Battlezone Forums

I have a strong feeling, neither Atari, nor Activision, gives a flying fiduciary crap about the use or misuse of BZ1 or BZ2.

I have a strong feeling that, if money is involved, they will become very interested very quickly.

VSMIT wrote:Sounds like a user problem. I've used Steam for a few years now, and I've never had any issues.

My steam sob story:

I first tried to use it when the Half Life mod Counterstrike tried to force it's players to use it. It never downloaded what it was supposed to, corrupted files, constantly disconnected from it's servers and restarted. I tried to use it for several weeks then vowed never to use it again. I just stayed with the last non-steam version of counterstrike and played with the rest of the non-steam users. (this was 2002 ish).

Then this last summer I had my cousins come over and ask me to install two games they got for their birthday. They both were steam games. I installed it, tried to create an account and each time I'd type in a username it was say it was already used. I picked one of their suggestions and it was already used. This went on for a few minutes, I even tried typing in their suggestions and nothing worked. I then uninstalled it, reinstalled it twice until it worked the third time.

Then I installed the first game, seemed to go well and then took 30 hours "updating" until the game was playable. Who wants to wait 30 hours to play their new game? In installed the second game, it took 45 hours to update. This was on a 5 Mbit connection that could download over 150 GB of data in that time. This doesn't even count the 10 hours lost because I closed the lid, causing it to go to sleep (I forgot they had it set to do that) and making it restart the download for the first one.

Doesn't sound like a quality service to me, and none of this was user error (most download managers can continue paused downloads). Nobody was using the internet heavily. The connection and ping were great. I'm not going to buy a game from a service that takes that long to work. Then there's the DRM issue and the fact that you have to be connected to the internet to play (they say it can play offline but I couldn't get it to work). That just adds more potential problems waiting to happen that don't need to be there.

Did you make sure you had the correct region setting? Trying to download from the London server in the US would slow you down a lot. Also, you have to have a game installed and run once in order to play it offline - if you're still having issues with it DRM after that, then it's not Steam DRM.

Maybe it just hates your guts.

First of all, Steam in 2002 sucked.

Second, if you ever managed to get in before, that name was probably still valid.

Third, yea region setting. Honestly Steam does fine for me. The thing with the patches is the size indication is often WRONG and instead reflects the size of the entire game and thus speeds past the parts you already have. If it was slow perhaps you had a bad day, its always been quite fast for me and in recent months Steam has been trying a new system which goes far faster and runs concurrently multiple games downloads.

I dare to say I have had my fair share of issues with Steam, their support is however pretty good and if it couldnt fix/reset things so it did work it worked after 1 or 2 updates of Steam.
I personally do not prefer -tools- that require to be activated in order to do something else, but beyond that I couldnt say anything (really)negative about Steam as it currently is.

It sounds like they've gotten their act together a lot in the last several years, good for them.

Perhaps a petition to have the original BZ2 and BZ1 games available for purchase on Steam is in order? Pandemic may have bitten the dust, but Activision still definitely owns the rights to both games. However, it may just be that the entire Battlezone franchise is now under the sand...

forgottengames wrote:Perhaps a petition to have the original BZ2 and BZ1 games available for purchase on Steam is in order? Pandemic may have bitten the dust, but Activision still definitely owns the rights to both games. However, it may just be that the entire Battlezone franchise is now under the sand...

No, the Battlezone trademark belongs to Atari. Atari is a right mess.

Try posting your vote here or beg at here. Gog.com carries *legal* copies of older games for not much. It would be great for BZ1/2 to have legal copies.

Remember: publishers are interested in sales. More legal copies sold could encourage similar projects being greenlighted. Piracy cuts out the feedback loop, and merely discourages publisher interest.

-- GSH

-Torrent link removed- squirrel

[Rest of text removed, too. Piracy is a don't ask, don't tell subject around here. You violated one of those. -GSH]

Found a better link for voting on gog.com. Updated my post above.

-- GSH

birddseedd wrote:-Torrent link removed- squirrel

[Rest of text removed, too. Piracy is a don't ask, don't tell subject around here. You violated one of those. -GSH]

legally speaking i own a copy, so i am legal to download it. however this may not be the case for most.

"Piracy is a don't ask, don't tell subject around here"