Sierra Quest Collections

[Dark Jaguar]

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...

The King's Quest collections must be the exception then. They have released 3 KQ collections before this one, each more fantastical than the last. The first just had 1-6 (and was released just before KQ7 was released I believe) but it had most of those interviews and such as well as a preview video of KQ7. It came on two disks, with 1-5 on the first and 6 on the second (well 1-4 are such tiny games relative to anything on CD that that's no issue). The second KQ collection not only included 1-7 but also the two Laura Bow games and all of Roberta's Apple II adventures as well as an Apple II emulator (which was surprisingly good). Oh and Mixed Up Mother Goose was on there too. The third collection was basically the exact same one only renamed the Roberta Williams collection. Nothing really noteworthy there. I think one had a 5th Apple II game (The Dark Crystal) that the other didn't and that's why they ended up making the change. I don't have much info beyond that. At any rate, all 3 had rich full instruction booklets with the full text from the originals, well the full story text anyway.

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.

Firstly, they wouldn't have to "completely reprogram" it. They would just need to find the pointer that called for KQ4's keyword checker and remove it so the game just directly loads into the startup sequence. It would take searching for that hex code but it would be a simply "dummying" procedure once they found it. Besides that plenty of people online have already released a number of similar hacks for old games anyway. Further, I do not suggest they tamper with the KQ6 and KQ3 copyright protection. That was actually FUN and I wasn't even aware they had done that as copyright protection to begin with.

Secondly, I acknowledged that they had to program the game's installers. That's child's play though. Hardly something that would take such a long time to make. I mean a simple "put this file here and make this text file" program isn't what I could call "back breaking coding". Nope, I'm not buying that as an excuse.

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...

Not buy the game. That's the way to send the message.

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...

As for evidence, I found this fan site listing all the details one could want for all the collections just now. That should clear everything up for both of us.

http://www.sierraplanet.com/curiosities/...tions.html

(Side note: Some of those FMVs are kinda infomercially and have some fanboy targetted propaganda about PCs being "teh betters" because of "CD graphix", but hey no biggy and it makes a good historical thing.)

Okay, turns out that first collection I talked about up there had two versions itself, and I got the earlier version because I didn't get a demo of KQ7 in mine.

In the case of the second collection series, it seems that while the disks themselves contained more content (while dropping some), the booklet contained more while dropping certain excerpts from the original manuals. Annoying I suppose.

At any rate, if you see those lists you notice that as time went on they dropped a few things in later collections, but at the very least they completely demolished the current offering in terms of extras.

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... :)

Never played SQ5. I have SQ1 and PQ1.

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...

That's more likely, sad as that is.

Nope.

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

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And with that, well now we know they just sort of slacked off and didn't really care. Wish they had put more effort into these collections... They could have been ultimate compilations. Problem is, with this release I don't see another release of these games coming for a long long time...