Does Holla Forums remember a time before Steam?

Does Holla Forums remember a time before Steam?

No, I don't mean all the way back to MS-DOS and DOOM ports, I mean that awkward period in between that and now.

PC gaming = steam

It wasn't awkward for me, I mainly just played single player games like I do now.

How old are you OP? No, seriously, how fucking old are you?

Bitch please

How old are you? that xfire layout is from 2010 or something

Ha I remember coding a c++ program that would flood any chat window on xfire and cause the client to crash for the opposing party, good fun.

Shit like Gamespy, physical DRM and GFLW existed before it, this shit would happen.
If anything its more ankward for me now that theres less choice and Steam is so shit, but at least pirating is still a thing and smaller devs can makeand sell their games much more easily, including Nips, so theres that.
I really miss when there were a shitton of PC physical on display thought, was really depressing game starting this decade by seeing PC physical dying thanks to normalfag flood, general console focus and all devs going console.

I don't have any screenshots of it myself and google doesn't have many great examples.

yeah I remember being massively pissed off when ever Gamespy or The Zone was a required service because it meant jumping through hoops in order to play. Thank fuck that Mechwarrior 2 back in the day let us use third party shit to connect over the internet.

But yeah there was a mass amount of bullshit in the 90s. Its just that it wasn't the norm, most companies were doing the right thing back then unlike today.

Bitch please

What a strange word to describe the golden age before the cancer.

Nah

more likely their 56k modem dropped out or mum picked up the phone.. "MUM GET OF THE FUCKING PHONE I'M TRYING TO PLAY QUAKE!"

Fucking dark times

xbox was my first online game experience

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xfire was pretty cool honestly, it worked, it told other people what server you were in (without the developer adding that support) and made keeping up with friends really easy. unlike steam where it's only games that have that support coded in so if it doesn't and you want to join a friend you have to ask them what server they're on.

Yes I remember the massive clutter on my desktop, only surpassed by putting my icons into a videogame folder.

Fuck Xfire, fuck gamespy. They took a simple thing like opening a videogame and made them take way longer than needed. If anything Steam at least keeps things simple and fast on my PC. Fast and no clutter is the only reason I started using it in the first place.

You're a funny guy, OP

This Xfire was a BITCH I dont know anyone who will defend it

Damn I remember playing AOK on that back in 2000 or so. Also playing OFP on Gamespy.

We're talking about me staring at a computer screen for an hour.

I have no idea what you mean by this, I started on a 386 in the DOS days and have been on PC up to now. I remember each OS I used as a kind of "generation" I and remember pre-steam winXP just fine. I even remember being pissed off that I had to install another program just to launch HL2.
Before online stores were a thing there was a place called "CD supermarket" that I visited every couple of months.

God i remember having to set irq channels and that other thing i always mashed enter through since it always auto-detected properly

Steam being that useless shit you had to install just to play halflife/CS and then came the big message one day. to paraphrase "we plan on turning steam into a digital distribution platform" "HA! Like i'll ever buy games from you assholes" i said"

modern gamers don't know shit. If only the knew the pain of having to manually set EMS memory, or knowing that in order to get sound working you had to know IRQ channels for both sound and music (because they used different formats back then). If only the knew the pain of having to setup drivers for mouse and joystick.

Modern gamers know jackshit. I have all the knowledge and yet its all basically useless LOL. God damn it. Stupid insta gratification bullshit. I miss the days when you had to know what you were doing. lol

How time flies.

subhuman trash.

Too bad games dont require you to do that anymore.
I bet that's why 90s games were good: no casuals because casual filters.

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What version of Linux do you use?

bitch please

I feel bad to have missed all this shit

Mah nigga. I remember when they got absorbed into GameSpy.

how old are YOU?

I'm not even the guy you're replying to, but that's a fucking big jump to conclusions there, son. Considering that your other post is nothing but passive-aggressive shitposting, I have to ask why do you even come here?

He probably uses Fedora or that one Linux distro that has the logo that looks like a fat guy standing in front of a giant Dorito.

