> Honestly, what is the appeal of Sierra's "Quest" games? Anyone who likes > them, please shed some light on the subject.
Ok, I guess I have to throw my hat into this ring... As a huge fan of both the old text/still graphic adventures AND the Sierra/Lucasart style games, they both have their own appeal. But the Sierra games did change some key aspects of the old text games and for the better. Now your main gripe seems to be with the fact that you can't just be in a room and say I want to do X. This was at first mainly a technical problem of doing pathfinding routines (notice that later Sierra and Lucasarts games all take care of this for you automatically through mouse controls. KQ1 was meant to be played with a joystick or keyboard, so you didn't have a mouse to point at stuff and intereact with it through icons (granted the Amiga and I believe Mac versions both had mouse support but they were just ports made at a later time. When Maniac Mansion is released these problems are dealt with). Also, the old descriptions in text adventures were replaced by graphics. This changed the nature of the puzzle solving from the old "ok, what items are listed in the descrption and let's play with those" to "what items are drawn with any kind of detail and let's play with those". Part of the appeal, especially in those early games was to try to find the items of interest, like watching an old detective movie and spotting which character was missing from the scene, because he was off murdering someone. Text adventures just had to tell you what happened and give it away or not tell you making it unfair. The visual nature of the games (which many people including Ken Williams admit were one of the big reasons people bought Adventure games, aka show off your hardware) was a major issue on its own and was therefore very important. The whole idea that you could move a sprite behind stuff was pretty far out back then for a home computer and made the game more accessible to younger audiences that were quickly bored by pages and pages of text. I can't recall how many times I was ticked off at text adventures that would show stuff in the images (especially on later games for 16 bit machines, which had much more detailed pictures) and since they weren't mentioned in the descriptions I couldn't interact with them. Despite the fact that this post is coming out a bit disjointed, another great addition of the Sierra style game was that you could finally have something besides straight choose your own adventure style gameplay. Action sequences were added to the games (Conquest of Camelot being probably the best example of this), which began to bridge gaps between genres and giving much more realistic feeling experiences, especially since you could now actually see scenes played out that would otherwise just be described. I guess a good comparison would be between the text adventure The Hobbit and Sierra's The Black Cauldron (which yes, was a point and click affair, but still). I use both of these because they were both cartoons and books I grew up on and so they spanned all three of my favorite mediums. There are moments in The Hobbit that just don't come to life, not only because of the relatively limited parser (not the greatest game engine in the text adventure arena), but because you just lack the animation. At the end of the Black Cauldron when the little furry guy runs right into the pot, that's a moment that will stick with me forever... much more so then a paragraph describing it. Karl Kuras aka Trantor http://drawnsword.trantornator.com Yeah, go visit my webcomic! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/swcollect@oldskool.org/
