Hi, I haven't posted here in a while, infact it has been a bit since I last posted here, so here I am.

tierra game central

Good luck with the new site!

Very Nice Broomie!

Good luck with your website!

~Dee

Cheers, if anyone wants to TGC has a sceduled chat every sunday at 9pm GMT... that's an hour from now. So if anyone want to they can come and join in with chat. It's a pretty good chat with admin features so any idiot who tries to spoil our chat will be banned.
So anyone interested?

I enjoyed your site. Linked from there to Tierra and downloaded Tierra's Kings Quest I.

I'm curious -- anyone who played the original Kings Quest I and the Tierra version -- how are they different?

Well there was infact a remake of KQ1 original made by Sierra into SCI. This was like KQ4, SQ3. Anyway, they had done alot of changes from the original but the remake of KQ1 in 1990 didn't do as well as the other KQs.

That's why Tierra remade KQ1 into stunning VGA graphics, so the remake is really based off the other remake by Sierra. It was also on my site.

I'm glad you like the site.

Cioa!

becky -- as broomie said, tierra's remake is based on sierra's 1990 SCI remake of the original AGI version.

i never played the SCI version, but played the original AGI version many, many years ago. even so, i was able to get through tierra's KQ1 remake very easily (i'm not sure what changes were made in the SCI version, but they were not very big changes!)

KQ2 is the one tierra made a lot of changes to. if you enjoy KQ1 (or even if you don't!), KQ2 is not to be missed. they took the premise of sierra's KQ2 (which was very elementary) and fleshed out the storyline an amazing amount. it was the best adventure game i played last year (better than syberia, IMO!)

emily

Thanks for the info. I played KQ7 years ago. I enjoyed it, but haven't played any of the other games.

I was a bit surprised at the Tierra version -- sort of expected graphics like KQ7. I was also surprised at how frequently you can die!

KQ1 reminds me somwhat of Kyrandia 1. I wonder why these third-person-fantasy games did well early on and then sort of disappeared (I mean, new ones weren't made anymore).

becky -- KQ7 is very different from the other games in the series. KQ fans tended to hate that one... not because it's a bad game, but because it's such a departure from the others (and much less mature than the previous games had been). tierra's KQ1 remake is in the style of KQ5 and KQ6 (which used the same icons and had the same type of graphics as KQ1). i think it's a shame the way the KQ franchise petered out (with KQ7, which many saw as a kids' game, and then MoE which wasn't really a KQ game at all) when KQ6 had such incredible promise. oh well. (incidentally, tierra's KQ2 "remake" was everything i would have wanted in a king's quest sequel.)

early sierra adventures (KQs included) had a lot of deaths. my theory on that is that they could only do so much with the engine and the game itself (and didn't have that much space to do it with), so they extended gameplay by allowing for a lot of possible deaths. it never bothered me then (i didn't know any better), but after playing more recent games that don't let you die unless you do something *really* stupid, i went back to KQ1 and realized how many gratuitous deaths there really were! they kept the deaths in remaking KQ1, but got rid of a lot of them in KQ2 because so many fans complained. (they also got rid of potential dead end situations, which also used to be abundant in sierra games and have since essentially disapeared from the genre...)

i think you should try KQ2. the deaths that are in there are pretty logical, and the story is really incredible. other than Shadow of Destiny, i haven't been as excited about an adventure game since Gabriel Knight 2 in the 90s. if you like tierra's KQ2, you should also try KQ5 and KQ6 (the very best in the series, IMO -- cowritten by Jane Jensen of Gabriel Knight fame.) KQ3 and KQ4 (especially) are also good games, but the older graphics and text parsers make them hard for some people to deal with. i played them when i was young, so i'll always be fond of them... but i know text parsers aren't much fun for a lot of people.

emily

Thanks fov. I'll download and try KQ2.

I remember reading a review of KQ7 where the reviewer said that it was pitched just a bit too young. It didn't strike me that way at all, but hey, what do I know? It was the second adventure game I played and I didn't have any preconceptions or perspective.

6 games before a series peters out really isn't a bad record. It seems inevitable that sooner or later, with a series so long, that one of the KQ games wouldn't sell well. I wonder if Sierra over-reacted to KQ7 not selling as well as they'd hoped.

