Just a short, but exciting, piece of news. GameSetWatch already apparently reported this, but I can’t help pass it along in case you don’t read the major news services.
Although many of you probably did not grow up in the 80s with text-based and graphical adventure games, my sister and I did. We practically grew up on a steady diet of King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and Space Quest games. The days of huddling in front of the 13″ VGA monitor and solving puzzles together are gone. My sister lives an entire continent away, and we don’t play games together much anymore. Until today, that is.
Which would you prefer more:
A) being able to play your favourite Sierra On-Line adventure games in a web browser?
or
B) being able to play those games in a multiplayer environment?
A + B = Martin Kool’s Sarien.net
Much in the spirit of Jet Set Willy Online, this means that you can now play a handful of Sierra’s old adventure games in a browser-based multiplayer environment. Imagine having 100 Roger Wilco’s walking around, exploring the Arcada. Imagine solving puzzles in The Black Cauldron with a friend 1000 miles away.
And all done by one guy (with the help of a friend). Spectacular.
So head over to Sarien.net if you have a chance and enjoy the ride. The only thing I’d love to see would be names above the avatars (so we can identify each other) and perhaps picking different colors for our characters. It gets tough figuring out who’s who on a screenful of Roger Wilco’s.
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From gnome:
And it can get so incredibly silly too…
On the other hand and since you mentioned JSWO, it would have been nice -though ridiculously difficult- to actually adapt gameplay to the new multiplayer setting. Btw, did you get a Spectrum yet?
From Floordje:
Now there are some vintage games we can both agree upon!
From chris:
@gnomemeister:
Yeah – the environment is quite adolescent unfortunately. But still, it has the opportunity to be a lot of fun if you can find someone else to play with. Would be VERY cool to see new gameplay suiting a more persistent world – but that would be another game entirely
No speccy yet ;( My dissertation supervisors are cracking down on me to finish (start) writing this damned thing.
@floordje: Welcome! Indeed, who couldn’t agree on these retro treasures?
From Jonathan:
Chris! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this when I commented on your blog post “the art of sierra” awhile back! I LOVE Sierra Adventure games and when I found out this news I freaked out! Playing a game like this through a browser is really cool, multi-player is even better, and finally playing on my iPad is the BEST. I’ve been waiting a LONG time for this!
I just finished an article on Sierra Adventure games for NERDTREK.com, the full article is here:
http://nerdtrek.com/sierra-adventure-games/