Idiots are idiots, to be sure, and deserve to sit scratching their heads while their firewall blocks them from playing. But server downtime really does remove your ability to play online AND offline if you didn't unplug your ethernet cable first, and because their status page has been incorrect during downtime, there is no way to know when you should pull the cable and when you shouldn't.
I believe there may be a file you can backup and restore to cover this, but you shouldn't have to, and you shouldn't have to pull your ethernet cable to play a game in the first place. Why isn't there just an "offline" button?
It can't. It's a bug. The steam authentication process goes something like this:
1. Check for ethernet cable. 2. Erase offline authentication. 3. Attempt to contact Steam for new authentication.
If you've got a cable plugged in, and Steam is down, you're hosed for both online and offline play until they come back up. Fixing this is just a matter of not erasing the authentication info until *after* a connection attempt is finished:
1. Check for ethernet cable. 2. Attempt to contact steam for new auth 3. If new auth received, THEN erase old auth and replace.
There is some truth in that, in both directions. People see oddball, creative, "cutesy" titles like Super Monkey Ball, Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Viewtiful Joe, etc... and think of Nintendo. There are those of us who *like* that sort of thing, and bought gamecubes specifically because of it. And then there's the (larger) crowd that isn't big on that, and avoids the cube like the plague.
Truth is, the playstation has always had oddball innovative games like this-- Mr. Mosquito, Ico, Parappa the Rapper, ReZ, etc... but people seem to overlook it. I'm sure marketing has done their focus-group homework, but I wonder if titles like this might sell better to 'cube owners than they do to PS2 owners? After all, those of us buying cubes did so in large part *because* of this reputation, accurate or not.
At the very least, there's a bunch of cube-owning dorks who would buy whatever port they tossed out. I know I'd love a copy, but I'm not buying another console until they get down into clearance territory. I've got more games than I can play already.
I agree that there are positives. I love steam as a content distribution system, and the idea of cutting out the middleman in publishing games. But I'm not going to ignore negatives just because there are some positives.
It's interesting that you report not having your token expire-- I've seen a lot of reports to the contrary, but perhaps they were all doing something wrong. Is Steam smart enough to distinguish between a LAN connection and an internet connection? This could be people's problem-- they are ostensibly "offline," but connected to something else in their house so that steam thinks they're online and kills their token by trying to re-authorize.
This is definitely a bug, and a fixable one. Hopefully, they get it taken care of.
What remains is third problem I outlined-- even assuming this issue is resolved, if Steam ever quits working, HL2 quits working. No new installs will ever work, even if they bought a legitimate copy off of a store shelf. Online play will quit, even for legitimate owners running their own servers. And offline play will quit working the first time you forget and leave your ethernet cable plugged in, or have to reinstall your OS.
Unless they plan on a drastic rework of Steam authentication, #3 remains a problem.
$15 a month will cover 15-25 DVDs from Netflix for me, which is more than I will realistically watch, with enough left over to buy one or two if I really like them.
I'm not much of a "keeper" type-- I don't need to own the media except in the very rare cases of my absolute favorites, but I'll pay to watch it once or twice.
Comparing shows you watch once on your tivo to DVDs you buy to own forever isn't really a fair cost comparison. Netflix is a better match-- and if DVD releases were closer to initial air dates, it would be good enough to replace DTV for me.
1. The offline authorization expires, and requires you to re-authorize periodically.
2. If Steam goes down, but your internet connection is still working, you'll lose your offline authorization.
3. Because of #1, if Valve ever goes out of business, takes Steam offline, or disables HL2 on Steam you'll lose the ability to play HL2, even offline, once your authorization expires in a month or two.
#2 is the really nasty one right now-- it's impossible to know if Steam is up without checking (their status page said "steam is online" during the last whole-day outage), and once you check, your old authorization is cleared out while it waits for a new one from the server. Of course, if the server's down, you won't get a new one, leaving you with an unplayable game until they fix their shit.
#3 will be particularly nasty in the future. Although they're nice folks now, if Valve is ever purchased by a nasty company, they could push us all out of the game to encourage "upgrades" to newer games. Or, valve could just die and leave us in the lurch.
Say what you want about the quality of Enterprise-- I'm more interested in the idea of fans buying their shows directly. Sign me up.
Screw ads, screw broadcast, screw the networks/middlemen/etc... let me buy my shows directly from the people who make them! Even just releasing everything to DVD immediately after it airs would be good enough for me-- if I wasn't paying for DirecTV, I'd have a nice monthly budget for buying just the shows I like on DVD or via download.
