Steam online gaming – oh dear me…

So there was a game i was interested in on Steam a mostly microsoft windows gaming site.

It is called Moonbase alpha – a nasa simulation ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/39000 ) .  Why well i once owned a dos game called moonbase it ran in 640k and on linux in dosbox on one floppy disk of the 1.44mb size from Wesson International.  It was fun ish – six simulations most being failures but one of the few games i liked (doom 2 fitted on 4 floppy disks).

Regular readers here will note a couple of problems

1. I don’t run windows (i use linux)
2. I have shit video cards

So i purloin a vista powered (should that be powned) computer for a couple of days to see if that new thing is interesting.  I create account on steam, install the download client which is not a bit torrent app – very conservative mind you with the traffic shaping by american isps i suppose steam also has to be defective ok for the defectives at the us isp.

Then i find the game and start to download a gb of stuff that is Moonbase alpha – this happens overnight, and the next evening i fire up and see if i can do anything.

Firstly some vista runtime is added to the vista os and then i play the game – about time, its not like  typing a:\moonbase.exe* is it?

Its a bit graphics jerky and the sound gets  loud and low, and repeats while a video of the flying over the moon is d i s p l a y e d.** I decide to restart the vista os – just in case it is me.

Still here ? I fire up the game again and the same display condition exists and very laggy mouse.  I try to click on options – nine (9) minutes later a screen comes up but i cannot see any options because the screen has corrupted, nine more minutes later and i manage to quit and comfirm that yes i do want to quit.

Meanwhile the video of the moon continues to annoy….

I fire up the steam client, delete that 1gb of game crap , and see if i can delete my steam id – the answer is no, so i then go and delete the nvida crap driver and then delete steam app from control panel  which did not take long at all.

So what have I discovered ? – i would not touch a steam game with a bargepoll, Microsoft Vista (with lots of memory)  is shite at games and i have no idea what the new moonbase thing is like however steam noted i spent 24 minutes trying to navigate a few screens, and there download client cannot keep track it lags 200mb from one stat to another – so had i download 600 mb or 800mb ?.

Overall – 0/5 bananas.  If you have to run windoze to be a space cadet then nasa certainly wish to appeal to the idiots.

I then returned the computer to its owner with a banana as a thank you.

* mac and windows users this is called a command line ** this is humour