You must be feeling really frustrated by now, Vyoma. I have the same feeling before too. They tell us that pirated copies are bad... you never know what's in it... people worked hard to produce those games.... blah blah blah.... But when I buy legal copies, and they don't work, I'm real pissed off. Especially when illegal copies do not have the problem. To make it worse, there don't seem to be solutions in their official homepage. Come on, I might not be a computer genius but i'm definitely not a newbie in computer. If my legal copy has a problem, i'm pretty sure other people have them too. If there are games developers reading this, please, tell your companies to update their homepage/FAQ... coz at the end of the day, when you pay for something, you want it to work. That to me is the bottomline. Moral argument that people work hard to produce games etc. don't really register when you are pissed off.

I am real frustrated now. I do not know what I can do because, this is what they gave me as a reply to my quesiton:

That does not make sense at all to me. I just do not have an internet connection at home, then how am I supposed to even connect to the internet 'temporarily'.

The sad thing is that they did not even mention the 'minimum' requirement on the packaging of Half Life 1: Anthology. They could have atleast done that. I do not know what to do with the four hundred something bucks yet worthless piece of plastic and paper.

Oh yes. I am real frustrated now.

But I still cannot get myself to get the pirated version.

Honestly this is a disgrace. First a dll is missing, second you can't play it without net.Pathetic man. Remember all those pirated games which used work without giving any probs whatsoever? As far as I've found, always the support teams will give junk answers. Your question is one among the simplest questions to answer. "Can I play the game without internet connection?", a yes or a no. Simple as that. If they can't even do that, then honestly it's a pity.
I'm sorry I've never tried installing this original game, so I can't really help in this topic. But couldn't help expressing myself. I believe that if you can't get the game working without internet, they should pay your money back along with conpensation. Well, if it was US, we could've sued them. But... This is God's own India. (You know what I mean )

This post has been edited by SP Rao: Sep 12 2006, 11:23 AM

Yeah, I know what you mean. Here it is just a norm for consumers to get fleeced. Anyway, I have been trying to get a connection to my home. One of the ISP said he could provide a phone link Internet, but would contact me later if he could give me broadband or not because he had to talk with his manager. He said he would get back to me once he does that.

Anyway, all I can say about that is that it is lying in one corner of the room collecting dust, and being the worthless piece it is. And I checked up the support ticket where I had asked a question again asking if I could ask for a refund. They have been silent. I just cannot imagine I would be talking like this about a company (Sierra/Valve) that created a great game like the Half Life series.

Why Valve make such a "Steam" program? In the past, they're not using that to package games like Half Life : Game of The Year Edition, Half Life : Counter Strike...And in the 2001, Steam released with "unliked-by" customers. Maybe because of that Valve wasn't well-known anymore 'til Half-Life 2 released.

I've same problem, and I've googling over the internet, and the answers still doesn't good. 'You have to connect to internet to play'. What a such damn!

But...Valve itself say that you must upgrade your Steam console to play offline. I don't understand this, but try that and play in offline mode.
Hope it works, because I haven't try this at home.

-reply by Edwin