So, it seems GOG's french version of this game is unwinnable.

I came upon this thread and since I recently started the game I wanted to make sure I will be able to get to the end before playing too long, so I used the cheat codes to get as far as possible, trying not to look too much to avoid getting spoiled, and much to my dismay I am now blocked, Robin is imprisoned and the only mission available requires Robin.

I checked on french forums and it seems nobody has met this problem, but considering most posts are old, it's likely GOG-specific.

I'm likely going to resort to the version I bought years ago on Gamersgate, unless something is made about this. Ironically, I bought it again here since I was thinking GOG's package would be the best. I'm not so sure now...

EDIT : The Gamersgate version is defective in the exact same way, hence I was wrong, it's not GOG-specific... and I finally found many comments about the problems of the french version, but those problems seem to apply to the downloadable versions. The old CD versions seem OK in that respect.

Personally, I think it's one of those case where the bug is specific to the French version. There are games like that. I recall when my cousin and I were kids and played Sid Meier's Colonization, the game tended to randomly crash whenever we met European leaders. Worse, we often played hundred of turns without saving, relying only on the autosave and then an English soldier landed on our coast and the game crashed and loading the autosave just replayed the AI turn, with the exact same crash at the exact moment. It got so bad, and we got burned so many times, losing great game with awesome map due to constant bugs that we had to resort to playing on Archipelago map, with small land masses, and then we'd park a colonist on every single square of our coast to prevent anyone from ever landing on it and crash our game. Years later I read on a French old games forum that these crashes were due to the game not being able to handle some text boxes that begun with letters with accents. The English version ran perfectly, but the moment you switched the language to French, you opened the door to those crashes unless you went out of your way and removed those letters with accents from the game's script files.

I had another similar story with Theme Hospital. I tried to play that game two or three times, played at a friend's house back in high school, that game was so great, but as soon we reached Level 4, the game froze during the cutscene between Level 3 and Level 4. Years later I played the game a second time at another friend's place. I thought my old friend's pirated copy was to blame, and that new friend had the original CD, so we gave it a shot, but no luck, we got the same frozen screen at the start of Level 4. Years later, visiting that French old games forum, I discovered tons of players that experienced the same crash. Turns out one of the messages from the in-game advisor was bugged in the French version, if you played the English version or if you played with the advisor messages option turned off, you were fine, but if you played the French version with the advisor messages turned on, well, since that bugged message was the first message you received at the start of Level 4, that message caused the game to freeze when the game had to display it.

Luckily for me, I'm at a point in my life where it's a non issue. I spent enough years on the internet chatting, posting on forums or watching Let's Plays that playing the English version of a game isn't a problem anymore. Back in the 90s however, that was a different story.

The situation was somehow similar for me. Though I prefer playing games in french, here is what comes too often with a french version :

- an awful translation with spelling mistakes galore
- an obvious automatic translation which can be as awful
- problems with accents as you witnessed, or translation too big to fit in the dialog box, text file corruption, that sort of thing (Simcity 3000 is an example, though I noticed that for hospital buildings only)
- patches existing for the english version only
- the game mechanics being updated but not the french translation, hence behaviour inconsistent with what is displayed (Legends of Eisenwald)

Concerning Robin Hood however, the problem is slightly different, since the french game WAS finishable. I suppose something bad has been done while converting the CD version to a downloadable one.

Ironically, it's easy to find cracked ISOs of the game on the net and I'm pretty sure they would work well, the only problem being that I don't want to run programs I got from untrusted places. I would not consider this morally a problem, since I own the game (I even bought it twice).

I consider morally more problematic that nobody tried to correct the bug in this game that was introduced around 2012 I would say, hence four years ago. Four. And no one does and even says he's doing something. And they complain about piracy...

It is also possible that this bug was not present in the original CD release and the bug was introduced in one of the patches released back in the days.

If that's the case, the 2012 release could be fixed by simply reverting to v1.0 of the French version.

I have the 1.0 version from Gamersgate and tried it as well, with no more luck...