First, specs:

Windows XP, SP3

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.91 GHZ

4 GB DDR2 RAM

NVidia GeForce 8800 GT

Ok, so the game does start for me and I can go into a new game. However, what happens is it just zooms into his room and nothing happens. Fez isn't there. If I go to the menu and go back out, he is, but when I exit the house, it just shows the old guy standing near the mailbox and he never does anything. The game isn't frozen - I can hear the bird chirping and see bits of its animation off to the left. somehow, I've gotten it to advance beyond this point one time, but after the mail dropped down, Fez never appeared. If I try to start a new game in a file that already has data, instead of zooming into the room at the beginning, Fez spawns a little to the right of the room and just falls and dies continuously. I have installed the update, it is version 1.7. Anybody have any ideas?

Have you tried re-installing the game?

Recently with an older game I was trying it was utterly unplayable (This is from Messiah), however I decided to go ahead and update my drivers for my video card and curiously the problems went away. For a game that's 5+ years old, you'd think newer cards/drivers wouldn't have had the problems. So update your drivers, make sure Direct X is at least version 9.

Although to comment on weird issues is the game design. Throughout the game there's occasionally symbols and it looks like a pseudo language. However at one point my cube has insisted I backtrack to an area, so I do. I go to the area (8 cubes) and there's one area that's marked as a secret, however when you go there it's just posters on the wall.

I'm not against the style, but unless you're really ready for it, you're not going to know that it's describing how the symbols map to the gamepad, actually I had to look up what was special about the room to learn that there's a mapping for all the letters, numbers, and pad buttons to the symbols as they are explained.

Be nice if the cube said 'hmmm I there's something about this that's important...' at least for the first one you come across one of these so you know there's something more, and you don't have to look it up. Honestly as fun as that type of puzzle type is, I'm not in the mood to write down every symbol to do a long conversion to figure out what something is trying to say. Maybe another time.