you still haven't told what VM and game version you're using so I could try here !

what I do currently here and always works in VBOX
- start the IDA listener utility in the VM
- load the IDB in desktop, configure and start remote debugging (make sure you copy WOXL folder from VM first else IDA will complain)
- there will be 1 exception occurring in ddraw, pass it to the app.
- debugging experience works well, rarely it will crash
- but only for the demo since it's HEL, couldn't get full ver. HAL to work in a VM
(btw not sure if it's really worth trying to absolutely get debugging of full ver. HAL, their modified date differs only by a week, but if you did then explain how you did )

For the SVN, see if you can get svn command-line utility to accept the certificate when you check out against a sourceforge repo, it used to work here but not anymore. If that works but the plugin still fails when updating from the repository (see IDA output window) then it means that the PySvn they use is outdated -> the only solution then is to manually commit as I've said, not a big deal but you lose this functionality straight from what the plugins adds to IDA file menu. Basically each one keeps a base IDB, plugin export names/comments/etc to DATs as text...