Lake's games for a while now have had this very infamous quality: Glitches are patched just as quickly as they are discovered. Some may view this as perfectionism, while others view it as a hinderance. The new Spark 1.5 patch follows this golden standard, as some are in love with it due to the performance boost it offers over the original release, while others loathe how it patched useful glitches and coompletely changed how certain parts of the game works.
Fear no longer however, as there is a way to make everyone happy. One useful feature of Steam is it allows games to be downgraded, unlike practically all console counterparts. Although many consoles allow you to uninstall a patch, on most it is often tricky to then get back onto a desired version, especially if it is not the original version or the current version. Steam comes in handy here as any version of any game can be downloaded through the console, and this rule certainly comes in handy for Spark.
Enough chat, here's how to do it:
- Press Win+R on the keyboard to open the run command.
- In the dialogue box, type "steam://open/console", making sure that the Steam client is already open.
- Input the following phrase in the console dialogue box "download_depot 601810 601811 6774552883254199841".
- The depot will now begin downloading. If your Steam install is in the default path, the download will be located at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\content\app_601810\depot_601811".
- Replace the files in the "Spark the Electric Jester" folder inside of the "common" folder with the files just downloaded.
- Fully close Steam by killing the task in Task Manager.
- Go to your "steamapps" folder inside your Steam install and locate "appmanifest_601810.acf" and open this file with your text editor of choice. 8') Locate the line "StateFlags", and next to it should be a number. No matter what value this number is, change it to "4", as this will stop Steam from automatically updating the game.
That's all there is to it, you should now be playing Spark unpatched just like all those days gone by, now get back to abusing Super Static!
This method is no longer working as of August 2020. New methods to downgrade are being explored by the Mods currently.