Pros and Cons of using STEAM for games ?

jjscotman

Hello

As I'm retired and now have quite a lot of time on my hands I've very recently taken up PC games for the first time and I'm enjoying it a lot playing games such as Fallout 3, Crysis, Bioshock and Oblivion.

Reading various forums I've seen frequent mention of STEAM as a way to buy and play games instead of the likes of Amazon and Play which I've used so far.

It seems to be quite popular but I was wondering whether more experienced gamers could give me advice as to the pros and cons of using STEAM.

Many thanks in advance.

DCFC79

A mate of mine uses steam and he pre ordered the call of duty game via steam and they wouldnt let him play it until release day, a pro is obviously you can download the game when you want

-TangleFoot-

Unlike retailers that send you a boxed copy in the mail, Steam is used to download games over the 'net. Each game purchased is associated with your Steam User Account, so you can download games as many times as you wish* to virtually any computer you can install Steam on. Unfortunately, this also means that you cannot sell a game to someone else once you've finished playing with it and if you don't like it, you won't be getting a refund.

*There are some exceptions, but these are few and far between.

jjscotman

Thanks for the very quick and helpful replies.

I think I will probably give STEAM a try, especially as I found that locating, downloading and installing patches can sometimes be a really tedious chore.

One problem I've encountered, especially when looking at the older iconic games like Oblivion which I missed first time round, is finding out whether the game will run on my Vista machine.

Does using STEAM help in any way in ascertaining whether a game will run on Vista ?

-TangleFoot-

jjscotman wrote: »

Does using STEAM help in any way in ascertaining whether a game will run on Vista ?

No. If anything, using Steam adds a little processing overhead thus raising the requirements ever so slightly.

The limiting factor will as always be the hardware inside your PC. What do you have?

robredz

Steam works just fine and you can get many retro games and play them on Steam as well, which avoids the problem of trying to use emulators, or playing about with compatibility settings for some games to run them in Vista or Windows 7. It helps reduce the modern equivalent of playing with the config.sys, or autoexec.bat files to get a game running like Doom in DOS 6. Install it in Steam and it should just work.

jjscotman

I have an Acer Aspire 6935G laptop.

Its the model with the 2.53 GHz processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM and Nvidia 9600M GT graphics card which is not too bad as far as laptops go for games.

So far it seems to be able to handle the games I've tried like Crysis, Fallout 3 and Oblivion.

Lokolo

I have used Steam for many years and love it.

Its good if you make friends as well as theres steam chat and such.

-TangleFoot-

robredz wrote: »

you can get many retro games and play them on Steam as well, which avoids the problem of trying to use emulators

No it doesn't - most of the really old stuff is provided by entities other than Valve Software which means there's no way of telling what you're getting without some serious research.

Have you not read the horror stories concerning the likes of the Space Quest Collection?

[Deleted User]

Steam is very good, they regulary have some great offers.

Direct2Drive is another good source too.

JasX

I use steam and am quite content with it:

Pros:
-all my games are kept in one place and can be re-downloaded at any time to any computer so i don't have to worry about losing CDs etc

-Community features and keeping track of friends online (to join in with when they're playing too) is good

-some early access to games 'pre launch' in the beta testing phase

-good catalogue of 'slightly older' games they heavily discount from time to time

-Does tend to have a lot of first person shooter games like the ones you list, L4D2 is comming out next week

Cons:
-you need a good internet connection to download games (can be 4GB+ each, only need to do this once per game tho)

-don't go around downloading cheats for your games as you'll be banned from all of them at once

-can be a bit awkward getting games to run if you are not connected to the net -> requires a little fiddling to setup in offline mode