I really cannot understand some people. I recently bought Half life 2, the well known first-person shooter game. Recently (almost a month after the purchase), i decided to install it, and play. Then, the nightmare began ...

First of all it requested to install Steam (tm), an network engine that is used to manage the purchased games by Sierra. I whispered to myself, "i don't want it, let's bypass the installation of steam " ... but unfortunatelly, Half Life 2 required this engine to play. So i gave up, installed the engine.

After the install i realized that it wanted an active internet connection to activate the product and play the game. Unfortunatelly, the computer i am using did not have a modem (yes, i am using 56.6k modem to connect to the internet). So i used my laptop computer as a gateway to provide network for my game machine (using NAT).

The engine began to initialize and a wizard like interface came up, introducing me to registration actions, product updates, multiplayer statistics ... After 1 hour and a half, the great gaming experience that i was ready to live, ended up as a nightmare. The game was finally started, but i realized, that when i disconnected from the network, the product became unstable, and demanded ... process termination from the task manager. The next day (today 23rd of April), i started a new game, but i am still forced to download whatever the Steam (tm), requires in order to play the game.

I finally downloaded enough data (almost 50mb) and initialized an offline mode of the game, so i can play without the internet connection. I don't know why Sierra had to come down to this solution to protect their legitimate rights andI think that there is a crack on the loose, somewhere in the net.

Ouch, so much for my 40 €.

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