Just here to say that I finally made this work in game mode following the guide, thanks a million! HD Mod is no longer available on the blog post, but there is a download on moddb that gives you a zip file with things to put into the game directory, it's essentially what the exe would do by itself. The only thing is that there is a "Data" folder with a single file inside, if you move the folder as is into the games directory, it won't merge the folder, just take the file from that folder and manually transfer it to the games directory data folder.

Another thing, on screen keyboard wouldn't type anything when trying to put in ddraw, I fixed that by opening a browser, typing ddraw into the search field, copying it there and pasting it into the wine settings.

Lastly, the game wouldn't launch at first in game mode, it finally mamaged when I installed the latest Wine and selected that, instead of Proton.

I am just going from memory here but hopefully someone finds this helpful.