After long days of WildStar and WoW, I pull myself away to see what the good old Steam has in store. The good old Steam that has accompanied me for so long, always keeping my game library tidy, and never showing me intrusive ads for games I never wanted. The same good old Steam that I found so much better than all the other services like EA’s “Origin”.
But at some point in the last months, a small, sneaky developer must have thought, “Let’s really annoy Cortyn today.” A new journey, a new crazy ride!
My Gaming Preferences: Dating Simulations with Birds
It’s a rascal who thinks something evil at the headline now. I’m sure everyone knows a similar situation: Some “good friend” links an article from Amazon that he or she finds really funny, and you were naive enough to click the link. From then on, you keep getting strange offers and are informed that you apparently are interested in the “Carp Calendar 2015” or the “Hildegard Orgon Accumulator”. It’s also unclear to this website that you wouldn’t even buy these things if they were free.
I now have exactly the same feeling with Steam. Because I received a game as a gift, like “Long live the Queen”, Valve now apparently thinks I am burning with interest for “Hatoful Boyfriend”. A Japanese dating simulation where, however, you do not flirt with humans, that would still be somewhat amusing and have its charm. Instead, you flirt – you guessed it – with birds. I must admit that I haven’t delved deeper into this game, so I might be doing it an injustice, but honestly: I would never find it interesting in a million years.
Always Forward into the Past
On one hand, progress is always something to be welcomed, but here they are clearly working in the wrong place. I cannot disable this new Steam design, and it’s extremely cumbersome to find the general updates that used to be neatly sorted on the homepage. Instead, I am now informed that I absolutely want “Papers, please!”, a game whose content apparently consists of checking the papers of immigrants.
What I find much more frightening is that some comfort features are still missing, especially a chat log for conversations with friends is still nowhere to be found – after a restart, at most the last three sentences are visible. Since you are primarily playing on Steam and can’t just click every funny link right away, because the boss fight with the 9-headed Hydra and its fire breath takes away a bit of my multitasking ability, I don’t understand how, after so many years, they still do without a chat log.
As for the Steam shop, I find it a bit hard not to just say: “Everything was better back in the day.” But thankfully, I can rely on Jochen Malmsheimer again: “Nothing was better back then, but many things were good. And it would still be today if we had left it alone.”.
