Half Life 2 Makes Me Want to Shoot Smack

I asked for, and received Half Life 2 for Christmas.

This was my first mistake.

Half Life uses this ultra-nasty anti-piracy mechanism known as Steam.

The software you purchase on the CD's is encrypted - and has to be reconstructed after registering yourself with Sierra's network.

This much in fact worked alright for me - but it was slow. Other users have not had as good luck and are filing complaints with the FTC! Getting Steam up and working on my system, and the game installed took about an hour.

This is when the problems really started.

The game insisted on automatically updating itself - this took about another 20 minutes.

When I got the game running (finally) - I noticed some graphics anomalies, then about 3 minutes later - boom! Reboot.

I spent a fair amount of time looking for solutions. Over a number of days I tried different graphics drivers and configuration settings.

After the game updated itself a number of more times (it seems to do this almost each time it's started) - things seemed to start working. I managed to get about 20 minutes of solid game play.

The same itself seemed reasonably interesting. Nice physics model / etc.

The next time I played the game - Steam kicked in and did another update.

Now it doesn't run anymore - at all.

In contrast Doom 3 (great game) and Deus Ex 2 both run fine on my system.

Intuit tried installing some copy protection software on my system with TurboTax 2002. They don't get my business anymore either.

Valve / Sierra: clean up your act.

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