Last night while I was waiting for tropical storm Edouard to blow through I decided to break out my ancient laptop & play some old games. Sounded like a good idea so I installed Dune 2000, a RTS that’s still a blast to play even now (especially for Dune fans).

This is where it gets bad:
I install the game in the same directory I install all my games (C:\games\), everything is fine right up until it finishes installing & I try to play it.
I click on the icon, get some kind of update message to which I click cancel (I never immediately update a game, I want play it first & read up on the update). It refuses to start, so I try to let it update, then 2 error windows popped up & nothing happened.
So like a smart guy I read the read me & it tells me if I don’t want the internet game play I should install using the “setup –a” option.
So I un-install, then re-install using the “setup –a” option, & you guessed it, same thing.
Not to be deterred I searched the web for an answer & after trying 2 other ideas I came across the right answer.

I couldn’t believe it was sooooo easy; all I had to do is accept the default installation directories & it worked.
The game’s own readme file & all the other crap I tried were completely wrong!



Please share some of your game installation horror stories.

It's not really an install story per se. But back when I loaded PREY on my computer, the framerate would tank constantly. It was pulling like 5-10 frames in a gunfight with the graphics options turned to the absolute lowest settings. (Keep in mind that my computer meets the recommended system specs twice over) I tried everything I knew, but I still couldn't increase the performace even slightly. This happened shortly after I had upgraded my video card too. As it turns out, I had forgotten to clean the old video drivers off of the machine before installing the new one. It was causing a conflict that murdered the performance of the game. I had wracked my brains for two days trying fruitlessly to solve a problem that required a 5 minute fix.

I've been having a good 'ol time trying to get some of my games running on my laptop (which I suppose isn't new anymore, as I've had it since April now). The two biggest offenders (even though I love them dearly) are MechWarrior 4 and System Shock 2.

I expected the problems with SS2. I would have died of surprise if it had worked right away. I just didn't expect it to take this long to solve those problems; it's only been in the past week that I've been able to load the main menu and the game itself still won't load without crashing. Yes, that's right- it has taken me clear from April through to the beginning of August to convince SS2 to run at all, but I still can't play. It's horrible- I want to go bash some Hybrids already. I miss my wrench.

MW4 is the other problem child, though seeing as how the game was made for XP it really shouldn't be doing this to me. I think I may have screwed up one of the installations- trouble is, I'm not sure which one. To bring this particular game up to spec is a real treat, especially if you want to play it online... in order, here's the grand list of things that I need for a complete install:
* The original game, MW4: Vengeance
* The first expansion, Black Knight
* The Inner Sphere Mech Pack addon
* The Clan mech Pack Addon
* MW4: Mercenaries, the stand-alone expansion/spinoff
* The PR1 patch for Mercs
* The maps from Vengeance and BK converted for use in Mercs
* Mektek's MekPak mod
* The NBT-Hardcore mod
* Various fan-made map packs
* All my old Mech variants
* Support for the community-hosted master server, since MS shut down the official ones
* My user profiles

Some of the above have alternately refused to install or installed incorrectly. The Mech Packs are gumming up the works too by working alternately for Vengeance/BK or Mercs, but never all at once and sometimes not at all. I've wiped and reinstalled all of this stuff at least half a dozen times and it still won't all work the way it's supposed to, and it takes so bloody long to install that I've taken to giving it an attempt every week for the sake of my sanity and preventing the waste of whole days.

I have had one bright spot in the grand reinstallation saga, though- a few games inexplicably just worked when I expected them to crash and burn (or at least require all manner of patches and tweaking. Myst, Riven, C&C 95, and a few other mid-90's gems offered absolutely no complaints.

jojo man & Wrath_Of_Deadguy01,
Man kind of makes my little problem look like a walk in the park, thanks for sharing.

Oh my gosh, I actually like Space operas. Those are not my favs, but they are relaxing where other games aren't. So looong time ago I played Colony Wars on Playstation and liked it alot.
Some month after I bought a new PC I had to think back of that game and wanted to play something similar with more freedom, so I borrowed Darkstar one from a friend for testing. Well the installation itself wasn't a big problem, but afterwards, the game did best in destroying the fun in playing it. Starting with the resolution which only allowed 1kx.75k(I usually play on 1.2kx1k). Switiching it to something else caused the game to shake. The 2nd problem was that after like 7 minutes the screen gets like washed out or less sharp. I read that this was a copy protection and shouldn't happen if you have the disc(and I had it, I borrowed it...). So for some strange reason the game was mega gliched and reinstalling it didn't solve the problem. I applied the latest patches which then caused all textured objects(with other words everything) to become purple, green and yellow. So again, reinstall, patches, restarting the computer caused the game to crash into an unbreakable black and yellow screen which could only be fixed by restarting the computer... Gosh I was... well, annoyed.

