Dead Space 2 - Crash to desktop after "Press any key to continue"

[Rodalli]

I just wanted to share this with anyone else who may be having this problem. This is for the folks who are seeing DS2 crash to the desktop with the generic "Dead Space 2 has stopped working" error message after you press "any key to contiue" on the game's splash screen. I wrestled with this for days before I figured out what the problem was. I'm running on Windows 8 64-bit and tried all sorts of things others have reported as solutions: disabling HID devices in Device Manager, deleting/recreating settings.txt file, uninstalling/reinstalling the game, verifying the Steam cache, uninstalling LogMeIn/Hamachi, disabling/uninstalling antivirus, updating video drivers...you name it, I tried it.

None of it was working. So, finally, since I work in IT I realized I could approach this the same way I do a lot of application issues at work. I whipped out Process Monitor (available for free on Microsoft's TechNet site). This program monitors and logs all registry and file calls by all the processes running on your system, so you can see everything a program is doing.

I ran ProcMon while recreating the crash in Dead Space 2 and I noticed that the very last thing deadspace2.exe was doing before the crash occured was to check the registry to verify the location of the user's My Documents/Documents folder, and then search that folder for old Dead Space 1 saves. It does this because Dead Space 2 unlocks a Refurbished Plasma Cutter weapon for players who have Dead Space 1 save files on their machine. The location it checks on Windows 8 is C:\Users\%username%\Documents\Electronic Arts\Dead Space\. It's looking for any file starting with "ds_slot_" and ending with the extension ".deadspacesaved".

In my case, it seems that deadspace2.exe was having trouble reading this file. Maybe it was corrupt, because the game crashed as soon as it tried to read it. All I had to do was move the file out of that folder location and voila! Dead Space 2 ran without any problem.

Keep in mind that if you run into this same issue, but don't want to miss out on the refurbished plasma cutter weapon, you can just create a new save game in Dead Space 1, if you still have that game installed, or find a copy of someone else's save game online and copy it to C:\Users\%username%\Documents\Electronic Arts\Dead Space\ (or the equivalent folder if you're running Windows XP). The save file doesn't have to be from a completed game - any save file will do.

I hope this info helps someone else. Have fun surviving the necromorph apocalypse!

[Enigma716]

Hey, I know this post is old AF. But I wanted to let you know that this post seriously helped me. If anyone is having crashing issues and tried the settings stuff and it didn't work (with DS1 or DS2) this might help:

Finding the Dead Space file, delete everything in it. Yes, you'll lose all your save data. BUT, it may be because one of these save files is corrupted. After I deleted the stuff in the Dead Space 1 file, both DS1 and DS2 started working perfectly again. So I'm assuming that whatever was corrupted in the DS1 files was effect how DS2 was trying to boot. Which I believe was stated by the OP that DS2 unlocks the Refurbished Plasma Cutter by using a save state from DS1.

So Cheers OP!

[Rodalli]

Awesome! This is exactly why I posted this, in hopes that it would help someone else out. Glad to hear you're up-and-running and that my post helped.

[FanTomFireD]

I know it's late to ask. But at the time did you then only have 1 storage device or multiple?
Asking as I have 2 SSD and 2 HDD

[Rodalli]

Originally posted by FanTomFireD:

I know it's late to ask. But at the time did you then only have 1 storage device or multiple?
Asking as I have 2 SSD and 2 HDD

I'm not 100%, but I'm pretty sure I had an SSD where my OS and all game files are, and a 1TB HDD where a lot of my user profile data was stored.

[moosenibble]

ok so i did this and then it crashed like 3 seconds after i pressed Singleplayer

[moosenibble]

nevermind, turns out i needed to delete the save files for DS2, thanks for the help in the first place though!