Originally posted by John:

Originally posted by Sweatington:

Or just turn of automatic updates in steam and launch the game directly from steam folder

Doesn't protect you 100%, sometimes steam says F you and just updates it.

Doubt. I have games in my library I haven't had update in over 2 years.

It will only update if you try to launch it from within the steam launcher or has been very specifically programmed to force update itself if found to be out of date. The later seems to only happen when the game is always online only or is required to pass some kind of connection to an authentication server if connected to internet.