With the all press that LucasArts has gotten for releasing Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and several of its classic adventures on Steam, it was really just a question of time before other publishers would follow. First to jump on the “everything old is new again” bandwagon: Activision with news that they’ve expanded their offerings on Steam to include the King’s Quest and Space Quest Collections, Aces of the Galaxy, Time Shift and 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures.
Ordinarily, I’d be one of the first to jump at the chance to replay (or in some cases, play for the first time) classic games I own on 3.5 floppy disks(!), but both the KQ and SQ collections are the same shovelware Activision foisted on the unsuspecting gaming public back in 2006. You remember, the collections where no tweakage of any kind was done to compensate for modern gaming systems… oh, right, they included DOSbox along with a wing and a prayer. Thanks for that. (where’s that rolling-eyes smilie?) The Steam page for King’s Quest even goes so far as to list the following warning: “Some games in this collection may run under Windows XP 64 and Vista 32/64, but are not officially supported.” So, tell me again why you’re offering these collections? Is it to test the waters for the possible release of classic IPs or is it all about the Benjamins? I’ll let you decide.
If you’re really hungering for some old-school King’s Quest action, might I suggest taking a stroll over to AGDInteractive and pick up one of their remakes… for free. Nada. Zilch. Their King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown was one of the first strictly fan-made remakes done and it’s a beautiful piece of work. Now there’s something done for the love of the game.
This is obviously just poor Sierra catchup, and LucasArts, so I’ve heard, released their stuff using DOSBox and ScummVM, the sods – I’d love to be proved wrong here.
I’m disappointed there is no proper support to get such titles working on newer systems. It’s a real shame.
You can probably blame the international juggernaut of anti-consumer evil that is Activision/Blizzard for this, since I assume the rights to those old Sierra titles reverted to Actizzard when Vivendi was rolled into the megapub and Sierra got dissolved. It’d take only a modest effort to get these games running in some simple proprietary emulator that would future proof them at least for a few more years, and almost unconscionable to charge money for games they know aren’t likely to work.
Frankly I wish they’d release these classics to the world, let modders and open sourcers tweak them so a new generation can experience the games of yore.