Classic PC Game Woes

Ah, Icewind Dale. You bring memories of R. A. Salvatore’s books and his famous Drow, Drizzt. So when I bought a box of old PC games and found the discs to Icewind Dale mixed in with those of Baldur’s Gate and other RPGs I could not cram them in my disc drive fast enough.

Having no knowledge of the game other than a recognition of its title I wasn’t sure what to expect. Its a massive game for its era, my 90’s gaming rig with only an 8 gig HD balked at it. However when it was all said and done the game ran perfectly.

Immediately I was struck by a half forgotten memory….. This seemed familiar! The music, the cross-hairs indicating where your characters should walk, and the artwork for the town of Easthaven.

So after ambling around town I decide to leave it only to meet some kid saying goblins stole his fish. Yeah! I’m ready to butcher me some goblins!

I died. Almost instantly.

Even running like a pansy back to town hoping someone would jump in and help me didn’t work and I just succeeded in filling my back with goblin arrows.

So, I load up a save file. Create two new characters to follow me along and head back to show those goblins what’s what.

We all died. Again.

OK, so despite having some half memory of this game from 13 years ago I clearly have no idea what I’m doing. My RPG experience up to now has pretty much consisted of only Pokemon and Elder Scrolls. So I cheated a bit and read about a low level quest you were supposed to start on and worked from there. Fetch quests, kill bugs in the basement, etc… and was just about to complete the final quest in town when “doonk”

“An Assertion Failed”

Aaand, I’m back to the desktop. Restart game, apply patch, try again, same results. Crap.

I installed the game on my current computer (thankfully it seemed to work). Apply patch. Re-do the quests. Last quest. Same results. Double crap.

So where does one go from here? I guess you could try installing it on various PCs to see if one of them would let you through it. There’s a stack of them in the corner I haven’t tried yet. Googling didn’t yield any results other than a downloadable patch that did nothing. I could just try not doing the mission and seeing if I could squeak by the goblins with less experience, but what if the glitch occurs at a crucial point in the game? On a mission you can’t skip over?

So now I know the plight of vintage PC gamers. When you run into an error or bug but the game is so old that Googling returns few results, if any, to your problem.