Sierra Quest Collections

[A Black Falcon]

I'll still experiment a little with the sound settings. I may just have the wrong item selected for music.

Actually, you're right, they're different. In DOS I have it set to Roland (the best option available, I think, unless it'd be possible to get MIDI if you try to copy in a DOS MIDI driver from some of the newer Sierra games and see if this game works with it... but with the setup as it is, DOS uses Roland as my SB card emulates it (which means each 'sound' is an insturment noise), while Windows uses the extended MIDI. They actually sound very different... not sure which is "better" though. It depends on what you want...

Note that the voice acting is completely identical in both versions -- staticy. :)

Yeah, still the original is always nice, even if it's just "classic mode" gameplay. By the way, there actually is a small list of gameplay changes in SM All-Stars. The one thing I noticed first time through is that a block normally fairly hidden by the background art in SMB1 (intentionally) is now clear as day. Also, some of the artwork is a little missing. I love the remake's graphics, but in SMB3 I sort of miss the sky being filled with little stars and flowers when you fly high enough. The one other thing that comes to mind is that there's no way to beat SMB3 in All-Stars so that you can restart the game with a full set of P-Wings.

Yeah, re-releases often do change a few things, which is one big reason (in addition to getting the original graphics) why people want to be able to play the older versions of games too... while often changes are for the better, they aren't always. It'd just get confusing if a collection included every version of a game though, when there have been a bunch of versions...

... actually, that'd be kind of cool. How about one for Super Mario Bros. -- NES, Mario Allstars version, Game Boy Color (SMB DX), Game Boy Advance (Classic NES)... but for the purposes of most collections, and the mass market, not considered necessary or really wanted at all, sadly. So while I'd love to see collectiosn truly include all versions of the games, I don't expect it, so it's not all that bad really that this Sierra collection does the same...

Yes, they are cheap too.

Is KQ8 one CD or two? Either way, both of those games are late titles, which means they'd need CDs to themselves for sure... save a few cents on every copy by leaving them out! :)

XP doesn't have that issue. You can assign a compatibilty profile to the game's shortcut that automatically converts down, starts the game, and then converts up when you are done playing. Doesn't do a "true" resolution drop that way though... a small problem they should resolve... also, resizing will resort the desktop icons which is annoying. What are "various things"? Aside from that bar, if you are in full screen mode, the rest of the screen should be filled with the game itself. Eh, I suppose for me it's worth it for the other advantages. Again, if they did a good job with these ports, they could basically just take the Windows version and slap in high res versions of KQ5's cursors as well as taking out those title bars.

What do you mean it doesn't do a true resolution drop? I thought that that's exactly what it does when you set it that way... so it just SCALES the game to your desktop resolution or something? Awful! Easier I know, but scaling... ick...

"various things": I said this earlier in the thread.

DOS: The only "limitation" on the screensize is the small black area on the top of the screen which the menubar drops down from.

Windows: In addition to that black space, there's the blue bar on top, the edge of the taskbar on the bottom (tiny I know, but a light line), the large (inch-wide plus) black bar on the top of the screen (above the dropdown area, and empty to make the game fit into a 640x480 resolution when the DOS one obviously uses a different screen ratio -- Windows is 640x480. DOS has the same width ratio -- 320 -- but the height is different. I think it's 320x200, which means that you need to have a 40-pixel black space on the top and bottom of the screen to fit the doubled image into a 640x480 window.), and the equally large black bar on the bottom of the screen, and the window borders that are on the screen around the edges.

Oh, I was under the impression you enjoyed it as opposed to forcing yourself to play it... oh well. Also, what's so frustrating about dying and instantly coming back? They give you clever hints and I actually like a little threat to my adventuring sometimes.

By the way, horror of horrors, they didn't include the first SWAT game with the Police Quest collection (in spite of it being in the last PQ collection),

Police Quest 5: SWAT... was that one an adventure game like the first four, or had that shifted it into other genres like the SWAT games since then have done (SWAT 2 being a top-down strategy game, and 3 and 4 being squad-based FPSes)?

http://www.mobygames.com/game/police-que...ion-series

Interesting... while descriptions do not call it an adventure game (more of an interactive movie/police simulator), it was in PQ:CS, so despite the genre change leaving it out this time is stupid.

and they included the floppy disk version of Leisure Suit Larry 6 (so no voices for you!).

Well, that means that I'm right about why they left out LSL7 and KQ8 then...

(and in the case of SQ1 at least, there really is a total overhaul using a point and click interface)

I assume that LSL1 also only includes the remake and not the original version then... but really, I greatly, greatly prefer the point-and-click versions to the text-input ones, so for me it doesn't mean much... some people hate the redone versions, though, so I'm sure they're annoyed. :)

I sure hope those crazy online comic guys lampoon this hard! That'd show them!

Sorry, won't happen. You need to be a pretty serious Sierra fan to have any idea about pretty much everything we've talked about in this thread, sadly...