As it is, I'm paying for a lot of channels I never watch, PLUS watching ads, just to get the handful of shows I enjoy. The system could be a thousand times better if "broadcasters" and "channels" went the way of the dodo and left us buying our shows directly from the people who make them.
Quick correction-- the GBA is a purely reflective screen, and has no light at all. The GBA SP has a reflective or transflective screen with a sidelight.
Instead of trying to do a solar-powered backlight, I wish more manufacturers would offer the option of a reflective or transflective LCD screen. This is like the screen used in the Gameboy Advance-- in bright sunlight, it looks fantastic. Indoors, they're not quite as nice as backlit, as they are typically sidelit to bounce the light off the rear reflector. It's a tradeoff. But you could use your laptop with no backlight power as long as there was good ambient light.
There was at least one laptop made with one of these-- If I remember right, it had a Transmeta CPU, but it's been a while. NEC Versa Daylite, or something close to that, and I think some of the Panasonic Toughbooks designed for outdoor use have them as well.
You're quite right, and I'm an idiot. That set of numbers is indeed japanese-only, and I missed it when googling. I apologize for any confusion.
The second set is still overall numbers, though, and backs up the original poster's assertions that the GBA sells like crazy. It's not in "Second place," though, because the PS1 has both the PS2 and the GBA beaten. If you want to include the "classic" gameboy, it's the runaway winner with 118 million units sold at the end of 2004.
That makes the Gameboy the best-selling console of all time, and the GBA number 3. And given the rate at which the GBA is selling, it may yet catch the PS1.
The sales for 2004 (from here appear to agree fairly well with the overall numbers the previous poster had, with the PS2 just barely outselling the GBA (note: you'll have to add the GBA and GBA SP sales yourself) in 2004, and both of them putting the smack down on everything else.
System - Sales this week - Total this year Nintendo DS - 221,625 - 889,400 PlayStation 2 - 112,970 - 2,503,532 PSP - 85,059 - 245,078 Game Boy Advance SP - 80,271 - 2,340,693 GameCube - 29,991 - 588,528 Game Boy Advance - 1,270 - 194,148 Xbox - 499 - 36,379 Swan Crystal 70 - 7,388 PSone 40 - 13,939
Overall numbers for the year are available here and agree with what the previous poster had:
Worldwide Hardware Sales (End of 2004) PlayStation 2 - 81.39 million Xbox - 19.9 million GameCube - 18.03 million Game Boy Advance - 65.74 million Nintendo DS - 2.84 million Sony PSP - 0.51 million N-Gage - 1.3 million PSone - 101.73 million
I'm too lazy to cut and paste any more, but everything I turned up from a quick google search seemed to agree fairly well. Overall-- PS1 is in the lead, PS2 is in second, GBA is third, followed by the Xbox and the Gamecube.
You have to get an "offline ticket" from the servers. The bug/problem right now is that if you don't know that Steam is down and leave your ethernet cable connected-- you'll get the "cannot connect to steam" message and your offline ticket will be erased. Which means that you can't play offline until you can get online to get your offline ticket renewed.
Once you've seen the error message, it's too late, and you can't play online or offline until the servers come back up.
And you can't just get a ticket and leave the cable unplugged forever, either-- the ticket expires on its own.
They could fix this easily by simply not disabling the offline ticket until after the connection attempt is finished-- but right now, a failed attempt with you still connected to the internet will disable your game until the servers come back up.
They have disabled "search" in their forums, and seem to have been deleting threads discussing this issue. There were quite a few large threads complaining, asking for information, and discussing the downtime last night, but I can't find a single one.
Additionally, during the peak of the complaints, they may have disabled posting, as I was unable to. (this could have been related to the load-- I'm not sure) I previously have not had any trouble posting to their forums. Posting is re-enabled this morning. Anybody know if it's back up? I can play, but I'd love to get a game set up with my friends, and they were all affected.
I can get in, but the friends I want to play online with can't. I gave Valve the benefit of the doubt and tried Steam, but if all it's good for is keeping legitimate customers from using what they paid for, this will be the last game I buy from them.
I'm sure the pirates are all having a ball playing with their steam-free pirate copies while a large portion of their paying customers twiddle their thumbs.
I see people by the score posting this sentiment every time this comes up. Your personal preference to not have a mobile is a completely legitimate choice. But that particular reason is nonsensical. I carry a phone, but I'm not compelled to answer it all the time. I turn it off when i don't want to be disturbed, and the ringer is always silent or disabled.
It's not an electronic leash. It's there for ME to call other people, and receive calls I want. Having one does not obligate you to answer it. But it does work out nice if your car breaks down or you need to (god forbid) tell someone YOUR plans have changed.
