Well, yes, as most of you would agree for games other than Left 4 Dead and maybe Team Fortress 2- Valve Corporation's content delivery system known as Steam just seems to get in the way.

In addition, even if you like the in-game interface which lets you browse internet, chat, etc., the fact that Steam logs how much you play is undeniably annoying since you won't want everyone to know what you are up to (eg. Mystwolf playing World of Warcraft). 

The solution is a program very similar but very different to Steam. This is Impulse (www.impulsedriven.com). Impulse is created by the makers of Stardock and Wincustomize and is partnered with many of the major game production companies.

With Steam, comes those tight little deals of 50% off games and complete packs that save you nearly 75%! But the hell with that, I have to launch steam every time I want to play it! Fuck that. If I buy a valve game I can add it to my Steam for all its glory (but if I buy a game in a store, I can't add it to steam and download it whenever/wherever I am and have it update patches... something available only if I buy Call of Duty directly from Steam)

Well, with Impulse (who also have sales) you can buy and download the game. Further it will auto-update the games with newer patches. What's better is you can register a product with them and it will be added to the account and you can download and auto-update it using Impulse even if you didn't buy it from them. And even better, you can run the games without Impulse launching... it's as if you did indeed install via CD.

This is good for:

1. You bought a game, registered it on Impulse, lost the install disc... Now instead of being royally screwed, you can simply just launch impulse, and download and install the game without any worries.

2. You want to easily install on more than 1 PC (your laptop, or your family get-together at uncle Berny's place in the middle of shit-town, NoWhereland).

3. (What appeals to me) You buy a game off of Steam when its on sale (eg. Nimtropolis [bestest best game ever made] goes on sale for $1 trillion instead of regular $10 trillion) you buy the game off of Steam, right click and go view CD key... and register with Impulse. Now you can play the game without launching Steam and people messaging you once you first launch and any other annoying notifications, etc.

In conclusion, I am a genius.