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Games Entertainment

Multiplayer Space Quest in a Browser 185

Posted by CowboyNeal from the taran-meets-roger-wilco dept.
Martin Kool writes "As a sequel to Quek we at Q42 are proud to present another DHTML javascript showcase: Good Old Adventures Remember the classic adventures games like Larry and Space Quest? Well, now you can play them online, multiplayer, right there in your browser." My favorite part about playing old Sierra games was watching and waiting for the screen to finish flood filling. Thankfully these are much quicker.
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Multiplayer Space Quest in a Browser More

Multiplayer Space Quest in a Browser

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  • Does not work in mozilla (Score:4, Funny)

    by krokodil ( 110356 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:00AM (#5247845) Homepage
    I guess I need Oprah browser or something

  • Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Amsterdam Vallon ( 639622 ) <amsterdamvallon2003@yahoo.com> on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:01AM (#5247852) Homepage
    I'm really into these new Flash websites, but I still think it's a shame we can't do Flash programming on our Linux boxes.

    Doesn't Marcomedia realize that ~ 25% of computer users *dont* run Windows?

  • Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of Onan (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:01AM (#5247853)
    My favourite part was the big black bouncing "Censored" box.

    Wait, I mean my LEAST favourite part. I would have preferred to see the twelve or fifteen blocky pixels beneath....pixeeeelllls.

    Either way it was better than having to use my imagination like in Softporn Adventure.

    Multiplayer though, that's just sick.

  • can we watch larry do the girl now? (Score:4, Funny)

    by craqboy ( 588418 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:01AM (#5247857)
    do we get to watch when larry gets freaky with the girlie? I hope so cause I hated the censor box going up and down instead of being able to watch larry get it on with the chick.

  • Finally.... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    we can all beat up Cedric the Own in one big gang.

  • It's the newest marketing trend (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tyrani ( 166937 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:03AM (#5247873)
    Release a new game in stores, release an old game that anyone can play over the net.

    Simcity did it not too long ago. You can play the origional SimCity [simcity.com]online.
    • Cool, so I'll be able to go back and play Sim City 3000 and Madden 97 (for example, both of which I own) on my laptop under WinXP in how many years when they release it online. I try and encourage my copyfriendly friends to make sure they buy the games that they like, at least a few of them, but when I get a laptop (with Windows pre-installed and staying for work related reasons, though I dual boot) and can't install any (well F1GP3 but that's it great though it is) of my games that I mainly have from when I used to have windows around (99? but SimCity 3000 is a couple of Christmas's old) it makes me wonder whether we shouldn't devote more attention to getting some top quality open games done to make the games companies really earn their money if they want some!
    • I am pretty sure some of the Zork games have been around in this way for quite some time as well.

  • Did you try to get the page to load? (Score:5, Funny)

    by LittleBigScript ( 618162 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:03AM (#5247875) Homepage Journal
    I think it is ironic to read "...things are must faster now..." and then wait 2 minutes for it to load.

  • /.'ed (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bios_Hakr ( 68586 ) <xptical@g3.14mail.com minus pi> on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:03AM (#5247876)
    I don't think thousands of users rushing to establish a connection to their poor web server was the multi-player game they had in mind.

  • This reminds me... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sawilson ( 317999 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:03AM (#5247880) Homepage
    Of the practice of sneaking text based games in
    daemons. I think either classic adventure or
    mansion was on one of the mindspring DNS servers
    for a while. You could play with nslookup. It
    went along the lines of:

    nslookup www.blah.com 207.69.188.186 forward

    and you'd get your request back and at the bottom
    of it would be something like:

    You enter a room and a loud clear voice says
    "ritnew is a charming word"
    or whatever your next move was. I'd love to find
    another one of these.

  • Hideous Intentions (Score:4, Funny)

    by robbyjo ( 315601 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:04AM (#5247891) Homepage

    So, you guys are posting to Slashdot to test how your multiplayer module would scale up, eh? :-) Well, you got it... Time to get to more work, guys...

  • SQ4 (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My first computer game was Space Quest 4. The intro was fucking hilarious, but too bad I couldn't get by that stupid killer droid. Was there any point to the energizer bunny? Why was it called space quest 4 when you get warped to space quest 12?!
    • Was there any point to the energizer bunny?