Still, if you don't want one, don't get one. Just quit using this "i don't want a leash" excuse. It makes no sense. If it shocked you when you failed to answer it, you might have a point.
I bought mine to sync the address book. The time I saved by not putting 200-odd phone numbers in manually was well worth it. The pictures were a nice side-effect. I probably downloaded 10, tops in the 4 months I had the phone.
I don't follow their online play reason, either. There's an ethernet adapter in my gamecube. If they have netcode in the other versions, I can't imagine a port would be that difficult. Especially given their experience developing Burnout 1 and 2 on the 'cube-- they clearly have some experience gamecube developers handy.
But I'm just whining since there's a good game that's not available for the gear I have-- the answer is just to pony up, or keep mooching on my friends' xboxes.:)
What phone are you using? I went through a couple of them, and had good luck with third-party cables and software. I had an LG-VX6000 before i moved to Sprint, if i remember right. A $25 cable and the freeware bitpim software allowed me to pull the pics off without paying verizon. I believe it supports quite a few brands and types of phones.
Sadly not available for the PC or gamecube, or anything else for that matter. I played it at a friends' place, and it is a great game, so I'll probably pick it up when Xboxes are $40 in a year or two.
You're clearly not paranoid enough to post on slashdot.
The implication here is that Carnivore was only being used because they had to respect your rights. Post-PATRIOT act, they don't have to bother with that, and are now just happily reading *everything*. Of COURSE the government wants to know how many questions you asked that guy selling Star Wars Action Figures on ebay. It's important in the fight against terrorism.
It's true that they haven't done anything innovative in a while, but I've had a tivo since 1.x, and they have definitely done good things since then. The first tivo I had didn't even have the ability to rank season passes for a good six months.
I'm hoping they last long enough to get that dual-tuner cablecard PVR out the door-- if not, it's looking more and more like all the other PVR companies are going to finally be usable tivo replacements.
I oversimplified a bit. You are quite correct-- the real ROM was never changed. Just a hack to the menu pointer that allowed other code stored in the RAM to be executed, which would let you start up a shell and give you access to run ASM programs.
For some reason, though, I really thought they were using an overflow with the backup process to change those pointers. Meh-- it has been a decade.
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Idiots are idiots, to be sure, and deserve to sit scratching their heads while their firewall blocks them from playing. But server downtime really does remove your ability to play online AND offline if you didn't unplug your ethernet cable first, and because their status page has been incorrect during downtime, there is no way to know when you should pull the cable and when you shouldn't.
I believe there may be a file you can backup and restore to cover this, but you shouldn't have to, and you shouldn't have to pull your ethernet cable to play a game in the first place. Why isn't there just an "offline" button?
It can't. It's a bug. The steam authentication process goes something like this:
1. Check for ethernet cable.
2. Erase offline authentication.
3. Attempt to contact Steam for new authentication.
If you've got a cable plugged in, and Steam is down, you're hosed for both online and offline play until they come back up. Fixing this is just a matter of not erasing the authentication info until *after* a connection attempt is finished:
1. Check for ethernet cable.
2. Attempt to contact steam for new auth
3. If new auth received, THEN erase old auth and replace.
There is some truth in that, in both directions. People see oddball, creative, "cutesy" titles like Super Monkey Ball, Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Viewtiful Joe, etc... and think of Nintendo. There are those of us who *like* that sort of thing, and bought gamecubes specifically because of it. And then there's the (larger) crowd that isn't big on that, and avoids the cube like the plague.
Truth is, the playstation has always had oddball innovative games like this-- Mr. Mosquito, Ico, Parappa the Rapper, ReZ, etc... but people seem to overlook it. I'm sure marketing has done their focus-group homework, but I wonder if titles like this might sell better to 'cube owners than they do to PS2 owners? After all, those of us buying cubes did so in large part *because* of this reputation, accurate or not.
At the very least, there's a bunch of cube-owning dorks who would buy whatever port they tossed out. I know I'd love a copy, but I'm not buying another console until they get down into clearance territory. I've got more games than I can play already.
I agree that there are positives. I love steam as a content distribution system, and the idea of cutting out the middleman in publishing games. But I'm not going to ignore negatives just because there are some positives.
It's interesting that you report not having your token expire-- I've seen a lot of reports to the contrary, but perhaps they were all doing something wrong. Is Steam smart enough to distinguish between a LAN connection and an internet connection? This could be people's problem-- they are ostensibly "offline," but connected to something else in their house so that steam thinks they're online and kills their token by trying to re-authorize.
This is definitely a bug, and a fixable one. Hopefully, they get it taken care of.
