Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
(re: re: Kings Quest 4 AGI etc..) I guess the term “strategy guide” is less likely to make you think you are “asking for help” where as “hint book” you are flat out saying – “I can’t figure it out”.
I remember buying my first hint book – I’ve only bought two for personal use – KQ1 and Gold Rush. I played KQ1 for YEARS on my PCjr and could never figure out where the magic mirror was. something like 3 years later when I bought the hint book- found out that my suspicions about the WELL were correct.. Yes I had typed every combination possible to try to dive down in the water in the well – I knew there had to be something to the well since they went to all the trouble to let you go down in it and explore around and stuff. I tried commands like :
Dive in water
Dive to bottom
Dive in well
Hold breath, dive
etc..etc..etc….
What did the hint book say to do? It said to type :
DIVE
It was simple as that… I think my parser must have been broken or something.. cause certainly at some point I MUST have typed that.. but maybe not .. oh well. I find it humorous looking back on things.
-Brad(re: Kings Quest 4 AGI etc..) Wow, that’s really something.
As for those “guides,” I suspect he means hint books. In the past, game guides were known as hint books. Today’s gaming generation is used to calling any book with clues about a game a “strategy guide.”(Leisure Suit Larry™ Magna Cum Laude)
Wht do you think of Sierra creating Leisure Suit Larry Magna Cum Laude with out Al Lowi?
(re: Kings Quest 4 AGI etc..) Whoo hoo KQ4 AGI.. semi-rare commodity around here.. keep collecting them.
These Space Quest guides – can you explain them? Are they hint books, or a diferent type of guide book? Thanks.
-Brad(re: re: Space Quest Box Scan)
The Buzz Aldrin game was released by Interplay, but I’m not sure who published it… I have played a demo of it and it seems like a Sim-NASA sort of game– cool concept. I’ve listened to a few music tracks and they were very impressive– rather epic sounding…
(re: re: Police Quest Collection ver 2)
I have the “4 Most Wanted” compilation. It has PQ I-IV and came with a compact trade-paperback sized manual that had the manuals for PQ I-IV… It also had lots of neat things like an abridged version of the LAPD Manual. The binding was a bit cheap, but I still find it to be interesting reading.
(re: Funniest Leisure Suit Larry Moments)
Yeah… That part with Shablee (or whatever her name is) on the beach is hysterical. I was playing through Larry 6 with a friend and we were really happy that we solved the puzzles necessary to score and when the “reveal” happened, we both screamed “Ack!”, then laughed for a good five minutes.
Fun times.
I remember laughing at a lot of Larry 3– especially at the stand-up comic with the pathetic jokes!
(re: Funniest Leisure Suit Larry Moments)
i would have to say in larry 1 when you are in the quickie mart. that whole scene is funny. from the phone sex outside, buying the condom, “What a pervert”, and trying to steal some stuff and getting shot buy the gigantic gun.
(re: Space Quest I memory question)
It’s really quite simple: position Roger to the right of the crate, facing west (left). Then, type “push crate”.
(re: Funniest Leisure Suit Larry Moments)
I reckon in number 1 when you sleep with the hooker and you say, ‘was it good baby’ and she replies ‘ .. was what good ‘?
(re: re: TSN Board Meeting Agenda Sheet)
Hi Ken:
You should consider a vacation here in Puerto Rico(in case you haven’t been here before)! It would be very nice to meet the best game making team in the short computer gaming history. I’m sure that you would like it over here. There is not much to say that hasn’t been said by many of the Sierra admirers but my sincerest Thanks for countless hours of joy your company brought (and still brings) to all of us. I got married two years ago and just finished building a computer able to play the OLD games. My wife never heard of them before (late starter) and now she will not let me play unless she’s present! She enjoys them even though she is not playing…but sometimes she grabs the mouse from my hand and continues the game. Roberta and you are still making fans even after you stopped making games. Too bad that here in Puerto Rico it was very hard to find those games for lack of good software stores ( i.e. I was never able to find the Roberta Williams Anthology to finally have the KQ series) The ones that I managed to find(LSL, SQ, PQ and a few others) are my most precious treasures. thanks you again and may you “live long and prosper”.(re: Best MT32 emulator?) The DOSBox release referred to in the last post can to be found here. The driver mentioned on the site is older than the DOSBox capability but both work so you can try either. DOSBox needs a hefty CPU for protected mode games and this is even more so when you want to run the MT32 emulator.
