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Games Entertainment

Leisure Suit Unix 110

Posted by michael from the leather-goddesses-of-fear-and-terror dept.
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.
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Leisure Suit Linux More

Leisure Suit Linux

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  • Re:Please no. (Score:3)

    by SEE ( 7681 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @08:29PM (#370274) Homepage
    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

  • Favorite lines of Space Quest series (Score:5)

    by Sheepdot ( 211478 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @08:32PM (#370275) Journal
    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.
  • Doom, Doom II, Quake I, II and III are all available for Linux.

    They play great, too! I've had some problems getting hardware accelleration working in Quake II but other than that all of these run great.

    Check out the Linux Quake HOWTO [linuxdoc.org], and the Linux DOOM FAQ [uoregon.edu].

    Peace.


    Claim your namespace.

  • Re:Please no. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • DOTT is one of the finest games ever made! I keep a vintage 486-66 to play it and a few older lucas games on (:-) 8 megs of ram, SB16, dos 6.22 ... QEMM 9 :) During the killer heat of the california summers I usually play these games in the wee hour of the mornings (the only time its cool enuf not to drive you mad).

    Really all of lucas arts work from that period is outstanding, MI 1 and 2, sam 'n max, DOTT ...

  • I *still* boot DOS to play lesuresuite Lary. "We got our 'R' Rating for sex not violence" has got to be the coolest quote :).

  • Re:stran9er days (Score:3)

    by spectecjr ( 31235 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @05:04PM (#370280) Homepage
    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

  • 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 [frostbytei.com] and if your really bored click here [mp3.com].

  • Re:Favorite lines of Space Quest series (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Please tell me you aren't really Gary Busey.
  • 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....
  • Damn straight. I find most current first person shooters boring after about an hour of play, although I do admit playing the original Doom in death-match mode for hours at a time. I find the big problem with those games is that it really requires no thought. You go around and blow everything to gibs. It's more rapid-fire reflex then anything else.

    *shrug* Maybe I just prefer games that you actually have to think to be able to solve. (Oddly enough, I can't stand Myst... go fig.)

    Kierthos
  • When i saw this posted I went on a search for old sierra games and found.... http://hyd.org/abandonware/sierra/ [hyd.org]. they have most of the games, except for some of the "recent" ones like KQ7, SQ6, LSL7.
    treke
  • Yeah, I'm one of them. Seriously. Are you from Section 9 or Hillse?
  • As much as I love the idea of running classic Sierra games in Linux (which I WILL do, naturally). Nothing beats running these games on the platforms they originally ran on. My first experience with sierra games was the orignal Kings Quest on my PCjr. What was great was it used the psuedo EGA graphics and the tandy 3 voice sound. Compared to the regular PC version, this was amazing. My current goal is to get an Apple IIgs and some classic Sierra games for it (IIgs versions naturally).
  • It troubles me that the state of Linux is such that the porting of a few ten-year-old DOS games to everyone's favorite OS is a newsworthy event. How about someone other than Carmack porting/making his new game run on Linux? As much as I loved the Sierra Quest games, The fact that this is such a big deal depresses me.


    --Brogdon
  • 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.
  • Section 9 kicks ass. I used to be an admin (probably still am...) but I haven't play tries in forever. I'll probably go back into it when tribes 2 comes out. I truly love the shifter mod.



    Dive Gear [divingdeals.com]
  • HL and CS are playable with OpenGL acceleration on Wine. Check out http://lhl.linuxgames.com/.
  • I can think of nothing better than using a $2000 computer to play Leisure Suit Larry.

    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 ;)

    --

  • There's a great wealth of Space Quest quotes at the Virtual Broomcloset [wiw.org], in the section labelled "Quoth the Janitor". Pretty amusing. At first, I thought that's where these came from
  • I had twice that into my Apple IIgs when I was playing LSL at its release. I spent a lot of time playing Sierra Online games back then. I also played a lot of Wings of Fury and Tetris too. I still fire up an emulator from time to time to play.
  • Everybody below is speaking of playing LSL on Linux, let's point something : UNIX is not only Linux. Example, you could play LSL on an old Sun Sparcstation 5 (which is cool and doesn't worth $2000 anymore).

