We gave our impressions of Space Pirates and Zombies last week, and spoke about our issues getting the game to run. In fact, this was included as part of the story's headline. Overall, we enjoyed the game, but we did mention the connection issues that plagued our writer's review session. This did not sit well with MinMax Games, which sent us an e-mail saying the issue was either with our connection or a temporary issue with Steam's server. In fact, other readers have written to us since the post ran, saying they too were having issues with Steam that day.

After looking at the evidence the developer presented to us and doing some research of my own, including going through a number of threads about the game, I have concluded the developer was right. We did some more testing, and we were provided a copy of the game that launched by itself, without needing an outside service. We found no further issues.

We live in interesting times, when the way we play the games can impact the games themselves. How a game launches, whether it's authenticated, and how it runs can all be affected by the digital distribution platform we play the games on. This rarely causes any issues, but in this case it did, and we inadvertently harmed the reputation of a developer we respect. For that, we apologize.

We're also going to change how we test games we play. Online games will no longer be played over wireless connections. Instead, the PCs we use to review games will be connected over Ethernet. That way we can remove wireless networks from the equation. If we see an issue and it's possible it could be the fault of the service we're using or our connection, we're going to wait at least 24 hours to see if we can reproduce the issue. These are simple things, but they should go a long way to making sure this doesn't happen again.

Again, we apologize for the slip-up, we thank MinMax Games for their patience, and at the very least this was a learning process for us. Also, you should buy Space Pirates and Zombies. I've been playing myself during testing, and I have had a wonderful time.