      Did you notice anything stuck on the back of the bunny? It might be useful someplace else. Heh heh.

  • Wow, how.. umm .. cool? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Warin ( 200873 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:07AM (#5247912)
    So basically this is an IRC interface masquerading as pixelated, ugly, early 90's looking (by modern standards..those games were very cool 'in the day!') Sierra Game?

    While walking around as Roger Wilco or Leisure Suit Larry seems kind of cool, and you can travel the various locales and talk to other people, you cant actually play through the stories.

    So whats the point...other than a chat room you can talk to other old timers who remembers when it was cool to play the game when it came out?
    • Sierra tried to do something sort of similar. It was called "The Realm." It was an MMORPG made with the Sierra interface. It sucked. As usual, Sierra discovered an online market before it's time and, as usual, completely failed to execute on it. I also beta-tested The Sierra Network (later the ImagiNation Network), which was actually really cool for it's time, but the internet was about 5 years from hitting homes, so the connectivity issue was too big a problem then, i think.

      -If
    • So basically this is an IRC interface masquerading as pixelated, ugly, early 90's looking (by modern standards..those games were very cool 'in the day!') Sierra Game?

      No, I'm pretty sure it was early 90's looking in the early 90's, too.

  • Are these legal? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Unfortunately the site is slashdotted (dare I say "farked"?) beyond reason. But I can't help but wonder-- if this is the real game, aren't there copyright issues w/Sierra? Or have they been given permission...

    Also, since I can't connect, could someone explain how Space Quest is now multiplayer as described in the story headline?
  • hehe....site most be flooded. whenever i move to another room it appears to be dark but its cause the site is so bombarded with hits

    Next week they will introduce Good Old Adventures Version 2.0 - Lagless version

  • huh, I dont remember (Score:5, Funny)

    by JeanBaptiste ( 537955 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:15AM (#5247956)
    any 403 errors in the original space quest...

  • *sigh* (Score:2, Funny)

    by PhoenixK7 ( 244984 )
    My favorite part about playing old Sierra games was watching and waiting for the screen to finish flood filling. Thankfully these are much quicker.

    Not for the next couple of days...

    Thanks slashdot!

    Before you mod this as a troll put yourself in the shoes of the sysadmin of that poor server, or better yet: whoever has to pay the bandwidth bill!

  • Any other Mozilla users that were lied to? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bergeron76 ( 176351 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:28AM (#5248010) Homepage
    The site says that it supports Mozilla, and the other Netscape "clones" yet when I load it in Moz. 1.2.1 I get a nonsensical site. Did this happen to anyone else or am I just overly intoxicated tonight?

    Jokes aside, I _loved_ the Sierra games and I can honestly say that they were the catalyst in my computing career/interests. I started with Space Quest I/II/III and when I upgraded to VGA I was all over SQIV. Kings quest, the Black Cauldron, and Quest for Heroes were among my favorites.

    Unless I'm mistaken, there's an open King's Quest project out there. I just can seem to find the link. Can anyone help me find it?

    (I have to get revenge on that witch that tricked me into her _pad_).

  • /.ed game server (Score:4, Funny)

    by grey3 ( 160961 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:33AM (#5248044)
    My favorite part about the old Sierra games was that I could actually PLAY them and didn't have to wait for the /.ed server to come back online, then drop off the face of the internet after the story gets re-posted.

  • hmmmmz (Score:3, Funny)

    by spudwiser ( 124577 ) <spudwiser@hotmail.GINSBERGcom minus poet> on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:39AM (#5248075) Journal
    Thankfully these are much quicker.

    Assuming they're not /.ed, which they are :p

  • "Flood Filling" is a false memory (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Minna Kirai ( 624281 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:45AM (#5248109)
    CowboyNeal is mistaken if he thinks a Sierra game like SQ or LLL forced the user to watch floodfilling happen. Those games used precomputed pixmaps for graphics- there was be a severe delay as they were loaded from a (5.25") floppy for each new screen, but you couldn't actually watch the graphics redraw.

    There were other games who exposed the process of rendering 2d vector graphics. I recall a few "Carmen Sandiego" clones for IBM PC or Apple that did this around 1982.