    Aye, we're talking about a virtual machine system developped 10 years before Java! And now it's running under MS-DOS (386+), Win32 and Sparc (and more)!!
  • I still have my DOTT CD - phear me!
  • Posting to slashdot isn't helping to make Linux a viable gaming platform either, sparky. If someone wants to write an emulator so others can play classic games, why do you care?

    As anyone can see, Linux's troubles moving into the gaming market aren't due to the OS, but instead to the fact that compared to Windows, hardly anyone uses it, and of those that do, most aren't interested in playing games.

  • My wife has this (board) game. I've never played it though.
  • Is there any chance they'll port halflife so i can play counter strike [counter-strike.net] in unix? :>
    ©o,,o©©o,,o©©©o,
  • Space Quest 3 runs nicely under dosemu. I don't see why the others wouldn't.

    Anyone know of an abandonware site that might have some of these games? I never got to finish Quest for Glory III back in the day...

    -John
  • No, a company can charge whatever they want to both cover the cost of the medium and produce a profit for an "official" disk. If you pay for a download, you have paid for the exact bytes as duplicated on their server and sent to your machine. You can take this and back your installation and backup copies are provided in the copyright legislation. If you lose your download you do not have the right to get a copy from someone else that downloaded the product.
  • They are still there. Half Life, Homeworld, Swat 3, Tribes and Tribes2. They also do "sports" games, well if you consider fishing, bullriding, and golf sports :). I wouldnt be disappointed if they'd go back and write some new adventure games (The 3d version of Larry previewed on Al Lowes website looked cool).
    treke
  • 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.)"

  • Ah, old Sierra games . . . (Score:3)

    by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @08:40PM (#370304)
    This makes me happy. This may not have much of a market other than those who played the games "back in the day", but there are quite a few of us around . . . [cue dreamy flashback music]

    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 . . .


  • At the moment, there is no direct relationship between us and Sierra. They know that we exist, and we suppose that they still exist by the time you read this, but that's about it. We have asked for SCI specs, but they assured us that they did not have any documentation pertaining SCI available. On the bright side, they haven't tried to sue us, either.


    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 [microsoft.com] 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 [speedygrl.com]

  • Re:Ah, old Sierra games . . . (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 . . .

    If I recall correctly, King's Quest V was probably the first game to use the "keyboardless" interface. In general, actually, the King's Quest games seemed to be the testing ground for the new interfaces. KQIII was the first to provide the popup dialogs instead of text at the bottom of the screen. That was subsequently used in the first installments of a couple of a few of the other series (Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry.) KQIV introduced the "pop-up" command box, which caused the action to stop while you typed commands (Sigh... no more "fast-typing challenges," like killing Dracula in KQII.) That interface was then used in Space Quest 3, Leisure Suit Larry 3, perhaps Police Quest 2 (never played that one), and Hero's Quest (which was renamed Quest for Glory after a bit of a trademark dispute with the "Hero Quest" board game.) Things sort of seemed to degrade a bit with the KQV interface, with its purely mouse-driven interaction. I'm not sure if the interface itself is necessarily to blame, though. I mean, King's Quest 5 was pretty annoying as a game (get this item, which you trade for another item, followed by another, and yet another, stepping you through a particularly linear game.) Quest for Glory 3 was a big disappointment for me, as well (a walkthru of the game would probably take less than two pages to write.)

    By that time, the whole adventure game market seemed to be taking a bit of a downturn... after the huge success of Myst, adventure game companies seem to have decided to move toward increasing puzzle content in adventure games (cf. King's Quest VI, Quest for Glory IV.) Even the LucasArts adventure games didn't seem to be selling so well (I knew a lot of people who played Monkey Island, but few who played the sequels.) Sierra was moving more and more toward beautiful-looking games with limited play value (I mean, look at Phantasmagoria... it spanned seven freaking CDs! That was back in '95!)