You’ll have to ‘find’ the MT32 ROM image yourself as no-one is allowed to distribute it. Like Sierra, Roland is protective of its old technology.(re: Best MT32 emulator?)
Pete,
For MT-32 emulation, I think the best is to use the MT-32-enabled version of DosBox 0.6. I’ve never used it myself, so I can’t say anything more.
For your memories of King’s Quest on the PCjr, you are right, it featured bird sounds which version 2 (the common AGI version) didn’t. There is currently no working PCjr emulator, but the Tandy 1000 version of King’s Quest is nearly the same, and works under Tand-Em with sound.
Vincent.
(re: re: Sierra (your times) annual reports) I’m not sure what I have from the Sierra days. I don’t think I have any of the annual reports, or quarterly reports — but I might. All of my stuff is packed into a dark, cold, storage shed, and I haven’t had the time to sort through it.
Reading them would be fun..
-Ken W(re: TSN Board Meeting Agenda Sheet) Hmmm….
Not too many comments on this – I don’t remember this exact document, and it’s not my handwriting. I wish it had a date on it.
This was from a presentation I did to the board of our TSN multiplayer games service. Reading this, in 2004, it is impossible to comprehend how revolutionary TSN was. You need to understand that when we launched TSN I had never heard of the Internet. The Internet did, I think, exist – but it was several years from being something that anyone outside of a few colleges, knew anything about.
Our board was being asked to vote for a HUGE amount of spending, on something that had never been done, and that we couldn’t guarantee could be done. Over the first few years, Sierra invested about $29 million in TSN! This wiped out our profits – but thanks to demos like this one, the board stuck with me.
Ultimately, TSN, later renamed INN, was a huge success. Several large corporations, including Microsoft, IBM and AT&T offered to partner it with Sierra. Bill Gates personally tried to persuade me to partner TSN with Microsoft. Ultimately it was partnered with AT&T, and what happened after that would require more time to describe than I have time for today.
As I write this, I’m racing to pack. Roberta and I in Seattle for a couple of days, for Doctor appts, Dentist Appts, Hair Appts, etc, and then are doing a quick vacation in South America – and, then return to our home in Mexico. I have no idea what internet connection I’ll have in South America — so, if you don’t hear from me for a couple of weeks — my apologies…
-Ken W(re: Make KQ9 in AGI? Also about autographs)
I think it’s a cool idea – Ken and Roberta always used to work with a very small staff back then, right? I’d LOVE to see a new AGI game. Most Sierra fans don’t care about modern technology when it comes to adventure games.
(re: KQ9.org)
Wow, I totally missed this message it appear, and so did the rest of the team.
At the time we were having server troubles, as I had setup a dedicated server to host mose of our main “assets” so to speak. Apparently, the Service provider was lax in keeping backups of the actual HD and we had to manually restore everything after a complete HD crash which turned out to be useless thereafter.
Right now, the new website is up and we’re updating daily with various features.
Sorry for taking so long to reply, even though this reply is probably pointless right now.
Regards,
K Pantelios
Public Relations Director
http://www.kq9.org (re: re: The Realm)
The Realm, ok that brings back a lot of memories.
I started that game when it first came online and it was great in those days. At some point I believe Lori Cole was going to get involved as well, although she held back for unknown to me reasons.
Unfortunately, in my opinion the game was ruined by Steven at the time , plus the decision to wipe everyone’s accounts due to some game bug being exploited when the game was out of Beta, I even recall writing an email to Ken about it, but due to my misfortune it was the day he had left the company; His reply confirmed what the future of Sierra was going to be from thereon.
