(no subject)

I never did make it out to lunch yesterday, so serinthia was kind enough to use the gift card that a co-worker bought for me (in return for some extra-curricular work) to buy The Orange Box for me at Best Buy. I'd been looking forward to thinking with Portal all day by the time I got home and realized that my video card, a Radeon 9550, apparently has known issues with this game and won't run it. I hate feeling like I've wasted fifty bucks, even if it was fifty bucks that I totally wasn't expecting to have. After spending the better part of an hour tweaking my computer to no avail, I frustratedly went to bed

(Because this is cool enough that I have to note it here, I was whetting my appetite with the online Flash based version of Portal that I was playing during the few short brakes I managed to take yesterday that I need to link to here. This is much fun indeed; give it a try. http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/)

I brought the games with me to work today just so I could try installing them on my laptop and confirm that the issue is hardware based. Of course, Portal installed and booted right up on the company-issues NC6400 with a Mobility Radeon X1300. I'm so far behind on games that it's been since the days of the Pentium Classic since I've purchased software that needs a hardware upgrade to run; it's a weird experience and makes the puppy sad.

But Serinthia, in another unprompted display of kindness, has offered me the use of a video card she has that should run these. Tonight, with any luck, I will be experience first-hand that magical hole in the sky through which things can fly. Thank you Serin! Because of you, even though at first I did not succeed, I will not fail.

If you are considering buying the orange box, please note that the install instructions are completely and utterly useless. Here they are:

"Insert the disc for the game you would like to install into your optical drive. If the drive's auto-play feature is enabled, select the game from the menu and follow the instructions."

Well; it doesn't really work like that. I inserted the disc and got the auto-run menu. I clicked install. The Steam client was loaded onto my computer. I then registered the product key and got onto Steam. I could see that all the games on the Orange Box were listed on my account (and then some, but I'll get to that later), but they were not installed. I put the disc back in the drive, but there were no new options. I put the second disc in the drive, but there was nothing usable on it. No exes to run, no autorun, just a bunch of files with unknown extensions. I could not figure out how to install the games from the media I had. So I started downloading Portal (a process that looked like it was going to take half an hour to an hour) and started poking around for more info.

I tired a bunch of Google queries trying to figure out what the hell the second disk was for. I found three or four forums where people were asking the same question. Nobody seemed to know why there were two discs in this box! Finally, I happened on the information I was looking for here at A Bugged Life. Oh! You have to install the game, register it on steam, then reboot? Then you have to put the disc in again and choose 'reinstall' on the auto-run menu? Then you can finally install all the games from the supplied media instead of downloading all five gigabytes of them from the Steam servers? I can only think that, since Portal, one of the most anticipated games in the set, is basically a puzzle game, the production crew figured that making it a puzzle to install the things would really excite the fans.

So, I mentioned that I have more games than I thought? Yes, oddly enough, I have, in addition to the Orange Box games, Half Life, Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, and Blue Shift. But I almost didn't.

See, when I bought the Orange Box from a thrift store a while ago, I immediately used it to install the Steam Client and create an account. Because my old standard, Stormdog, was already taken, I registered Stormdog42. Then I found out that I couldn't use the CD key and, even though I have the physical media, they wouldn't reassign the key. Hence my purchase of it from Best Buy.

After I got the new copy home, I installed it and logged into my Steam account. Except that, instead of typing Stormdog42, I typed Stormdog. The funny thing is, it let me in! In fact, I didn't even know I was in the wrong account until I looked at my list of games and saw a bunch of stuff I wasn't expecting!

I really have no idea why they are there or where they came from. I have some memory of playing these things *years* ago. They might even be from a set of games that I picked up at a thrift store or something in Michigan. I know I used to play them at some point, but I can't remember how I got them or whether they were my copies to begin with. But in any case, somehow, an account that I must have set up at some point is still there, and even though I'm not sure I can find the install media from that long ago, because they are on Steam, I can just download them. That little unexpected bonus is kind of nice after wasting six bucks on a used copy that I couldn't use, and fifty on a new copy that I also can't use. Yet....

Work has been stupidly busy as some ass-clown (I suppose not an entirely no-talent one if he can write viruses that get by Symantec) released an IM virus that's been spreading all over the internet since early yesterday. We've been picking up the mess. Fun stuff....