The 2nd story is maybe 3 months old but again about a space game, this time X3 Reunion. And like before, installing wasn't the big problem at 1st. I played it and thought of installing the Xtended mod as well which after several tries finally worked. I also changed some ship statistics to my liking. Then, I got the weird idea to tweak the game and here we go again. Everything in game disappeared, there were no stars, no ships, nothing. I changed it back, but it didn't fix that problem, so I redownloaded the mod, uninstalled the previous version and reinstalled it which didn't fix it again, so I thought I can repair it with the game disc maybe. I inserted it(I forgot, after the last patch, this can be played without disc^^) and got the funniest error message ever: Wrong file format! Windows cannot read Media along with some numbers. I'm not bad with computers, but this bug screwed me somehow. Restarting the computer(funny that this almost always solves mystery problems) changed the error message to something like ERROR: Symatec couldn't be found. So in a summary: I installed a game which wasn't playable anymore and I cannot fix it because windows cannot find Symatec... This Error was so persistent, any other disc couldn't be read because of a Norton Program which wasn't even on my computer. And it worked before! But again, I'm not bad with computers, so I uninstalled the game 1st(which again didn't work properly, so I deleted the game folder and deleted the entry in the Registry) and entered the beloved regedit and found one checkbox with a path leading to something like Symatec app. Deleting that fixed the entire Problem I had.... I still wonder how that actually happened...

lol never had trouble with x games at all... they always seem to work even if you mess up badly... but ya you might loose some stuff or sit in the engine instead of your cockpit or you placed a planet to close and your spaceship blows up everytime you load......

symantec is somekind of anti virii btw... like kaspersky and if im right connected to norton... might be possible that the starfuk copy protection of x3 resulted in a conflict with it...

the worst ever was Medieval 2 + patch + kingdoms addon for me...
was at a friend and we wanted to fight a lil battle so we said lets install... well bad idea... we sat there from 4pm to 2am till we could start (somehow the dvd was kinda sloooooow)... additionally we had to manually swap languages cause the addon was german but the main game wasnt lol resulting in the loss of half the voices
and the nicest of all surprises was that they removed the lan battles from rome to medieval and the campaign can only be played on one pc... screeeew.... well back to battlefield then lol

oh did i mention quake 1? lol it removed my harddrive from me bios... took me sometime till i realized what was wrong...

The point is that I do not have Norton on my computer.


rofl, that one made me laugh^^. I wonder how that happened...

NWN2 definitely gets the prize for me. I've never had that much trouble getting a game to run properly. Required more than a few reinstallations and patchings, all of which took over four or so hours approx. And once I finally get it up and running... *sigh* I'll save it for the NWN2 thread. Bottom line it, I'm not playing.

Recently, I had trouble with Spore, even in the short amount of time it remained on my system. During a routine installation, it apparently decided my Arial font should accompany it into oblivion. *shrug*

But looking at some of your posts I probably got off lucky so far.

ha so im still leading with 5h for one medievalTW installation

but does anyone remember the dos game times when you had to mess with autoexec.bat and 640k mem? wing commander were my favourtie suckers... you really had to optimize the operating systems file structure to get the last byte out it or it wouldnt run... well with 40mb harddrives back then it was no wonder... 15mhz cpus and 33mhz in turbo mode (ya a great long forgotten invention of the muscle pc area) lol... ah and 1mb ram
graphics card you ask? lol...

Dude..... the turbo button! yes I do remember that.
And the autoexec.bat IRQ sound settings, glad that's over.

wow you had a soundcard? well later on i got one too with a free copy of monkey island 2 juhu... ah the good ol times...

Here's a horror story to make your blood turn to ice. One of my friends borrowed my Morrowind and insists that he gave it back, even though at the time I asked for it I hadn't seen him since giving it to him. So no Morroblivion for me.

Those may be grounds for a black eye!
Just kidding (a swift kick in the butt would do).

Oblivion with lots of mods and I have yet to get them all work. I spent hours and hours trying to find the conflict, then gave up and went to play Postal 2.