See sale on Steam.
Purchase Max Payne and Max Payne 2 because they are cheap and I like those games and wouldn’t mind playing them again.
Install games.
Games do not work.
Go on Steam forums. Look for patches/issue fixes. Attempt fixes. Games still do not work.
Uninstall. Download warez copies of games. Install them. Games work fine.
(Well, at least I paid for them, I guess.)
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8 users responded in this post
I had that problem with Bioshock when I downloaded it during its sale. After a day it seemed to fix itself, so I didn`t quite reach the illegal warez stage.
I`m curious about any consequences of downloading an illegal copy of a game you paid for, and can easily prove that you paid real (digital) money for.
I have long ago abandoned Steam. It’s buggy and unreliable. If you’re interested in a good online marketplace though, I’d recommend either Impulse or Greenhouse (at playgreenhouse.com)
YOU FILTHY PIRATE.
You should see the Oddworld games. It took a COMPLETE WINDOWS REINSTALL for the damn things to work on my machine. And I was about to buy the Playstation versions because I was so frustrated at the game.
Same thing happened with me and Jade Empire.
Fuckin’ Steam.
My wife purchased Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 this weekend during the Steam sale and that damn thing didn’t work either. I’ve never had a problem with Steam purchased games prior to this, so I’m going to call it a one off. All of the other games we purchased during the sale work fine (even if they suck — but then, I don’t expect much from video games that cost $0.99).
I had trouble with GTA4 at first, but now it’s working and I don’t know why. I’ve had trouble with older games like Majest (from Impulse), but generally Steam’s track record is pretty good. I did get a refund on Far Cry 2 (whatever the open-world GTA-in-Africa game was) because it simply would not run on my machine – always crashed after ~15 minutes.
I’ve had pretty good luck with Steam overall, with the exception of demos that always seem to crash with optionally taking Steam down with them. It’s the least invasive ‘digital download’ marketplace at present unfortunately, which is to say I still can’t re-sell or loan my products but they were all generally bought at a steep discount.
I had to warez Fallout 3 after buying it non-steam for similar reasons, somehow my drive wouldn’t recognize the DVD or something.
The only time I’ve had problems with Steam games, it was because C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\Commmon\NameOfGame was too long; if you haven’t and don’t intend to abandon Steam, re-install it to c:\Steam\ and see if that helps.