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Leisure Suit Unix
koshka writes "Remember wasting hours trying to navigate bamboo forests? Space Quest 3, Quest for Glory 1, and most recently Leisure Suit Larry 3 have all been completed using FreeSCI, an engine for running Sierra games on Unix." I can think of nothing better than using a $2000 computer to play Leisure Suit Larry. Oddly enough, some of Sierra's other games are also playable on Unix.
If I wanted to play a first-person shooter, well, that's what the local laser-tag arena is for. Higher framerates, better color depths, lightspeed-rendered immersive 3D environment, no lag, and multimedia including sound and tactile feedback.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Space Quest was known for its great quotes:
"You get the ladder and put it in your pocket. Ouch." - SQ3
"Bet you can't fit that thing into your pants. Guess I was wrong; it does fit. There must be plenty of spare room in there." - SQ6 (As you pick up a large board)
"That's right. You have no head. That darn pool must have been filled with acid. You obviously can't go on living that way." - SQ1
"The odor coming from your person makes you regret skipping last month's shower." - SQ1
"I intend to infest your planet with genetically-engineered, door-to-door insurance salesmen." - SQ2
"The guard appears to be less thick than you remember him. Many of his formerly contained body fluids seem to be at large." - SQ2
"Only a dumb moron would fall for that tourist trap! Suddenly, you feel like a dumb moron." - SQ3
"We rejoin our friend and semi-hero, Roger Wilco..." - SQ4
"This rough area tastes strangely like blood. Oh, that is blood! You shredded your tongue! Your mother should have warned you about licking strange areas." - SQ4
Djurkwhad: Whats your mamma call you?
Roger: A mistake. But my friends call me Roger. Roger Wilco.
"...and finally... FINALLY... nothing much happens. That must be an invalid code. Try again." - SQ4 (After trying and getting the wrong code after a LONG ass time)
Roger: Let's boogie, girls!
(Roger dances around)
Roger: I sure know how to bust a move
(If you click on a mannequin while dressed like a woman)
"Hey, keep your hands off yourself! This is a family game." - SQ4 (Using hand on yourself)
"Wilco! Have you been whiffing cleaning fluid again?" - SQ6
"Don't touch that. We don't know where you've been." - SQ6
"She looks like one of those 'professional' ladies your mom told you about." -SQ6
"Oh, yeah, real smart. Let's go poking around inside a pod that's probably carrying a half-dozen miniature face-hugging, saliva-dripping, face-eating exo-skeletal alien piranha things. And while we're at it, let's split up so that we're all alone and defenseless, okay?" - SQ6
"I hope I never get so far gone that I start talking to myself... like... this." - SQ6
"Picking up your clothes? Dammit, Roger! You're a janitor, not a responsible adult!" -SQ6
"That's not recommended. That'll either get you an appendaged removed, or a date you don't really want." - SQ6
A good series all in all.
I remember playing these games on a 8086 with a MCGA monitor.
Great to know linux finally caught up with that technology.
Another 20 years and linux will be ready for last decades desktop.
Yippy.
Really all of lucas arts work from that period is outstanding, MI 1 and 2, sam 'n max, DOTT ...
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I *still* boot DOS to play lesuresuite Lary. "We got our 'R' Rating for sex not violence" has got to be the coolest quote :).
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I wonder why some of these gaming companies don't take the initiative of assisting developers port their software to unsupported systems such as Linux, and the BSD's.
The upsides to doing so would:
Cost nothing in their own budgets
Create more exposure for their companies
Could create revenue next time around for new games
Open a new market other gaming companies don't have. (Linux, BSD's)
It costs money in terms of:
Quality Assurance (aka Testing)
Packaging (yes, most people still buy boxes of software)
Tech Support -- the average Tech support call costs $5 to the company providing it. Sierra does this for free to their customers.
There's the whole marketshare angle too. There's literally no profit in doing the port. Give it a few years though, and who knows?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
i think its agi not sci, but noteworthy nonetheless that a fan made a professional looking sequal of the same graphical quality (using the same engine no less!) purdy nifty, still have to play it a bit more.
A shame about sierra...ken williams can rot in hell.
oh yeah, the link: http://frostbytei.com/space/
and for those who like html click here and if your really bored click here.
when Push Comes to Shove
That would be dopewars. It was written originally for VAXen, then got ported to linux. There have been wintendo versions released as of 1/01....
