Painkiller: Black Edition Forum

I'm using Painkiller: Black Edition 1.64 (bought on Steam) in CrossOver Games 8.1.4 (pretending to be Windows XP) on Mac OS X 10.6.1.

1. I launch the game in Steam.
2. The resolution changes and the screen goes black. (I tried setting Cfg.Fullscreen to false in the Bin\Config.ini file. No effect.)
3. Shortly thereafter, I get Wine's “The program Painkiller.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close.” error message.

Curiously, every time I run the game, Steam says “Performing first time setup… Installing DirectX for Windows (step 1 of 1)”. No other game gives me that trouble.

Even more curiously, I just tried Left 4 Dead (verifying that the statement at the end of the previous paragraph is still true), then ran Painkiller with L4D open (to get the “first time setup” status message). With L4D open in the background, Painkiller runs fine! I'm confused.

Edit: …And now I'm back to where I started. Crashes on launch, exactly as described above, even with L4D open. Argh.

I am running Painkiller Black on wine but not under Steam. It has always worked for me and not has never been difficult to install either (it likes Win XP). Sometimes it crashes if you make outrageous changes in the video resolution but otherwise has been a most reliable game (I would call Gold at least). I am also running Battle out of Hell (under Win XP) and Painkiller Overdose (under Win 2000). This is a steam problem most likely.

You might try buying a retail version of the game. It is not expensive and the game play IMHO is more than worth it (the part in the catacombs on its own is worth the entry price).