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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."
It is clear to me that the gaming industry and its reviewers are in bed together; the fact Sierra's Arcanum won an award (pc-gamer) from anyone is incomprehensible.
I am very frustrated with the obviously biased reviews and stuffed ballots out there. Here is a list of games I have played, or tried to play recently, and a simple review. While these are just my opinions, I don't think they are too far off mainstream sensibilities...
1)Arcanum -- good idea, horrible implementation. The screen is zoomed in at low resolution and doesnt scroll. The characters track apparently using bresenham's algorithm, and actually get aliasing in their path when the walk at angles! The graphics are horrible, the gameplay subpar.
2)Pool of Radiance -- Should be called Pool of Doo Doo. Nuff said. Worst game I ever paid for.
3) Wizardry 8 -- 3d version of Pool of Doo Doo.
4) Dark Age of Camelot -- Everquest and just as pointless.
5) Gorasul -- You drink potions from the commode because the German english translation is so poor. Low resolution.
6) Gothic -- A great game with a bit of a learning curve. Panned by american reviewers who it is clear never actually played the game.
7) Baldur's Gate II, et al -- the standard for RPGs today. Can get boring for the less... enthusiastic.
8) Icewind Dale et al--Like Baldurs Gate II (with Heart of Winter), more accessable storyline, but more linear as well.
9) Anarchy Online -- even more boring (and buggy!) than everquest.
10)Harry Potter -- Hey, not bad for a kids game. None to exciting though.
11)Emperor of Dune -- great graphics, interesting RTS. Looses steam over time, largely due to too few too small maps. Fairly slow paced. Great graphics..did I mention that?
12) Black & White -- Best game of the year? What are they smoking? Its nearly unplayable because of the user interface that has you clawing the ground to move. The graphics arent even that good.
These system requirements are INSANE!
System Requirements
*Pentium or higher processor, at least 233 Mhz
*SVGA display with VESA driver
*1 MB Video RAM required, 2 Mb recommended
*16 MB RAM
*MS-DOS 5.00 or higher, Windows 95/98/ME or Windows 2000
*Games made for Windows require DirectX 7 or higher
*About 50 Mb free disk space
*Sound card optional (supports Adlib, Sound Blaster and General MIDI for music; Sound Blaster and ESS Audiodrive for digital sound).
50 Megs of disk space! Why? Direct X 7! This is a 2D game! Why not the Allegro library, SDL, or DirectX 3? I cannot even run it on any of my machines, since they dont have Win 98, ME, 95 or something that supports that version of Direct X. This should be able to run on a 386 with a VGA card, instead they have done some TOTAL code bloat! How complex is this remake? More complex than even Quake or Doom II or TuxRacer? That is nuts!
I sure as hell wont d'l it. I have a PC gamer cd from a few years back that has kings quest 1[original] on it. If I want to download something that needs 50 megs, it wont be this!