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(re: Shadow of Darkness)
yeah, what a sad ending to my favorite series ever… (I don’t think DragonFire really counts, sorry!!)
I never even beat it.. Too many bugs!!!!
I wish Sierra would release the code and let someone re-do it so we could all go back and play it again..
oh well…
(re: RAMA: Do any of you remember that one?)
Well, now I’m curious. I may load it up to see what it’s like. If it runs without massive tweaking, I’ll try it.
Interesting, this “wandering aimlessly” sounds a bit like Myst. The copyright on this game is 1996, so it’s newer than Myst… but I wonder if Sierra was purposely trying out the first-person style? Was this the first Sierra game that came out with a first person perspective?
(I thought Lighthouse may have been the first first person game Sierra did… that one is also copyright 1996.)
-emily
(re: re: re: re: RAMA: Do any of you remember that one?) My development team did go to Sri Lanka to meet Clarke, and film some footage with him.
You are right … Gentry Lee was the writer. A wonderful person – seriously. Charming. I may be being unfair to the game. It HAS been a long time. My opinion tends to be adversely impacted when something ships late, goes over budget, doesn’t hit it’s revenue projection, or gets poor reviews. My memory isn’t perfect, but I think I remember it being guilty of several of these sins.
-Ken W(re: re: re: RAMA: Do any of you remember that one?)
crap…i just went searching for the box to try and refresh my memory of the story line for this game but can’t find it. i do have the cd case here. unfortunately, the back cover talks about “The Betrayal of Antara” (that’s one I never played)
but yeah, the fact that Arthur C. Clarke was a part of this project helped to make me believe this would be a true classic. hmmmm…the cover has the name Gentry Lee on it. that must be the great author you spoke of.
i have heard of authors having trouble making the transition from book writing to game writing. this seems like it may have been the case here as well.
i don’t ever remember the puzzles being hard. what i remember is just wandering aimlessly on the surface of this alien planet looking for artifacts. i could not derive a purpose for my character other then, “hey, here’s another cool thing to look at”. i had not emotional connection to myself (the main character) nor any of the other characters (there were few).
i think you 2 have convinced me to try this again. this time (being much older and hopefully more wise ..ha!), i will try to keep an open mind. emily, would you mind letting me know when you get started? i would be interested in getting your thoughts of this one.
did you ever get to meet Arthur C. Clarke?
(re: re: RAMA: Do any of you remember that one?)
Oh goodie. I somehow managed to acquire two copies of this game (actually there’s no somehow about it — it happened because I can’t keep myself from buying Sierra games if I see them cheap…) Haven’t played it yet. Can’t wait, what with that glowing endorsement. 🙂
Is it that the puzzles are too hard? Or that the gameplay itself was just kind of awkward?
I’m sure I’ll play it at some point, but it’s certainly not at the top of my list.
🙂 emily
(re: Police Quest II Box Art: Ken is that you? :-)) Nope — it’s a guy named Greg ??? – who was an artist with us at the time. I think he also appears on the cover of Police Quest III.
I don’t think I appear on the covers to any of the boxes… Roberta is on the cover of a Mother Goose box (and, one other box cover that isn’t quite as wholesome).
-Ken W(re: RAMA: Do any of you remember that one?) I have negative memories of Rama. It was a total mess.
It was an experiment to see if Dynamix could do an adventure game. We had a famous author on the project (whose name I forget) and even got Arthur C Clarke’s participation. Dynamix was awesome, Arthur C Clarke is certainly awesome, and the author (whose name I’ve forgotten) was awesome, the art was awesome, and Sierra’s adventure game technology was awesome — but, roll it all together, and what do you get – a disaster.
Why?
It’s been so many years. that I don’t remember what all went wrong. My recollection is that the project was horribly over budget, and that there were creative issues. Also, there were issues associated with taking a book author and putting them to work in an interactive medium.
Rama was beautiful. It’s worth finding a hint book, and playing it through just to see the graphics. Perhaps I should have kept the team together and had them keep polishing the play until we had a great game. Vision is always better when you look backwards. At the time all I remember thinking was: I NEED to get this shipping, and stop the spending.