    Going back even further, Sierra had some games like "Mystery House" which did monochrome line art. IDR if there was floodfilling or not.
    • well, it's sort of false. The first Kings Quest was set up so that everything that was important came in last.

      it was like a hintbook for nothin' :)

    • Perhaps your computer wasn't slow enough. I, with my incredible 8mhz Kaypro 2000+ laptop [obsoleteco...museum.org], did indeed watch space quest II render piece-by-piece on my 8-colour (actually 8 shades of blue) screen. I remember the wait times vividly, as you may imagine. The horizon would appear, then the trees, then the %#^$% maze that I was perpetually dying in, because I couldn't differentiate between two very similar shades of blue.

      Strangely enough, I enjoyed it immensely.
    • FWIW, the only time I've seen the phrase "flood filling", it was in a program called Apple Paint for the Apple ][. The function of it is what most graphics programs today call a "bucket fill". I'm not sure if this is the origin of the phrase, but that was the first and last time I've seen it used. :^)
      • Flood filling predates bucket fill quite a bit and is pretty descriptive of how the algorithm works.

        This is back in the olden days where you could count the number of available colors on your hands,or if you were lucky, feet aswell.

        A color was a color. To have a "tolerance" like you have on todays fancy shmancy bucket fills was pointless. Floodfill would expand a colored area until it hit a pixel of a different color than the one you started filling. If you had a black outline you wanted to fill and there was a hole in it, the color would spill out, filling the entire rest of the screen. i.e. "flood".
      • Your experience is non-representative of modern use. Google has seen "flood fill" 490,000 times, but only knows of 246,000 uses of "bucket fill".

        Flood Fill is the original description used by computer graphics programmers. "Bucket Fill" is a variation invented by Xerox or Apple to matchup with the icon on their GUI toolbar.

  • Sierra Games still work! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sethadam1 ( 530629 ) <ascheinberg@gmai ... minus physicist> on Friday February 07, 2003 @12:48AM (#5248120) Homepage
    I cracked out a copy of good old Space Quest II about a year ago and loaded it up on my Athlon. It still works just fine. Sure, it's a little dated, and yes, those damned boxing robots are still friggin impossible, but it works.

    Funny thing is, I won the game in a few hours, but I remember it being weeks when I was a kid. Oh well. Now I have Leisure Luit Larry and Police Quest to track down!
    • it's a little dated, and yes, those damned boxing robots are still friggin impossible, but it works.

      You can easily defeat the boxing robot challenge by slowing down the time.
    • Funny? Not really. Faster, modern disk IO means no more spending 80% of game time waiting for screens to load.

      It also means you can save your game every 60 seconds, without waiting (swap game disk for save disk...wait wait wait... swap back), and with no concern for running out of space. That'll save you a lot of lost time when the game pointlessly kills you (carnivorous mushrooms, anyone?)

      PS. SQ2 had no mechanized pugilists. You're off by one sequel. For minigames, SQ1 had desert-racing and anti-Sarien gunslinging. I don't remeber any in SQ2, but the 3rd game (which changed to a totally different graphics engine) had AstroChicken and boxing. AstroChicken had catchy music and was rather fun. Two more sequels, and they were reduced to "You Sunk My Battlecruiser", one of the least entertaining things imaginable.
    • Funny thing is, I won the game in a few hours, but I remember it being weeks when I was a kid.

      I've done the same thing with a few old C=64 games like Arkanoid (when I was a kid, that purple ball was impossible to get past, now I just whizzed by) and Paradroid. Since I played them now on the same compuer as I did then, the faster hardware theory doesn't hold. Any other thoughts on a reason? Are we just so wired for life in the fast lane that the old games aren't challenging anymore?

    • Sure, it's a little dated, and yes, those damned boxing robots are still friggin impossible, but it works.

      I thought the boxing robots were from SQ3, The Pirates of Pestulon.

      Ahh, the memories... I remember endless hours of frustration resulting from that fine, fine game. Of course, my main problem with the whole series was that if you forgot to check the change pocket of your great-granduncle's Crimean War uniform three minutes after the introduction after sneaking through the seventh air duct on your right and prying open the wall with a toothpick, three Pringles, and a curling iron, you couldn't solve the game and had to load a game you saved three weeks ago.

      Or maybe that was Donkey Kong.

