My retail copy of THQ's Dawn of War II has been sitting on my desk for nearly a week. It's been teasing me you see, but I've been unable to rip into its tight shrinkwrapped innerds because I just moved. Tonight I finally got my gaming rig back setup and went to install the Warhammer goodness I've been waiting to savor.

Problem is, I'm still waiting.

Why? Steam.  For some inexplicable, moronic, braindead reason THQ chose to force all Dawn of War II customers to use Steam to install, run and update the game.  Why did I pay for a retail box at all? The disc only installed the filthy Steam client (didn't even give me the option of installing to a different drive) and then downloaded the game off the Net. WTF?  I'm sorry, as a consumer I had rightly expected that I'd be getting a game on my DVD, not Steam.

Gets better from here.  So Steam downloads and installs my "retail" game, forever tying me to using what's a pretty shit poor client (yes some folks hate Steam - they just get deleted off their forums for speaking out). I figure I'm good at this point, but nope, there's apparently an update. Can I play DoW II while this update downloads like I could've on Impulse?  Nope.  Even worse, the Steam client - in true fail fashion - just keeps switching from "Download starting..." to "Updating...0%" to "Download starting..." and it won't let me play the game at all.

What the hell did I pay for?

Although I haven't bought it, I hear the Empire: Total War release (which also forces Steam upon everyone) has been an even greater debacle of fail akin to the Half-Life 2 release years ago. Wow, way to go publishers!  Your incredible stupidity seems to grow by leaps and bounds with each passing year. Why don't you do your customers a favor and stop tying us exclusively to one service?  PC gamers already get boned as a matter of course, we don't need more. K, thanks.