Or maybe after 7 games the designers were simply ready for a change. The insatiable public has a greater taste for its favorite series than the designers/authors do. (Agatha Christie and Poirot, Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock) Maybe Roberta should have secretly created an evil King's Quest game in which all the main characters suffer horrible deaths -- then put this game in a safe somewhere to be published posthumously, thereby releasing the creative juices for a real Kings Quest 8.

I miss the Shadow of Destiny thread. It has disappeared into the ether, hasn't it? I happened to print it near the end and it's about the size of a New Business prospectus or Phd thesis.

actually, MoE turned out the way it did because sierra changed hands while it was being developed. after Ken Williams sold sierra, Roberta lost a lot of her power there. apparently she had to fight for the adventure elements that stayed in the game. she made a comment about this on Ken's website recently... i'd link to it but apparently she wasn't comfortable with how the thread came across, so she had him remove it. but the gist of it was, it was a struggle to get the game made at all, and a lot of her vision was removed by the time the game shipped.

KQ7 actually has some very dark elements. an interesting tidbit about the co-author (lorelei shannon) is that she also writes gothic horror fiction (and she did phantasmagoria II). there are definitely cartoony elements in the game, but i think overall it was the graphics and move to the "one icon" system that turned people off. (before this, the sierra games had had different icons for look, talk, use, etc. that gave the player a lot more freedom of interaction than KQ7's hotspots.) i started it when it first came out and never finished because i was annoyed by the interface. played through the whole thing a few months ago and it really is a decent game... just couldn't live up to some of the others, for me. (of course, i played the others between ages 10 and 15... so it could be a matter of perception on my part, as well!)

i hope you enjoy KQ2! it has all the elements of a great adventure game, IMO.

emily

ps hopefully that Shadow of Destiny thread wasn't lost when adventuregamers went down... they said they didn't lose any of their data, so i'm hoping we'll get it back!

Having played KQ7 first, THEN when my next game (The Lost Files of Sherlock Homes) had several different icons as you describe, I thought the interface was clumsy and repetitive. Why miss the solution to something because you only used the "look" icon and not the "use" icon, or vice versa? Why miss the solution because you only said to "use book on table" instead of "use table on book"? It seemed silly to me. I thought it was a dinosaur interface left over from the text adventures. I guess perceptions really do differ!

Interesting about Roberta and Kings Quest 8. I read an interview with Ken Williams recently (forgotten exactly where) that described some of the things that went on in the transition. It is very strange, but the interview chiefly left me angry.

I was angry that Ken and Roberta are cruising somewhere on a yacht while so many employees have lost their jobs. I was angry that a company that made so many adventure games (even though they maybe didn't sell as well as other games at the time) is now strictly focused on the bottom line.

It's irrational -- Ken and Roberta don't owe anybody anything. They entertained a lot of people for a lot of years through their games. They employed a lot of people at the same time. They were innovators and they left a distinctive mark, most of which was positive.

They don't owe me a Kings Quest 9 with updated graphics, terrific story and innovative interface. No, they really don't.

that's what www.kq9.org is for...

from what i've read on his website ( www.sierragamers.com ), ken seems like a very nice guy. i think one reason it's hard to reconcile today's sierra with the sierra that made all the great adventures is because they went out of their way to make the customer feel like part of the "family." so when the sierra we knew and loved broke up, it was that much more difficult to deal with. you don't see people mourning the death of Trilobyte or Activision the way people mourn Sierra.

something i really appreciate about the Tierra team is that they're not only doing a great service through their remakes, they've also captured the family atmosphere that Sierra had in the 80s and early 90s. the developers regularly answer questions on their forums and seem really excited to give the gift of their games to the fans (made obvious by the fact that they're working so hard for free). if and when those guys ever go commercial, they're going to have a huge customer base to begin with.

emily

ps funny what you said about the dinosaur interface... i remember when text parsers were first replaced by icons (KQ5 was my first experience with this), it seemed to kill some of the challenge because you didn't have to spend time figuring out which words to string together...

Good luck with your web site. I always loved Sierra games.

I followed the link at the site and read more about KQ 9 in The Inventory. It sounds most intriguing. I wonder when they are aiming to release it>

bookmarked!