Activision Brings King's Quest, Space Quest to Steam

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Fans of Classic Adventures rejoice: Activision has brought the entire King's Quest and Space Quest collections to Steam.

All seven games in Sierra's King's Quest series are currently available for the 25% discounted price of $15, with the six-game Space Quest series available at the same price. The system requirements for King's Quest warn that "some games in this collection may run under Windows XP 64 and Vista 32/64, but are not officially supported," so 64-bit users may want to wait on compatibility reports before plunking down their digital money.

Activision also added Artech's space shooter Aces of the Galaxy and Saber's shooter TimeShift to its lineup. Last, and certainly least, Wanako's 3D Ultra Mini Golf Adventures has graced Steam with its extreme presence.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    July 23, 2009 12:25 PM

    "Some games in this collection may run under Windows XP 64 and Vista 32/64, but are not officially supported."

    BOO TO YOU ACTIVISION. BOO. TO. YOU.

    • reply
      July 23, 2009 12:27 PM

      I like the "may" as if they didn't even bother to test them AT ALL.

      • reply
        July 23, 2009 12:28 PM

        Because they didn't, why should they care? If they even sell 1 copy they made the effort worthwhile.

    • reply
      July 23, 2009 12:31 PM

      Definitely boo worthy. That whole 'may' thing is bullshit. Why don't they just come out and say if they run or not? They know if they do. And I'm sure the answer is they don't. But hey what's a little loss of honesty when there are games to be sold.

      • reply
        July 23, 2009 7:30 PM

        Maybe they are smarter than we think and dont /have/ a copy of Vista around to test it on. :D

    • reply
      July 23, 2009 12:34 PM

      I have the Space Quest collection cd-rom. It installs the games with pre-configured (posibly outdated) versions DOSbox.
      I think what they are saying is "we don't make or service DOSbox but it should work. If it doesn't then don't cry to us"

      • reply
        July 23, 2009 12:35 PM

        but they are selling the game with that wrapper. If it doesn't work then people sure as hell should get to cry to them. they sold it.

        • reply
          July 23, 2009 12:55 PM

          They sold the game with a wrapper 20 years ago. It's the exact same game, only 5 times cheaper. If you can't figure out how to use dosbox then you probably weren't smart enough to install the game 20 years ago by configureing EMS,XMS, Upper and Base memory, bootdisks all in your config.sys and autoexec.bat.

          To quote Lewis CK "How quickly he thinks the world owes him something he only knew existed 10 seconds ago..."

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc

          • reply
            July 23, 2009 1:02 PM

            Well done. I kind of wanted to say some very similar to you but I didn't think anyone would get it.

          • reply
            July 23, 2009 1:44 PM

            It didn't sell with fucking dosbox 20 years ago.

          • reply
            July 23, 2009 1:50 PM

            Also It's 2009. I shouldn't have to do anything to make a damn game work. I went through all that crap 15 years ago. And let me tell I was a goddamn wizard at getting Dos games to work. And I'll be god damned if I'm gonna go through that shit again. If they are gonna release a game they should make sure it works. And if it doesn't work on 64-bit OSes then they should flat out say that instead of this "may" crap.

            • reply
              July 23, 2009 1:52 PM

              I'm about to throw a Sprite at you guys.

            • reply
              July 23, 2009 7:34 PM

              Agreed. I did all that years ago out of sheer desire to get games I purchased to fucking work. I no longer want to do that and would have to relearn half of it to begin with.

              That said, out of sheer desperation I've gotten dosbox to work with a couple SQ games in the past. Unfortunately I was then unable to get the sound patches to take for the narration. Then I had to reformat the PC (long story), forgot how I got it working in the first place, got fed up and forgot about it.

              My free time is precious. I don't have much of it. I want games to work without having to go through excersizes in frustration. That's one of the reasons that apart from a few online games (I'm addicted to QuakeLive now), I generally play my 360 nowadays.

            • reply
              July 24, 2009 7:14 AM

              Haha - I remember making boot disks trying to get Ultima VII to work - it needed some insane combination of low memery and high memory that no other game (at the time) needed. And then when it finally ran, it ran like crap. But god did I love that game.

              In comparison, Sierra games were always really easy to get running.

          • reply
            July 23, 2009 11:33 PM

            If you pay money for a product then the world sure as shit does owe you something -- a working product or a refund. At least the part of the world containing the people who took your money.

      • reply
        July 23, 2009 12:35 PM

        Not necessarily. First of all which versions of Space Quest 6, King's Quest 6,7 and Police Quest 4 did they use for these collections? They may not even be the dos versions. I sure hope they are.

      • reply
        July 23, 2009 12:40 PM

        BTW: I have never had any problem running DOSbox under Vista64. If I was going to buy those Sierra games off of STEAM I would still create my own custom DOSbox profiles with what I know to be the newest version of DOSbox.
        Those 2 collections where published years ago and I'll bet they still have some old version of DOSbox that was made before 64bit operating systems where common.

    • reply
      July 23, 2009 12:38 PM

      *sniff* *sniff* Smells like shovelware...

      Come on Activision, I know you saw LucasArts making some coin off their old games and said ME TOO, who wouldn't? But you missed the step where LucasArts put in a little bit of effort making sure they'd actually work on modern systems.

      Good idea, poor effort.

    • reply
      July 23, 2009 12:38 PM

      For real. If LucasArts can do it, so could Activision. I was surprised when LucasArts said they made sure to get them working on modern systems. I'm not surprised to see that Activision took the lazy way out.

      • reply
        July 23, 2009 12:40 PM

        It makes me laugh because Activision and Vivendi are a match made in heaven, they think so alike.

      • reply
        July 23, 2009 1:17 PM

        I bought and played through Fate of Atlantis (from Steam) and it worked great all the way through, although it does have some mouse pointer and clicking that isn't quite right. Sometimes screen location -> mouse pointer didn't seem to jive very well. As for clicking, I had to do "long" left mouse clicks for the game to register them, rather than a typical left click.

        Slapping these other games up on Steam and saying, "Eh, they might work," is just plain lazy. it's as though they're saying, "We want to do this, but we don't want to put the effort into it."

        • reply
          July 23, 2009 1:40 PM

          I'm noticing the long mouse click issues as well, but quite frankly the game looks and runs great considering it was made more than 15 years ago. Lucasarts increased the resolution and ensured compatiblity - something Activision is not doing.

    • reply
      July 23, 2009 11:31 PM

      Yup. If they can't be bothered to update the games -- or at least test them and make a clear statement one way or the other -- for modern computers then they shouldn't be asking people money for them.

      I don't care if they are cheap, they should at least tell people whether the things will fucking work or not and not leave them to find out after spending the money.

      GoG.com show the right way to do things, TBH.

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