[AndreaDraco83]

Willkommen, my fellow Shadow Hunters, to the AdventureGamers Community Playthrough #10, Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned!

As many of you already know, I deeply love the Gabriel Knight series and it’s a pleasure for me to conduct this playthrough. Of course I hope that we will have an hell of a fun, but, personally, I hope to have a chance to show you some details of this masterpiece that are often overlooked: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is rich and literally filled with small, lavished particulars and it’s easy to miss them the first time around.

The adventure is quite long, and quite difficult. Furthermore, it features many optional actions that, while unnecessary to complete the game, deepen the story, the characters and even the environments. Thankfully, the game is divided in practical chapters – or, more properly, time blocks – and it will be easy enough to organize this playthrough respecting the natural flow of the game.

I set up early this thread because I know that Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned can be particularly tricky to run on modern machines with modern video drives. So, even before the playthrough officially starts, I thought it might be good to have a place to share problems and solutions and help each other properly installing and running the game.

First of all, I strongly suggest to visit this Sierra Help page, where the mighty Collector addresses many possible problems and explains their solutions. Particularly, on this page you can find solution for the more common compatibility problems encountered during the game. On the other hand, here you can read about some known non speed-related bugs of the game: fortunately they are very rare, and hopefully you won't ever stumble upon one of them. If you do, though, don't desperate: there are solutions!

If everything is fine and your machine is powerful enough, on this Sierra Help page, Collector give a precious tips for those of you who want to run the game in a fancy 1280x1024 resolution: yes, it's possible!

Finally, if this isn’t your first playthrough of the game, you may want to activate the Easter Eggs. There are plenty of them, and many are extremely funny (with one in particular being priceless). Here is the procedure to activate them, taken once again from the Sierra Help Pages:

To trigger the egg icon, hit the Ctrl key, the Shift key and the ~ key**.
When you hit these 3 buttons, the console comes up. In the console window type: SetFlag and then hit the space bar. Within the quotation marks that will appear, type EGG and hit the enter key.

** If you are using a non-English keyboard, chances are that you don’t have this symbol. If you want to activate the Easter Eggs, you will have to set your keyboard language to English (United States) and then hit the \ button (at least this is the correspondent button on my Italian keyboard).

Now, if these tips are useful, in a couple of days the playthrough will effectively start. On the contrary, if you have any problems running the game, we still have some time to set thing right.

PS: I'm obliged to say that all the images I will post during this playthrough come from The Pendulum of Life, a site dedicated to the Gabriel Knight Series Art (both official and fan-made), thanks to its owner, Belbor.

[DustyShinigami]

Wow, i wasn't aware that there were a load of secrets/easter eggs. I'll have to check them out the next time i play through it.

[J.H]

Might buy this tomorrow and join in if I can fix my PC lol

[Banderwocky]

I'm all ready to roll when it's go-time.

[orient]

I seen what seemed to be a fairly recent re-release of this game in a store here in Australia and I was thinking of picking it up. I can only assume this version's optimized for newer machines.

[tastebud]

Originally Posted by orient

I seen what seemed to be a fairly recent re-release of this game in a store here in Australia and I was thinking of picking it up. I can only assume this version's optimized for newer machines.

i've played this game not too long ago for the first time. not sure if i was using Vista or XP but it definately installed and ran without a problem.

[KasiaD]

I installed the game yesterday, so I am ready to start whenever you are.

I had a black screen at the beginning, but there is a thread here which helps to fix this: http://www.adventuregamers.com/forum...ad.php?t=19291

This is my third time I am going to play so definitely I wish to see Easter Eggs, so I have a question. During which moment of the game should I hit Ctrl Ahift and `?

It is possible to increase the screen resolution in the game, but I will also try the 1280 trick - I cannot wait to leave work and begin )

[AndreaDraco83]

Originally Posted by KasiaD

This is my third time I am going to play so definitely I wish to see Easter Eggs, so I have a question. During which moment of the game should I hit Ctrl Ahift and `?

Any time during the actual game (not cutscenes, not time-blocks presentation).

