Asterix The Gallic War

Genre: Action-adventure

Release Year: 2000

Developer: Sourcery Development Ltd

Publisher: Infogrames

Age Rating: Everyone

Playability Status: Perfect

Tested On: Windows 10 x64

Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable

Everyone’s favourite Gaul and his portly sidekick feature in this curious mix of strategy and arcade action. In the game, you will lead a campaign to recapture Gaul from the pesky Romans by playing a simple strategy game and using lots of magic potion. The game also features arcade like sections where you will get to test your brawn and reflexes rather than your brain.

Installation

In order to install the game, place the disc in your computers optical drive. Dismiss or ignore any autorun prompts that appear, then browse to the CD in Computer/This PC. Locate the Asterixstart or Asterixstart.exe file, right click on it and choose “Run as administrator”. You then simply need to click the install button and follow the on-screen prompts.

During the process the installer will offer to install DirectX 7, there’s no need for this as the version on your PC will already be more up to date.

Running the game

Before you can start your campaign against Rome’s legions, you need to get a fix or two installed. Start by using File Explorer to open the games installation directory, that is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Infogrames\Asterix” by default. Once there, open the “Exec” sub-folder. Open another File Explorer window and open/explore the Asterix CD in Computer/This PC. On the root of the CD there should be a file called “ASTERIXSTART.EXE” (it may appear simply as ASTERIXSTART depending on how you have your File Explorer configured). Now, copy the “ASTERIXSTART.EXE” file into the Asterix\Exec folder that you opened earlier.

Now, follow the tutorial here to install DGVoodoo2 into the Asterix\Exec folder (the same folder you copied ASTERIXSTART into). Remember this is a DirectX game so you will need the DGVoodoo2 files from within the MS sub-folder.

Now, run the “ASTERIXSTART” program from within the Exec folder. Click on “Settings” and make sure that Video Device is set to “dgVoodoo DirectX Wrapper and that “Resolution” is set to “640x480x16bpp”. If you’ve configured everything correctly, the window should look like the one shown below.

Click on OK when you are done. The game is now configured and ready to play. To start the game, you need to run the ASTERIXSTART program and then click “Play”.

At this point you might want to take a moment to update the games Start menu shortcut, which will be pointing to the wrong executable. Search for “Asterix” on the Start menu or search bar to find the games shortcut. Now, right click on this shortcut and choose “Open file location”.

This should open a File Explorer window showing the shortcut. Find the Asterix shortcut in the window (ignoring the various readme files and website links). Right click on this shortcut and choose “Properties”. A window should appear similar to the one shown below.

You now need to edit the “Target” box, at the top of the window. Change it so that the shortcut is pointing to “ASTERIXSTART.EXE” rather than “ASTERIX.EXE”, you can simply click on the box and type in the extra characters yourself. Once done, hit “Apply”. Windows User Account Control will prompt you to confirm the change, do so, then click “OK” to close the Window. The game is now fixed and ready to play.

Configuring controllers

While the main game can be played using the mouse, you might want to play the arcade sections using the controller. Luckily, the game supports controllers as decently as any game from this era. Start the game and from the main menu, choose “Options” and then “Configure controls”. You can then assign the buttons on your controller (we used an Xbox One controller for testing) however you like.

If you prefer to play from the comfort of your couch, then get yourself a copy of that essential PC gaming utility, Xpadder. Below is a picture of our Xpadder profile for the game.

By assigning Escape and Enter to the back and start buttons, and the arrow keys to the directional pad on the controller we can now pause the game and navigate the menus. It’s possible to navigate around the games map using the control stick, though the in-game prompts are all configured for the mouse. By binding the mouse buttons to the shoulder buttons we at least make this a little easier to understand.

Note that in our profile we have the left mouse button bound to the right shoulder button, and vice versa. This is because when using a joypad, we find the right hand button more natural to use as a primary button. This makes the in-game prompts a little confusing though, so feel free to switch it around if you prefer.

Troubleshooting

Failed to get mouse error – This error occurs if you try to start the game without having updated the shortcut to point to ASTERIXSTART.EXE. Go back to the start of the guide and make sure to copy ASTERIXSTART.EXE from the CD and update the shortcut to point to it.

Screenshots

Click on any screenshot to enlarge it.

Obelix exploring the Alps

Strategising with Getafix