MINERVA - read-only archives

Perhaps one of you here can see what I cannot. It seems every time I try and run any Steam-based games in offline mode (which I do because I have dial-up and just want to play SP at the moment), it forces me to go online if I want to launch the game at all. It doesn't seem to matter if it is MINERVA, HL2, HL2: Ep. 1, etc. It happens with them all. Any ideas/suggestions?

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Steam.....is .........well, stupid


That's why I preloaded Ep2, and Portal, then had to wait 3 hours after release restarting Steam so I could decrypt the games little by little.

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That is a old school bug and still not fixed :| did you check the steam error pages?

Make sure to run the games at least once while in online mode, and then you can run them in offline mode as much as you want.

When will the insanity stop?

I see. I assumed you were referring to Steam since this was the Steam subforum. My bad. My statement stands nevertheless.

On topic with your post, locworks...I have to agree. That is a crazy amount of money to spend for games that many people probably already own a fair portion of. There is no indication of any special content either as an enticement to buy, just the games as they are. Some of the games don't give you anything new, and are almost a duplication of others, like Half-life and Half-life: Source. Other than the fact that the physics is enhanced the game is basically the same. Unless you want to play Someplace Else, right? ;)

No worries. A solo Steam Half Life download is . A bargain bin hunt may be even less expensive.

The only realistic scenarios I see for the Complete Pack are:
- burglary, fire, flood, earthquake destroying the disks and serial numbers
- (self)-gift for recent FPS convert or a gamer who's returned from a self-enforced no-game-land
- game dev team setting up a test account/machine

That's a narrow demographic, but since the overhead is close to 0, Valve can do that.

I will now confess buying the and fall silent for a few minutes.