Sierra Quest Collections

[A Black Falcon]

A few notes... first, as far as I know all of Sierra's CD collections of adventure games have included the manuals on the disc, and not in paper form. Quest for Glory: Collection Series (and thus probably the rest of the '97/'98 'Collection Series' series -- SQ, KQ, etc) had the manuals as text files on the CD only. The manual just had an overview. That meant that all the manual art was gone...

Some collections from other companies have included paper manuals -- the two Lucasarts Archives collections I have include the manuals compiled into one large book (3-5 games per collection), and the Interplay 15th Anniversary Collection, a 6-CD, 15-game collection, included the collected full paper manuals for all of the games, compiled into one massive book (I guess that was cheaper than 15 separate ones...). Sierra was cheaper even back then though, so this doesn't surprise me at all... the only question is if it's just text files or if it's PDF scans. Either would work, but scans would be nicer.

Apparently, all this time, the only thing they actually bothered to do was slap DOSbox onto a disk and run all the games from that. Did they even optimize a special build of DOSbox (since it is open source, which I guess would require the source code of their modifications to be released to the public domain) to overcome the shortcomings of using such a method? Hmm... That's the sad thing really. They didn't even take away KQ4's copyright protection (I guess the code is just SO old they probably don't even have the original source code for that game any more and that would require hex editing). This is compounded with the fact that they didn't put either Mask of Eternity in the KQ collection or the last of the "good" LSL games in that collection (I'm not even talking about the horrid 3D one, I'm talking the one from 1996 or so from what I've been reading).

You answered the copy protection issue yourself: they'd have to completely reprogram parts of the games in order to remove those parts, so games which include copy protection in all of their versions can't have it removed without way more effort than is worth it for a simple collection like this. Oh, and while they are using DOSBox, it does have a launcher and stuff, so it's not like you have to deal with DOS... so there's a bit more effort there than just tossing the games and DOSBox on the disk. They also had to modify the game's install programs so that they'd install all of their files to the harddrive, something that in the CD games you could only do with some user modification (which is a nice option, but you should have the 5MB-install-with-CDs option there too if you want, but it seems to be missing...) -- it wasn't a selectable option in the installer or anywhere else.

Further, no details at all on the presence of any extras beyond the emulator and the instruction booklets on the disk. The only conclusion to reach until otherwise noted is that's because there IS nothing else on the disks.

A reasonable assumption -- these are bare-bones. So no bonus games like the KQ:CS pack had, no other extras, and if there was a QFG collection too, I bet it wouldn't come with the QFGV music CD that the CS collection did. Too bad, but what can you do...

I'm talking the interview movies, quiz games, that King's Quest checkers and backgammon thing, all manner of odd editorial pieces about various histories of the series, and so on (really a very fleshed out collection, the way it used to be done, back when games were tall as a mountain and twice as smart).

That's referencing the Roberta Williams Anthology thing, right? Because I don't think that King's Quest: Collection Series, or any previous compilations, had that stuff in them, though I could be proven wrong...

And there's one other thing to add: instruction booklet on a disk is not a very useful option. It's one thing if they include all you need to know right inside the game, so that there's always a helpful context sensitive help option at your finger tips depeding on the menu you are in or a very detailed tutorial or massive in-game help menu with demos of how to do things (later Final Fantasy games for example did a really good job of not needing an instruction booklet). It's another if they didn't change a thing. Now I have to tab out of the game to read stuff. Well, no big deal in some cases. In the case of KQ3 and KQ6 though, that's not really a decent option. In these two games, important information like excerpts from a magic book of magic wizard powers and a guidebook to the land of the green isles are things I'll be holding in one hand as I solve puzzles with the other using said information and clues. Tabbing back and forth in real time, especially in the more time sensitive parts, well you can guess the results.

None of the CD games have copy protection (for instance in QFGIV there is copy protection, but only in the floppy version -- it's removed from the CD one), to the best of my knowledge, and the early floppy games don't have it either, so I'd expect that this would only be an issue for a few titles, and perhaps they include that information in paper form too... maybe not, but either way, it's generally a one-time thing that shouldn't be too hard to deal with. After all, DOSBox does support alt-tab and windowing... this isn't some game where if you try to task-switch out of it to look at some text document it'll crash or something. :) (yeah, I have several games like that, it's a major pain...)

You are absolutely right that DOS games very frequently included lots of very important information in their manuals and that trying to play them without them is a really bad idea that will inevitably lead to great frusteration and that having to task-switch to read the things is a hassle, though, so I do agree... I just know that this stuff is normal for these collections, so either get some printer paper ready or task switch/window the things. It is feasible... not anywhere near as good, but feasible.

For most of these games though, the manuals just provide background information, not critical stuff you actually need to play. I have KQs 1, 5, and 7, and 5 and 7 came with manuals that you really didn't need to read at all to be able to play... the most useful thing from either game was the mini hint guide that came with 7 that helped you through the first few puzzles. :) 1 wasn't a boxed version, so it was just on the disk, but its manual use is equally unimportant... we're not talking about something like a Dragon Wars or Curse of the Azure Bonds where you need, at times, to read numbered paragraphs from one of the manuals at times, providing both a reduction in space (saving all that text in memory) and copy protection on top of the codewheel (in Curse of the Azure Bonds' case)... not to mention, well, codewheels. They did have codes and stuff in the manuals, but not full-fledged codewheels...

Space Quest V does require the manual for codes, though. If you recall, the codes for how to travel to other worlds are hidden in this article in the middle section of the manual... :)

But I'm just blindly guessing at this point. I can only say that if it's all just DOSbox, I could have done that, and I did do that (as did others in this very forum), and it does beg the question of what took so long if this is all they bothered to do.

I doubt that using DOSBox was some last-minuite thing. I don't know why this took so long, but there must have been some issues... that or it was kept on the very last of the back burners, maybe often with no staff, and that they just finished it now because of how little effort they'd been putting into it...

This may just explain the absense of the LSL game, since maybe that last one was not also released with a dos version to begin with.

Nope.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/leisur...e-for-sail