Sierra Quest Collections

[A Black Falcon]

Your list of data for the Windows versions is not entirely accurate. The cursors are black and white, that is a downside, but on the upside they are high res and thus easier to use. They are not the windows cursors.

Further, there's that bar but in the port job I'm sure they can get rid of that, and it didnt' really cut off any of the game anyway (it just took up some of what was already a black part of the screen for the game icons).

That's wrong. I have both version installed, so I checked. DOS KQV runs fullscreen -- the only black bar on the screen is the small on on the top where there menubar pops up. In the windows version, there are large black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, along with the small black area where the toolbar drops down and the blue bar on the top of the screen. Now, you are seeing the same scene; the Windows one just is using a higher resolution... but when the game was designed for the low resolution, it doesn't really help things to raise it. It looks best in its full-screen original resolution.

Oh, as for the cursors, while they are context-sensitive in both versions, the Windows ones have no character -- they are miniscule, first, but also they have none of the personality of the DOS cursors. For instance, the 'walking' cursor. In DOS, it's a mini-Graham, with the colors and all. In Windows, it's a just a little stick-figureesque thing. The eye? Similar, in Windows it's just a little Windows-style eye while in DOS it's much more interesting. Same goes for all the other cursors... they're shrunken, stripped down and not as good versions of the original DOS cursors. The DOS version of the game is just better. The main reason for that is definitely the fullscreen display that the Windows version can't emulate, but the cursors do play a role too... and the incompatible save files mean that once you've started with one you need to stick with it, so I chose the better version.

Mast of Eternity... yeah they seem to want to forget that example of why marketters shouldn't be the ones in charge of major business decisions. Still, that game needs an update too. At least that one can be updated with a patch easily enough, if they cared. It just needs to have certain glitches fixed in the scoring system, some glitches in how it works with XP, and finally just better support of directx so detecting "3DFX" is no longer required to use all the higher graphical functions of the game (right now I use a glide wrapper to trick the game when I run it).

I've tried to use Glide wrappers for a few games, one worked (for the Redguard demo), but the other one (for Pod) doesn't... I just get black textures ingame with one option, and a crash with the other one. Bah. :(