Have seen a fair bit of bitching aimed at Valve with regard to Steam, the distribution & authorization system required to run Half Life 2. Until now I had assumed that people were shitty because they couldn’t play the game until they had authorized their copy via Steam… but now I realize [my internet connection being temporarily down] that you can’t play unless you are connected… ie you can only ever launch this [single player] game while you are online!

When I tried to run HL2 without a net connection I got an error saying “This operation cannot be completed when Steam is in offline mode.” Even though the game still appears in the Steam menu with a launch option. Showing properties on HL2 explicitly declares: “Offline Mode: Ready” – Silly me had assumed that this meant: “Ready to play” , when of course I should have read it as: “Ready to tell you to fuck off, even though you’ve just spent US$60 to download this game”

Until now I had considered Steam to be a slightly fiddly but logical way to distribute content, but now I see it more as a steaming pile of shit, effectively forcing my computer to ask Valve’s permission every single time I want to play this game.

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UPDATE: It seems I am mistaken, it is not so simple as I had thought, and now it does seem possible to play offline without hacking; unlike earlier today [???], if I disable my net connection I can now can play Half-Life 2 offline – so basically, I don’t have a clue what the problem was before, but the official word is that offline play is supported. Apologies for the half-cocked rant, but hey, you know… Half-Life 2…