    I personally applaud the work being done to let us play these old adventure games. I wish that a new era of adventure gaming might arise. It probably won't happen, in my cynical opinion, though. The Internet makes it too easy to solve the really tricky (but so very satisfying) problems in games.

    Sigh... I'm too young to be getting nostalgic...

    Michael
    Hardcore Sierra Gamer's Pop-Quiz: What does "ifnkovhgroghprm" mean to you?

  • Well, I don't know if it counts, but LucasArts recently released Monkey Island (Escape from Monkey Island). Still funny as heck.

    And they fixed the main problem with going over to mouse, IMO.

    In the old adventure games, you have to know what to pick up, to pick up something, like type "Pick up key". The problem with mouse, was that you could just move the mouse over the screen and right click on whatever to pick it up. In Monkey Island, they fixed it so that, Treepod has to look at something before it is visible to be picked up. Works great.
  • What about point and click sierra games like space quest 4 and QG3?
  • Hero's Quest (later called Quest For Glory, for some reason)

    The name was changed to avoid confusion with the board game, Hero Quest, which was later made into a PC game.

    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

    Yep, I distinctly remember this being the first one because immediately after I purchased it and tried playing it with a keyboard I purchased my first mouse.

  • 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!

  • Re:Favorite lines of Space Quest series (Score:3)

    by ChadN ( 21033 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @08:53PM (#370311)
    This reminds me of what used to annoy me about the Infocom "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" game.
    [paraphrased]

    >n
    The door is locked

    >n
    The door is locked

    >n
    Really, it's closed and locked

    >n
    There's nothing in there

    >n
    Come on, I'm serious, there is nothing behind that door

    >n

    >n

    >n

    >n
    Okay... Maybe there is something behind that door. But it is locked.

    >n
    You can't open it

    >n
    Really there is no way to open it

    >n
    Hmmm, okay, maybe it opens just a bit

    etc...

    This isn't the actual text, but it is roughly in the spirit of it (although I remember having to be a LOT more persistent than even this, for a couple of the puzzles. That was one damned hard game as a kid)
  • It just requires patience for the market to begin to take risks. I remember in the early 90s laughing at the primitive DOS games as compared to my Amiga. 8 years later and the Amiga has risen from the dead more times than Dracula and WinDOS has some amazing stuff for it. The same thing could happen with Linux, who knows. One thing I'd love is to be able to put a CD in the drive and boot into a game with a stripped down Linux handling the necessary devices.
    No crappy unstable OS getting in the way, just the bare bones required.

  • A Little Interview Might Help (Score:5)

    by BRock97 ( 17460 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @09:27PM (#370313) Homepage
    Wow, I couldn't agree more. For a little hint into what went down at Sierra, you might want to check out an interview [gamersdepot.com] Gamer's Depot [gamersdepot.com] did with Mrs. Williams some time back (thank you Google [google.com] 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.

  • Re:Whatever happened to Sierra? (Score:3)

    by FiSHNuTZ ( 213853 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @09:30PM (#370314)
    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 [allowe.com](creator of the LSL series) and Scott Murphy [scottmurphy.com](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 loved Colonization and Railroad Tycoon (and Transport Tycoon) when I still had a dos partition. I've tried to play them using DOSEMU but the setup is so damn complicated and I've given up getting it to work. Has anyone else had any success getting their old dos games working in Linux?

  • Maybe it's just me, but I'd much rather see a SCUMM game engine (for LucasArts games, such as Loom, Monkey Island, D.O.T.T., Full Throttle, Sam'n'Max, Zak McKracken et al.) And before anyone says I should get coding myself, I've got too much programming-work to do already.

