It's what comes out of my ears...

Bloody Steam. 

I was forced to install this in order to play a game I buy every release - Football Manager. Sports Interactive will always find some way of diminishing my enjoyment of their excellent title every year, usually connected to DRM somehow*. This year, their game Football Manager 2012 had to have Steam (a sort of games shop by Half Life creators Valve, which behaves in some very strange ways indeed) even if you bought the boxed version, or you can't play Football Manager this year at all. Unless you download it for nothing off Pirate Bay.

My assumption was that it was only one game for one year and that I could always get rid of steam in 12 months time, or at worst get a pirate copy of the game once a decent one is available and uninstall Steam that way, but to date I've complied and installed one piece of software so that I can install another, which is nonsense. 

The first problems came along very quickly. I play FM with an editor and a scout, have done for years, never with any bother. Scouts are programs that take the save file and show me information about players in it the way I tell it to, as opposed to the way the game shows them to me. It gives me control of my data. Editors come in handy when you play Garath McCleary down the wing and notice they've made him white, however these manipulate your data while it is in memory. Again, compatibility with the game version and save version is paramount. 

Steam auto-updates games, and I would fire up my game once a week to find it had been patched again, unbeknownst to me, which would then involve me having to download new versions of scout and editor each time. Laborious and unhelpful, particularly if I'm only on for a quick go. Eventually, I came to learn that even though I want to be prompted to install any update for any game on Steam, I did not have that choice, it was nowhere in the menus. Instead I have to go through game by game specifying it like Floella Benjamin trying each shaped window on Playschool. Awesome. 

In any case, I long since told Steam to leave my Football Manager game alone. This has reduced the interference of Steam to a simple minute-long delay when I click the FM icon on my desktop before it begins loading. I have no idea what Steam does during this pointless period but in a very great number of years of PC gaming (My first were HHGTTG by Infocom and Starglider) I've never known a game need to sit there doing sod all for sixty seconds before showing me so much as a splash screen. So well done on that. What has caused me to pen this sarcy little post is that today I've tried in vain to fire up FM2012 and have a couple of matches while I wait for the Forest vs. Bristol City match to begin, but apparently I can fuck off, because a big update is downloading for Football Manager. Just like I told it not to. 

Even better, the desktop icon for FM now doesn't lead anywhere. Thanks, SI! Thanks, Steam!

I've been buying Football Manager since it was called Championship Manager on the Atari ST, sixteen or seventeen years ago. I'm looking for a compelling reason not to just help myself to it in future. 

* Everything from throwing a shit-fit when I dare to try to play a CD in my CD drive to throwing a strop at what other software I've got installed (clue: none of your fucking business, whoever you are) to simply not allowing me to play until I connect to a server that isn't there. That was a great day I took off work, sat reading the pirates on the forums go on about how good the game was while the box sat forlornly on my desk like an impotent porn star.


**UPDATE** - The update was enormous and it will be a few days before they update the scout, which means that I can't progress with my game as I'm at a point where scouting is vital to what I'm trying to achieve. Even though after half an hour it has condescended to let me play my game, I still can't.