Top 5 Games of 2017 that wouldn’t start because of this one Steam bug
Steam, the popular PC game distribution platform, has this one bug that won’t go away. Sometimes you select a game you own that you want to play, click the little blue “Play” button and the game just… does not launch. No error messages, no real indication that anything has gone wrong, except that you’ve gotten all fired up to play a video game and instead you are now googling “steam games don’t start.”
I think this first happened to me sometime in the summer, and it has continued to afflict my library throughout the year. It’s so annoying that I wrote a whole article about it. That article is this article, so without further ado, here’s the top five games of 2017 (meaning games I played in 2017), good and bad and a little in between, that I had to go the extra mile just to get working.
5. STAR WARS™ — The Force Unleashed™ Ultimate Sith Edition
Ok, technically I bought it on Good Old Games’ GOG Galaxy client, but the bug that initially prevented it from starting was virtually identical to the one from Steam so I’m including anyway. The only way I could get STAR WARS™ — The Force Unleashed™ Ultimate Sith Edition to work was to reinstall GOG Galaxy, as well as all the games I had bought on it. At the time, I was only about 80% sure that this wouldn’t delete my entire collection of Gwent cards, but thankfully it worked out just fine. Looking back over this list, it’s disheartening to think that reinstalling a client and an entire library of games was the easiest fix I found for this bug, but maybe the moral of the story is I should just switch to GOG.
Once I actually got it running, The Force Unleashed wasn’t a bad little video game, even though the main character is named Starkiller. It’s fun to play a Star Wars game where you get to use all the nasty Sith powers and toss Wookies off bridges and not think too hard about why Darth Vader gave his secret Sith apprentice a red lightsaber if he didn’t want anybody to know he had a secret Sith apperentice. There’s an impressive amount of costumes you can dress up Starkiller in, which I appreciate. He seems to get a new outfit every level, and there’s also a bunch of weirder options where you can play as a Clone Wars character or C-3PO. It’s been a very Star Wars-filled end of the year for me, and The Force Unleashed has been a worthy addition to that theme.
By the way, did you know that Starkiller is named Starkiller because when they asked George Lucas if he could suggest a proper ‘Darth X’ moniker instead, he came up with ‘Darth Icky’ and ‘Darth Insanius?’ Holy shit!
4. Bioshock Remastered
Along with The Force Unleashed, Bioshock was another member of the pantheon of games I got super hyped for almost a decade ago, but was never able to play because I didn’t have the money for a proper console until like high school. There’s a perverse kind of pleasure in now being able to pick up more technically advanced versions of those games up for roughly as much as it would cost me to buy lunch at a bodega. In this comparison, I guess randomly not being able to launch Bioshock Remastered and having to play the original version instead is like when the guy who makes sandwiches at the bodega puts mayonnaise on your order even though you didn’t ask for mayonnaise, or even any ingredient that started with the letter M.
Playing Bioshock for the first time in 2017 is a bit of a disappointing experience. I remember being terrified of this game in the half an hour I spent with it at a friend’s house back in the day, but as a grown adult who was once woken up by a loud thump in the next room and groggily yelled “Come kill me then, bitch” and went back to sleep, It’s not really that scary. It’s also not really that engaging, since the shooting and the powers don’t have much to them beyond doing damage to and eventually killing enemies, but it is interesting and thematically appropriate to see the DNA of so many other video games being hashed out here.
P.S. Between starting and finishing this article, I bought Bioshock 2 Remastered and ran into the exact same issue, down to the free original copy running just fine.
There’s always a remastered version. There’s always a Steam bug.
Bioshock Infinite blew ass.
3. Heat Signature
Suspicious Developments’ follow-up to Gunpoint was like a 50–50 shot on whether or not I would be able to get it to launch. As far as I remember, this was one of the first titles where I encountered the not-launching bug. That I kept restarting my computer and verifying the integrity of my game files a dozen times until the error just disappeared reoccurring is a testament to how fun this game can be at times.