  • Mine was a $7000 25mhz 486 with a mighty 200mb of hard drive and a VGA graphics card that was totally wasted on leisure suit larry 1. Of course I was all of 13 at the time and had to keep guessing the age validating questions.
  • They wised up and bought companies to produce the games for them...
    Sierra owns Blizzard (Diablo, War Craft, Star Craft...)
  • good god, granted some games are considered classics, but isnt there a time, say when the game is 10 years old that we all move on and grab the latest port of quake?
  • I had some games from the Ultima Collection running under DOSEMU. Worked good, though in XDOS it was a little funky. Best to just quit out of X and run from there.
  • *sigh*

    I remember a long time ago - about 1990, I guess - I walked into my local newsagents and they had a few old computers for sale. I walked right by a Vic-20 and an Acorn Electron on sale for TEN IRISH POUNDS!!! I went back the next day, after smacking myself in the head many times, but alas, they were gone.

    dave

    (The electron was the precursor to the BBC micro and had a good structured BASIC with a built in assmebler as well as half a dozen serial and parallel ports. You could install a Word Processor and a Spreadsheet as ROMs. You could easily use these things to control robot arms or whatnot and they were so small (about the size of a PC keyboard) you could attach them to autonomous devices.)
  • When are they going to port over some good games?! I've been dieing to play a little DOOM II action..but no...stupid ID making me go back to Windows just to slay some imps! GGRR... Damnit...why won't anyone ever listen to my ideas?! DOOM + Linux = Dinux! HA! l8r

  • ummmm (Score:3)

    by waddgodd ( 34934 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @08:08PM (#370323) Homepage Journal
    I hope Michael knows that LSL was designed to play on a $2000 computer in its day....
  • "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."

    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.

  • http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/06/162228_F.sht ml
  • Yeah DOS 3.2 could play LLS also..This won't help make linux a viable gaming platform. If anything I see it as an insult. "Your OS can't play the latest games on the market so stick to '90's Sierra games".
  • That's what you get, a bunch of pseudo-pornographic second-rate adventure games to play on your "wonderful" linux computer. If you want to play games, use a windows machine.

    If your "linux" can truly do anything, I'd like to see you lifeless geeks write something that will get me heroin.

    Let's see what Larry does when I type in "Shoot heroin".

  • Exactly what I was thinking. Full Throttle was a great game, but it came out around the time Duke 3D and Quake 1 took the spotlight, so it has almost been forgotten.

  • Re:Please no. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    C'mon, we're Linux users. It's not exactly like we have much choice when it comes to modern and/or good games.

  • hehe, take what you can get i suppose, as much as i want to hate windows.. the games spank most of what's avaliable for linux *sigh*
  • 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 :).
  • DOOM for *n?x is available. There's even a DOOM sysadmin tool.

    In fact, I was playing DOOM II on an O2 at the ufie 3rd anniversary party.
    Cheers,

    Rick Kirkland
  • Sierra's lost their touch for making great adventure games. For me, it all started to crumble when they released Quest for Glory IV with its "arcade-style" combat system.

    I haven't seen anything at all decent come from them recently except for SWAT 3: CQB. Other than that, they've just been milking Valve's Half-Life for all it's worth. Oh, and there was Homeworld, too, but Barking Dog developed that for them.

  • 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
  • Just to clear it up, they seem to mostly publish the work of other companies, except for the Dynamix stuff. I believe they own them out right
    treke
  • 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.
  • I'm not proud that linux can do it because it's a technical feat, I'm just glad that I can play the games that I remember from when they were new. And play someof the ones I never got a chance to play (KQ2,3), SQ2, QFG2. On top of that it's a fun way to write a quick game or two for fun.
    treke
  • 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.

    Hmm... I'd have to say that, given the current state of gaming on Linux, the old Sierra games are better than 99% of the "modern" games already. With the current absense of good adventures on ANY platform or OS (The Longest Journey [longestjourney.com] notwithstanding, and maybe Escape From Monkey Island [lucasarts.com]) this is actually very interesting, to me anyway.
  • Please tell me you just cut-and-pasted all of those from some other page.
  • Dos 3.2 could. But im not sure that the same thing goes for windows millenium. If if it does, your soundblaster live wont help you relive that niffy Larry tune.
  • Half-Life runs under Wine. See http://goatse.cx/ [linuxgames.com] for more info, including a HOWTO.
  • If your looking for an FPS with some strategy, try Tribes (coincidentally, also published by Sierra). Some of the mods have gotten so complex, (e.g., Shifter) it's practically become an RTS.
  • I don't.

