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King's Quest Fan Project The Silver Lining Is Back
LoTonah writes "After eight years of development and a Cease & Desist from Vivendi, King's Quest fan project The Silver Lining is back in action. From the website: 'We are extremely happy to announce that our project, The Silver Lining, will definitely see the light of day! In a wonderful turn of events, Activision reached out to the Phoenix Online team a few months ago with a desire to revisit their decision regarding The Silver Lining. After negotiations, the C&D has been officially rescinded, and Phoenix Online has been granted a non-commercial license to release The Silver Lining! Our team is ecstatic about this, and as hard as we've worked for eight years, it's the tireless belief and support of you, our fans, that has made this possible.' The first episode of the project is due to be released on July 10."
Good on Vivendi. It's good to see they realized they made a mistake, that this wasn't hurting them (Quite the opposite, probably), and correcting the issue.
One company (on one issue) down, a few million more to go!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Probably a combination of not having to pay for the fan-made remake, nostalgia from when we played these games as children, and delight at seeing a long-dead game formula we loved revived. Try getting a good adventure game like the old Lucasarts point-and-click adventures. It's not EA or Activision stepping in to give us what we want. It's the indies. That's why people love indies.
So why is it that it's bad that EA or Activision makes constant sequels and remakes to games but then everyone has these orgasms over fan-made games that are just remaking and rehashing old games?
Because, it's clearly out of love that a fanmade project is finished. Fans are rabid and serious about doing a sequel justice.
When big companies often make remakes and sequels, it's { often } just a cash grab. You can feel that the title is lifeless. I could give you a long list if you were really interested.
Peasant's Quest
It's not JUST that they're made by fans (although that's part of it - see below). It's the style of the actual original game.
These kinds of old adventure games actually came up with new, innovative, refreshing, and comedic CHARACTER INTERACTION (i.e. STORIES).
"Aliens are invading, and you must kill them or all mankind is lost" gets kind of old after the 5th... no make that the 1st, iteration.
As to why fan-made remakes are often better:
Because they are made by fans, and fans often understand the lore, storylines, plots, and nuances of the series better than any one individual developer or project manager at the company even does.
If you don't believe me, go find some die-hard Star Trek fans...
In the early days of the web, Fox was trying to threaten every X-Files fan page for violating their trademark. Lucas threatened to sue every Star Wars page out there. Companies felt it was their duty to protect the IP. They didn't realize these fan pages weren't stealing money from them, but rather were adding value to their brands.
Fan pages and fan projects are free advertising. Any company who sues a non-commercial fan project is idiotic at best, and doesn't like receiving money from their customers.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
OH MY GOD!! So excited!
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/petition/petition.php
I love Activision right now. Would that they let TFB have access to Star Control license ...
Try getting a good adventure game like the old Lucasarts point-and-click adventures.
As you or others may not be aware, Tales of Monkey Island is thoroughly enjoyable. Telltale Games is doing a good job on this "long-dead" game formula with other games like the Sam & Max franchise as well.
Although really, they'd rather release shitty new games and duplicates of their old games on different systems.
Gotta keep killing those fan games. You can't really ruin a good video game franchise with fans jumping in there and making better stuff.
Yes, because Activision would certainly charge money for a project which is a labor of love for the fans.
There's a fundamental, qualitative difference between a game for $49 and the exact same game for free. There's also a significant difference between a game made by a huge corporation and one made by a bunch of geeks. Even if the results are identical.
If someone gave you a cold beer on a hot day, you might well appreciate it more than the same beer for $12 at an overpriced restaurant.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sorry, but this seems sort of like people who get happy over a tax rebate. IP is an unjust usurping of what you can do with your own real, physical property. In this case, the fan team simply gets to do what they should have been able to do in the first place.
Don't forget Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People! http://www.telltalegames.com/strongbad
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
You guys are going to love this.
http://www.agdinteractive.com/games/games.html
Not sure how these guys pulled it off (probably got permission before Vivendi ate Sierra), but they've been doing Sierra remakes for a long time.
Actually, it is starting to look like there is a bit of a revival for adventure games. :)
New Monkey Islands, new Sam & Max-es, etc.
Even a few new franchises.
Things are looking up
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Try getting a good adventure game like the old Lucasarts point-and-click adventures
There are actually more new point-and-click adventure games released than you probably think. Their biggest difference from the 2D classics are that most of them are rendered with beautiful 3D graphics even though they often have a fixed camera position to emulate the 2D-adventure style of play.
Try browsing around at Adventuregamers or MobyGames for a while.
Some examples:
Also don't forget that with ScummVM you can play LOTS of those classic 2D adventures that you never had a chance to play when you were younger. :)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.