THE WORLD has come crashing down around Half-Life 2 players today, as Steam's authentication servers in Europe have died.

Players who have rushed out to buy the game today and have tried to activate this afternoon have been greeted with the message, below, that they cannot complete the authentication process and so can't play the game. Many of the gamers that we spoke to were outraged. One told us that he "... Waited ****ing years for this game to come out and now can't play it? I've got the damn discs in my hands! It's outrageous! I want it now!" Similarly strong-worded conversations were had with other gamers.

A technical support engineer at Vivendi said that it could be three hours or longer before the servers are fixed and games can be played.

Early birds up this morning activated the game at 8am with no problem. If this subsequent monumental crash is anything to go by, however, we can only expect all hell to break lose when the USA comes online in force.

When I buy some software, I do not expect the software to be totally useless until it is registered. I do not expect the registration process to be on-line only. I do not expect to have to give out details such as my email address. I do not expect to have to download updates to the registration software before I can register, I do not expect the registration software updates to fail half way through. When I have managed to do all that I really DO NOT expect the whole registration process to fail repeatedly, rendering the software I have bought with hard earned cash totally useless.

If this is the way forward for PC gaming regarding a standalone, single player, off-line game, that I have bought at a shop, I think its time to look elsewhere for entertainment.

I get home, and install the game (5 CD's - 30 minute install), I then try and register the game as it offers in the install - no luck, page not found forever - so I move on. I double click the HL2 icon, and up comes this Steam box asking me to update my steam client 20 minutes - then asks me to create an account - Account creation meets with problems...met with "Server is busy or down please try again later" Account Activation time - 3.5 hrs. Finally, I'm ready to play, ohhhhh no...wait, it now needs to unlock the game files....Unlock time 4.5 hours, 3 reboots, and one very pissed off customer.

This registration affair is obviously a huge failure. To have purchased a DVD copy of a single player game, only to have to wade through 15 hours of recurring errors and server crashes is absolutely unacceptable. I'm just glad I didnt book the entire day off work yesterday as it would have been a complete waste of a days holiday.

The European registration web page would not load at all. I continued with installation and tried for several hours to get a steam account set up. Constant 'winsock error, connection reset by host' messages. When I finally got past those, the installation of god knows what extra software started 'your steam account has timed out' was the message I got again and again. I finally (after around 10 hours) got to the screen where you can click on the 'register a product I already own' screen. I entered my CD key details and again the connection was terminated by valve, several times.

Various other errors continued throughout the night. at 11.30pm (the game was supposedly released at 8am in england) I finally got a message saying my registration code could not be verified and that my game would be unlocked (decrypted) anyway

So, here it is at last. The game the world has been waiting for with trembling anticipation.

With shaking hands I open the DVD drive and carefully load the disc.

I click the Install button.

Five hours later I still haven't played the game, and my breathless excitement has turned to bitter anger at being fooled yet again by cynical and apparently uncaring vendors.

My head is actually spinning. I don't know what I've done wrong. My internet connection has been on the whole time. There's this thing called steam that seems to be causing me problems. It says it will bring Valve's games to my desktop. All it's done so far is bring pain between my ears.

I entered my CD key about twenty times before it would accept it, and despite apparently creating an account I couldn't get through to it for ages. When I eventually did get steam running, clicking on Half Life 2 in the start menu simply launched a web page that tried to sell me what I already owned.

Eventually, by accident I opened the DVD drawer and then closed it again immediately with the DVD still in place. A screen bearing the hitherto unseen legend "Play Half Life 2" appeared. I clicked it, but very little happened. The hard drive thumbed it's nose at me with a wee "whirr" every ten seconds or so, but nothing else.

I honestly think Valve are going to alienate a whole bunch of gamers with this. These forums are already awash with people suggesting the best way to get the game running is to wait for the anti-steam/no DVD crack. One guy made the very good point that there's no way an inexperienced gamer, or a youngster moving up from his PS2 or XBox would sit through several hours of install, registration and connection problems. It's like flinging the PC back to the bad old days of DOS.

What Valve have failed to understand is that if you ask extra of your customers you'd better deliver the product they've paid for. Any delay is unacceptable. The game may be worth it if your install goes smoothly and you get connected when you should, but if you don't it doesn't matter how good the game is. Every hour spent not playing, farting around instead stokes up huge resentment against the product.

Even worse, if you eventually manage to get the thing to play in off line mode, but you decide to go on line through steam for any reason and your connection fails, it locks HL2 until the connection is made! This is madness!

I firmly believe that HL2 will be one of the best games I've ever played. But it'll have to be to make up the ground it's already lost! My capsule review so far is - "The worst game I've never played. The biggest waste of gaming money ever. -5/10 (that's one minus for every hour spent trying to get it working)."

Vivendi Universal Group must be wondering what the hell is going on. They tried to stop Valve doing this, and were painted as the bad guys. Now it turns out they were right and everybody's favourite developers were wrong!

Until yesterday I thought of Valve as being a cool bunch of switched on dudes who had delivered one of the gaming highlights of my life. At the moment I think of them as a bunch of money grabbing half-wits, so divorced from reality they have entirely lost touch with their customers. If it wasn't for the fact that I know I'll get the game working eventually, I'd take it back to the shop and explain to them how the UK trades descriptions act works - "fit for purpose" is the phrase the act uses.

At the moment all the greatest game ever made is fit for is the bin.