Purchased box of 5 cds; can't play

[SuperMom]

What do we do now? We thought we'd installed the game by first inserting the first cd and then following the instructions (put in all 5 cds one after the other when it was requested).
Then Steam updated. Asked us to create an account, which we did.
Now it looks like it's downloading the game(s) from the net, which is ridiculous because we have 5 cds in that brand new box!!

PS: HL and CS is the reason for living of my son and I'm just the mom trying to make him happy.

What now?

 

[Raeven0]

Welcome to business with Valve, maker of everyone's favourite 15-hour $50 game, Half-Life 2! Please throw all expectations of logical, reasonable gaming out the window.

There have been about six thousand updates to the game since it was first released, and you have to download all of them. For some reason. Hope you have broadband.

 

[SuperMom]

Thanks for the prompt response.
At the moment it's updating loads of stuff.
It also says that 2 of the games are installed, so obviously we want to start playing with what's installed. Can we do that while it's still downloading the rest? My intuition is yes, though not recommended. But I could be wrong.
What's best: wait another 5 hours for everything to be updated, or start playing leaving it do its thing in the background?

 

[99.vikram]

You can start playing after-
1. loading from CD
2. decrypting gamefiles.

So yes, you can start playing if it says 100 %.

 

[SuperMom]

OK I have no idea what you mean by decrypting gamefiles
BUT
I'm hearing some whoopy-jumping-up-and-down-h*ly-shit-look-at-that sounds from my son's room.
So I conclude that he ignored my recommendation of waiting for the downloads to finish and he started playing.
Thanks all for your input, I'll now go upstairs and have a look at the epiphany that just happened.

 

[Raeven0]

If you can play the game, by all means, play away and let Steam quietly download in the background (assuming it will be so kind to do so). You may experience longer loading times when you reach an area with undownloaded content, but that stuff should promptly take priority over all other content downloads so that it can be loaded.

I find it mildly amusing that you censored "holy" but not "shit"

 

[SuperMom]

Wanted to thank you all for the support before signing off.
Son didn't even come down for my famous homemade bolognese: means everything's working fine.

PS: knew I had to censor something but did not really know which word. Went for the most sensitive one!
Thanks again all
C-

 

[DEATH eVADER]

I find it mildly amusing that you censored "holy" but not "shit"

Its the funniest thing I've seen in ages, past all the "Munro Incident" sigs

 

[JNightshade]

It's censored that way because what she was really saying was "h-C*NTF*CK-ly shit". It's a motherhood thing.

 

[Beerdude26]

Woah, you bought HL2 for your son.

You truly are Super Mom.

 

[MorganFreeman911]

Yes, This game is Awsome.

 

[Rizzo]

I think she is a he and he is the son.
If not id say stay away from your sons room. Those sounds just made me think of something else for some reason.