Good day sirs, i would like to thank all those who posted in my Gentlemans Special Intrest thread yesterday, it helped me out a lot and i had a good time last night thanks to that.

Now, i have another problem that i need help with and thankfully this is more to do with gaming than gentlemans buisness.

See, the thing is with all these steam sales and such i find myself buying a good many of these games however i have one problem and that is that a few times (especially in the past couple of months) steam has just ceased to work and i have had to backup my games then uninstall and reinstall steam again which just isn't all that helpful.

Now i have heard that there is a way to play steam games that i own without steam. I have heard of a website called Gamecopyworld in which i would be able to download something such an exe for a game i own to be able to run the game without having to load up that bothersome steam client!

Now can anyone confirm this and possible give any advise on how this works? I don't have anything against steam it's just that it becomes rather tiresome to load it up every time i want to play games and with it crashing and all hohohoho!

Your feedback would be appreicated gentleman, thank you.

- ChickenHero

Your game copy world idea is commonplace though shady, also I would advise against that particular site.

Basically your looking for a crack, I dunno how it works with steam though, I just use offline mode if I need to.

Out of interest, concerning your thread last night, Im slightly concerned at to what you were doing with the helmet....

You would advise against that site? Very well sir... i know you may not want to mention a site here then but could you point me in the right direction for a location of an exe or crack to play without steam?

My helmet? Why sir.... what i did with my helmet is very private :) Hmm so gamecopyworld is ok then? Thanks for the explanation though, i'm still not sure if downloading cracks/exes is 100% safe though however you said it worked with some games right?

Really? Why? It is one of the more reputable sites for that kind of stuff. Just make sure you visit it with a secure browser, they have lots of shady ad stuff there, but the files themselves are perfectly fine.

Ive used the site twice, both files were packed with keyloggers

Probably false positives....cracks are always coming up on AV apps as various things...even when clean.

The cracks work 100% for the retail versions of the games. Due to some games on Steam that use SteamWorks are being updated quite a lot, crackers usually give up trying to crack every version.

But! Most games on Steam that don't use SteamWorks and have also been released as retail, can be made Steam-less just by replacing the exe with a cracked one.

Legally, it's also possible to run all DOSbox games without running Steam.

Right this day down, because I will probably never say this again: GameRager is right. That was likely a false positive. A lot of cracks do some pretty hinky things to get around copy protection and DRM. Many of the "tricks" they use are virus-like in their methodology and implementation, but are not actually viruses. Their similarity to a virus is enough to make the overly cautious heuristic scans on anti-virus products go on alert.

Personally, I've never seen an AV go crazy because of a crack for a game, and it really should not, because most protections can be removed simply by hex editing the exe.

Maybe reaver894 went to some link that was located on GCW at the time?

Yes, most can get by with a simple hex edit, but I have encountered more than one that involves replacing not just the EXE, but also related DLLs (usually on Tages protected games) and at least one of those was reported by my old anti-virus as a potential keylogger (or it might have been a trojan, can't remember for sure) when it actually wasn't.

Bah i'm right alot of time...though not usually as coherent as I was when I wrote that. :)

I tend to dislike the Steam client just because it's so incredibly bloated. I pretty much always end up having to set the affinity to a single core and dial it down to lowest priority. Failure to do that results in games for which I have plenty of processing power becoming a slide show.

I've seen that on both DNF and FO:NV, my specs are more than enough for both games and yet they run like a slide show if I don't put steam in its place. It's a shame that the alternative is cracking it.

Can I just poke my head in here to say thanks, guys? I've been wondering if something like this was possible for a while now, so as soon as I saw this thread I had to try the idea out. And, though so far I've only tried it on a handful of games (specifically, Lego Batman, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Oblivion and GTA San Andreas) and it seems to have worked like a charm (bar one or two of the cracks being flagged by MSE as viruses). You guys are awesome.