Help with starting Half-Life2

[Loudude117]

Ok I'm throughly confused with this. Can anybody offer advise on how to get this game started. I installed the game to my computer then went to the steam website to continue. I have a dial up connection so this whole process is very tedious and time consuming. I enter the key numbers and a screen pops up with Half-life2,Counter strike and Half-Life Source all showing 95-96%. I then highlighted half-Life 2 and clicked on the launch button. I got a message that the game would launch in 14448 minutes! What the hck am I doing wrong? I only want to play the game on my computer not the net!
Thanks
Lou

 

[Cole]

Don't worry. It wont take that long. I am a Dial upper to. I recently got a new HD and reinstalled steam from scratch(Normally I would copy steam to CD's and put them from there). It's just downloading all the updates right now. I'd pause Source SDK if it's updating(will improve HL2's updating speed) if thats goin to.

The time will massively decrease as it goes. I've had it say something like that and 5 minutes later it was at like 700 minutes 5 minutes later 200 minutes and so on..
Also do you get 56k connections as in 5.4Kb/s as your average download(Or somewhere 5.00+). I think it took an hour - 2 hours total for me, I just let it go while I played something else. Usually though just leave it on over night(How I dl 600+meg files...leave on overnight for a few nights).

 

[Loudude117]

Thanks Mineral!

So when the download is complete I will then be able to play the game anytime on my computer off line by double clicking the Half-Life2 icon on my desktop? Will there be any other reason to have to connect to steam?
Thanks again!

 

[Laivasse]

I installed HL2 when I had 56k and like minerel says it's a couple of hours tops unless something funky happens. If you don't intend to play CS online, or if you're more worried about HL2 for the moment then it might be useful to set CS and HL:Source to "do not keep this game automatically updated" for the time being.

Once HL2 is updated to 100% you will be able to play offline. Just start Steam or your HL2 shorcut when you're not connected to the net and it will give you the option to start in offline mode. The last update created this weird shiny effect in many people's games however, so you might want to connect to Steam again at some point in the future to see if Valve release a fix for that, and it will automatically update.

 

[diluted]

Once the game is fully updated, it should work offline, though Steam is known for screwing up Offline Mode on a regular basis.