      No, I'm pretty sure that it was SQ. Maybe not that particular scenario, but one remarkably like it, on several occasions. Then again, I was about 11 when I played them, and somewhat less attentive to detail. Still, though, putting dead ends in a game like that is, IMNSHO, a mark of poor planning. The Myst series, on the other hand, was excellent in this regard. The solution to a puzzle may be excruciatingly obscure, with the only clue residing on the other side of the world, but it's there, and there's always a way to get back to it.

      Then again, I played SQ5 for the first time recently, and solved it in a matter of hours. So maybe I just got smarter. Or maybe the games just got easier.

      /* Steve */
    • And I LOVED Astrochicken!
  • I see... the games were running too fast, so they submitted the site to slashdot so it would be slowed down to the point where it was just like playing them on the ol' 8086...
  • While I'm waiting for this Q42 "good old adventures" thingy to load, I just wanted to give a shout out to my former favorite online-DHTML-based game, Astronest.

    Astronest [astronest.com] was actually a DHTML-driven database app a la "Solar Realms Elite." But it was SO much better because (not that I'm remembering SRE all that well at the moment...) instead of just trading a few units of food and buying 2 sorts of ships, you could actually *design your own fleets* and stock them up with weapons you'd "researched" by spending tons of turns poking around on the site.

    It was a ton of fun, until you got to the upper levels where you realized that thousands of teenagers play WAY more than you and it's mathematically impossible to design fleets better than *all* of them. I say "was," not only because it gets depressing at the high end, but also because it's no longer around; I visited that link for nostalgia's sake, and it throws off tons and tons of popups now; I wouldn't recommend visiting.

    Allegedly there's a Korean version out there somewhere that's still playable, but I already dedicated way too much of my life trying to win that game. But man it was fun.

  • Trouble with tribbles... (Score:3, Funny)

    by VoidEngineer ( 633446 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @01:18AM (#5248236)
    Ack! I've got Queks multiplying all over my webbrowser! Help!

  • Quicker, yea right. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Harik ( 4023 ) <Harik@chaos.ao.net> on Friday February 07, 2003 @01:20AM (#5248243)
    My favorite part about playing old Sierra games was watching and waiting for the screen to finish flood filling. Thankfully these are much quicker.
    ... and to make yourself feel at home you directed the slashdot DDoS at them to slow their servers down! EVIL! Pure Evil!

  • SQ6 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mickcim ( 455246 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @01:24AM (#5248269)
    I'm still waiting for Space Quest 7. Number six ended with a "To Be Continued..."

    • Re:SQ6 (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      there won't be one. Mark Crowe and Al Lowe (the Two Guys from Andromeda) were fired by Sierra years ago while working on it and a new LSL game. Both projects were scrapped as soon as they left.

      • Re:SQ6 (Score:2, Interesting)

        by jolujogat ( 193230 )
        There won't be an OFFICIAL space quest 7, but there is a fan-made game being made:
        http://www.sq7.org/

    • Re:SQ6 (Score:2, Informative)

      by Beetle B. ( 516615 )
      Sierra dropped all plans for SQ7 - read the full story at:

      www.wiw.org/~jess/roger.html

  • Page text / play link - from the "Play!" page (Score:3, Informative)

    by tbdean ( 163865 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @01:35AM (#5248319) Homepage
    BEFORE YOU START
    Please make sure you have read the HELP section on this site before you start playing. It explains all the controls, and you'll find lots of other valuable information there too.

    One more thing. Once playing, please avoid using foul language, it won't be appreciated by most people. Besides, why risk the chance of getting banned from the site for life? Don't forget, if you find someone to be annoying, you can always ignore that player by clicking on that character.

    READY?
    Well then, what are you waiting for?
    Click here [goodoldadventures.com] to start!

  • Am I the only one... (Score:3, Funny)

    by sryx ( 34524 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @01:37AM (#5248333) Homepage
    who read the URL as www.GoodOlDadVentures.com

    Maybe thats how they are paying for it :P
    -Jason

  • /.'ed (Score:3, Funny)

    by Iscariot_ ( 166362 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @01:39AM (#5248339)
    Anyone wanna post one of these games up here, site seems to have been slashdotted. I bet you'll get +5 so come on... why wait?!

  • QuakeDHTML (Score:5, Funny)

    by Iscariot_ ( 166362 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @01:44AM (#5248355)
    I'll pay 50 bucks to the first guy to get quake running in pure DHTML code.