What remains is third problem I outlined-- even assuming this issue is resolved, if Steam ever quits working, HL2 quits working. No new installs will ever work, even if they bought a legitimate copy off of a store shelf. Online play will quit, even for legitimate owners running their own servers. And offline play will quit working the first time you forget and leave your ethernet cable plugged in, or have to reinstall your OS.
Unless they plan on a drastic rework of Steam authentication, #3 remains a problem.
$15 a month will cover 15-25 DVDs from Netflix for me, which is more than I will realistically watch, with enough left over to buy one or two if I really like them.
I'm not much of a "keeper" type-- I don't need to own the media except in the very rare cases of my absolute favorites, but I'll pay to watch it once or twice.
Comparing shows you watch once on your tivo to DVDs you buy to own forever isn't really a fair cost comparison. Netflix is a better match-- and if DVD releases were closer to initial air dates, it would be good enough to replace DTV for me.
1. The offline authorization expires, and requires you to re-authorize periodically.
2. If Steam goes down, but your internet connection is still working, you'll lose your offline authorization.
3. Because of #1, if Valve ever goes out of business, takes Steam offline, or disables HL2 on Steam you'll lose the ability to play HL2, even offline, once your authorization expires in a month or two.
#2 is the really nasty one right now-- it's impossible to know if Steam is up without checking (their status page said "steam is online" during the last whole-day outage), and once you check, your old authorization is cleared out while it waits for a new one from the server. Of course, if the server's down, you won't get a new one, leaving you with an unplayable game until they fix their shit.
#3 will be particularly nasty in the future. Although they're nice folks now, if Valve is ever purchased by a nasty company, they could push us all out of the game to encourage "upgrades" to newer games. Or, valve could just die and leave us in the lurch.
Say what you want about the quality of Enterprise-- I'm more interested in the idea of fans buying their shows directly. Sign me up.
Screw ads, screw broadcast, screw the networks/middlemen/etc... let me buy my shows directly from the people who make them! Even just releasing everything to DVD immediately after it airs would be good enough for me-- if I wasn't paying for DirecTV, I'd have a nice monthly budget for buying just the shows I like on DVD or via download.
As it is, I'm paying for a lot of channels I never watch, PLUS watching ads, just to get the handful of shows I enjoy. The system could be a thousand times better if "broadcasters" and "channels" went the way of the dodo and left us buying our shows directly from the people who make them.
Quick correction-- the GBA is a purely reflective screen, and has no light at all. The GBA SP has a reflective or transflective screen with a sidelight.
Instead of trying to do a solar-powered backlight, I wish more manufacturers would offer the option of a reflective or transflective LCD screen. This is like the screen used in the Gameboy Advance-- in bright sunlight, it looks fantastic. Indoors, they're not quite as nice as backlit, as they are typically sidelit to bounce the light off the rear reflector. It's a tradeoff. But you could use your laptop with no backlight power as long as there was good ambient light.
There was at least one laptop made with one of these-- If I remember right, it had a Transmeta CPU, but it's been a while. NEC Versa Daylite, or something close to that, and I think some of the Panasonic Toughbooks designed for outdoor use have them as well.
You're quite right, and I'm an idiot. That set of numbers is indeed japanese-only, and I missed it when googling. I apologize for any confusion.
The second set is still overall numbers, though, and backs up the original poster's assertions that the GBA sells like crazy. It's not in "Second place," though, because the PS1 has both the PS2 and the GBA beaten. If you want to include the "classic" gameboy, it's the runaway winner with 118 million units sold at the end of 2004.
That makes the Gameboy the best-selling console of all time, and the GBA number 3. And given the rate at which the GBA is selling, it may yet catch the PS1.
The sales for 2004 (from here appear to agree fairly well with the overall numbers the previous poster had, with the PS2 just barely outselling the GBA (note: you'll have to add the GBA and GBA SP sales yourself) in 2004, and both of them putting the smack down on everything else.
System - Sales this week - Total this year
Nintendo DS - 221,625 - 889,400
PlayStation 2 - 112,970 - 2,503,532
PSP - 85,059 - 245,078
Game Boy Advance SP - 80,271 - 2,340,693
GameCube - 29,991 - 588,528
Game Boy Advance - 1,270 - 194,148
Xbox - 499 - 36,379
Swan Crystal 70 - 7,388
PSone 40 - 13,939
Overall numbers for the year are available here and agree with what the previous poster had:
Worldwide Hardware Sales (End of 2004)
PlayStation 2 - 81.39 million
Xbox - 19.9 million
GameCube - 18.03 million
Game Boy Advance - 65.74 million
Nintendo DS - 2.84 million
Sony PSP - 0.51 million
N-Gage - 1.3 million
PSone - 101.73 million
I'm too lazy to cut and paste any more, but everything I turned up from a quick google search seemed to agree fairly well. Overall-- PS1 is in the lead, PS2 is in second, GBA is third, followed by the Xbox and the Gamecube.
