Old Sierra Games Breathe Anew

Cow_With_Gun writes: "A small group named Tierra has taken it upon themself to resurrect the classic Sierra anthologies. So far they have brough King's Quest 1 up into the world of VGA and are working on other titles such as Quest for Glory 2 and King's Quest 2."

Comments

I dont know if I should be excited or sad.

[interstellar_donkey]

Excited because I love these games.

Sad, because as a general rule, despite all of our graphics and sound advances, todays games just don't have the greatness that could be found a decade ago in EGA.

Re:I dont know if I should be excited or sad.

[argStyopa]

I entirely disagree. I'm a game reviewer and I run into this from reader email all the time.

While nostalgia for old classic computer games might be cool in sort of a "I remember when..." way, PLAY THEM. Go to the Underdogs site and download them and play them. You will soon see that despite rosy-colored memories of how much fun you had playing Empire or Sword of Aragon, suddenly it's apparent that, while great games for their time, our expectations are tremendously higher. Games back then managed a very small number of variables, and were incredibly easy to 'break' by disobeying the programmer's expectations. Either that, or you were straitjacketed by the game to play the way it wanted you to. And let me say right out: this is NOT to demean the creations of pioneering game programmers like Dan(i) Bunten. Dani created some outstandingly playable games. But play Command HQ (probably the best game of its type at the time) and then play a beta of Warcraft III or Europa Universalis2. There are a jillion more levels of strategy, AI capability (sans cheating), units, capabilities, flexibility for mod authors, and on and on and on...

In the same sense everyone likes to dis as 'chrome' modern graphics ("real computer gamers will play in EGA and like it!"), that's horse puckey too. EGA SUCKED. I still can't even see the colors Cyan or Magenta without being nauseated.

Face it, like it or not, while some modern games blow, so did some old ones. And the good ones then can't really hold a candle to the good ones now (SFC, Shogun, West Front, EU2, etc) except through the fuzzy favorable view of nostalgia.

Re:I dont know if I should be excited or sad.

[wysoft]

I still can't even see the colors Cyan or Magenta without being nauseated.

Then you must be talking about CGA :)

Re:I dont know if I should be excited or sad.

[interstellar_donkey]

But I don't think King Graham et al. hold a candle to a good, solid 20-minute round of Quake III Team Arena (Capture The Flag mode).

I think it can. Those old games had something to them: writing.

Quake III is a compleatly differnet genre. There is no writing in it. The quality of game play relies almost entirily on the people you pick to play.

I don't play Quake III. Mostly, because I suck at multiplayer (and have never really enjoyed it), but I was really let down when I found out Quake III did'nt really have a game with a story line.

I loved Quake II. I felt a great sense of satisfaction when I beat the game. Quake III has no game to beat; it's never ending, and when broken down to it's key elements, all it basically consists of is a graphics and physics engine. To that end, the only real craftsmenship in most modern games is in technical tricks.

The older games had craftmanship in their stories; something we just don't see anymore.

Which is better? That's a matter of personal taste. Personally I'll take a good story over graphics any day.

And craftsmanship is, to me, key.

At present, I typically only play simulation games. One of my all time favorates is Sim City. As somebody who waisted a good deal of time in college playing Sim City 2000, I folowed the development of Sim City 3000 very closly.

I became worried when everything comming out of Maxis seemed to indicate the new version would have better graphics/more buildings/better interface. But nothing was said of game play.

I was heartfallen to discover after 20 or so hours of play with the new version that really nothing had been done to the simulation engine, and it seemed, under the auspicious of making the game more accessable to the new player, they had stunted the realism of the simulation.

The message sent was clear: Software developers today are more interested in making a game look pretty then givig it guts.

The really sad part is, the only game line I can think of that has real advances in every new release is the flight sim series distributed by Microsoft.

I've never sat down with a new release and been disapointed. When they put out a new edition, it's actually better. When I load up ms2k2, I never said 'oh I miss the wire frame world of version 2'.

Wouldn't it be better if...

[Jason1729]

instead of rewritting the same old games, they continued the series with new stories?

Jason

My Fondest Sierra Memory

[nat5an]

The coolest thing from my childhood that I remember was actually going to California on vacation and visiting the Sierra Headquarters. My family was cool like that. At that time they were giving us, as a tour group, a preview of Space Quest 4, with its (oh my God) VGA graphics and fully voiced dialogue! I was blown away. Then the presenter went on to show us all the various creative ways you could die in the first few screens of the game.

I kinda doubt that I'd have the same experience going to visit id Software headquarters so they could show us their incredibly cool graphics engine and wax poetic about the GeForce 4.