    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 [ridiculopathy.com]

  • Ultima VII [sourceforge.net]. Excellent game, but run likes shit on today's hardware. So it is being re-written.

  • Re:Ah, old Sierra games . . . (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ifnkovhgroghprm? It means I can enter it into Google and take the wild guess that it's the gnome's name in KQ1. Duh.
  • Just to clear it up, they seem to mostly publish the work of other companies, except for the Dynamix stuff. I believe they own them out right

    Sierra is owned by Havas Interactive Inc., who also owns Blizzard, Dynamix and quite a few others. Sierra acts as the publishing and QA battlegrounds for a lot of these other companies (which is why, for example, Diablo II is a Sierra title as well as a Blizzard title).

    There's some homegrown stuff in there as well -- a few titles I can't speak about right now, all of the Hoyle stuff, SWAT, etc etc.

    Simon (who works there in the forgotten, misbegotten, Sierra Home dept.)
  • ...but what about The Incredible Machine? Now THERE'S a classic, quality Sierra game. TIM and Civ are the only games I've every actually purchased. I can run Civ on Linux (two ways, counting FreeCiv). How I wish TIM was on Linux....

    (Yes, I know there was a project to recreate it on Linux, but alas it appears dead)
    --
  • Oh, there's LOADS of debate about what kind of copying's illegal. If your legit copy of SQ3 is corrupt, I'd say you're within your rights downloading another copy.
  • Pleople spent time to create these games. Others spent time playing them. Why should they dissappear, especially if people can enjoy them again for there nastalgia. I never owned an Atari. I bought one a few years ago just to own a piece of old tech. Some day in not too distant future I am going to buy a Commodore 64. NOT at 128, who would ever needs 128 bytes!
  • 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 LOVE Frontier: First Encounters to be ported over to Linux. I can't even play it on my Windows box (it can't cope with my Voodoo3 or SB128). Anyone agree. I know that Elite 4 [frontier.co.uk] may have a Linux port but I really want a bug free FFE right now.

    Claric
    --

  • It's probably for the same reason that someone will read a book when they could be watching television.
  • actually it's not _that_ hard to get in the engine room. Just typing "aft" 5 times suffices. Only then the game pretends that there would be nothing in it. After two more "look" it tells you about the spare improbability drive.

    I won't come up with a transscript, though, I just died and it takes about a hundred steps to get to this damned door (the door next to it is even harder, btw)

    Oh, and you can play HHGG as a Java Game on Douglas Adams website [douglasadams.com]

    so long, Michael

  • No! (Score:1)

    by Decimal ( 154606 )
    good god, granted some games are consideredd classics, but isnt there a time, say when the game is 10 years old that we all move on and grab the latest port of quake?

    You might, but I won't. The original Legend of Zelda is a quality game that I will never outgrow. Now if you're so accustomed to eye candy that you can't stand anything below a resolution of 640 x 480, I consider you spoiled.
  • All of my old favourites play on Linux: Elite, The Sentinel, Uridium (with contortionist key layout). Ahh those were the days, when playability mattered not graphics.

    Elgon

  • I'd seen that around ... but I thought it was only for creatin of NEW games?
  • I still see people getting a kick out of that game! My roomate was so stoked when his sister gave him a copy of Liesure Suit Larry (dunno which version). Somehow, trying to get some lame computer character laid is a gratifying, fun and relaxing experience. Don't ask me why or how; it just is. Maybe it's such a popular game because it allows all those people whose social skills have decreased due to huge amounts of computer time actually meet hot chicks and get laid. But we probably can't admit that, can we, those of little life...
  • You didn't buy the right to have that information, you specifically bought the medium. Implicit in that purchase was the right to make a copy via installation and the right to make backup copies. You apparently failed to backup the media you purchased. You are not entitled to a copy of someone else's media just because you were irresonsible with your own. The idea that you paid for "the information", not the media, is what gives rise to restrictive and possibly enforcable software licenses and other prohibitions against our rights.
  • when it's nikstlitselpmur

    I actually got the KQ 1-6 (well 7 too but that doesn't work for whatever reason) combo pack. Farily decent stuff, and KQ1 is still as fun as I remember playing it back in 1990. (Gotta love the computer speaker music). I'll have to get the LSL and maybe space quest games too.