I do have my beefs, though. The game starts out with a really cool tutorial that introduces you to a world and characters you really want to get into, but then it dumps you into a bunch of procedurally generated missions you just play over and over again while a bar fills up. Sometimes things come together and you get a really fun scramble to complete a mission before you run out of time, but you’ll spend way more time executing the same game plan over and over again, and given the game’s length you can bet that plan will get old eventually. There’s a few more conversation bits that are nice because you get some actual worldbuilding, but they take way too much busywork to reach. I put about 12 hours into the game and got maybe three-fourths of the way through, which is a shame because I barely had 12 hours in me at all.
2. XCOM2: War of the Chosen
War of the Chosen is #1 on the theoretical list of 2017 games that made me feel like a huge sucker. I won’t be making that list, though, because it would be 90% gacha games.
After debating for ages whether I would give War of the Chosen a try, I flipped a coin to decide, then promptly ignored the negative result and bought it anyway (In retrospect, that was probably God reaching down a hand trying to help my foolish ass out). I downloaded the game once, and couldn’t get it to run, so I reinstalled once, with no luck. Did you know XCOM 2 is like 35 gigabytes, by the way? It was a shitload of downloading, especially on a wifi connection that can go as low as 2 mb/s on a bad day. The next day, halfway through a third install, I gave up and got a refund.
The story does not end there. After holding on to the refund money for a week or so, I ran into a post about someone who had the exact same issue with the game that I had had, and their fix for the issue that I hadn’t tried. Taking a total leap of faith, I used my refund money to buy the exact game for which I had just requested a refund. The fix worked, but it was still an incredibly dumb move I would caution you all to avoid.
How’s the actual game? It’s alright. It definitely feels like the beginnings of a sequel that got downgraded into an expansion pack. There’s such a clear line between the original and new content, and sometimes they don’t play well together, clumping up on top of each other so you’re dealing with five or six different things to keep track of in one mission. If the original XCOM 2 felt like a solid core of mechanics that was maybe a little lacking, War of the Chosen feels like an over-correction, with second layer of systems somebody thought would be cool grafted on top. It also has what I call “Persona syndrome,” where the sim-y, management stuff you’re supposed to do as a side thing ends up being more fun than the intended meat of the game. The fights can take forever and basically require you to save and load constantly, but I got to the third row of room expansions in my ship before I finished making the first room the game requires you to build as part of the story. That was fun!
- Zombi (ZombiU)
Zombi is the reason I started writing this article. After being told that this game was worth checking out ever since it first launched with the WiiU, I finally decided to give the PC version a shot the next time it went on sale. What I got was a complete brick that will not start up no matter what I do. I have tried:
- Reinstalling three times.
- Verifying my game files every time I reinstall.
- Clearing my download cache and logging back into Steam.
- Disabling my antivirus.
- Fiddling with four different settings on my graphics card.
- Making a Uplay account, just in case the Uplay client that Zombi downloaded onto my desktop was connected to the game and preventing it from starting in some way (it was not, and now Ubisoft has my email).
I have tried every fix I can find, short of manually reinstalling Steam and all of the games I have on it, but nothing has worked. I‘m not even sure if I’m going to bother requesting a refund, considering how low the price was. The bug has won.
What makes this bug so maddening that I’m compelled to write a whole article about it is how little there actually is to it, compared to how much of an impact it has. Like I said earlier, there isn’t even an error message. The game just doesn’t work, and you have no idea why.
This other frustrating thing is that every encounter with this bug turns out a little differently. On GOG, it took an extensive reinstall, but that was it. The Bioshocks were unworkable in one version, but worked just fine in another form. Heat Signature sometimes worked fine and sometimes went completely dead, until the issue just stopped happening. I was able to completely fix War of the Chosen by fiddling around with my graphics card, but that didn’t work for any of the other games. And finally there was Zombi, completely inert and unfixable.
If there was one solution that always worked, even if it was complicated as hell, that would be one thing. Instead, every time I run into this bug it’s uncharted territory all over again, with the possibility that nothing will work always looming in the distance. I’m glad at least that the worst case scenario only happened that one time. and that I got to play as many games both good and bad as I did this year.
Here’s to playing even more worthwhile stuff (and continuing to write about it!) in 2018.