In terms of multiplayer, yes. In terms of single player, it actively punished faggots who didn't know their hardware because you couldn't enjoy the full experience if you didn't have the IRQ settings for your sound card.
Imagine one of today's plug-and-play faggots trying to get sound to work on their vidya only to fail time and time and time again to later find out they don't have a goddamn sound card and they need to buy another part to their computer, crack it open, put it in, run the install disks and hope everything works
and then they find out they bought an incompatible sound card and there's no returns on opened hardware

I know that feel.


I'm not sure if you are trolling or not but I agree with , that is acted as a casual filter. Games weren't dumbed-down because dumb people couldn't get them running.

IT JUST FUCKING WORKS

I believe you're talking about Arch Linux. You can't get more stereotypical linux user than an archfag. They think they're l33t hax0rs and masters of linux because they know how to use the terminal and scripts to install their software and rice the shit out of it.

Holla Forums is over

but what do you do after you've beaten Doom and Doom II?

I wish I had a giant cool ranch dorito like the Arch Linux logo guy

Go play Blood, Heretic and Hexen which are better than Doom 1/2 in every way.

As mentioned before: There was no "awkward time".

PC games never disappeared from the shelves in Germany. And piracy provided convenient online delivery since at least twenty years before steam was a thing.

I remember this in 1998. It was like entering an entirely different universe. I miss it so bad.

I wish to return to simpler times.

Ah, Xfire. I remember that my clan in M&B did meetups there. This is before the dark days of the Steam release and the massive drop in community quality.

Conclusion:

Since steam era started only in 2012 for me, I think user is talking about 1992. I don't know where the fuck you got your 198 unless you're one of those obnoxious early adopter cunts who actually installed steam for half life. Fuck you for ruining PC gaming user.

It was pretty awful, I'm glad that age is over.

BTX was a government thing that nobody cared about. I am talking about the early 80's and late 70's. BBS's and X.[something] networks were a plentiful source for pirated games. 300-1200 bauds were no problem, with games only a few killobytes in size.

You're a faggot.

Hexen is fucking shit.

Play the Marathon series, duh.

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Well I do, kinda. I was born in 95, but I didn't had internet in my home untill 2008 or so. I always wanted to have the internet and for one and only reason. To downlad all the fuckign games i wanted. I always had to ask a friend from school to download something for me, or borrow from someone. At the beggining my dad would borrow games from his coworkers.

I used to be on the internet from time to time. We used to have an intenret cafee place. It was 1 zl for 15 minutes (about 1$ for an hour) but the guy in the store was lazy, very often he'd go outside for a ciggarete or something and just forget i was there. I could sit 1-2 hours for 1zl, and when he suddenly remembered that the time is up i'd buy another 15 minutes. I didn't had a pendrive yet, only floppies, so i couldn't download anything big.

I also remember one thing. My friend got half-life 2, the original 5 CD version. We're installing and waiting for the cool game, we're both fans of the original HL. But it required fucking steam, we didn't know what it was (we didnt speak english, kids in poland) and i remember trying to download crack for hl2 in that internet cafee.

It was in another city, about 4 kilometes away. My friends were waiting just outside off the town. I was driving back on a bicycle with a floppy. I could see them from far away. I raised my hands with the floppy like they do when they finish the race and yelled. I GOT THE CRACK

Apparantely i just downloaded steam installator.

It's better than Doom 2 you triple faggot

Motherfucker.

I personally continued using XFire all the way until they shut it down last summer. And I truly lament the loss of a client like it that isn't maintained by a retailer/is literal DRM now.

Xfire shut down? Damn.

I wish I had a whole week to set up my software environment.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

Steam, Origin, uPlay are all a different shade of cancer, and I feel uneasy about using GOG Galaxy as well. It's a shame Raptr is bloated and not quite at parity with Xfire, I still don't really like it being tied to a GPU manufacturer either.

That explains it. A few weeks ago I remembered about Xfire and wanted to go find my profile so I could see how many hours I spend and on what games. It just kept leading me to some tournament bullshit. Really wanted to see my old profile but oh well.