**Fixed the Signup Link below - apologies for the broken URL**
Space Quest fans unite!
First of all, let me thank the mods and admins of this reddit for allowing me to post here and to connect with the SQ community. Having this toy has been a dream of mine for a long time, but I needed a critical mass of supporters to bring it to life.
I'm back from Japan and I've been working solidly on the toy and the prototype is 95% done!
The Landing Gear / Engine mechanism is perfected.
The lighting and electronics are worked out.
Interior details are coming together and so is the assembly plan for production.
All that remains are some captain's chairs, a few decals and the removable roof/dorsal hatch!
The 3 action figures: Roger Wilco and Mark & Scott (two guys from Andromeda) are also in the works and their joints (articulation) is being worked right now. (This is the only part of the project I sub out to other artists as figures are not really my wheelhouse)
On track for September delivery!
If you have not signed up for the newsletter please do it here.Newsletter subscribers get first dibs on the toy and a discounted price at launch.
Wonder if you have any strange childhood memories and experiences with Sierra games, like "things that were not supposed to be there", maybe something like Mandela effect, etc.?
I have a very strange story about Space Quest 5: the first time I played the game, I passed the test without cheating. The second time, I failed, but the third time I managed to do it again. Honestly, I had absolutely no idea one is supposed to cheat, and only found out about this when I read the walkthrough.
My name is Tyler and so far this game is really fun and the story is really good. I honestly figured out what a schattenjager is and what cabrit san cor means. The voice cast is awesome. Tim Curry is awesome in anything that he is in. The only puzzle that sucked was the Snake puzzle wear you have to click on a very specific part of the museum to activate the fan or you will die (Died 4 times to this and died once getting to St. John's Eve conclave by not wearing the Crocodile mask...LOL you fursuit to prevent you from dying as a furry I love this game even more) I also like how the game is educational and makes you learn about Voodoo and New Orleans without realizing your learning thus making this game and the whole trilogy part of the pantheon of 90s computer lab edutainment games (I would be very shocked if an Elementary School got this game to teach kids about US History only to be met with boobies during said St. John's conclave). The puzzle with the gravestone to get Dr. John to bring the coffin was a bit hard so you can track him. This game was on my 100 games I want to play and beat before my 33rd birthday list and this game is fucking awesome.
I've just released a new update to Chat Quest Online, the AGI MMORPG. I've added the casino from Larry 1 where you can play poker against bots or other players. Or give the slotmachines a try. The odds are on your side... I swear.
Also to give you a bit of a headstart you will now receive $20 from the taxi driver, when you're broke.
Was visiting my parents and they still have many of my old things on a book shelf. Pulled this off: the storybook that came with my 3.5" floppy Dos version of King's Quest. Used to love getting little "feelies" like this with physical games.
Huge thanks to all of the people who have signed up for the mailing list for this toy. I am on track to deliver the first 50 in September! Still time to sign up for the newsletter here.
Latest Progress highlights
- Mechanism for simultaneously raising landing gear / moving engines is working beautifully. Feels very nice. This was the most challenging feature of the toy and it is done - all downhill from here.
- Working on lighting now
- Figures for Roger Wilco and the Two Guys From Andromeda (Mark & Scott) are sculpted and are now being articulated (adding joints).m Figures are 63mm (~2.5" high) each.
- Working on custom collector box for the toy and/or figures. Stay tuned.
Hello all, as we approach July 20th (Al Lowe’s birthday) I wanted to reach out to thank him for everything he’s done and share some fanart I made to show my appreciation. I’ve looked on his website and the link to email him seems to be not working. If anyone happens to have that email I’d greatly appreciate it! Thanks 💚
Error 47 recently put out a tribute to QFG4, with a really epic rock cover of the main theme. It starts out slow and moody, but kicks into overdrive around 2:35 and I absolutely adore it.
I've messaged the mods about 2 months ago asking whether I could post a link to my own, free, Sierra (and LucasArts) inspired adventure games here, or whether that would be considered spam (or irrelevant, as they weren't made by Sierra). Never did get a response. Does anybody know?
