christiangamer

Sometimes I like to play games on my computer.  I don’t have anything top-o-the-line, but it can handle most games that I throw at it.  Yesterday, however, when I tried to “Install” Sacred 2, I remembered why I love consoles.

I’m glad it was my day off.

I started the process around 10am.  Put DVD 1 in and went and hung out with the kids as it installed.  Came back later to swap the other DVD into the drive – worked fine.  That process only took about 20 minutes or so.  Then I decided to download the latest “patch”.  Apparently, Sacred 2 has been a pretty bug-ridden experience for a lot of folks, and so it wasn’t that surprising when I found out that the cumulative patch was 722 mb…

No problem.  I gave it a click and went and started planning lunch.  I came back to the pc to find that the patch was fully downloaded (didn’t check how long it took).  I found the file and hit it and my machine suddenly acted as if it was a 386.  For about a minute, nothing at all happened; I’m a patient person sometimes, so I figured that it needed that minute to primp or something.  What finally popped up was the typical install message/user agreement to hit accept on and away it went… verifying my files.  Verifying what, exactly?  I assume that this was an anti-piracy program doing some snooping.  It crawled along at 1% progress per minute or so and stopped dead at 6% and told me that my files had been changed and the patch would not be installed.  That’s funny, because I had previously installed and played the game on my laptop; this was a fresh install on my desktop.  How were the files changed?

I took a long, dark journey onto the Sacred 2 internet forums to find some help, and I finally found the answer after reinstalling the game and failing with bad advice 3 or 4 times.  I read this very overlooked post by a self-proclaimed nerd who checked the error logs (he was having the exact same problem as I was).  What you have to do is extract a file off of the game DVD (explore it, open up a cabinet file and explore it; then copy a file within that file into the installation directory on my hard drive) and replace the one that was originally placed in the install directory.  No really… I essentially had to patch their game with a user-discovered fix, in order to get their patch to work.

I finished installing the patch at 9:00 pm.  I installed/wrestled with the game (off and on) for 11 hours; played it for 30 minutes.  Great game – should have waited for the console version that is coming out in May.