Seriously Valve?

So, I was installing one of my personal favorite games, Half-Life 2, on my laptop. It has a shitty onboard graphics card, but it’s plenty enough to run the game. I re-downloaded the game through Steam because it’s convenient, as my brother would say, “as a mother-fucker”. Once it’s finished, I start playing the game. I hear G-Man’s “Wake up, Mr. Freeman” speech and the game begins...


I start getting graphical bugs. No problem, says I. I don’t have a great video card... some tweaking should solve this problem. I force it to run under DirectX7 shaders (by entering “-dxlevel70“ in Steam’s advanced launch options) and, voila! problem solved...

...Not really. Anytime Combine soldiers opened fire at me, the game crashed. Even when I shot at them first, crash and bun. Generic “hl2 has stopped working” error (in Vista, btw). How the fuck are you supposed to play a first person SHOOTER if you can’t even SHOOT?!

Recently, HL2 was updated for the Mac release. Before this release, Half-Life 2 worked just fine for me. I understand that I’m running a pretty graphical intensive game on a pretty bad graphics card... but it was totally playable last year. I check some forums to see if anyone else is having problems with the new build... They are.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t live without Half-Life 2. I can’t. Oxygen, Food, Water, Half-Life 2.

I was about to eat a shotgun for lunch, when I decided to try one more thing: download a non-Steam version of the game. After finding a suitable torrent, I download and installed... I nervously click on “NEW GAME”.......

Works like a charm.

What the fuck, Valve? I had to pirate a game I already owned to make it run on my machine. Yes, I do own it:

I understand that opening up, arguably, your finest game to Mac users is a good move... More well deserved cash in your pockets. And I’m sure these new bugs will eventually be eradicated and maybe a future build will be more stable on older, shittier machines. I also understand that updates are necessary to keep an older product exciting. You did add achievements to HL2 (and HL2: Episode 1, Episode 2 already had ‘em) and probably corrected some old bugs. Hell, you may have even added some new textures and updated the graphics a bit. But what the fuck?

If any of the high-ups in Valve read this, please listen. My Steam username is johnnypalooza. I bought the retail version of HL2 for PC in 2006 or maybe 2007 and my product key is registered. I also own the digital version of the original Half-Life. But, I had to pirate a copy of your undisputed masterpiece so I could play it again. I’m sorry. :D

Wait... no I’m not. I wasted a whole goddamn day trying to fix this. And I was sick to boot! Go fuck yourself.

Just kidding.