So I’m a bit of an old fashioned gamer. My PC isn’t massively up to date graphics-wise etc. because there’s no need for it to be (and it causes more problems than it solves) – I don’t tend to play very taxing, or very new, games. I like sticking around with games from the early-mid 2000s or the 90s, and it seems like I’m always running into errors.
I know technology advances – of course it will, and that will create some issues, bizarre as some seem to me. (I am still truly baffled that my computer can run the first three Monkey Island games no problem, but Escape From Monkey Island won’t launch – despite it being newer. I have an older gaming PC for some games, and it works there at least, so that's something.)
But I constantly seem to be running into errors these days – some small, some large. I’ve just been playing the Syberia games and they had issues but were mostly playable. The first game crashed repeatedly after picking up an item, but a quick google popped up a solution to do with graphic settings that got me past that bit. Other than that, there were just some minor speech issues (the first game had overlapping speech with long dialogue, the second game cut short spoken dialogue if it was too long – but the whole sentence was there in the subtitles at least). So they weren’t too bad.
Then there are just bizarre issues with some games, like Rollercoaster Tycoon – which I can get to run absolutely fine – until I try to save or load, wherein the game crashes. If I play a game in one sitting it has no issue and it remembers that new areas have been unlocked.
Today’s issue, and what finally inspired this blog, is an old adventure game called The Black Mirror. It installed no problem, try and launch it and… bang, my anti virus popped up with a Trojan alert. From googling, this seems to be a common issue, though I can’t figure out from varied responses if this is a false positive or an actual Trojan. (My anti-spyware software found nothing, and my anti-virus didn't find anything further either) The fact that all the game publisher’s sites seem to no longer exist doesn’t really help matters. So I’ve no idea if I should ever even consider putting this game disc in my PC again, or if it’s a risk. Naturally this classes as a pretty big barrier to playing the game. I'm wondering if this issue is just something to do with how it tries to launch the game (it does seem familiar, so I suspect this might have happened with one of my games before). Next step, I think, will be seeing if I can get it to run on the old gaming PC without it freaking out.
Are any of the rest of you people who enjoy old games? Do you often come across issues, whether big or small? Do you get annoyed at even small issues, or do you just get on with it?
(Sorry for the repost if you've seen this before, had a slight technical issue and decided to repost.)
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