The game is Juiced (2005)
I'm normally pretty good at getting old janky PC ports running but this ones stumped me after multiple attempts.
Tried running through Lutris, Bottles, Heroic and base system Wine. using many old and new versions of wine/proton.
DXVK, D3D, Different directx dependancies through winetricks and even tracking down an old Directx9c Windows installer and installing that in the prefix but even that didn't help.
FIX here: I needed to install dxdiag through winetricks, which revealed a memory error that was fixed by downloading the 1.01 patch from here. I also switched to Wine-GE 8.26, using Proton the game would crash after the first loading screen.
I'm still working out how to get my controller fully working but that's apparently an issue even on Windows sooo
it just seems stuck at the check. maybe it also expects a specific os version to let you in?
what is protondb saying about it? are game/wine logs cluing us in with anything at all?
Sadly Lutris logs aren't giving anything useful just 'Child 29151 exited with wait status: 0' Which is apparently a "nothing error"
And nothing on Protondb as this game never released on Steam.
I did also try setting Wine to Windows XP mode but that also didn't help or gave me a separate memory error bug.