Got steam back! I'm going on the Half Life 2 source forums to see if they know a tried and true way to register w/o a CD.
if you buy directly from steam or just buy the game and install steam, thenregister the CD key, you can download HL2 directly from steam, which means theres no need for a CD. Thats how I got HL2, it took a couple of hours on my 2MB connection.
Well after several boring months of waiting I'm finally playing HL2, it's pretty good so far but I'm not really impressed with how it runs on my pc. The only way I can get it to run without much of a hitch is by turning the textures quality to medium, which causes things to look pretty crappy. Still the gameplay holds, the physics rock (I love just going in a building and throwing everything out the window, expecially the TV), and the facial animations are amazing. The only prob is I don't understand why I have to connect to play, I thought after I'm signed in under a registered profile I can just boot up the game off-line? But when I double-click on the icon it opens up steam, opens the account, and prepairs to run the game. Which is annoying for everyone in the house who wants to make calls, at least it doesn't need the cd in at the same time. How does it run on the rest of your systems? I've only got it @ 800x600, trilinear filtering, high shadows, high char. detail, no AA or AF, reflect world, and texture quality: medium. And that runs pretty well but that's about all I can get away with, I just can't allow myself to lower the character detail, it's a psycological thing I guess.
you can start steam in offline mode and play it. Just turn off any connections, start up steam and it should say something about no network and would you like to start in offline mode.
For some reason when I used to start it offline it would ask me to connect, but now when I try starting it it just gives me the prepairing to play HL2 dialogue and goes into the game, it's great. Though for some reason when ever I click on any of the home screen icons like "load" or "resume" it will stick for a few seconds and I'll have to wait for things to process and listen to the same sound repeating for a bit before anything happens, it's really weird. Anyone else had this or is it just me?