    They're also good because I can play them really fast on my Pentium 166 mHz system...sigh

    ----

  • anyone know how to get Johnny Castaway [gnudawn.co.uk] to run under linux, it's the best screen saver ever :) It was produced by sierra, so I wonder....

  • Retro games are more popular than you'd think (Score:5)

    by alewando ( 854 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @08:16PM (#370361)
    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.

  • Oh yeah? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well i can play LSL on a Z80 running CP/M!
  • I'm really happy to see this actually, being that there are Win32 binaries available. FreeSCI also does cool things like filtering and blending to at least attempt to make the games run better, not to mention the fact that the original games don't always run the way they're supposed to under Win98. I wish there were programs like this for a bunch of my older games...
  • ...Hero's Quest (later called Quest For Glory, for some reason)...

    Just a quick aside regarding the name change:
    Sierra had to change the name from "Hero's Quest" because a game company (Milton Bradley, I think) had dibs on the title "Hero Quest" for a neato hack-and-slash dungeon crawl board game.

    Another odd Sierra story. I saw Al Lowe (creator of Leisure Suit Larry) on "Name That Tune" years ago. He sheepishly said his job was "Computer Programmer" and went on to win the game, if I remember correctly.

  • I'm holding out for Day Of The Tentacle (Score:4)

    by Dean Edmonds ( 189342 ) on Sunday March 11, 2001 @08:18PM (#370365)
    I've never been into these kinds of games much. I played King's Quest (III, I think) and quite enjoyed it. Then I played another (V) and was bored. Yeah, the graphics were better and you had a few more choices, but it still had a certain sameness to it.

    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

  • My god, what have they done to tux! I mean, he's naked! If we allow this, soon they'll be tons of naked toons out there! At least the old Warner Brother's cartoons wore clothes like tuxedos [dragg.net]!

    Oh...wait...

    nevermind...

    -----
    IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
    -----

  • abandongames.com [abandongames.com] seems to have a lot of abandonware on it. Seems that a lot of the stuff on there is semi-legal, so download at your own risk.
  • 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.

    -
  • Heck you are right, I spoiled hours and hours of my time on Railroad Tycoon, as well as on Civilisation (the original one)...I sometimes play them if nostalgy befalls upon me.
    The high-res version of RT just plain sucked. There is another older game you ought to play if you liked Railroad Tycoon: Transportation Tycoon (Also from MPS). It's cool, nice graphics, lot's of posibilities.
  • Hey, you don't need to buy one, just be sure to look around carefully. This weekend a friend of my sister was cleaning his basement and he found an old C64...He was going to *throw it away*, geez! For most people such old hardware has no value, not even historical one. Now I own my very own C64 with tapedrive and diskettedrive!
    Yes, I should get a life instead of getting all excited about old machines. I own a Sinclair QL too, and an Atari Portfolio (granddad of all palmtops, it's display is broken tough).
  • For me, it all started to crumble when they released Quest for Glory IV with its "arcade-style" combat system.

    For me, it all started to crumble when they released Quest for Glory IV with so many game-crashing bugs that I, as a die-hard fan who had played all the earlier ones to completion (multiple times for 1 and 2), couldn't even get far enough in the game to see its arcade-style combat system.

  • 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.
  • Don't forget MAME and all the other emulation projects for Linux. The Xmame [mame.net] home page is a good starter site to find lotsa info, as is the main MAME [mame.net] 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 [mame.net] (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

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