Steam doesn't want me to play games anymore

While the Steam distribution system looks pretty good on paper and hasn't been a cause for concern previously, I'm having one hell of a time trying to convince it to stop locking down my games here in Surinam.

Before leaving the Netherlands I bought the Half-Life 2 Orange Box through Steam, installed the games and made sure they were activated so i could play in offline mode. All was well. During a boring, rainy day I played some Portal, was thoroughly pleased with the game and tried playing it again the next day.

The Steam client told me something along these lines: "No. I am updating your game. Go away." Apparently the Steam client had accidentally been online -there's a very shaky wireless connection with a 64kbps internet connection in the appartment complex. I saw that all games had an auto-update feature enabled, which is great in times of bandwidth, but Portal has been inactive for the last two weeks, apparently updating. It's that slow out here.

Not to be outdone by a piece of software, I disabled the update feature, made sure that Steam was offline (it was) and decided to play HL2 Episode 1 instead. This lasted until it was time for this game to get the wonderful "Updating: 0%" message rather than "Sure, go ahead and play me!".


And now HL2 Episode Two started too. I'm running out of games I have configured to not update at all. Quit this bullshit already!