Okay, I decided to play the Half-Life 2 demo. Installed Steam, made an account started downloading it. all looked good.
It then stopped downloading at about 20% for no reason.
I went to launch HL2 and and it was okay, except in game it kept having random stalls for no reason, sometimes for half a second sometimes for 30 seconds. Then I realised it was stalling and immediately after playing a sound, I thought maybe it was taking ages to load them, then I realised it was fine with sounds I had already heard.
So I'm there thinking, there's no way it's doing what I think it's doing. I closed it, opened again and restarted the demo, all was fine and dandy until it played a new sound.
It gets to wanting a new sound in the game, requests it from Steam, downloads it and then carries on. It doesn't download while it's off, or when it doesn't need them, it's only downloading stuff when the game requests it. This is ridiculous, it makes it unplayable. This can't be right can it?
Half-Life 2 seems a lot better than I thought it was and I want to play it properly, but I am planning to buy it from Steam, it's not like this with the full game is it?