Another triple-A PC release, another series of cryptic driver conflicts and random crash bugs. Perhaps I'd be able to stomach Half-Life 2's idiosyncratic batch of showstoppers better if they didn't partly stem from Steam, whose Big Brother-like tendencies seem slightly ironic, given Half-Life's Orwellian subject matter. While it'd be an exaggeration to say we're living under the digital equivalent of marshal law, Valve's digital delivery service has been hitting some major bumps and snags.

Steam was presented to the public as a new, more direct means of purchasing a suite of games they were likely already planning to buy. Circumventing brick and mortar resellers (along with Valve's own publishers, with which the company is currently undergoing heavy litigation), Steam sounded like the perfect embodiment of the internet ideal: to empower the individual. Valve's 1998 opus, which has proven to be one of the most influential games of all time, leant Gabe Newell and friends a certain amount of credibility as innovators. So, millions pre-loaded the new Source Engine offerings via www.steampowered.com. After all, Steam would be required to launch the game anyway, so why trouble with five CDs?

Immediately upon the game's launch, Valve's digital delivery revolution was riddled with problems. Users cheerily encountered delays of several hours, as well as some Steam caching and validation bugs, realizing that rarely did a launch of this magnitude go off without a hitch. MMOGs made a convenient comparison, as these seem to always, in their infancies, be plagued by overloaded servers. Furthermore, PC gamers have grown accustomed to buying games that don't work out of the box, even if that "box" comes in the form of downloaded data packets.

Unfortunately, the issues didn't stop there. Steam's singular use of Punkbuster technology caused myriad crashes with Radeon cards—the very hardware that Valve and ATI will breathlessly assure you fosters the best HL2 experience. It's no coincidence that ATI's Catalyst 4.9 drivers were updated twice on Half-Life's launch day, although neither was specifically marked as the driver endorsed by the G-Man, or even the Combine.

Some users' troubles were resolved. Others, like me, have encountered the now-notorious stuttering problem. This issue makes the game's brilliantly-written, well-acted, meticulously-recorded spoken dialogue sound like it's being spun and scratched by Grandmaster Flash. Worse, these stutters would occasionally fulminate into full-blown, inescapable audio loops, capable of taking a whole system down. Valve hastily released a Steam update to solve this problem, which may in part be caused by the way Steam and Half-Life synergistically cache audio. Valve suggested downloading the fix, and revalidating your Half-Life 2 installation.

Of course, although the fix apparently helped a few, I was still out of luck. From the look of Steam's forums backlash, I wasn't alone. That's why, yesterday, I was suddenly overcome by a Hulk-like rage, and descended into glorious madness! When confronted with such overwhelming tsuris, my Jewishness seems to strongly manifest itself, eroding years of association with Beacon Hill shaygets. I was tempted to label Gabe Newell a paskudnyak. "GEVALT! I wait six years and get makhes? What, I should reformat!?" Actually, that's exactly what I tried. I felt naked--stripped of my dignity. I wondered: flanked by the formidable duo of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, both of which remained unfinished, why was I so intent on cajoling this one game into some semblance of operation? Why am I now desperate to head home to see if lowering the game's maximum RAM heapsize will ameliorate any of these issues? Perhaps because this particular game really is as good as we say.

Once again, I am incredibly impressed by forum folk, and how what must be a large percentage of the world's technological brainpower seems to be devoted to getting games to actually work. For example, one steampowered.com forumite is convinced that my vertex buffers aren't locking properly. I'll admit it—I've had vertex buffer problems for years. I guess I've just been too embarrassed to talk about it until now. Safely ensconced within this community of people disenchanted with Steam, taken under the auspices of literally hundreds of angry nerds, I feel I'm finally in a friendly enough cultural climate to discuss these issues. A few more weeks of Half-Life 2 freezes, and I might be finally ready to post such revealing factoids up for public scrutiny as my embarrassingly inadequate CAS latencies.

I still believe that Steam will be really and truly excellent someday, perhaps after years of rampant instability and financially-devastating litigation. The vision it represents is still highly intriguing. The execution just needs to catch up. Until then, I'll be enduring a love-hate relationship with this game, and my brief glances at the beautiful texturing of its scorched cityscapes.

Edit: A patch was released on 11/25/2004 , via Steam, to address the stuttering problem, which is actually the result of three separate bugs. On my own machine, the patch greatly reduced the frequency of the stutter, but did not eliminate it..