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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Old Sierra Games Playable In Browser Through Open Source Game Engine 78

Posted by Soulskill from the we-all-know-which-game-you're-going-to-try-first dept.
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.'"
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Old Sierra Games Playable In Browser Through Open Source Game Engine More

Old Sierra Games Playable In Browser Through Open Source Game Engine

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  • King's Quest = hardcore (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kbrasee ( 1379057 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @12:33AM (#27710163)
    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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by stonedcat ( 80201 )

      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.

      • LOL very true, I probably spent as much time doing that as I did playing some games. LHX Attack Chopper was awful for that.

      • Re:King's Quest = hardcore (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Saturday April 25, 2009 @01:44AM (#27710449) Homepage Journal

        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: (Score:2)

          by horza ( 87255 )

          Also much better than serial numbers on CD or DVD cases, which inevitably get lost. The booklets were usually quite useful, with maps for adventure games or easy key maps for simulators or shooters (even a novella with Elite), and actually added value when you bought the game.

          Phillip.

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

          Personally, I prefer the disinfected Pirate Bay edition which doesn't inflict such malaise on my poor computer, but to each his own. Then again, it's been a while since I've run across a game that was worth even pirating...

          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.

          Back then we had copy machines. Heck, I knew some guy who copied Star Control II's

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Jurily ( 900488 )

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

          That's one thing definitely good about Vista: the UAC catches Securom when it tries to sneak by in the background. Also proving once again that it's malware.

      • I remember a game for the 8086 which did that, called Realms. This game came on two single-density 5.25" floppies (360KB each) and ran on a machine with 512KB of RAM. As you can imagine, there wasn't a huge amount of space for a storing a complete copy of the manual. It turned out that it only asked for about a dozen words. Remembering enough of these that starting the game a couple of times meant that you didn't need to look in the manual was very easy.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by bishiraver ( 707931 )

          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.

      • I remember that Elite 2: Frontier had that type of protection but it could be bypassed. You just had to save while docking and if you did it at the right time it would repeat the same question on restore. They you tried every possible letter and when you got it right, you'd have one of the copy protection answers. By doing that a few times I got the whole table in no time.

    • Re:King's Quest = hardcore (Score:4, Informative)

      by kbrasee ( 1379057 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @12:45AM (#27710221)
      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.
      • oh god i forgot all about that, i never did get to see the ending... i'm gonna have to dig up my disks and see if i can get it running in dos box...

    • So, by 'hardcore', you're meaning fundamentally flawed and broken.

      To which I'd agree.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gad_zuki! ( 70830 )

      That was really the death knell for adventure games for me, even though I grew up with them. The games were never that logical, yet they were kinda fun, but no one likes being told "You should have given the jerky to the eagle and the lamb to the wizard four hours ago." The damn jerky was 100 saves ago I dont have any saves from then. Or whatever the item that was easily to mix up in the beginning in King's Quest V. That was my last adventure game.

      I felt without a gaming home until I later discovered the F

      • Re:King's Quest = hardcore (Score:4, Informative)

        by Mr. Bad Example ( 31092 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @05:53AM (#27711215) Homepage

        > 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: (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          True and that was very, very good but there was at least one extremely annoying bug in Monkey Island II. When you had to win the spitting contest you had to 1.) drink that drink which made your spit think, 2.) wait for when the wind was blowing and 3.) beforehand blow the horn to make everybody leave thinking that the mail boat has arrived so that you in the mean time could move the flags closer. The third one was buggy in some versions - at least the Amiga one. You could only get them to leave once and whe

        • I always thought that the two Star Trek adventure games by Interplay (25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites) were well-put together with a minimum of moon-logic. I think I still have the CD-ROM version of Judgment Rites (with all the voice acting) somewhere.

          Okay, okay, "Museum Piece" kinda stretched it there for a bit.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Sigma 7 ( 266129 )

          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.

          The earliest ones didn't, unless there's something missing. In particular, Zak McKracken allows the game to be put in an unwinnable state when you put the bread in the garbage disposal, before removing the pipe.

          I'm not sure what happens if you don't purchase the book from the Lay Devotee, but if I recall, he only appears once in the first airport. Also, you can also give the book to the Bum in Miami, which also throws a wrench in the plans. (The two walkthroughs I found didn't show contingency plans.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by olman ( 127310 )

          "It was a rubber tree"

          Darn I laughed so hard 1st time.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by b0ttle ( 1332811 )
      I must say I prefered the Lucasarts concept of never having to restart the adventure, but Sierra's adventures where great too and I also almost break my keyboard multiple times when those things hapenned.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Chees0rz ( 1194661 )
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Triv ( 181010 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @02:05AM (#27710531) Journal

      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 [everything2.com].

