I've wanted to play Giants for a long time, and I was glad to finally get it. Unfortunately, I'm having some problems getting it to work.
After the three intro screens, I saw the loading screen with the green, red, and blue tinted images of the three characters. There was no loading bar after several minutes of waiting. I tried checking the Task Manager, and it said the game was using CPU and was "responding," so I maximized the game again. I was treated to a screen that was now completely black save for "Restoring Textures........" in the upper left corner. Occasionally, an extra dot appeared afterward.
I had to hard reset my computer after several minutes of nothing happening. I tried uninstalling the Geforce 3 mod which I had downloaded (leaving GRM and GiantsHook enabled), and tried the game again. This time the loading bar appeared under the three pictures and a series of odd looking white boxes which I assumed was probably text being displayed incorrectly. The loading bar ended up hanging at about 75% full, so I ended the process and reinstalled the game.
However, on a fresh install, the same problem occurred: same odd looking loading screen hanging at 75%. It held for so long that my screensaver started, and I again had to hard reset because I couldn't get out of the screensaver.
I figured that perhaps running in XP 64-bit was the problem (I didn't have a spare copy of 32 bit, that's the only reason I'm using it), so I turned on compatibility mode for XP 32-bit (despite the fact that it was running the program in 32-bit mode anyway). Same problem.
Anyone have any idea what might be going on?
Specs:
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
4 GB RAM
Geforce 8600M
If it helps any, I'm running the game off an external USB 2.0 hard drive, but that doesn't create a problem for anything else I run.

try setting it to run on only one of your cores.

That didn't seem to help. I even tried a program that would set its affinity to only one core before I even launched it, as opposed to using the Task Manager. I still received the same problem.
Question...is there supposed to be a line of text during the loading screen above the blue bar? Or are those odd-looking white boxes normal?

I'd try the latest or different graphic drivers if it's freezing at "Restoring Textures." I'd also try reinstalling the game on your main hard drive, since some games have issues if you try to run it on a non-regular hard drive.

Maybe revert to an older video driver. Also is there a file in the folder that allows for setup outside of running the game?
I would check but I finished the game and did an uninstall for a bit.

You may try hitting enter a couple of times and a new game should load. I have the same problem with a completely different machine, I just can't see the main screen. I don't know how to load a saved game though. Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!
Specs:
windows Vista Business 32 SP1
Intel core 2 duo 1,60 GHz
3GB RAm
INTEL GMA X3100

Allright.
I've installed the Graphical Revision Mod and the main screen is now visible. The only problem is that I can't enable landscape bumpmapping anymore, since everything looks transparent with the setting on. Who cares.
My main problem now is that the game has a quite low framerate in certain points. Sigh.