Bit Stirrer

I've lost count of the times this has happened to me. I'm sure there are plenty of other blog posts and news articles that vent about this particular topic - but I just have to let off a little Steam...

So I'm sitting at my PC, I've just finished hacking away at some bugs in a little app I'm working on and I want to unwind. I think to myself, "Hmmm, I should play a game. I haven't played HL2 for a while... I'll have a bit of a play through."

So I go click on the Steam icon and then I wait... I wait while Steam (Valve) validates I haven't pirated my copy of HL2 and the various other games I have in steam FOR THE BILLIONTH TIME!

But that's not even the thing I'm griping about. Not even close. If that's all Steam did, I'd be fine.

So Steam, even though I have turned off updates for all my games, insists on updating them when I go to play them. Where I live, bandwidth costs me money per bit! So Valve think they have the right to just steal my bandwidth to check security and update games I've already payed good money for?!? Okay... Whatever, that's not what I'm harping about either.

Here's the problem: every few months Valve creates an "update" to one of the games... or all of the games which has "Unforeseen Consequences"... Yeah, that's right. They FORCE an update on my games that BREAKS them.

So, I try and load up HL2 and what happens? Well, Steam has made the games 64bit compatible. No more of that 32bit nonsense. Problem is, the game hangs as soon as the pretty little tab appears saying "64bit"... So I wait, maybe it's loading.

Nope.

Just hangs.

So now, just to play a little bit of a game to unwind, I've got to google the solution to this problem. THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF UNWINDING I WANTED, VALVE!

Anyway, yeah. Steam sucks... We all know it. I just had to get that outta my system.