Game Running But I Can't Play

[bernadettetime]

I'm trying to play my one and only Steam game, Pharaoh + Cleopatra. I launch the game and it says that it's running, but the game window doesn't open. According to my task manager, Steam is the only program my computer is running. In the past, Pharaoh has shown up as its own instance. When I try to open Pharaoh a second time, I get an error that it's already running.

Any ideas?

[*P0P$*FR3$H3NM3Y3R*]

Usually when STEAM says it is still running that means the games .exe is still running as a process. You can check that in the Task Manager via the processes tab.
If it is there you can manually kill the process.
That won't help with the startup issue in itself, but you can try again then or try verifying game cache and such.

[XistenZ]

If you recently bought it you can refund it since it doesn't seem to work on your machine. Keep in mind that even if the gamewindow don't show up, steam will still count the time so troubleshoot wisely as you can only "play" up to 2 hours before you won't get a refund.

[Los Pollos Rimmer]

Try running the exe in compatibility mode from the root folder. :)

[Leonardo]

I have exactly the same issue and I think that's related to the latest Steam update I got this morning.

This Steam update makes it impossible for me to play a Steam game, no matter what I do and don't tell me to do this or that in order to get it working again.

Just fix it with another update or restore Steam as it was before the latest Steam update.

[Professor Unknown]

Kasj

[Muppet among Puppets]

Originally posted by Leonardo:

I have exactly the same issue and I think that's related to the latest Steam update I got this morning.

This Steam update makes it impossible for me to play a Steam game, no matter what I do and don't tell me to do this or that in order to get it working again.

Just fix it with another update or restore Steam as it was before the latest Steam update.

Are you in the beta?

[Leonardo]

No, I am not using beta.

However, I dunno how but somehow I could start a Steam game and play it as I've done before the recent Steam update.


EDIT: I just to want to mention that I got another Steam update installed in less a hour. Anyway, now it works at least it does for me.

[Muppet among Puppets]

The last update was a month ago

[Robolovsky]

I have exactly this issue trying to run any of the Half Life games. They say "Running" but don't go to the game screen. If I close the process down in task manager I can then restart the game and it works normally. There are other issues as well but that's the main one. Steam support have said that it is a known issue and in the fullness of time there may be an update to fix it.

[8ullfrog]

Muppet, I'm not using beta, but I had two STEAM updates in two days. First one added the much reviled DOWNLOADS MANAGE feature. No clue what the second one did.


Just checked, Half-Life loaded fine. Ran, jumped, missed the jump, got turned into gibs.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Yes few days later there were 2 updates.