Hi, I own the retail release of this game and when I recently went to play it I found that the videos that play when you build a castle weren't working. When I saw the game here on GOG I figured I would pick it up for a low sale price and that the movies would work because GOG just does awesome stuff to make everything work in the older games. Well, still no castle movies.

Now I love this game and of course it's awesome without the movies, I just miss them. The swooping camera and the windy, lonely sounds... It was part of the magic of the game for me. Does anyone else have this problem/know of a way to fix it? All of the other vidoes play in the game, intro, after battle, victory, death, etc.

Every time I build a castle it makes me feel a little sad. If I had to guess I would guess the videos may have used quicktime, but I'm not sure why as the rest of the videos apparently did not? Any help for my minor disappointment would be greatly appreciated.

Which game are you referring to? I'm almost sure they play properly in LotR 1, so do you mean LotR 2 then?

It's definitely from the second game.

Yes, the second game. I'd think my memory was off except that I remember the videos so vividly, including the sounds. I really miss them and I wonder why in both my retail version and the GOG version everything in the game works but those videos. Also wondering if anyone is able to see the videos?

I have seen them except the royal castle last time. Just built a keep and norman keep and the videos work on the GoG release.

I have the same problem as the OP, but I found a workaround:

If you keep holding down the left mouse button when you click "Yes" on the castle building screen (i.e. when you start the building process), the castle cutscene will play as long as you hold down the left mouse button.

If you release the button, the building screen will close, thereby stopping the video as well.

So the problem isn't with the videos not playing, but the game registering mouse clicks in odd ways, sometimes registering two when there was only one - e.g. when saving the game, pressing the confirmation button tends to initiate a left mouse click on the map object underneath the save game screen, opening a farm tooltip if there was a farm there, or a labor screen if there was a town, etc, as if you clicked twice, although you only did once.

This is probably what happens to the castle videos too - the game registers a second mouse click which stops the video and prompts the screen to close.

Thanks Raydell. There were reports of other missing videos, so this could be what's causing it too.

Happy to help. :)

Like PanzerAzelSaturn noted, the issue isn't unique to the GoG release - I'm experiencing it on the Windows version of the original CD copy too.

It's only the original's DOS version where those vids play well by default for me, but that one has other issues of its own, so I'm quite happy with the GoG release, barring this minor quirk, it works perfectly.

Yay, I will have to try this. It makes perfect sense because I have noticed the double mouse clicks in other places, especially when saving, it always acts like I clicked twice and ends up turning off industries. Now I wonder if there is any workaround for the game constantly registering 2 clicks instead of 1? A really weird and unique problem in my experience.