  • floodfill? (Score:2, Informative)

    by yanyan ( 302849 )
    Hmm... i don't remember having to wait for Space Quest or King's Quest to floodfill the screen. I DO remember though, that the drawing technique used in some of the earlier Quest games (in particular King's Quest 1), caused some objects to be drawn last, and it would be really obvious to the player. Imagine the whole scene completely drawn, and one or two last objects placed in. All of the time, these objects were movable and or get-able. For example, in KQ1 there's a boulder that you could move to get a knife under it. Because of the way that particular scene was rendered, it was a giveaway.

    In later games though, all objects were drawn simultaneously, so this minor "flaw" disappeared.

  • does anyone else think it's kind of hypocritical (Score:3, Interesting)

    by funkapus ( 80229 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @02:44AM (#5248560) Homepage
    that in the source of the page, they have the following comment:
    Hi there,

    Nice to see you are interested in how we built Good Old Adventures. Feel free to discover that we didn't make it too easy for you, but why hack our code if a free singleplayer/standalone version will probably be released someday?

    when their whole project is basically a copy of other people's work? and they're posting this on an open source advocacy site?
  • ...for the server load to die down :

    Why, go and play all those Infocom text adventures [xs4all.nl], java'd, through your browser, of course!
  • could somebody fill me in with links to those?
  • Wow, lookit all the links! I had no idea so many people had created so many SQ games! I'll add this one that was released in 2001, "Space Quest - The Lost Chapter" [frostbytei.com] (Hope he can handle it).

    It's meant to fit in between SQ2 and SQ3, and has the interface totally down. I've played it about 1/4 the way through since last week, and so far my only complaints are the spelling errors every dozen messages, the (very) wordy cut scenes, and the way some exits to other screens are totally hidden. (Don't even get me started on the squid). There are hints and walkthroughs available though, and is very welcome to those who miss the text-interface games that made Sierra so popular.

  • Screw space quest, I want Scorch! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by riflemann ( 190895 ) <riflemann.bb@cactii@net> on Friday February 07, 2003 @07:17AM (#5249095)
    I am still waiting for Scorched Earth [classicgaming.com] to be updated so that it works in true online multiplayer mode.

    An online version of that game would absolutely rock! Please Wendell, do it!

    Yes there are clones out there, but none are quite so good.

  • In the meantime play a game... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sh0rtie ( 455432 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @07:50AM (#5249159)

    Give Scott and his friends a visit over at Javascript Games [javascript-games.org], for more DHTML goodness

    Note:
    Opera isnt supported as it doesnt (at least it didnt used to) support the ability to re write the page after loading (elm.innerHTML) due to Opera's incomplete DOM model so any mildly adventurous DHTML will fail, hence Mozilla/NS6/ IE required.

  • Starsphere (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Idimmu Xul ( 204345 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @08:41AM (#5249291) Homepage Journal

    I'd rather play Starsphere [starsphere.net] which does work in all browsers, and is a free online mmorpg where you control a planet and it's space fleet and go up against thousands of other players.

  • Where my good ol' King?

    I loved SQ, and PQ and LLL, but my first adventure gaming experience was with KQ. This GOA site for some reason forgot to include the king and his crew.

    Oh well... It's still uber cool. (Man, I miss those old games. If anyone knows a port of them or how to port them or if it's possible to port them to Linux, let me know. I'd really love to play them all again. Heck, I'd pay for it.)
  • You leave a small circle of nose grease on the door. If you were Karl Malden, it could have gotten ugly.

  • Sierra incurred my wraith after KQ4. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gannoc ( 210256 ) on Friday February 07, 2003 @11:21AM (#5250253)

    You get cupids bow and 2 arrows early on in the game. You can shoot a pegasus? to make him fall in love with you. At any time, you could shoot the other arrow and it would fly across the screen, etc.

    THE LAST PART IN THE GAME, the evil queen or whatever, required the 2nd arrow. Literally, the last two words you typed were "Shoot queen." If you shot the arrow 5 hours ago... tough luck, you were dead.

    Weeee, fun.

  • Not quite on topic, but the game Wyvern [cabochon.com] is well worth checking out. It is a massively multiplayer online game similar to Gauntlet in some respects. It runs under java, so it tends to be pretty platform friendly.

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