Please, wait for actually begin the game for the playthrough to officially start: this way we can really play each segment together

Otherwise, if you're so eager to begin the game, I could start to post the segment until the first pit-stop, even if I'd really prefer to see the ZGI playthrough finished - it is such a great game (and a great playthrough), that it really deserves it.

[KasiaD]

I will stand by of course. Just wanted to prepare everything before the playthrough starts..
Thanks for help and I am patient

Unfortunately I do not have Zork game - not easy to cme by in Poland :/

[D.C.]

Oh, man. I'm so tempted to join in. GK3 is my favourite game of all-time, that's sort of why I'm not going to join in. For some odd reason I find this game deeply personal and it means a whole damn lot to me, so much so that I don't want to analyse it into millions of tiny pieces. I like to play at my own pace too. All you folks playing for the first time are in for an amazing ride, though! Enjoy.

[AndreaDraco83]

Originally Posted by D.C.

Oh, man. I'm so tempted to join in. GK3 is my favourite game of all-time, that's sort of why I'm not going to join in. For some odd reason I find this game deeply personal and it means a whole damn lot to me, so much so that I don't want to analyse it into millions of tiny pieces.

That's what I feel for the whole series, and The Beast Within in particular. I hope that maybe you'll pop in once in a while to tell us how you see certain things!

[colpet]

I loaded the game on my XP and so far minimal problems. I even was able choose the highest resolution in the game options. The only problem I had was a black screen when I exited the game, necessitating a computer restart.
I first played this at the end of 2003. In the box is over 75 pages of notes, so at least I won't get writer's cramp this time. I played it with 2 other gamers, and because of this, I know that some conversations are able to be missed depending on how long you stay in some areas, etc. I'm hoping to get all of them this time around.
Even though we haven't officially started, I have to say that the intro music gave me shivers, this is one of my all time favorite pieces of game music.
My boxed game includes a prologue comic. I didn't realize last time that a whole graphic novel is also available - viewed on adobe. I'll have to give that a peruse, especially if it has all the dialogue from the game.

[AndreaDraco83]

Originally Posted by colpet

Even though we haven't officially started, I have to say that the intro music gave me shivers, this is one of my all time favorite pieces of game music.

Agree. The orchestration is luscious and powerful, with some touching, vibrant undertones that are very poetic. Kudos to David Henry for composing such wonderful music!

[Wimli]

GK3 is my favourite adventure game of all time as well. I'm looking forward to play through it together and see everything that I might have missed on my previous playthroughs, like the easter eggs! Didn't know about them, thanks for bringing attention to that AndreaDraco83! The opening movie is indeed brilliantly atmospheric, can't wait to get started!

[Tiocfaidh]

Originally Posted by Wimli

GK3 is my favourite adventure game of all time as well. I'm looking forward to play through it together and see everything that I might have missed on my previous playthroughs, like the easter eggs!

Me too !

I never got the full score, not even with a step-bystep walkthrough

Maybe this time

[AndreaDraco83]

Originally Posted by Tiocfaidh

Me too !

I never got the full score, not even with a step-bystep walkthrough

Maybe this time

Have faith! I have achieved the full score two times, and even following two different paths (mind you: extremely similar, but with a couple of different actions each)!

We will succeed this time too!

[Tiocfaidh]

Hopefully

I just popped the first CD into my drive ...
No problems at all, the game runs very smoothly.

I´m set and ready

My first playthrough
I would have joined the Lost Crown one as well but I just got through the game a couple of weeks ago.
Didn´t want to play through it again at that point in time.

But GK3 is perfect for this because of the numerous timeblocks.
This is going to be great

[skaata]

Would love to participate, but: After installing the game and starting it, I can hear the "Sierra intro mucic" and then my screen goes blank. No windows errors or nothing. Just a black screen. I´m using windows vista 64 and my graphics card is a geforce gtx260... If anyone are using a similar configuration or know how to fix my problem, feel free to respond since I would love to play).
Regards
Skaata

[AndreaDraco83]

Skaata, as far as I know, Vista 64 isn't compatible with GK3. Maybe Collector will stop by this thread to share his knowledge, but - unless I'm very much mistaken - the game won't play under this OS.

[KasiaD]

I fixed this problem by launching FFDshow options and adding GK3.exe to applications which are not supported by FFDshow.

But I use XP on the other hand