Saturday, October 22, 2011

Temporary Turbulence in Skylanders? Re-install.

Personally, I reviewed Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure on the PC. Specifically, I tried it under Windows XP and Windows 7 on my dual-boot gaming machine / Media Center PC. The XP version played well, but reflections in some places were messed up - something I believe to be related to something to do with the graphics drivers and the new motherboard from the Media Center, but not very distracting, in any case. Most of my gameplay was on the Windows 7 version, which didn't have this issue (since I didn't have to install the drivers for the motherboard myself).

There was a bit of an initial take-off problem, when the game wouldn't launch; it would just crash on me when I tried to play the game. That problem turned out to be an issue that Skylanders has with a setting typically used for Media Centers. In case anyone else runs into this problem, I wrote up how to solve the Win7 Media Center / Skylanders: Spyro's Adventures problem.

What I did find, however, was that certain levels had a bug which caused the Spyro Portal to intermittently think that the collectible character figurine had been removed from the portal for a couple of seconds and then recognize it again and return me to the gameplay. The time between occurrences could be as long as about 45 seconds or as short as a second or less. This effect would interrupt even the in-game story dialogue, leaving me to throw in my own words at each pause, Mad-Libs-style, since I couldn't do much else. I encountered this issue on one challenge level and two story-levels in the game: Hobson's Choice, The Goo Factory and Battlefield, respectively. I talked back and forth with Activision to determine the problem, but, in the end, it turned out to be that something went wrong in the install of the game.

The Solution: Re-Install Skylanders: Spyro's Adventures

Eventually, at Activision's suggestion, I uninstalled the game using the Uninstall option on the Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure disc and choosing to not delete my saved games and then re-installed the game again. Once that was done, I tried the three levels that had given me problems earlier and had no problems whatsoever.