Yeah, I wasn't really interested in playing the game...

For my birthday last week, one of the presents my wife gave me was a copy of Left4Dead2 for the PC. I had been asking about it for a while, ever since a movie maker told me how he had used the game engine for the effects on his film and planned to release the maps for gamers.

After a week of work and swim team-related distractions, I finally sat down today to install the game and begin enjoying some zombie-killing goodness.

Boy, was I surprised.

I installed the game from disk. Well, more exactly, I inserted the disk and it installed the Steam game engine. It then installed Left4Dead2 from disk. But it will not let me play the game until it downloads some updates.

About 2 hours worth of updates.

What the HELL? I can't even play the game while it downloads? I can't do ANYTHING with the game until it finishes downloading.

In TWO HOURS.

I have a high speed broadband internet connection. But the game is going to block me from playing while it pulls down updates I didn't even ask for. And pausing the update process so I could, I don't know, PLAY THE VERSION I INSTALLED, is not allowed. I can't play the existing version until it finishes update.

IN TWO HOURS.

Valve, seriously, this is ridiculous. Why should I HAVE to download your updates to play the game? Why can't I play the version I have installed? Sure, I can see requiring updates in order to play online. That way everybody's playing the same version and there's no chance of version mismatches causing problems in game play.

But if I want to play locally, why should i have to download an update? And, at that, how about ASKING ME FIRST? Or giving me some warning that you're going to tie up my network by pulling down GIGABYTES of updates? As the person who owns the hardware and the network pipe don't you think I deserve at least SOME input on this process?

Really, you've pissed me off with such a poorly thought out process...