Who remembers Larry Laffer? #chatgpt #aiart #synthart #sierra

king's quest 2 has the most al lowe ending of any sierra adventure game

it's honestly kind of sad how self-serious the company's games became by the 90s. i loved their mid-80s era.

For #ProgTuesday by @DXMacGuffin, a "collaborative, mutual remix" EP:

#TheOcean & #SIERRA: Boreal | Traum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k5O6Bd3Fpk

https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=-k5O6Bd3Fpk

back in the mid-90s just prior to sierra's downfall into fmv and poorly funded titles (their sale to CUC international), the company started looking for low-risk low-profit income avenues.

in the post-doom FPS feeding frenzy, the bloom was off adventure games. they were expensive to produce, and their audience was shrinking fast.

one solution was recycling old software, and honestly, it was great for a 13 year old kid like me, because it meant that i could buy a "sierra game" for $10 instead of the $60-$80 i would normally have to pay for a flagship title

Crazy Nick's Software Picks were collections of mini-games taken from sierra adventures. there were several of them - LSL, King's Quest - I happened to find this Conquest of the Longbow pack at a pharmacy.

the games were *great* - Archery and Nine Men's Morris kept me absolutely occupied for weeks. I had no idea at the time that they were culled from a full sierra adventure, until I discovered it by accident in my twenties.

today i found my copy of the game, buried in another game box. it still has the greasy kid fingerprint from me eating a bag of Old Dutch (regular) chips while i played

Right now, a #Jani's world premiere #Rachmaninov with Goerner #Sierra and #Strauss from #Dallas https://www.worldconcerthall.com/en/schedule/a_janis_world_premiere_rachmaninov_with_goerner_sierra_and_strauss_from_dallas/86754/ #wch

In 25 minutes, a #Jani's world premiere #Rachmaninov with Goerner #Sierra and #Strauss from #Dallas https://www.worldconcerthall.com/en/schedule/a_janis_world_premiere_rachmaninov_with_goerner_sierra_and_strauss_from_dallas/86754/ #wch

Today, a #Jani's world premiere #Rachmaninov with Goerner #Sierra and #Strauss from #Dallas https://www.worldconcerthall.com/en/schedule/a_janis_world_premiere_rachmaninov_with_goerner_sierra_and_strauss_from_dallas/86754/ #wch

This is supposed to be a bad ending, apparently.

mark crowe deserves so much more credit for his animations

pro move: add yourself as an npc in your own game

dick move: make yourself the hardest npc in your own game

warren schwader: why choose

(a classic interview with schwader from halcyon days: https://dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/SCHWADER.HTM)

finally discovered the nature of sierra's Gold Rush! timer bug after 25+ years of being softlocked by it, and unable to finish the game. afaik, this hasn't been documented anywhere. (edit - ha, it was - over at uhs https://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/hints/goldrush/92.php)

the game relies heavily upon its internal timer to trigger specific events. the first - and most important one - is getting a letter from your brother in the mail. if you don't get the letter, you get stuck 3/4 through the game.

the letter is supposed to arrive after 8 minutes. every time i've played the game, the letter never arrives. the same goes for selling your home to the real estate agent, or waiting for the rains to stop (and fields to dry out) later in the game. the events never happen.

today i discovered that you can type 'time' and it will show you the amount of actual time that has passed. on a hunch, i toggled the game between Fastest mode and Normal mode. the video shows you exactly what has happened: the internal timer never runs in Fast or Fastest mode, and the game is convinced that the clock is stuck at 04:29 forever.

i *suspect* this is probably a cpu clock speed problem, as was often the case for sierra games - many of them have buggy or nonexistent timer code that couldn't anticipate a world faster than 4mhz.

anyway, i'm just glad to have figured this out. it has plagued my dosbox playthroughs for two decades, and i can finally finish the game.

Screenshots of a press build of Sierra's Police Quest 3, from Game Player's PC Entertainment Magazine vol. 5 #1 (Jan/Feb 1992).

In these screenshots, the dialogue speech bubbles have an extra line of blank space at the top and bottom, a visually distracting feature that was removed in the final game.

Drei Drachen kriechen in meinen Schlaf
Die Seele woll'n sie lebendig zum Fraß
Feurigen Atems, gespaltener Zunge
Genießen sie jedes Mahl

I finally started playing Gabriel Knight for the first time!

I love the way how Tim Curry (Gabriel Knight) reads this German poetry!

#PhotoOfTheDay is another of Yosemite Valley, with Liberty Cap and Nevada Fall at the center.

Turns out Laura Bow 2 has some absolutely wild differences in the background art between the floppy & CD versions, on part with Space Quest 4 in some screens.

Almost all screens have at least some minor palette reduction on CD, but sometimes the changes are quite drastic.