Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Fantastique! I love looking at the old boxes, and seeing the screenshots. Wow, it really plucks the harp strings in my chest.
The 80’s for some was Madonna and Michael Jackson. Well, they were for me, too.But they were mostly about what King Graham was up to!I ran home from school every night, waiting for KQ4 to appear in my letterbox, and more than once shed a tear of bitter sweet disappointment each night it wasn’t in there. I remember the feeling so strongly!– MurrayI think it’s great that people are doing university work on these old games!
You should get a real old 286 computer to run these classic games on! Play them the way they were originally played, off a crusty old 5 1/4″ disc, and the PC speaker. Fantastiche!But seriously, if you want to run them well, you could try DosBox, which emulates DOS within Windows, which should give you the convenience of modern computers, just using a file for the game (instead of an unreliable old diskette), and they also let you save and load your game more conveniently, and should also emulate old sound cards and things.All the best.– MurrayPeasant’s Quest is brilliant, and their imitation of the classic Sierra artwork is heart warming. And I love their sense of humor, and how they manage to pastiche the King’s Quest genre while also making a great little game in it’s own right!
Game Interfaces!
With rose colored glassesfirmly affixed, I have a thought for everyone that extends even further from the“learning to type” discussion…
I’ve always had a nigglingfeeling that somewhere along the line, the potential of this art form – adventuregames, and indeed computer games in general – was lost. The glinting of graphics and action somehowdistracted the world, and made them forget the other elements that give so much. The writing. The conceptualization of the world. The possibilities hidden beneath the surfaceof the world, to be examined and revealed by the player.
Now I’m not saying thatSierra actually achieved all that was to be achieved here. Indeed they didn’t. But I feel as though, with their initialtyping interfaces, they touched on a truly conceptual way to interact with theworld. One that has been lost, and hasnot really be re-explored since.
I feel as though no-one hasreally taken up the baton in striving to explore the nature of interaction. Sure, typing is a bit slow. Sure, it’s a hassle to create content andinteractions based on written input! Butit’s actually the best way to allow players to interact deeply with aworld. It provides gamers with thewidest breadth of verbs – even going beyond physical actions. Players can not only hit, look, get, give,hide and jump, but they can also persuade, lift, turn, press, scrape, joke,nudge, brush, sift, or seduce!
Personally, I loved thetyping interface which was the gateway to a world full of possibilities. A range of possibilities that the point-and-clickinterface compressed into the 5 verb icons, and a cursor you’d wave over thescreen. To me, that turned the game intosomething closer to a “watched” experience, and further from the experience ofexploring the world with your mind. Iloved those early typed interfaces, where you really considered the world throughan empty window, without icons or cursors. Your controls were words and concepts.
And intrinsically linked tothis, I think Roberta had a real knack for populating those worlds with wordsand concepts.
Maybe it’s just my rosecolored glasses, but I’d love to see a game that is accessed through words andconcepts again…
Ah, KQ3! My favorite Sierra game of all time. I loved the breadth of the story… moving all the way from Manannan’s captive, down to the “big wild world” below, and the first game to really have a proper story. A huge leap from the somewhat arbitray nature of KQ1 and 2.
I still remember the leaping excitement in my heart when mum took me and my brothers into Tandy in Melbourne city, down those steps into the store below, to look for the latest Sierra Adventure Game, and to hold the box and see the picture on the front, and already, all the possibilities of that world, filling me with excitement.Haha! It was amazing, the physical effect these games had on me as a youngster! Running home from school, waiting every day, would KQ4 have arrived in the letter box yet??? Is it in there today? Heart beating with excitement! Haha. Aghh, those magical gold boxes. So nicely presented.I guess it was the magic of entering that world yourself. Going right in there and facing the baddies! Trying to solve the dilemmas of a land, and it’s citizens, all beseiged by troubles and dangers!Magical.