You have to get an "offline ticket" from the servers. The bug/problem right now is that if you don't know that Steam is down and leave your ethernet cable connected-- you'll get the "cannot connect to steam" message and your offline ticket will be erased. Which means that you can't play offline until you can get online to get your offline ticket renewed.
Once you've seen the error message, it's too late, and you can't play online or offline until the servers come back up.
And you can't just get a ticket and leave the cable unplugged forever, either-- the ticket expires on its own.
They could fix this easily by simply not disabling the offline ticket until after the connection attempt is finished-- but right now, a failed attempt with you still connected to the internet will disable your game until the servers come back up.
Terrible.
They have disabled "search" in their forums, and seem to have been deleting threads discussing this issue. There were quite a few large threads complaining, asking for information, and discussing the downtime last night, but I can't find a single one.
Additionally, during the peak of the complaints, they may have disabled posting, as I was unable to. (this could have been related to the load-- I'm not sure) I previously have not had any trouble posting to their forums. Posting is re-enabled this morning. Anybody know if it's back up? I can play, but I'd love to get a game set up with my friends, and they were all affected.
Their server status still says STEAM IS ONLINE.
At least *acknowledge* you fucked up, Valve.
I can get in, but the friends I want to play online with can't. I gave Valve the benefit of the doubt and tried Steam, but if all it's good for is keeping legitimate customers from using what they paid for, this will be the last game I buy from them.
I'm sure the pirates are all having a ball playing with their steam-free pirate copies while a large portion of their paying customers twiddle their thumbs.
Nice work, Valve.
You get to use the actual sights on the gun model, rather than a crosshairs. It's not like you can't aim-- you just line up the two sights.
I see people by the score posting this sentiment every time this comes up. Your personal preference to not have a mobile is a completely legitimate choice. But that particular reason is nonsensical. I carry a phone, but I'm not compelled to answer it all the time. I turn it off when i don't want to be disturbed, and the ringer is always silent or disabled.
It's not an electronic leash. It's there for ME to call other people, and receive calls I want. Having one does not obligate you to answer it. But it does work out nice if your car breaks down or you need to (god forbid) tell someone YOUR plans have changed.
Still, if you don't want one, don't get one. Just quit using this "i don't want a leash" excuse. It makes no sense. If it shocked you when you failed to answer it, you might have a point.
Pointers.
I bought mine to sync the address book. The time I saved by not putting 200-odd phone numbers in manually was well worth it. The pictures were a nice side-effect. I probably downloaded 10, tops in the 4 months I had the phone.
I don't follow their online play reason, either. There's an ethernet adapter in my gamecube. If they have netcode in the other versions, I can't imagine a port would be that difficult. Especially given their experience developing Burnout 1 and 2 on the 'cube-- they clearly have some experience gamecube developers handy.
:)
But I'm just whining since there's a good game that's not available for the gear I have-- the answer is just to pony up, or keep mooching on my friends' xboxes.
What phone are you using? I went through a couple of them, and had good luck with third-party cables and software. I had an LG-VX6000 before i moved to Sprint, if i remember right. A $25 cable and the freeware bitpim software allowed me to pull the pics off without paying verizon. I believe it supports quite a few brands and types of phones.
Sadly not available for the PC or gamecube, or anything else for that matter. I played it at a friends' place, and it is a great game, so I'll probably pick it up when Xboxes are $40 in a year or two.
You're clearly not paranoid enough to post on slashdot.
The implication here is that Carnivore was only being used because they had to respect your rights. Post-PATRIOT act, they don't have to bother with that, and are now just happily reading *everything*. Of COURSE the government wants to know how many questions you asked that guy selling Star Wars Action Figures on ebay. It's important in the fight against terrorism.
It's true that they haven't done anything innovative in a while, but I've had a tivo since 1.x, and they have definitely done good things since then. The first tivo I had didn't even have the ability to rank season passes for a good six months.
I'm hoping they last long enough to get that dual-tuner cablecard PVR out the door-- if not, it's looking more and more like all the other PVR companies are going to finally be usable tivo replacements.
I oversimplified a bit. You are quite correct-- the real ROM was never changed. Just a hack to the menu pointer that allowed other code stored in the RAM to be executed, which would let you start up a shell and give you access to run ASM programs.
For some reason, though, I really thought they were using an overflow with the backup process to change those pointers. Meh-- it has been a decade.