I’d like to play Half-Life 2 for no other reason than I own it, and sometimes I play the games I own. Steam would rather install two copies of the game on my harddrive. And two copies of Counter Strike. And two copies of Half-Life deathmatch. And two copies of Steam while it’s at it. Both copies seem to be required in order to run the game, which is ridiculous in and of itself, and would be merely a very large, Gabe Newell-sized nuisance… if Half-Life 2 even ran it all. It used to run, back about this time last year. Now it just spends five minutes loading the intro screen and then freezes 30 seconds into the game.

Maybe Valve is punishing me for never buying the original Half-Life, or maybe this has something to do with Steam’s insistence that my very much up to date video drivers are, in fact, not up to date.

There is a reason most of the games I own are console games.