Je découvre ce soir "Sequel", un album de Robert Holmes, compositeur de musique de jeux vidéo et notamment des "Gabriel Knight". Il est d'ailleurs l'époux de Jane Jensen, l'autrice à qui on doit le personnage.
"Sequel" est un album de musique de jeux vidéo... sans jeu vidéo associé. Ce sont des thèmes putatifs, qui pourraient exister dans une suite à Gabriel Knight, et c'est vraiment chic :
Good morning everyone! Let's rank King's Quest Games!
King's Quest 6 - To me this is rhe quintessential game. It has fantastic design, amazing art, delightful voice acting and embodies wholeheartedly the spirit of the series in a way that is easily forgotten throughout its lifetime. This is a must play for Sierra point and click fans #retrogaming#adventuregames#sierra
She makes cyberpunky dark music I really like. Sometimes with a bit of vocals but most of the time without. (I'm not really good in this, just listen to her. 😁)
I think my favorite song if this album is "By Fire" so far. So if you don't have time for the full album, try this song to get a feeling for it.
very rarely i can still find old sierra titles at the thrift store. this is the first time i’ve found a sierra flight sim in the wild: the highly respected Red Baron 3D (3dfx/Glide re-release of RB II) 😍
A beautiful start to the morning at #ForkedMeadow#California! I wonder how the new #WolfPack south of us is doing on this fine summer morning? It is only a matter of time before we see some wolves at Forked Meadow!
Yesterday the high was 69f and the overnight low was 43f. Right now it's 48f. #CaWx
The very controversial "Nightmare Rock" at the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California. Nearly every B-western from the '50s was filmed in the Alabama Hills as well as hundreds of other movies, both classic & modern. The Alabama Hills are public lands. Thankfully, while roadside Nightmare Rock has been painted in various ways over many decades, I have never seen any other street art or graffiti in the area.
Walkthroughs are written in the first by the author, reporter-style, for the first half of the book. the second half of the book has a more traditional step-by-step walkthrough.
of more interest are the last 50 pages, written as a surprisingly deep Encyclopedia of Daventry.
there are somewhat .. ah, adorably hobbyist... drawings and maps illustrated throughout that add a lot of charm.
ISBN 0-07-881555-X
1990, Osborne McGraw-Hill, Berkeley, CA
sometimes when i'm sick or wiped out from a long day, i pull out a #sierra#adventuregame point'n'click that i've finished a dozen times
there's something calming and reassuring about stepping through the same old puzzles you already know how to solve, the same faces and same jokes, and re-tracing your steps through familiar old places.
i always loved king's quest v's painted snow, which looks more like cake frosting than mountain powder.
this particular scene is worthy of note because of its high angle, as if perched upon the ledge of a mountain 100 feet above graham and cedric.
these scenes were rarely used in sierra SCI adventures, because they required a whole new set of walking animations. the shadow of a bird high above, crossing the visible pond, is a nice bit of foreshadowing.
today, some obscure sierra on-line & dynamix history that shouldn't be obscure yet is due to how gaming culture developed: Front Page Sports Baseball. this just came in the mail, and i'm so glad to finally have my own copy after playing a demo from a CD-ROM Today! magazine cover disc as a kid.
this dynamix-produced and sierra-published title is weird for a bunch of reasons.
first, it's one of the last few DOS-only games that came out in the mid-90s.
second, it runs in hi-res mode using what i suspect is a blend of software-rendered 3D and 2D sprites that were a holdover from dynamix's 3Space engine used in almost all of dynamix's titles. (pic 2) the animation is crisp, the sprites are beautifully rendered in a very compressed colour palette.
third, the Front Page Sports series were massive hits - outselling other sierra/dynamix titles of the time. but no one talks about it, because sports games often get irritated yawns from gamers.
fourth, this game is fun to play. it's not just an average EA sports-style title. the batting/pitching gameplay is addictive, and the simulation of the players and teams is deep.
and finally, there is - unbelievably - still an active FPS Baseball community still modding and developing rosters for the game. someone maintains a tool that generates websites that lets other people see the outcomes of your baseball games like a late-90s ESPN network site 🤣 https://www.silverbox.com/biorhythm/
What I find interesting about the Sierra classic is that after a certain time you always have to eat and drink something in order to survive.
Do you know of another game with similar mechanics?
Do you have a favorite minor character from any Sierra game? Mine is definitely Edgar from King's Quest IV, because he reminds me of me in terms of his character.
Something I noticed from @JuliaMinamata's latest Level 0 Designers video: the side doors of the kitchen & study of Colonel Dijon's mansion in #TheColonelsBequest are French windows in the exterior close-up shots, but tall wooden doors in the exterior screens where they're seen from a distance.
There's also a mysterious green thing on a short pole by the kitchen door in the wide shot. I wonder if that's a garden hose, or something else? #sierra#laurabow#colonelsbequest#adventuregames
Sierra's Sneak Peeks 1993 (archive.org)
A 1993 Sierra On-Line demo CD, including rolling and playable demos, information, and videos about the company's current game and software catalogue.