Sewage Valve
Valve the computer games development company. They suck.
I loved Half Life 2, but I didn’t love their poor programming. Frequent crashes, stuttering sounds and stuttering gameplay. Unrecoverable hangs! I managed to finish it on my old computer, but I tried to play through it on my new computer and gave up about a third of the way through due to crashing and stuttering.
My mate bought HL2 episode one, he had to download it with Steam twice as the first time it never finished downloading, it hung at 83%. Now he can’t play it because it crashes on startup. Valve claim it is a bug with his computer. Hardly likely. More likely their rubbish programming skills can’t compete with decent software houses.
I don’t anticipate buying another Valve product, episodic gaming doesn’t appeal to me, and that’s where they seem to be heading. But mainly I think they are shit.
Update [26-Jun-2006]
Apparently, if you disable hardware acceleration for your sound card, you may be able to alleviate the stuttering/crashes. I haven’t tested this yet, but you may want to try it.