hello Glitches people, can a game or game disk go corrupt suddenly? i am talking about Syberia, which i have played two or three times without any problem until it went all strange on me in the middle of a game session. the screen went all 'blocky' in places. i was able to repeat this 'blockiness' by replaying that particular part of the game but not resolve the problem. can a disk be too old to replay and can i recover from this? thanks, robert.

Highly unlikely a disk would go bad. It is possible it acquired new scratches since the last time you played.The first thing I would try is to use a disk cleanner solution on the disk and a cd/dvd player cleanner on the disk player.

Besides what Geo stated...

It's also possible that the problem has to do with using different video card drivers than the ones you used the previous times you played it.

It could also be due to one of the files from the game not installing properly.

CD's and DVD's do "wear out" over time because the dye slowly diffuses and loses the distinction between 1's and 0's in the data on the disc. DVD's normally "wear out" quicker because the data is closer together on the disc, so diffusion of the dye has greater effect. But Syberia isn't that old a game and this is unlikely to have happened unless the disc was subjected to extreme heat.

Another possibility is that the disc always had a "marginal" area on it, and that your DVD player is starting to wear out and have more difficulty reading the "marginal" areas.

One thing -- is the game reading from the disc at the time the screen is going blocky? or was the game installed to the hard drive. Unless it's reading from the disc at the time you see blockiness, the bad file is already on your hard drive and you'd have to reinstall the game to see a difference.

Might be "too much information" here.

hi Jenny100. the disk is installed to the hard disc when it went 'funny' on me. you have to see this for yourself as it is hard to describe. i know not much help, eh? robert.

It sounds more like a driver issue to me (that or your video card is on its last leg). Have you tried running an older set of drivers?

hello, how do you obtain and run an older set of drivers? robert.

You go to either the Nvidia or the ATI website, depending on which video card you have, and look in their driver archive for older drivers.
What video card do you have?

hi Jenny100, i have a radeon 5450 video card but when i go to the ATI site, they ask for $29.00! i don't think i have the correct site. can you direct me to the right ATI site please? robert.

Drivers are free.
You either went to the wrong site or clicked on the wrong link.

Are you using 64-bit Windows 7 or XP or ?

Here's the driver archive for XP
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/previous/Pages/radeonaiw_xp.aspx

Here's the archive for 64-bit Vista (some also for Win7)
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/previous/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx

i have the 64 bit Win7 card. how do i navigate this ATI maze? robert.

If you drill down a couple of pages more from the Link that Jenny100 gave you, you can download their Auto Detect software:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/auto_detect.aspx

The ***ATI Catalyst 9.11 drivers from 11/17/2009*** seem to be the oldest drivers they list as working for Windows 7. So the 9.11 drivers or anything newer from the ***Previous ATI drivers page for Vista and Win7*** should be OK. You may have to uninstall your current drivers before installing the older ones though.

When going back to earlier drivers, you sometimes have to try quite a few to find the ones that work best with your game and your particular video card. Also, just get the driver and not the "software suite" or "Catalyst Control Center."

hi Starcom. after downloading the ATI driver, i get a language preference screen which prevents me from actually installing the driver as i cannot move the screen out of the way. can you help? Robert.

Does it allow you to select a language?

See if this how-to helps. In this example, there is a dropdown box for the language, and then you click "Next."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlxIvc16vQg

It's also possible there is a UAC prompt (User Access Control) hiding behind the window you're looking at, so if you see no way to choose or accept the language, try dragging the window around and see if there's anything hiding behind it.

If you need to uninstall the current ATI drivers, this video shows how to completely remove the current drivers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihVEGWrk5E4

None of this will help if the problem is with the card itself rather than the drivers.