Doctor Frog’s Pontification Pad

I installed the Half-Life 2 demo about a month and a half ago. I was impressed with not only the graphics quality, but also the efficiency with which the game ran on my doddering old system. It was also apparent how much sheer work had gone into the look of the game, from the hi-res textures to the thoughtful little touches that brought the demo to life. The much-trumpeted gravity gun was a fun little novelty that soon wore off, and the gameplay was about as linear as the original Half-Life, and almost as fun.

The demo download was also over 700 megabytes, took forever to download from fileplanet.com, and then had to download more than 35 megabytes of update patches after it had been installed. It now sits idle, sucking up 3.5 GIGABYTES on my hard drive. Not a SINGLE FULL GAME on my system takes up that much space, and this is JUST A DEMO.

And so, farewell, Steam, with your required, arbitrary startup “helper” application that continually badgers me to buy Valve games every time I run it. And farewell to your borderline spyware bloat.

I look forward to playing this landmark PC game when it hits the bargain bin (and it will), and when the game can be reliably divorced from what one grumbling soul referred to as “the Steam virus.”

The ubuntu style for blackbox is based on the default theme for Ubuntu Linux, “Human.” Human is the only theme I have ever seen that makes extensive use of brown in a way that I could live with. So I just had to steal their idea and replicate it here! ubuntu comes with a bsetroot background and a 3dc style, to convert your windows background and window style to match the overall theme.

ubuntu is a style designed for bblean for Windows, but should work for any other *box shell. Find out more about blackbox shells at bb4win.org.