Category: Videogames

I’ve started playing Dungeon Keeper II again. I looked into it, and you don’t have to run it on a DOS emulator anymore (yay), because GOG Games apparently buys up old abandonware and keeps it current so it can run on modern systems. I recall that before, even from GOG Games, DKII would crash constantly and was absolutely unplayable. Plus they had a patch to update it to the “latest” version of the game, which also happened to prevent Dark Angels from spawning. Ugh. So I had given up on that for a while.

For whatever reason, I looked into it again this weekend, and found that from GOG Games it is now only $2.39 to buy DKII; plus, I saw in the comments that the game supposedly was updated to run on Windows 7 and Windows 8. At that price, I figured, what the heck. I’ll buy it and see if what they say is true. I wouldn’t mind being out $2.39 if it was still completely unplayable.

So I bought it, and it took a minor bit of tweaking around to get it running on Windows 10 (which nobody claimed it could run on, so this is not surprising), but it wasn’t too bad. Pretty much all I had to do was enable DirectPlay on Windows 10, which you do in Programs and Features by enabling “Legacy Components” in the list of Windows Features to turn on/off, and then enabling “DirectPlay” in the drop-down menu under “Legacy Components.” Et voila!

I got it up and running, and – no crashes! Everything was smooth and perfect. I played it for approximately 1,000,000 hours and it never crashed or lagged once.

But, after approximately 1,000,001 hours of gameplay, I finally discovered that one of the old problems were still there to haunt me. No Dark Angels. Dun-dun-duuuuuhhhnn. Serves me right for doing the campaign first, even though all I wanted to do all along was My Pet Dungeon. If I had started with MPD, I would have noticed this right away.

It didn’t matter if my whole dungeon was nothing but temples, I wouldn’t get a Dark Angel. I might not have noticed, if not for the fact that suddenly a Maiden (dryder) entered my dungeon. I have a deep-seated association with Maidens and the glitches associated with the patch, since they were first introduced in the anti-Angel patch. UGH. I almost quit and stopped playing right then and there. What is there left to aspire to, if you cannot even get Dark Angels?

Fortunately, I did a bit of Googling, and found this site that outlines how to correct the problem caused by the patch, and even provides the necessary files (from the old, non-patched version) to do so. Phew!

As you can see in the above screenshot, after replacing those files, you can now have a dungeon in which Maidens and Dark Angels coexist.

And yes, Warlocks are my favorites forever and ever, which is why I always must have a gillion of them.

I found this screencap from Morrowind randomly, and thought it was kind of funny that I even had it.

All I remember about this screenshot is that I took it whilst lugging around a humongo Daedric War Axe that was worth a kabillion gold but weighed more than I did, so I was trying to find a vendor to unload it on ASAP. I think I was in Molag Mar.

I was talking to that redhead Altmer about something, when suddenly that Ordinator ran up behind him and shouted at us to leave him alone or something. And then the Ordinator stood there staring at the Altmer forever. I think I thought it was the funniest thing so I took a picture.

But whatever I found hilarious didn’t quite translate into the picture, as you can see.