Endgame Viable

Okay well now I can join the ranks of people who have had problems with Steam. Apparently there was a Steam update to Company of Heroes on Sep 27. For some reason, the update didn’t work properly (in my case, it may have failed because I ran out of disk space), and since then I’ve been getting those unhelpful “game is unavailable, try again later” messages whenever I try to launch the game.

I did some Googling and did all the things everyone suggested, including deleting a blob file, validating the cache files, deleting game content and re-downloading, etc. Eventually I found a COH forum message ([http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=603772)][1] from someone stating that he had found some Event Log error messages generated by Company of Heroes from something called “SideBySide,” and that after installing a Microsoft VC++ patch, the problem was fixed. Lo and behold, that fixed my problem, too. Score one for the gaming community, zero for the gaming industry.

Update: The patch also trashes the radio chatter voices. [Another forum thread][2] directed me to switch languages to Spanish (or whatever) and then back to English, and then it re-downloads the correct files and it works again.

[1]: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=603772)%20stating [2]: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=603905