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

      Gr.

      • Oh dude, that's right, it was the Yeti!!! I either missed the pie or ate it, and even though I had like 93 other things in my inventory that seemed like they could have dealt with the Yeti, too bad. Had to have the pie.

  • QFG (Score:5, Interesting)

    by juventasone ( 517959 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @12:40AM (#27710199)
    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 [agdinteractive.com].

    • Well, the Quest for Glory series used the later Sierra SCI engine rather than the AGI engine. Luckily, the ScummVM project has recently merged in FreeSCI, which will, eventually, enable users to play all the Sierra SCI games on all the various systems and consoles that ScummVM supports.

    • It is depressing. That was my favorite series. I actually had the first one when it was still called Hero's Quest. The only one I never got to play was 5 (my computer at the time wasn't good enough to play it). I found a version of it recently but now my computer is too good to play it. I've been itching to finally get around to finishing the series since the game first came out.

  • Oh dear god (Score:5, Funny)

    by Misanthrope ( 49269 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @12:44AM (#27710215)

    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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by lunchlady55 ( 471982 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @01:02AM (#27710275)

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

    • You pick up the ladder and jam it in your pocket.

      Ouch!

      First saw that game at a Software Etc. in the Capitola Mall. Super-classic.

      • Ah, Software Etc.! Absolute best software store I've ever been in, for games or anything else. I bought about 50 million games there, as well as packages like Corel Draw and Visual Studio. They seemed to have at least 1 copy of every game ever made. I was bummed when they went out of business, the Great Northern mall never was the same after that.
  • It's cool but kind of broken. I tried leisure suit larry for a few minutes and spent most of that time levitating, crawling gregor-samsa-like across the walls, and running in place in front of doorways extremely slowly or quickly.
    Also, skip the multiplayer; I set my avatar to dog in leisure suit larry and someone else said "Lick dog's balls" which was like, thanks but no thanks Larry.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by b0ttle ( 1332811 )
      I think the idea is great, but I tried to play LSL in linux firefox, but it was full of bugs, like lot of larries printed on the screen at the same time. Then I tried it in a virtual box with IE6, and the same thing hapenned.

      Anyway, I really liked the site and I hope they fix the bugs and put more games on.

  • SCI (Score:3, Insightful)

    by etherlad ( 410990 ) <ianwatson@NosPam.gmail.com> on Saturday April 25, 2009 @01:59AM (#27710513) Homepage

    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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by DreamMaster ( 175517 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @03:28AM (#27710801) Homepage

      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.

  • All the "Lucasarts vs Sierra" stuff way back when. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Saturday April 25, 2009 @05:02AM (#27711097) Journal

    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.

  • You can't save the games. This is really important, because the damn things were HARD, and sometimes saving was part of the puzzle solving.

    For example, Space Quest had a slot machine that you had to use to get money to buy a spaceship. But the odds were no better than a real slot machine (and it would KILL you), so the only way to get past it was to save every time you won, load the game every time you lost.

    • you were supposed to hack the slot machine somehow so that it would win for you 3 times in a row, and then explode, if I remember correctly =).

      • With the magnet thing that was used to disable the force field protecting the star generator.

        But the GP has a point. In LSL1 you're supposed to play slots or blackjack in the casino, too.

  • Would love to see Starflight in this format. That brings back memories...

  • you could do this 2 years ago... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ianopolous ( 1080059 ) on Saturday April 25, 2009 @08:18AM (#27711943) Homepage
    You can play over 140 dos games in your browser here: http://www.classicdosgames.com/online.php [classicdosgames.com] Once they incorporate JPC's new applet snapshot facility it will have instant load time as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LDoggg_ ( 659725 )
      Not the same thing at all. That site requires java. These sierra games are done using javascript and layered PNG images.
      • This is true. However there are over 1.5 billion Java enabled devices worldwide, a good number of which have web browsers.

        • This is true. However there are over 1.5 billion Java enabled devices worldwide, a good number of which have web browsers.

          Indeed. And most of them are sold overpriced coffee by bra-less baristas expecting a tip for looking pretty and doing, you know, their job.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kullnd ( 760403 )
      You can't post stuff like this, I just lost a good couple hours of my life on that damn site!
  • Doesn't SCUMMVM run most of these old dos-run games? Whether or not they were Lucasarts or Sierra.

  • Playable? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    None of these games were "playable" the first time around, so don't get your hopes up... The multiplayer bit is a nice touch though, this way you can see that others are just as confused as you are.

  • Where do you put the floppy?

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