Someone used Claude to create visuals for Zork. This got me thinking about how easy it would be to leverage Claude -- and possible one of the leading visual AI tool connections -- to make some of the less attractive games more fun to look at by today's standards. Imagine a Gabriel Knight 3 that didn't look awful!
After quite some time, I've delved back into the Leisure Suit Larry series with perhaps one of the most difficult of the Sierra Catalogue I've played to date. (Don't worry, I've not played Codename: Iceman. Yet.)
Leisure Suit Larry 2 is definitely a lot more different than the first game, and I've done a deep dive into in this video. I hope you enjoy!
Just curious if anyone plays this game on Xbox Game Pass. I tried to last night (it is included with the Retro Classics section) but I was having a very hard time. I wanted to know if this may just be because of the emulation - i.e., basically just technical issues arising from it being on Game Pass. I keep getting stuck trying to move around (I am basically at the beginning in the room that the two female characters share; Laura - I think that is her name - is supposed to explore at this point, but I can't get her to leave the room). I know other point/click titles have problems on AntStream, and this is basically the same company doing the Activision titles on Game Pass.
Just wanted to see if anyone can confirm this is a lost cause and I should stop trying. Too bad, because it seemed exactly like my type of game, in the sense that, according to the help information, it is not really about solving puzzles, it basically is an interactive trip through a mystery story...to me, it's like an animated comic book, which I think is cool.
I'm not here to promote this guys Ebay listings or help him sell. I'm just in awe of the original artwork that is extremely hard to find because Sierra chucked a lot of it in dumpsters back in the day. So sad!
I've spent the past year improving and porting Johnny Castaway to the PS1, along with a ton of new features (freeplay, scene select, closed captions, new holidays, more!) A real labor of love and a new way to enjoy Johnny.
I've been wanting to ask this to the community forever: of the Quest for Glory games, which is your favorite, or how would you rank the games' fighting system?
My ranking:
QfG2: Trial by Fire
The rest of them 😜
Kidding aside, maybe next would be: Qfg1: So You Want to be A Hero (A big part of me still wants to call this Hero's Quest) (btw, I'm only considering the EGA version just because I played it so much more than the VGA remake, so I don't remember the latter much)
QfG4: Shadows of Darkness
QfG3: Wages of War
QfG5: Dragon Fire
Quest for Glory 2: Trial By Fire
Ah-hoo, werewolves of London...Ah-hoo!
For me, the combat system in Trial by Fire was simply perfection.
Movement was quick and responsive, and it expanded on QfG1's rudimentary combat system with a system that was quickly intuitive: the 9 keys on the numeric keypad mapping to 3 variations each of attack, parry, and dodge.
After coming off QfG1, where the response to your attack/parry/dodge keypress, was sluggish, this combat system was, gratifyingly, instantly responsive. And the variation to each movement type gave me a much-appreciated feeling of finer-grained control of the specific movement I wanted executed.
To me, this was, by far, the high point of combat mechanics in the QfG series.
Quest for Glory 1: So You Want to be A Hero
A hyper-realistic simulation of trying to get one's cat to take a bath
I went back-and-forth a bit, as I wrote this post, whether to place QfG1's or QfG4's combat system in the #2 spot. Finally, I decided, this is a personal preference list, not meant to be any kind of analytical take on the issue, so I gave it to QfG1's combat system. That choice might be mostly nostalgia. This great game was the first in the great series, and set the precedent for me, that action can coexist with traditional adventure game mechanics.
But objectively, I found the combat system overly simplistic, limited to an attack where it was never clear whether you could intentionally pick between a strong attack and a quick attack: sometimes an attack looked like a "quick" thrust, and other times it looked like a "deep" lunge, but I could never make a 100% correlation to my actual keystroke. And you were limited to rudimentary side-to-side and backward dodges (or raising a shield if you had one). Also, I found the response to keypresses to be quite sluggish.
So overall: the combat system was primitive. Perhaps intentionally so because Sierra was hesitant whether their "traditional" clientele would accept a more "action-y" combat system?
Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness
Eh...what's up, Doc?
