Nothing working via Steam on one particular machine

I'm trying to play some TellTale games I own on Steam on my laptop, but they all seem to fail in a similar way.

When I try to launch, very little happens. No windows appear, although the cursor icon does appear busy for a few seconds and in procexp I can see that a process is started before quietly stopping again. I've tried a couple of episodes of Sam and Max and one of Tales of Monkey Island and it always seems the same.

I have another computer and everything is normal there, but of course I want to play on my laptop... I'm sure it worked at some point. Can't really think of much else to help diagnose. I've tried verifying files in steam just in case. I tried quitting Steam and launching an executable directly and there seems to be no difference.

In my Googling for similar problems I found some advice to reinstall Steam. I suppose I could try that if anyone really thinks it might help, but it's a bit of a hassle and I don't really see why it should.

OS is Windows 7 64bit FWIW; don't think that or other specs are all that relevant.

Comments

  • DjNDBDjNDB Moderator
    edited November 2012
    Do you have LUA for Windows installed?
    It can cause that kind of behavior on some TTG games.
  • edited November 2012
    I did, just uninstalled and it doesn't seem to have made any difference. I'll restart and see if it's any better.

    Thanks
  • DjNDBDjNDB Moderator
    edited November 2012
    Specifically the environment variable LUA_PATH conflicts with the games.
    So if it still doesn't work after the restart check if it still exists.
  • edited November 2012
    OK that makes sense. Restarting now.

    FWIW, Back to the Future games installed from GOG worked fine. Sam and Max 104 downloaded from here failed in slightly different ways before and after uninstalling lua.
  • edited November 2012
    Many thanks, seems to be ok now. I guess it was just a coincidence that the games I tried under Steam were the same that had this conflict.

    It would be good if the games could be patched to resolve this bug; seems pretty straightforward work.
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