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
When i saw this posted I went on a search for old sierra games and found.... http://hyd.org/abandonware/sierra/. they have most of the games, except for some of the "recent" ones like KQ7, SQ6, LSL7.
treke
I'm probably the only one who remembers this, but LSL1 was essentially a graphics port of the text adventure Soft Porn, which may by why it was more lewd than the second LSL.
HL and CS are playable with OpenGL acceleration on Wine. Check out http://lhl.linuxgames.com/.
Obviously sarcasm, but these were my sentiments, years ago, when people were blowing $2500 (then!) to play Wolfenstein 3D and Doom on PC's. Of course, they could also use these same PC's for word processing, budget balancing, research, etc.
The operative word here is could not did ;)
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But most of my old disks have become corrupt or lost over time.
So that means I have to hope I can illegally obtain the game files off of the net, and as we all know, that just ISN'T possible!
I mean, if it were then that would imply that poeple online were pirating. And nobody pirates, right!?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
My first Sierra game was Leisure Suit Larry I (for those of you who haven't played this, it starts with an "age verification" quiz, where you have to answer questions like "Who was Spiro Agnew?"), followed by King's Quest IV. Then Space Quest III (Astro Chicken!). Then back to Space Quest I. Hero's Quest (later called Quest For Glory, for some reason) came next. Fun fun. Leisure Suit Larry III next; much racier than the first. Police Quest I . . . the best part was the overhead view of driving the car. Then Space Quest IV came out (to my knowledge, the first of the VGA series). This one was fun, but it marks the switch from EGA command-line to VGA point-n-click for Sierra. That title had some particurly funny parts, . . . like the throwback to EGA Space Quest I in the middle of all the 256-color beauty, and the parody software you could buy at the mall. But, all downhill from there for Sierra.
What the hell happened to them, anyway? Those were some brilliant game writers . . .
I wonder why some of these gaming companies don't take the initiative of assisting developers port their software to unsupported systems such as Linux, and the BSD's.
The upsides to doing so would:
Cost nothing in their own budgets
Create more exposure for their companies
Could create revenue next time around for new games
Open a new market other gaming companies don't have. (Linux, BSD's)
Its a bit odd to see that most gaming companies are still on the MS bandwagon, when significant articles, studies, polls, show that Linux and BSD's have gained ground within the past few years. I'm sure if there were more games available there would be a bigger boom of *nix users.
Anyone from a gaming company here care to comment?
Where in the world is my wife
360 degrees of Karma
I remember playing Larry 1 on an amstrad luggable which I'm sure cost much more then $2000 dollars at the time. IT had a seperate monitor too! And a modem!
Wow, I couldn't agree more. For a little hint into what went down at Sierra, you might want to check out an interview Gamer's Depot did with Mrs. Williams some time back (thank you Google for finding that old review!) She gives a little insight as to what truly happened at Sierra. I guess it got pretty messy and she regrets the decision she and Ken made to sell.
As for looking back, I would have to agree that the Laura Bow mysteries were some of the best. Graphics were great for the time and it was all around fun that my mom and I would play (I was a youngin'). LSL was also a classic, but no one has mentioned Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, another classic from the designer of LSL, Al Lowe and with some help from Mark Seibert. Yes, they will be missed.
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
I'm surprised this hasn't come up before on Slashdot, it's actually kind of a sad story, what happened to Sierra(their adventure game department, anyway). In Feb. 1999(I think) Sierra's Oakhurst, CA office was shutdown and all employees of it were fired without notice on the day it all went down. For those of you who don't remember, the Oakhurst office was the first Sierra office and the one where, up until it's demise, they made all of their adventure games. If you're wondering what happened to a few of the more known designers of their adventure games, a few of them have websites. Al Lowe(creator of the LSL series) and Scott Murphy(co-creator of the Space Quest series) are the ones I know of. I've actually e-mailed Scott Murphy and asked him about this stuff, basically he said that when the company was sold by Ken Williams the new management were a bunch of losers who felt that following other game companies examples and switching to fully multiplayer and FPS games was the way to go. SQ7 was acutally in development up until the shutdown of the Oakhurst office, but it was a butchered fully multiplayer game that Scott Murphy wasn't proud of being forced to make anyway.
I hope Michael knows that LSL was designed to play on a $2000 computer in its day....
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to why anyone should care why game technology older than many Linux developers should be exciting."