The very first time I experienced the QfG4 combat system, I didn't like it because I thought it was too "action-y." It's obvious that this combat system's inspiration was games like Mortal Kombat, maybe Street Fighter, etc. I will confess: another reason -- a completely stupid reason -- I originally didn't like the QfG4 combat system was because the first enemy I encountered was the Vorpal Bunny, and at the time, the horror/comedy tone they were going for just didn't vibe with me. When I encountered a bunny as an enemy combatant, I just felt like they weren't taking things seriously, and that tonal shift from the prior games -- which were "self-serious" as far as enemy combatants -- was jarring to me at the time.
But I was young and naive. With the benefit of age and hindsight, my appreciation of QfG4 in general, including its combat system, has increased. I appreciate that the fighting mechanics were responsive. And in the same vein that all "action-y" fighting games stealthily sneak in elements of strategy and timing, so too did QfG4's. Not to mention, the game offers a modicum of "variety" of attacks (you can control the strength of your attacks, including magical attacks by holding down your keypress/click). It's obvious that the inspiration for this combat system was games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and that
But I seem to recall the actual execution of this combat system was lacking: I seem to recall issues with the speed of certain enemies, relative to a human's ability to react, being out-of-balance. Perhaps this was an issue addressed in later patches -- QfG4 was notoriously buggy on its first release -- but that was the lasting impression the game has left on me.
Quest for Glory 3: Wages of War
That dinosaur is yawning
Mostly, I just thought this combat system was dull.
I wish I could flesh this out with more detail...but there's not much more to it. I just thought it was dull.
You had four icons you could click...the animations were like a slideshow...the backgrounds were some nonspecific abstract art (or blazingly ahead-of-its-time Windows wallpapers)...and that's about all there is to it.
Quest for Glory 5: Dragon Fire
If I could see what the hell was happening on this screen, maybe I could write a caption for it
At some point, I want to immerse myself in reading people's reviews of QfG5 because I have such mixed feelings about the game, and I want to see how much my feelings resonate with others'. So much about this game, including its combat system, feels like noble intentions with unintended consequences.
On paper, this combat system seems like it should have been the perfection of what I perceive as every prior QfG game would have wanted to do, had they not been hindered by technical limitations of the time: a seamless flow between "regular" onscreen game mechanics and the combat system. But in execution, I feel that this had the effect of eliminating the "immersion" and "connection" you previously had when you switched to a closeup of your enemy combatant. The onscreen characters were often so small with respect to the rest of the (gorgeous) scenery, that you couldn't make out any detail on what I think were otherwise similarly gorgeously-rendered enemy models.
I also vividly remember: because the combat was "seamless" with regular game environments, enemies would often navigate behind environmental objects, to where you couldn't see them anymore during combat, or the AI pathfinding would make them navigate to impossible-to-reach places...it all ended up being a mess.
Noble intent with unintended consequences.
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Anyhow, that's my little take/rant on the Quest for Glory series' combat systems that I've been wanting to share. I'd love to hear others' opinions of the different combat systems from the various games in the series.
Off-the-wall thought inspired by another commenter here at r/Sierra: wouldn't it be awesome to have in-game developer commentaries for classic Sierra titles? I.e. imagine playing the classic Sierra games on a modern PC, where some kind of overlaid UI, etc., let you access a commentary from the game designer/contributor related to the scene/event/plot that you're current at.
In this day and age, I imagine the technology to do this is trivially available/creatable...and being perfectly blunt, we're in an era now when Sierra's cast and crew of game designers/developers/artists are aging and might not be with us for much longer. If ever such an endeavor were to happen, these'd be the last few years when it'd be possible.
Al Lowe is, famously, open to chatting up just about anyone about all things related to Larry, Al's own tenure at Sierra, and Sierra in general, to whoever contacts him (he even makes his email public), so if ever there was an enterprising person/group who would embark on such an undertaking, I imagine Al Lowe would be game to participate.
...
I have so many random thoughts about "one last hurrah" for classic Sierra games...but then I realize that times have changed, gaming tastes have changed, the rights to anything Sierra-related have likely been diluted and acquired and divested and amortized to the deepest depths of licensing Hell...so likely nothing can ever come of it. 😢