-Ken W(Play old Sierra Games on new PCs)
Hi, recently I came over some old games: KQ1 to KQ4, SQx,LarryX. Memories of my children and me playing for hours, many years ago. Allthough I’m 57 now I’d like to have a go again, alas, it doesn’t work on GHz-CPUs or does it?
Who can help?
Greetings, Volkert(re: re: Why’d you stop making text-based games?)
As for #3, do you know exactly when that was? or perhaps what game specifically was it that started capturing sells internationally? it’s just for curiosity’s sake
were you targeting overseas sells or was that a side effect of the great games?
(re: Why’d you stop making text-based games?) We stopped using the text parser for a few reasons:
It seemed like a good idea .. Infocom had a better parser than us, and it was easier to compete by switching the focus rather than take them head on.
I liked to try new things. Phantasmagoria was something new (live actors). KQ8 was an experiment with using 3d. Not all experiments worked, but that’s what I liked about Sierra. We were willing to live dangerously.
Our games started selling internationally. It was easier to make text OUTPUT international, than text INPUT
-Ken W(re: re: Size / Format Discussion)
Yea i’ve seen those Totally MAD CD’s and they are nicely done indeed.Hope we get that same level of quallity.
I’m checking to see if i can contribute in any way to the project with some materials.(re: Don’t eat the spinach dip )
you can do it. Don’t be afraid i dead ended in that game coutless times. If you need any help feel free to ask. I beat them all.
(re: Police Quest on Windows 2000) It works on my XP machine, though I have not played it all the way through on XP. I can not say if there are any bugs that will keep you from playing all the way to the end. As always you will need
Link: DOSBox(http://ntvdm.cjb.net/” target=blank>VDMSound and VDMS Launchpad to have the audio with DOS games.
Also, if you have any trouble with it, you can always try running it in <A href=”http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/)
.(re: Don’t eat the spinach dip) i remember now. initially i ate it right away – then i saw i lost the points, and restored. i did make the mistake of eating it on the lifeboat too. yuck!
still haven’t finished that game, i stopped on the airplane. i’m paranoid about hitting a dead end. i think i had more stamina when i was a kid… i never worried about that stuff!
🙂 emily
(re: Animation Tools for Kings Quest VII?)
Wow, that’s pretty neat. I have a previous King’s Quest collection, and it had a whole bunch of drawings and stuff in it but they were all pretty low resolution – these ones aren’t quite print res, but they’re definitely high for web res. Can someone with the anthology bundle all the pictures up (are there any from other games on there?) into a few ZIP files in their original format and send it to me? I can take 10 megs at a time, so let me know if you can and then I’ll send you a message through the board with my attachment email address.
(re: re: Iceman missed the boat)
That sounds bad. One of the things somone told me was the navication was 100% on the mark or you die. Sounds like a game with promise. oh well.
Also in SQ1 re-make you get an item that messes with the slot machine to make it jackpot all the time.
(re: Don’t eat the spinach dip )
Well not if you eat it right away, but if you saved it Larry would eat it on the life boat and being several days out to sea would have made is in a worse way than it was to start (yes it can get worse) and you would die, but in real life I got sick right off the bat.
(re: re: Animation Tools for Kings Quest VII?) You can look at some of the sketches here: http://mitglied.lycos.de/pirotess/daventryheaven/main_eng.htm
(re: What’s the deal with the birdcage?)
that’s a good question. was it supposed to be a reference to KQ2?
-emily
(re: Don’t eat the spinach dip )
haha!
i think i restored immediately after eating the spinach dip because i was afraid that losing points meant i would get some horrible illness and die. this game was made back when Sierra thought it was funny to put dead ends in their games…
🙂 emily
(re: Animation Tools for Kings Quest VII?) Unfortunately I don’t have the Roberta Anthology so I can’t tell you that one. Those sound cool!
Kronos is not a software company, it was a visual effects company that did movies such as Lawnmower Man. As far as I know, they’re not around anymore (probably consolidated into another visual effects place what with all the mergers and such in big corporations’ holdings today).
