I just installed Beyond Good and Evil, and I played through the opening bit, up until you get a chance to save on the mdisc reader machine thing.

The reason I stopped there though is because my computer got super hot, specifically the graphics cards did. This is really strange for a couple of reasons, but mostly because this game is 9 years old, my graphics cards are 4 years old, and I can played the Witcher 2 on this laptop and not have the cards get this hot after only about fifteen minutes of game time.

I'm wondering if there is anything about this game that won't play nice with my set up, or what I should try to do to make the game run without it cooking everything?

I have an Alienware laptop, from just about four years ago, with SLI 2 GeForce GTX 280M cards, with an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU and 4 GB of ram. I'm running W7 64-bit service pack 1. My system lets me switch between integrated and discrete graphics, and I would just use the discrete, but that card is GeForce 9400 card, and while it isn't the most horrible thing it really stutters badly when trying to play BG&E with it.

The game settings are: resolution of 1440x900; Water Detail, high; Antialiasing, on; Flare, on; Shadows quality, high. And then the compatibility settings, which I didn't change:Triple-buffering, on; SSE, on; HW Vertex Processing, on; Multi vertex stream, on; Mipmapping, on; W buffer, off; Fastflip, on; Autogen mipmap, on.

Thanks for any help!

Try turning on Vsync. There are some games that don't have any built-in framerate limitations, so your graphics card will always work in overdrive to provide as many frames as possible, which can cause overheating. For those games, the better your card is the faster it overheats. Since Vsync limits your framerate, it can solve the problem (if that is in fact the problem). I'm not sure if BG&E has that issue, but it's worth a try. It is a console port after all.

Are the cards Optimus-enabled? If so, double check, whether the cards switch correctly. Games older than a couple of years are often not detected. I think I had to change the rule manually for BGE.exe.
(If it is optimus your onboard graphics probrably run and overheat as the nvidias don't kick in.)

If not, never mind my post.

I enabled Vsync through the Nvidia control panel and I played for about 5 minutes to see if that did anything (I couldn't do longer before because I was going out). It seemed to still kick the cards into high-fan mode though. They were not as hot as they were before though, so that is good. But I'll try for a bit longer now to see if that actually fixed the problem or not.

Edit: Nope, apparently that does not fix the problem. Daaang. I just played for about 15 minutes and the area of the laptop where the graphics cards are is super, super hot again. And the fans are at their highest and making sad noises. :( I'm not sure what "Optimus-enabled" means... But I am able to manually switch between integrated and discrete graphics. When I load up the settings config for BG&E it does show the switch of graphics cards (if I only have the integrated on it shows that; if I have the SLI cards running it shows the GTX 280m). Device manager shows all three running at the same time though when it is in discrete graphics mode.

Optimus enabled cards are hybrid graphics set ups automatically switching by task. Usually this task switching has problems with old games, e.g. BG&E.

No idea how to solve your problem though, as it didn't help, apparently.
You are running a laptop, right? Could you post the model? Laptops can be very weird in their graphics set ups.

It is an Alienware M17 laptop, with the specs I wrote in my first post. I got it in August of 2009, so it is approaching fully three years old.

Edit. I imagine it might just be that it is really old, but I have no idea why BG&E specifically makes the cards really, really hot.

are you at least getting good performance?

I'm running on a single Geforce 360M and get tons of slowdown every time I enter the city through one of the highways... perhaps the game is just poorly optimized for windows 7?

Perhaps.

The performance was fine, though there were some occasional graphical glitches like textures popping and such. But overall very smooth and nice looking.

I actually just finished building a new computer so I'll try out BG&E with that at some point to see if it was maybe just my computer.

Having the same problem. It's absolutely frying my laptop. In just the first 15 minutes, the plastic casing around my the mouse pad section of my laptop got so hot I could barely touch it. I've never had this happen with any game before.

Think I'm going to ditch this one. Looks like a good game but.....what with the graphics issue, plus I've now made two attempts to save a game and it just doesn't save, looks like it will be another GOG game I throw into the 'never mind' file along with The Last Express :(

Maybe it really doesn't play well with laptops?

After building my new computer it works much better (it definitely doesn't overheat the thing -but if it did that would be scary considering how many fans the case has), but it has still crashed a couple of times, seemingly randomly.

I really like the game so far, and I'm quite interested in the story it just is difficult to get play time in when it could crash on me (and since I can't save every 10 seconds neurotically) I might lose a lot of time played.

I finally just gave up on it.

Had 3 attempts, all of around 15-20 minutes each and my laptop was just getting hotter and hotter, so hot it was literally burning my hands. Very weird, as I've probably played 200 games on it and never had this problem before.

So, I've decided to just watch Beyond Good and Evil on a YouTube walkthrough (I]m about an hour into it right now, and it's a very good game!), and will try to play it myself when I get my desktop back up and running in the next few weeks.

That's the exact same problem I was having. Maybe the game is badly optimized and really puts pressure on the motherboard or cpu or something that would definitely not be as well cooled in a laptop than a desktop. Though I don't know exactly where most laptop components are in relation to each other (as in what would be most directly below the keyboard).