This game is by the company Hothead and is very fun. You can get it through retail or through Steam. If you haven’t played this yet, I highly suggest doing so. It’s not a very long game, but it’ll keep you entertained for the entire duration of your game play 🙂 I commend Hothead on creating such a great game. I’m sure you’ll like it too so give it a shot! After all, you might as well if you don’t have it because a demo is available to try out for free. Mind you that these fixes work for Thongs of Virtue as well.

Here’s a brief description of the game from the official Deathspank website: “Described by top scientists (and most reviewers, some of them scientists) as Monkey Island meets Diablo, DeathSpank is an exciting hack and slash action RPG set on a massive, dangerous, curvy world. In between hacking and slashing, DeathSpank solves puzzles and explores an epic story. DeathSpank will vanquish evil and be a hero to the downtrodden; he will collect loot, level up, collect loot, acquire new abilities and collect loot.” Sounds good huh? Anyway, let’s get on to the topic of this page — the actual game fixes for the PC / Windows version of the game rather than the console versions (Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 / PS3). Some of these recommendations may help with the Mac / Macintosh version as well.

If your game is running at snail’s pace or seems to be running at a low frame rate / low frames per second (fps), or if you have weird problems on your game screen such as pixelation, shadows, etc. — then I suggest trying the following game solutions:

— Close all unneeded programs and services
— Lower all game graphics settings (i.e. resolution, etc)
— Verify that you do meet the hardware requirements (they’re not high)
— Upgrade your video card / graphics card drivers, as performance improvements and bug fixes for games are often included
— Make sure you’re using the most recent Direct-X version

This can be caused by numerous reasons. Try the following:

— Run the game as an administrator / in administrator mode (Windows 7)
— Set the compatibility of the game’s exe to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) if using Windows 7
— Update your DirectX
— Update your drivers or try legacy drivers (newer drivers can fix the problem for some cards, whereas older, legacy drivers may fix it too)
— Try setting the affinity of the EXE to Core 0 and Core 1
— If using Steam, then try to validate / revalidate the game’s cache
— Try running the game’s EXE directly instead of launching the game through Steam
— If the game crashes during the EA logo or Hothead logo, try renaming gameoverlayrenderer.dll to gameoverlayrendererBAK.dll and then running the game. You may be required to do this every time though
— One user has recommended using the program Gigabyte OC Guru to allow the game to run correctly

If your having difficulty with achievements from showing up or being earned, then it may be Steam related. Often times, a disconnection or reconnection will occur with Steam while you’re playing the game. Depending on the time it occurs, you may unfortunately have problems with an achievement from being registed / awarded. For instance, addict achievement, chicken kills achievement, etc. You can try:

— Playing in offline mode (sort of defeats the purpose of achievements)
— Trying to earn the achievement again

These two errors prevent the game from running and seem to be most common with ATI cards. For example, the ATI Radeon x1950 Pro, x1650, HD 3800, and HD 5870. These D3D errors can be confusing as despite having support for the game, it still does not play.

— Try patching your game, as Hothead is working on this problem
— Try using the an ATI legacy driver (especially for x1000 series)

If your game controller is not working, then try plugging the game controller after the game is open rather than before it’s open. This may cause the game controller to register correctly and function as it should.

Unfortunately, some people are losing their saved game data randomly while playing. Try the following:

— Disable Steam Cloud

The saved data can be found, and should also be manually backed up, in the following directory:

C:\\Program Files\\Steam\\userdata\\NUMBER

The number may be something like 18040 rather than named “Deathspank”. Make a backup of *.sav files in the remote directory (not the local directory). To try to recover your old saved data after backing up your saved data like so:

— Launch the game and create a new game in the old game’s slot
— Save the game, and then exit Deathspank / Steam
— Now try replacing the new save file with the save file you had just backed up
— Run the game

If all goes well, then you’ll be able to play now. The “Continue Game” option should no longer be grayed out. However, if the *.sav file is corrupted, then the file itself is likely corrupted and unfortunately your data cannot be recovered.

This is a DirectX DLL error.

— Try downloading the file d3dx9_43.dll and placing it in the same directory / folder as the game’s exe. If that doesn’t help, rename the copy you have in your C:\\Windows\\System32 folder to something else (i.e. d3dx9_43BAK.dll) and put the recently downloaded DLL there
— Try running the game’s EXE directly instead of launching the game through Steam
— Navigate to C:\\Program Files\\Steam\\SteamApps\\Common\\Deathspank\\DirectX and run dxsetup.exe

If you know any other game fixes for this game, please post them! Alternatively, if you are experiencing game problems and this guide doesn’t help you troubleshoot them / solve them, then leave a comment and we’ll try and help you out as soon as possible!