So I was reading an article today that struck a cord of nostalgia in me. It was about a game I frankly hadn't played in many years, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth. It got me hankering to redownload it and play it again, so I downloaded it. It's only about six gigs so it took only about a couple minutes or so. Tried to run it; nothing happened.
Reached out to my resources in various forums and they were sayin' I had to do all sorts of tricks and songs and dances they suggested but basically it was way too complicated for a 20-year-old game with ancient Civ 4 graphics so I just gave up and uninstalled it.
It was about this time I noticed that down in the bottom right corner whenever the task bar would pop up, my new Windows 11 install was requesting an update. So I clicked on it and let it do its thing. I thought it'd be a little security patch or something. Oh no it was a big old update and it took a good 20 minutes with many reboots. When it came back sure enough a lot of things had changed.
First off I noticed that when it went through its reinitiation and the lock screen came up, it had a different Windows 11 default background. So I went into settings to change that and for some reason I wound up in the wrong setting place and I accidentally clicked on the graphic that I had chosen for my lock screen to be my desktop background. When I realized I made the mistake I tried to go back and correct it but my original photo that I use for my desktop background was gone from the selection. I clicked on browse photos and I couldn't find it anywhere. Why did Windows 11 delete it?
Well, I thought, a minor inconvenience, after all it is an MSI desktop wallpaper that I got directly from their website. Long story short, I go to their website, they have 47 pages of desktop wallpapers in various configurations and styles and patterns, oh my, but not the one I had. They must have discontinued that pattern.
So now I did a Google Image Search. And the new image search AI sucks. It was pulling up anything but searching for that image. I think because of the new AI algorithms it tries to think "Well what is it that they're looking for with this image?" and it was pulling up things like if this particular background was part of a YouTube video and I'd click on that and find out it's a YouTube video that has nothing to do with this background it just happened to appear in the video. Or some other nonsense.
I finally found it after scouring through tons of image samples and it looked like it was available for download from one of those fly by night desktop wallpaper websites where you don't know what the fuck you're going to be downloading turn off, anxiety producing enough, I click on download and nothing happens except a little bit of a graphic showing it's working. I go to another site that has it as well it tries to block me by preventing me from downloading it because they want me to sign up even though it says free download. Oh man these crappy sites they just want to harvest your information. Well screw that I know way around that. Pulled up view source went directly to the HTML code and downloaded directly from that. So after about a half hour of laborious work I got my wallpaper back.
But that wasn't the only part of the nightmare that would continue on through the day. That's right this whole day has been filled with update problems. Turns out this update was the update to what they call version 24H2. So not only did it mess with those two settings that I just mentioned that directly correlate to Windows itself but also applications on Windows that affect pretty much everything. I've noticed my graphics are a little bit different and I went into my AMD graphics software but I couldn't tell what was going on other than that it looked a little bit off but frankly by the time I went into that other things were starting to perturb me that were much more problematic and I had to deal with them.
The main thing was this somewhere along the line I thought I'd take a break from it all and just have a nice relaxing game of good old Civ 5. You know, the game might play pretty much every freaking day. The game I basically couldn't live without. The game that is pretty much almost as important as this blog. The game I live by.
Open Steam, click start, looks like it acknowledges my click for a second or two, and then reverts back to just simply the green start button. In other words it ignores me. Nothing happens. The game doesn't start.
Now a few months ago, Steam changed the way this game plays and had played since it's initial turnout years ago where the publisher had it launching from a launcher. Originally, you click start in Steam, then the 2K launcher would pop up and you click start from there. It was a minor inconvenience and frankly a lot of games do that. If EA puts games on Steam, they do that, and many other publishers as well, most notably any Paradox games. This gives those Publishers another opportunity to try to push DLC or other titles that they've published directly at you basically pushing ads in your face before you start your game. It's irritating, I agree I hate it, but I've come to learn to just deal with it. So it was surprising for such an old game like this when Steam decided to eliminate the launcher. But I didn't complain. One less pain in the ass and it worked just fine without it. And, ever since my upgrade to Windows 11 a week or so ago however long it was, I've played Civ 5 several times without any problem. But it was just today after this big update that it was doing this.
I check on my friendly forums and subreddits and lo and behold this issue is flaring the fuck up today all since this rollout of this update. Now I don't think that the update was universally rolled out to everyone today I think others got it earlier a bunch of us got it today maybe others will get it later that's the way they do this, I'm familiar with that, but I know I was part of a big group today that experienced the same issue because the forums were crammed with people screaming WTF. To the brainiacs, and the people with patience that went and figured out the solution, I have to give them hail and hardy congrats, because, as we know, with stuff like this, you're not likely to get much help from either the publisher, Steam, or specially Microsoft. Each will point their fingers at the other in a way not actually directly saying so and each will shirk their responsibility in coming up with an actual solution since doing so may actually point the finger directly at themselves and they wouldn't want to be doing that now would they.
So it was a bit of a song and dance to get it to work, it dealt with deleting a few files, pouring a salt circle around a pentagram, invoking the Great Spaghetti Monster, and maybe saying a Hail Mary just for the fuck of it, but after several hours of pulling what little hair I have on my head out the familiar bassy tones of the beginning of the theme music heralded the start of Civ 5.
Of course, part of the song and dance and Hail Mary process required deleting the majority of everything I'd saved so it went through the opening video, and I had to go into options to reset my custom settings, and of course, all my saved games went bye-bye. No big. Let's face it I hardly ever go back into a save game.
So far the other major thing that had occurred with this update were my sound settings; they had been messed with as well so I had to go and reset them in my RealTek software.
So I guess today proves that you can't always start singing it was so easy until you know all the kinks have been worked out. Especially when it's one of the most contentious upgrades in Windows history. I'm just crossing my fingers that this is the worst it'll get cuz I'm too old for this shit. A younger me used to love to troubleshoot this. I don't find it a fun challenge any longer. It's just a big headache. And at my age I got enough aches and pains thank you very much.