EVERYBODY! You must have Quicktime codecs installed for the game to start. I also had the black screen problem at first too. After installing QTLite (a less bloated version of Quicktime) the game started fine. Edit: QTLite seems to be solving the problem better than simply installing Quicktime itself....

I'm going to assume this is just me, but for some reason I can't download the demo for this game. I've checked other demos to make sure, and they work just fine. For some reason when I click the download demo link on Shad'o though, Steam freezes for a few seconds, then flashes back to normal, and the demo is not downloaded. Any idea what I might have messed up to cause this, or are others having a problem trying this demo?...

I'm having a CTD issue on the second stage of the game; it happens at the same point in the game, during one of the last waves. I've tried various resolutions and that didn't seem to help. Is there a log / debug file somewhere that I could look at, or something that I could do to help diagnose the issue? I've dumped the output of DxDiag here for reference: http://pastebin.com/gJZYHfnb I'm using the QT Lite package for QuickTime support, as Apple's codecs didn't work for Shad'O on my system. Thanks!...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/windows-quicktime-1.3540832 The developers need to remove the QT driver requirement because it is putting people's computers at risk.

I just noticed that literally every single discussion about this game is on a problem so I wanted to chime in and say that I'm actually having a pretty fun time with this game once I got it working. Nice looking, stylish graphics, cool story, and a simple to use interface. It's certainly not paving much new ground in the tower defence genre, but is still a solid, if by-the-numbers, entry. The developers really should be on here reasuring people that their game isn't all problems and what problems there is...