Old does NOT mean boring. This is a common misconception. High end graphics is nothing more than eye-candy. That being said, there is nothing wrong with eye-candy, but its not the end all be all of gaming. Look at Diablo II. Not exactly Quake 3 graphics, but still fun and quite popular. You know what the number one machine of all time for gaming is? PC? Nope. PSX? Nope. N64? Nope. The number one gaming system of all time, is the gameboy at a stunning 8 bits of power.
I still play a number of original Nintendo games. They were fun then, they are fun today.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Yeah, i agree it's pretty lame that such a big deal is being made about porting some ancient games, but hell i'd rather take sierra adventure games over any of the generic FPS and real time strategy games that flood the gaming market. I wish they still made more quality graphic adventures today. Maybe I'll go out and buy a sierra game collection or try to get me some nice old warez (damn copy protection is really annoying though :).
I've got pretty much every one of Sierra's old games (except Codename: Iceman and the Conquest series), and I think I've finished all of them. Question: What happened to Sierra? The last thing I remember them releasing was King's Quest: Mask of Eternity, and seeing as how it was a 3d adventure game with a combat system (A combat system! In a King's Quest game...), I lost interest. On an unrelated note, when Colonel's Bequest came out, it was supposed to be "First in a series!" Well, we got The Dagger of Amon Ra, but nothing after that. *sigh* Those were two of the finest games they made (right behind the often forgotten Manhunter titles). Later, Joe Shuler -BotF http://brotherhoodofthefin.cjb.net
It's funny that things need air to breathe
Usually the older games have better gameplay and interfaces though. Take my favorite scapegoat for this point, Sid Meyer's Railroad Tycoon. The original, in it's ~1990 interface was easy to use, fun, and addictive. Flash forward a few years to Railroad Tycoon II. The interface is much less intuitive; I finally gave up after a while of playing with it, as much as I loved the original. Just because a game has a few years under it's belt doesn't mean it is no longer relevant.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
Is the idea here to port what PC/Mac users no longer want to buy? More and more stories on /. surround the idea of running windows on linux, running old crappy windows games on linux, etc. why?
Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to why anyone should care why game technology older than many Linux developers should be exciting.
Today: news organizations recruiting unstable high school gun nuts
They're doing something similar for the LucasArts games here:
http://www.mixnmojo.com/scramm/
But it doesn't support Linux right now.
I'd seen that around ... but I thought it was only for creatin of NEW games?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
My first reaction is to wonder why someone would be so happy about the porting of such old games to linux, when they've been played so much on other platforms. But retro games are more popular than you'd think.
The hobbyist mentality of the average linux user is quite compatible with the emulator mentality -- just look at the popularity of MAME and other emulation software on Linux and the BSDs. Both operating systems are suited to people who would rather relive what once worked than senselessly reinvent themselves.
There is a lot of money to be made in pandering to people's nostaligias, as any record company or movie executive would tell you. Combo packs of old games have been a staple of the game market for years. Bringing them to a new platform and one which is dominated by people who loved the original is the next logical step.
Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards captivated my attention, mainly because it was funny and irreverant. I got quite a bit of play-time out of that one. Then I tried the second game in the series and found it significantly more tame. I guess Sierra decided that they didn't want to scare parents away from buying the thing for their kids.
I've tried a couple of other KQ/LLL-style games since then, but the only one which has grabbed my attention enough for me to run it all the way through has been Day Of The Tentacle, from LucasArts.
Now there's a classic game. I don't suppose anyone is porting it to Linux?
-deane
Gooroos Software: plugging you in to Maya
-deane
Forget this old stuff, we need a Linux port of Half-life and Counter-Strike!
And Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, but that's not Sierra.
-
For these old games, playing a downloaded version is not good enough. You need the manual. The one for LSL3 had the "Never Never eat" song which was the path through the forest (take the first letter of each word: N for north, E for east, etc), as well as other important clues for the game presented in a humourous and subtle fashion that an onlne walkthrough won't give. To really play LSL3, you have to spend hours looking through the Noontonyte advertisements trying to make sence of it all.
-no broken link
Don't forget MAME and all the other emulation projects for Linux. The Xmame home page is a good starter site to find lotsa info, as is the main MAME page.
If you like LSL and want other "racy" games, you can find on many ROM sites some of those old Japanese "strip" and many other games (like the one that was a Qix clone except as you cleared areas it exposed a nude girl). If that's how you get your jollies, hey, have fun, at least you aren't out shooting people...
- Twid
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho