Half-Life 2 MINUS Steam - Is it possible?

I have to agree with the OP on a few points.

I hate steam, I don't want it. I just want HL2 on my PC and when I double click the shortcut, the game launches. End.

Piracy will ALWAYS get around any form of software protection you give it, HDMI for example, they spent MILLIONS on it, yet some dude has already cracked it.

Oh and my offline mode doesn't work either.
 
Concorde Rules said:
I have to agree with the OP on a few points.

I hate steam, I don't want it. I just want HL2 on my PC and when I double click the shortcut, the game launches. End.

Piracy will ALWAYS get around any form of software protection you give it, HDMI for example, they spent MILLIONS on it, yet some dude has already cracked it.

Oh and my offline mode doesn't work either.
Click to expand...

But the game won't launch until you put thew CD in. Which takes longer than it does to load steam in my experience. Ok you can patch the game so it doesn't need a CD but then that is no better than patching HL2 so it doesn't need Steam.
Steam almost certainly does reduce piracy because it is much more effort to pirate than traditional games. if Valve want to do it then good for them. pirates are the scurge of the games industry, especially on the PC. If people didn't feel the need to steal from developers/publishers then we wouldn't have these security measures.
That aside, as i said, i really do like Steam.

As for taking ages to decrypt. Its a few minutes more on top of installing the title first off. It only occurs once and you have no other hassle. I don't see how it's any worse than before, it just takes a few minutes longer.
 
Phnom_Penh said:
I remember when I was a wee lad, I was able to buy Half Life in a big orange box, and I was able to install Half Life and play it, without screwing around. :p
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yep, but that didnt need steam. If it had i doubt you'd of come on here complaining about it! :D

Its like buying a game that needs a DX10 GFX card and then whinging because youve only got a DX9 card!

If you do not like steam then do not buy a steam game!
 
Tombo said:
You can't bypass steam without using pirated copies anyway.
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So the whole copy of HL2 has to be cracked to bypass Steam? It's not possible to just download a modified exe and off you go? :(
 
I much prefer steam and wish more games took it up. Im not talking about EA link, which is a pile of poo. I like having games automatically patched. I backup my steam every couple of months, so to reinstall everything is just a single click on a file. (Also backed up to DVD's and my NAS)
 
You can bypass it using a method that decrypts all the content gcfs and uses a modified exe/something too.

I only use it because at our LAN events we will *ALWAYS* have issues with steam offline mode and it's the only way around it. At home I have an inet connection 24/7 so I just use steam as per normal.
 
Aekeron said:
You can bypass it using a method that decrypts all the content gcfs and uses a modified exe/something too.

I only use it because at our LAN events we will *ALWAYS* have issues with steam offline mode and it's the only way around it. At home I have an inet connection 24/7 so I just use steam as per normal.
Click to expand...

Care to share? :)

If you don't want to talk about it on here, my email is in my trust.
 
Steam has its good points but overall its horrendous. There are still people in this world without internet access, steam rules out HL2 for them. I cant play offline as steam refuses to let me without telling valve i wish to do so. It doesnt stop piracy because there are a lot of pirate copies floating about on the torrent sites. Sure, you cant play online with a pirate copy, but you cant with most games - only one person per cd-key.
My main issue is with the updates. If i just want to play a game for an hour or so, i want this to be available immediately. I hate the fact if tehres a new patch steam insists on downloading it before i can play. Why? it was fine before, and if i want to update i will - i just want to play the version i was playing yesterday!
I have to agree that steam is a step backwards not forwards in terms of customer satisfaction.
No "if you dont like steam dont buy a steam game" please, i want to be able to play a game without the bloatware that comes with it. The old days where you installed and clicked the shortcut were the best. What was wrong with it? It was simple and effective, something that steam tries hard not to be
 
Whilst it is possible to do (since it appears that you are going to do it) the outside of the box states that you will have to have an internet connection to play the game.

I agree that it shouldn't be the case but I installed HL2 again at the weekend knowing after 2 years there would be some updating and went to get me a sandwich. I had my lunch and the game was ready to be played (well nearly it had to decrypt the game files which took anther 10 mins)

Still I was warned on the back of the box that I would need to connect to the net.

I agree that we should not have to download updates though obviously a bug in the system. Unless HL2 didn't actually work out of the box?
 
It worked reasonably well on a fair few systems when it came out. It's odd that you're forced to download updates... Though personally I hate not having a game running it's latest version (even though I'll often not even be able to notice the difference).
 
I got half life 2 when it came out.

At the time I didn't have internet where I was living. However, I took my PC elsewhere, installed the game and activated it online, and then set it use 'offline' mode.

This worked fine for about a month, before it randomly lost my password and I was left not being able to play a game that I had legitimately purchased.

I think that is pretty pathetic. It has it uses for patching and updating, and it's nice to be able to install your games on different PCs without the disk.

As an anti-piracy measure, however, it sucks. There have been pirate copies of HL2 floating around since day 1, and yet I, a customer who had legitimately purchased the game, was left unable to play it.

This is unacceptable as far as I'm concerned.
 
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