So I know that Valve was all stoked about their new Steam thing, but did they *have* to force us to go through it to install the game? I bought the DVD for a reason, I’m not ready to screw around with their new system. And sure enough, my suspicions proved true. My copy of half-life2 got here a couple hours ago, and I haven’t played it yet. Because I can’t create an account on Steam. Every piece of the form I submit takes 5+ minutes, and the final form which says “Create account” just fails. Every time I try, I get a different error code, usually network related.

For the love of god, give me an offline option for installation, Valve!

Update: After spending the last hour or so trying over and over again to create my account, it finally went through! Now the error says “Your username is already in use.” Agh. So now I get to start all over again with a different username, and maybe in another hour find out whether or not this new username is taken.

Update: Even more fun to be had. After finding out that “spaceninja” wasn’t available, I decided to just jump to “obeso” like I did for xbox live. Again, I go through the whole thing, and get error after error. Except this time, something went wrong, and instead of getting only the “back” button after the error, I got the “next” button. I got a success message saying my account has been setup. I can’t login with Obeso, because it times out. I can’t try to recreate the Obeso account because it says the username is taken. I can’t retreive the password because it says the username doesn’t exist. This is starting to seriously suck.

Update: Hooray! It finally worked! Two and a half hours it took, but I’m now the proud owner of “ObesoThePirate” on steam. Now I get to try to log in!

Update: Tycho at Penny Arcade‘s take on my Steam problems:

Apparently people who bought it at retail had some trouble getting their copies running right, it was fixed shortly thereafter. I’m given to understand that people who ride horses to work or in other ways live their lives discordant with science and reason also suffer because of their strict adherence to anachronism. Get with the fucking program. Stop mixing those specious folk remedies and download your games directly from the Intertron.