Never again.........Steam!

[suitcase]

I built my new PC because I couldn't play any of the newer games on my old one. BTW the stats below are my old build. So, the first game I buy is the COD Black Ops. I have all the other CODs and never a problem. With this new one though, I've had it for months and yet to even get it loaded. I knew I needed a internet connection to load it but never thought it would be this complicated to just play a game single-player! Right now I'm on dial-up and can't seem to get the thing updated or whatever it is that steam wants from me in order to play it. Not only that, every time I boot the steam icon pops up like it wants me to do something and it's anoying to have to deal with that. The only other game I had that needed steam was Half life 2 and after a 4 hour install time it played fine.

[james64k]

You can simply select Steam not to start along with Windows. (One way is: Start -> Run -> Type msconfig -> Startup -> Untick Steam -> OK)

Games like Black Ops use DRM methods. There's no way to get rid of them, unless you don't get the original copy of the game.

[Force Flow]

It's not steam's fault. Did you buy it through steam, or did you buy a retail copy with a disk?

Under the game's requirements for the digital download of the game, it states:

Call of Duty®: Black Ops requires an initial hard drive space of approximately 24GB to download and install the game via digital download (8GB of compressed files, 8GB of decompressed files and 8GB of installed files). Upon installing the game, 16GB (compressed and decompressed files) may be deleted from the hard drive. Please make note of where the compressed and decompressed files are being saved on your hard drive in order to later locate these temporary files for removal.

[juppy]

I had the same problem with Portal 2. I bought the retail version, thinking that I'd be able to install most of it from the disk, like I had done before with all the Half Life games, and then just need to download the updates from Steam. Upon trying that, it wouldn't let me install anything without a live internet connection, and when I gave it that (dial-up, like you) it started downloading, so I thought okay, it's just getting the updates. Wrong. After 4 hours, the update was still showing 0% done, so I got suspicious and checked out the Steam console to see what was going on, and it showed Portal 2 with something like 30 MB already downloaded and 10 Gig left to go. It was getting the whole dang thing from online!

So apparently the only reason for buying the retail disk is so it can give you a link to go online and get it there. Very stupid install, IMO. They need to realize, like alot of web designers and site owners on the internet need to realize, that not everyone has access to broadband yet, and as such they could at least put a warning or something on the box that says you have to have broadband to use it. I guess they don't care because they get their money either way, whether you can play it or not.

Just out of curiosity after seeing how much I had to DL, I tried figuring up how long it would take me to DL that whole thing, and came up with something like 56 days, if letting the computer run 24/7, and barring any power fluctuations or disconnects which would make me start over. So at the time I bought it, I could've gotten it downloaded by, oh, Halloween maybe.