With few exceptions, I haven’t had any major issues installing and running older games on my PC, but every once in a while, I get hit with a problem child. While I’m still using Windows XP, I have more than enough memory, an external HDD and a pretty decent nVidia video card (that runs almost everything I’ve thrown at it  just fine). Overall, I’m pleased with the results (especially as I don’t play many modern shooters or games that demand an annual or biannual update to a new card just to show off nice and shiny stuff but deliver nothing new in terms of gameplay).  Anyway, I finally got stymied big time by of all things, one of my favorite console games I just picked up in its PC incarnation. Worse still, it seems that a lot of other people are having the same (or even more extreme) problems once they manage to install this classic.

Since it was released on the original Xbox back in 2002, I’ve replayed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic at least once a year because it’s a damn good game and like a good book, it deserves a fresh read every so often. After a few years of ignoring the PC port (I was perfectly pleased with digging out the console version), I finally decided to pick up a copy of the PC version mostly to see how it would look at a higher resolution and with whatever improvements any patches added. Turns out, it was Darth Glitchy working the production droids to death in some sweatbox on Dantooine and giving Jabba the Hutt his 70% cut of the profits, as I can’t even get the damned game to install, let alone play…

All the game discs are mint as can be, but in trying to install the game, I’m getting an ANNOYING dirty disc message and even more stupidly, I can’t even copy all the files on the first disc onto my hard drive or a USB stick because some can’t be read by my DVD drive. I’m hoping this isn’t because the game NEEDS a CD-only drive, but I’ll be trying to copy files onto a laptop in a few days to see if that’s a workaround I did a bit of digging around on some Lucasarts boards and wasn’t at all pleased to find out that even if I were to get the game up and running, I’d be in for a potential raft of graphics and gameplay problems that could keep me from completely enjoying the game. Of course, I’m hoping hat I have as few issues as possible once I manage to fight through the current dopey stuff going on with these discs, but at this point, I’m thinking about using what I paid good money for as a nice set of coasters an definitely skipping picking up KOTOR II, as I hear there are just as many problems with getting THAT old game to run.

In any event, my yearly playthrough will have to be done on the old Xbox here (which is thankfully STILL working like a charm). Damn you Darth Glitchy… You too, Jabba!