Recently the hacker 'simulator' Uplink was made available over Steam. As I had not played the game and I had such found memories of Darwinia, I was eager to experience the title that started Introversion off. The provision of some credit card details and a quick flex of my ADSL modem was all that was required to have the game stored locally on my computer.

Unfortunately once I started the thing up I noticed that images and text were getting cut off. Sighing rather heavily I went off to the Steam Support page to see if there was an answer to my problem. Unfortunately, due to the relative recency with which Uplink appeared on Steam, there were no entries of any sort to be found. Oh well, the forums will no doubt have complaints by now if this is a regular problem. A couple of bugs were mentioned on the Steam forums but none relating to my issue. Once again being an early adopter left me in the dark.

Now considering how many times I have dealt with customer support for various publishers in the past, I thought the most expedient option would be to post a message on the forums to enquire if anyone else had experienced the issue and had a work around. Thanks to Posting and You I've felt little compulsion to join the Steam forums until now so a registering I went. At the end of this process I tried to make a post describing my problem but was met with a message informing me I had no ability to make a thread since my account registration was in queue to be moderated. What? Didn't I just go through an email activation process? What possible service could this further moderation achieve?

A little despondent I went back to the support page to register my question. The text informed me that I should create an account and then ask a question regarding my problem. Huzzah, more registrations. So I registered and noted the text said that if I couldn't find an answer to my question I should make use of the Ask A Question tab. Guess what? No such tab exists. I was using Opera though and some websites that are not truly W3C standards compliant display incorrectly in that browser. So next I tried logging in using IE only to be met with another perplexing problem.

The darned thing kept saying my password was wrong. To say I was getting cranky by now would be a major understatement. Of course the next step was to ask for the system to send me my password via email. No problems. The email comes through and informs me that despite entering in my desired password during the registration process no password was set. That's right, to log on I had to leave the password field blank.

Guess what? That's right. No Ask a Question tab. This time I Googled about looking for alternate ways of contacting Valve's support team only to run across a link on some other forum pointing me to the Ask A Question page. Finally… I don't even need to log on. I enter my question and I'm away.

Having to deal with such unintuitive mechanisms for getting a simple question answered (I have actually solved the problem on my own since then, it was a conflict between Windows Blinds and Uplink) is ridiculous. I'm sure Valve is not the only culprit here and it isn't because they are going out of their way to screw consumers over. They just don't think from the perspective of their customer and end up failing them as a result.

Managing to put this on 'paper' has eased my upset somewhat, especially since I managed to fix the issue myself. Unfortunately I have discovered something more frustrating; the game freezes my whole system after 2 - 5 mins play.

Damn I hate Mondays.