As there is a new, exciting Valve game on the near horizon (Left 4 Dead), I thought I might put up another post about the SDMB Steam community. It’s a great way to coordinate gaming efforts or at least play with other like-minded (read: mature) people.
It can be found here:
Anyone looking forward to L4D?
That’s cool!
Unfortunately, nobody is playing games that run on my (old-ass) machine. 
I pretty much hit the wall with HL2.
I am absolutely looking forward to L4D and I actually signed up with the SDMB community a couple of days ago. Now I just need to add some people as friends so we can get a foursome going in the demo. Who’s with me??
ETA: I use the same name in steam as I do here.
Well…at the moment I’m a little miffed at Steam and Valve; I finally got around to purchasing Portal (an impulse buy at $9.99 when I was at Best Buy the other day), and the darn thing won’t run. I’ve deleted and reinstalled a couple of times, but it always hangs on the “Loading…” screen (you know, the one that displays with the blurry image of the actual game).
I’m pretty sure it’s not my computer - it’s a top-of-the line Alienware that I bought a little over a year ago, and it’s had no trouble running HL2 and subsequent episodes, WoW, Fallout 3, etc.
Grumble.
Right click on the Portal icon, go to properties and add to the command prompt the line “-console” without the quotation marks. It should now read Portal.exe -console or Portal -console. try to start the game again.
Looking forward to it, but with a great deal of exasperation.
I will have to go on the pile behind
Fallout 3
Farcry 2
Dead Space
Red Alert
Warhammer: Age of Reckoning
Warhammer Online
and a couple of others that escape me at the moment.
I really need to take a month off from work to get a leg up on my gaming.
grumbles
Still no joy, I’m afraid.
Might it help to try and run it in a window, rather than full screen?
I hate to experiment too much with this, because when it does hang, ALT+TAB doesn’t work, and the only way for me to recover is to power off the computer (by holding down the power button until the computer shuts down) and then power back on. I prefer not to do that any more than I absolutely have to.
I’ll have to join the group when I get home. Anyone play Condition Zero?
Never heard of it 'til now. Interesting; could be my next game after I tire of Fallout 3.
I posted this in the L4D thread but I’ll post it here too since it really improves steam functionality:
I sent some messages to people about joining our game but didn’t get a response. In some cases I suspect they don’t have it set up so that they can receive steam messages in game. To do that, go to the main steam window-> file -> settings _> in-game tab _> and then click “Enable Steam Community In-Game” - then whenever you hit shft-tab it pulls up an overlay which will let you respond to messages in game, add friends, send invites, etc.
Let’s get this thing going!
I joined the SDMB Steam community way back when we first started it, and almost forgot that it existed until now.
I’m “furlough” on Steam and have recently been playing Far Cry 2.
If anyone wants to try it a few friends and I used to have stupid amounts of fun doing the Half-Life 2 Deathmatch thing. The catch - we would do gravity-gun only matches, so no guns: just stuff you can throw at someone else. It’s completely on the honor system but when you get three guys running around a room all trying to throw sinks at each other you’ll see why we had so much fun!
I just got your invite Senor Beef, sadly it looks like you are done playing.
And I cant seem to get anyone’s attention. There’s 5 people playing Left 4 Dead right now, but none will reply to my chat requests and I can’t figure out how to join their in-progress games. Steam has a confusing interface in my opinion.
Right click their name and click join game.
As far as replies - only about half the people I sent messages to replied, which is why I suspected they may not have the in-game steam community overlay enabled.
Given that a slate of new games have come out that are multiplayer and coop oriented, I’m going to bump this thread so people new to the group can sign up.
I’m guessing the L4D2 game will be particularly active, since we had full 8-man versus games with nothing but SDMB players every night of the week for months.
I’m looking forward to CoD:MW2 coming out soon, and would like to try some MP again, as long as people don’t mind a really shitty player. I’ve been practicing, but
Looks like Borderlands will be my next purchase. I’d be up for some Doper multiplayer with that.
I joined the group - I’m “kmatheny” on Steam - but don’t have L4D or L4D2 yet. Too many other games claiming my precious spare moments right now.
Just a heads-up. Our little Steam group has attracted a spammer of Steam phishing sites.
Yep - just got a chat request from something named “Free game” and it said we shared the SDMB in common.
Yeah, I got a message and I was trying to boot him, but I can’t find a mechanism to do that. Probably doesn’t matter anyway, I suspect the bots just try to randomly join as many groups as they can, send messages, then leave.