Old Sierra Games Playable In Browser Through Open Source Game Engine

Lord Byron II writes "Like Quake III and Zork, Sarien.net has converted and made available many of the earlier Sierra adventure games. Currently, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry are playable, and more are on the way. They are Javascript-based, and require no Flash. The site's creator, Martin Kool, said, 'To actually allow gameplay, I reverse engineered the original AGI interpreter in javascript. The reverse engineering process has been done before by others, and the best known existing interpreter (Sarien) has recently merged into ScummVM. Due to that, the interpreter mechanics were fairly well documented online.'"

Comments

King's Quest = hardcore

[kbrasee]

KQ V and VI were hardcore adventure games... Nothing like playing through 20 hours of a game just to discover you forgot to pick up the stick on the beach within the first 5 minutes of the game, and then having to restart the whole thing. Made me want to break my keyboard multiple times.

Re:King's Quest = hardcore

[stonedcat]

At least now you don't have to dig out the god damn book and turn to page 23 and type in the 15th word in the 2nd paragraph.

Re:King's Quest = hardcore

[kbrasee]

It was also nice how if you had a certain system config, you'd get to the VERY END of KQ V and it would run out of memory, and Sierra wouldn't patch the stupid thing.

Re:King's Quest = hardcore

[Chees0rz]

How about not being able to get past the Yeti near the end of the game- you and your sister begging your parents to let you call the Sierra hotline- only to hear the haunting words....
"Throw the pie you received from the baker, at the Yeti"

Yes, the pie I ate like an hour into the game... that pie. That same fucking pie.

Re:King's Quest = hardcore

[Khyber]

I'd much prefer that to having Fuck-UROM or SafeDisc installed on my machine.

In fact that was probably one of the best forms of DRM. But now we have the internet, that means of DRM is effectively useless.

Re:King's Quest = hardcore

[Triv]

Nothing like playing through 20 hours of a game just to discover you forgot to pick up the stick on the beach within the first 5 minutes of the game, and then having to restart the whole thing.

It wasn't a stick, it was a pie.

...I thought I was over it. Guess not.

Gr.

Re:King's Quest = hardcore

[Mr. Bad Example]

> That was my last adventure game.

You should give the old LucasArts adventures a try. They were specifically designed so that you could never get stuck or lose the game or get killed for stupid reasons. It meant you could relax and enjoy the game's story, and it was almost always well worth it.

Re:King's Quest = hardcore

[bishiraver]

Prince of persia would ask you e.g. 'The first letter of the third word in the fourth paragraph on page 55.' They must have had a rather large hash table - I played through the game more times than I can count, and don't recall it asking the same one twice.

QFG

[juventasone]

The fact that there's no plans for Quest for Glory would be depressing if it wasn't for the recent release of this free QFG2 recreation.

Oh dear god

[Misanthrope]

My own personal grade wrecker is back, awesome. I always enjoyed how Sierra made the death sequences so humorous, I'd spend hours trying to kill myself in inventive ways. Monkey Island's parody of creative avatar murder was hilarious.

Nostalgia

[lunchlady55]

Memorable commands:
KISS SARIEN (SQ1)
USE ROCK IN SUPPORTER AT GUARD (SQ2)
GET LADDER (SQ3)

Re:Leisure Larry Suite

[Khyber]

I loved Leisure Suit Larry. See, there was a little quiz built-in before you got to first run the game, in which it asked you questions to prove you were an adult. Me, being about 7 years old when I first played it, found it endlessly amusing that I knew the answers to the 'adult questions.' I actually blew the original install diskettes because passing those quizzes was more fun than the actual game.

Re:Neat but buggy

[RenHoek]

:) The 'lot of Larries' is not a bug.. It's multiplayer LSL. Those are other players.

SCI

[etherlad]

Great that AGI games are getting some support, but what about SCI? There are far more of them, and they were (IMO) far better. Why are there no real SCI emulators out there?

Re:SCI

[DreamMaster]

The most well known attempt to create an interpreter for SCI games, FreeSCI, has recently been merged into the ScummVM project. Development has been going on rapidly since then, and some SCI games are already completable, with support for more to follow.

Note though that this is only in the daily SVN builds, not in the 0.13 stable builds.

Re:Just wait for MONKEY ISLAND

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind sir, I urge you to relinquish the trappings of your long-past youth and allow your intellect to briefly blossom. May it wither only after your grasp of the concept of reasonable means of communication is firmly established.

Now, pray excuse me, I do believe I can smell the deliciously browned toast being ready.

All the "Lucasarts vs Sierra" stuff way back when.

[AbRASiON]

I miss them both really.

Sierras adventure games up until around KQ6, Larry 6 were really quite fun, Space Quest too.
Even Police Quest, up to 4 was great, so was LA of course, with MI 1 / 2 and the Indy Franchise - Full throttle.
Those games were once the king of the IBM personal computer, you got a PC because it could run Larry or Space Quest, maybe castle, alleycat and eventually Lemmings, Prince of Persia etc.

I got 'in' around 18 years ago, 386DX was out and I had a 286 at the time, they were amazing - no doubt nostalgia has a hell of a lot to do with it but they were simpler times (not much conviential ram required for the old adventure games either, more games like Falcon etc)
I spent many an hour playing these mysterious games and while some of it was frustrating, I think they shaped me to who I am today, my sense of humour and in part some of my intelligence and vocabulary is owed to these witty and intelligent game writers.

Do yourselves a favour and track down a developer of one of these games and fire them off a thank you email, I emailed Scott Murphy a while back (Space Quest 2) - he still has a website.
I eagerly look forward to retirement, in about 30 to 40 years time there should be enough classic games to re-play for the rest of my life.

Re:Leisure Larry Suite

[janwedekind]

I still remember playing Larry and having a hard time to get the woman in the bar to dance with me:
Larry: Would you like to dance with me?
Woman: I don't understand.
Larry: Let's dance!
Woman: I don't understand.
Larry: I want to dance with you!
Woman: I don't understand.
Larry: Shall we dance?
Woman: I don't understand.
Larry: Do you want to dance?
Woman: I don't understand.

* two hours of trying*

Larry: DANCE
Woman: Oh yes. That's a good idea. Why didn't you ask me earlier?

you could do this 2 years ago...

[Ianopolous]

You can play over 140 dos games in your browser here: http://www.classicdosgames.com/online.php Once they incorporate JPC's new applet snapshot facility it will have instant load time as well.

Re:Leisure Larry Suite

[beatbox32]

You did what do the install diskettes? Hmm... Leisure Suit Larry appears to have had some sort of corrupting influence on you.