Bittersweet memories, I miss the good old days when I would turn on my 8086 machine, go make a cup of coffee, do some housework, make some phonecalls and return to see it still booting up, hehe. King’s Quest Games were and still are my favourite passtime.
Regards,
K. Pantelios
(re: Sierra (your times) annual reports)
Ken has a lot of business-related material, including annual reports and those types of things. I’m sure he will have lots of things to say in response to your questions (he told me his internet access will be shaky for the next two weeks, so that’s the reason if he doesn’t respond right away). I did copy / scan a small amount of Ken’s business stuff that I found to be interesting… so that will make it up here sooner or later.
(re: Sierra (your times) annual reports) Ken,
I’ll go ahead and pipe in on this discussion – I actually this morning was thinking about nearly the same thing. I was interested in the practices that Sierra implemented as far as business and compensation for its employees. I am not necessarily looking for actual private figures for individuals, but rather how people were imployed – paid by the hour, salary? Also, if they proposed a new game idea to you, did they get any special profit-sharing for a great new idea, or were they just compensated as they were regularly – like for instance Al Lowe, or Scott Murphy – when their respective series launched.
As I said I am not looking for actual numbers, just practices in the Sierra business world. Especially back at the start of Sierra around the 1980-1985 era.
Thanks.
-Brad(re: re: Looking for Quest For Glory collection (not anthology))
I think people are hoping to find these collections “new” (i.e., from an online store rather than second hand on ebay). Ain’t gonna happen. My only other suggestion is to check thrift shops and yard sales, but then it’s dumb luck if you find what you’re looking for. eBay and Amazon are your best bets (and you’ll probably get better prices on eBay). Half.com is another site that I like, but I don’t know how often these collections show up there.
-emily
(re: Looking for Quest For Glory collection (not anthology)) Good luck with your search, that may be one of the harder collection sets to find (fully boxed, etc.)
Why exactly does everyone who asks a similar question seem to add the clause ‘not Amazon or eBay’? They both offer a ‘well-known’ (though probably not loved) service! eBay is 50% luck and 50% knowing how to bid and more importantly when to walk away.
Gamez Tradez (or something like that) is a possibility but usually deals in trades (between members) only.
Seriously, anyone who’s got it probably knows it’s worth more than they paid for it (especially as the Collection Series failed to generate much sales interest when originally released and so I don’t expect there was any more than 1 ‘run’ done of each?!). In which case they’ll probably be wanting to keep it for themselves or make as much ‘profit’ as possible and so will probably eBay it.(re: Make KQ9 in AGI? Also about autographs)
Hi Troy.
I share the feeling about old AGI, also SQ I and II are great, and LSL !!! I have all the AGI games in my collection but KQIV AGI version (but don’t care too much since it is not a real AGI I would say).
I think they were great because being the first ones deadlines were more loose and less time devoted to tech was more devoted to plot.
Even being a great fan of AGI (thus sharing your feeling) though, I must vote in favour of Ken and Roberta decision of moving always forward in tech. It prooved the only way to keep Sierra alive and kicking in an environment were others failed remaining at the starting pole (great companies, but remaining there becoming mere niche and not being able to compete, earn money and therefore produce new games).
I also think advancements for Sierra were harder hitting on KQ, since KQ was always the first using the new technologies….
Ciao,
Giovanni(re: re: re: Running older games on Windows XP)
Here is how I got KQ5 to work.
Open up notepad and type:
SCIKQ5.exe-h win\winres.cfg
Save this to your game folder as Kq5.bat. Then right click on it and set the compatibility tab to run in Windows 95, 640×480,256 colors. Do the same thing to the SCIKQ5 file as well. It is the one with the yellow crown. When you want to play it double click on the SCIKQ5 file. This is how I got mine to run. Just make sure to set the display to 640×480 before trying to play.Also when saving games I had to change the save game folder to C:/sierra/kq5. It is not from the collection though,it is the regular CD version when first released.So I don’t know if these instructions will work for you or not. Good luck!
