New Failures
Comments(2) Games on Steam that I’ve tried and failed to play in the last 24 hours:
Majesty 2: Sequel to a game that I quite liked. Steam had it on sale for $10, so I picked it up. Before I was done with the tutorial, it triggered the spontaneous-shut-off problem that I first observed in Team Fortress 2. This has happened in a few other graphically-intensive games lately.
Audiosurf: Included in that Steam indie sale pack that I’ve played most of by now. (Mr. Robot was in the same pack.) Launching it with Steam already running brings up a featureless white window that either goes away after a fraction of a second or freezes up and has to be killed through the task manager. Launching it without Steam already running somehow lets it get far enough to put a bunch of text in that window, then crash with the error “Questviewer.exe has encountered an error and must close”.
Gish: Part of the same sale package as Audiosurf, although I already had a registered copy from pre-Steam days. After twice temporarily feezing up with a dusting of random pixels and then coming back with a video driver error saying that the hardware had to be reset, it finally turned off the machine like Majesty 2. This from a 2D game.
I’m really going to have to get a new video card. I’m willing to put it off for a while, though. There are still plenty of games that don’t need it.
Definitely sounds like something’s haywire, yup. Those are (Majesty 2 possibly aside) not exactly video intensive games.
I actually doubt that Audiosurf is having the same problems as the others, though. For one thing, the symptoms are completely different, and for another, from what I see on the support forums, it looks like it’s been generally plagued with system-specific bugs since its release.