It wasn’t until I lost my internet connection for two weeks as part of the Connecticut Snow Apocalypse 2011 that I was really bothered by single-player games that function only when connected to the cloud. It started when I was playing Atom Zombie Smasher. It’s a steam game, so it was constantly trying to sync with the cloud. That’s fine when I’m connected, but the issue is that in offline mode, the game would hang for five minutes at a time when quitting. A few times, it froze the machine entirely. The worst came one time when I tried to play and my machine was entirely unable to start Steam due to lack of connectivity. It would try for a while, and then ask me if I wanted to start Steam in offline mode or quit. When I chose to start in offline mode, it would tell me that I’d chosen an invalid option and close out of Steam. I had to tether my phone in order to start the game at all. Starcraft 2 was pretty bad too. Although it let me play the single-player campaign in offline mode sometimes, at other times it would simply not work disconnected.

These games are supposed to work offline and don’t. This makes me even more tentative about games like Diablo 3 which will apparently require constant connectivity. Even Mass Effect 3 will require a one-time online check. As always-on internet connections become more common, I think we’ll begin to see more and more of this. But goddamn it, it bugs me.