Woohoo! I’ve beaten it! Half Life 2’s installer, that is. Almost as much fun as the game itself, although not quite.

First, the DVD doesn’t work in my PC. But “Ah!”, I think, “That clever Steam thingy should just let me activate the game and then download it!”. So I enter my key into Steam – and it asks for the DVD. Hm. Try again.

I check the DVD in my laptop – it works there, but my laptop sure as hell won’t run Half Life 2 – at least not in any way that you’d want to play it. However, my laptop does have an external USB hard drive. Sooo… copy all the install files to that, then plug the hard drive into my PC and install from there. Woot! It’s installed! Double click on Half-Life 2, enter activation key and… “Please insert DVD”. Bah, foiled again.

How about… Steam keeps track of games online, doesn’t it? So if a game is activated in my account, I should be able to play it anywhere, right? Hmmm… So if I install Steam on my laptop and activate it there, I ought to be able to play it on my PC, right?

Cup of tea first. Ah, that’s better.

Woohoo! Half Life 2 activated! Now, turn off laptop and connect to Steam again on my PC.

Oh. Why does it keep telling me to pay for Half Life 2? Quit, reload. Still telling me to pay for it. Reboot PC. Still telling me to pay for it. Something not right here.

Wait, what? I have to tell Steam to log me out and then log back in again for it to notice I’ve activated a new game? That’s retarded, that is.

But… w00t! It works. Three hours later, I finally have Half Life 2 working. Brilliant. If only all installs could be so simple.

Oh, and in other news, Starship Troopers doesn’t work, so I don’t know if it’s any good or not.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.