes it misreads your actions, although usually when this happens to me, it actually does something better than I it meant to. This time 'round they mixed up the fights a bit more, with extra sequences to get a sneaky stab in and so on but you are still basically having the same battles over and over again. If you found this too grindy in the first one it's gonna more or less be the same here despite some slight improvements.

The story has really been fleshed out in this one and it really sucked me in with the little prologue. The whole experience is a much more solid one, it just run so smoothly on my iPhone 5, whereas the original had a lot of bugs and clunkiness. If you can get it at a dollar I say 9/10.

For more info on both games you can see my original review here. It is amazing to see just how much the graphics have improved on a damn phone.