Patrick Bregger (303331) on 5/8/2013 4:09 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Love for Sail and the original Leisure Suit Larry are pretty good. I'd probably also like the Quest for Glory series, but I never played them; I only watched a walkthrough on youtube.
The two Laura Bow games are theoretically awesome but suffer from poor puzzle design. The first Gabriel Knight has a good atmosphere, but I really did not like the puzzles. Freddy Pharkas is very funny, but I don't like the puzzles. I guess you recognize a pattern.

The only Sierra games I really like were only published by them: Arcanum, FEAR, Half-Life.

The worst Sierra games I have ever played: King's Quest V and Codename Iceman.

I would also mention King's Quest VII, but I could not endure it more than two chapters. I did not like King's Quest VI much, I guess it is the best of the bunch, and I have absolutely no recollection of the first four games (but I know I did play them). I thought Leisure Suit Larry II to VI were not worth playing, but for varying reasons. Phantasmagoria is an example for everything wrong about "interactive movies". The only Space Quest game I played was the last and I wish I did not. The Police Quest games have an interesting concept, but I don't like the execution at all.

Of course I played most of those games many, many years ago.

Pseudo_Intellectual (66471) on 5/8/2013 5:19 PM · Permalink · Report

Sierra made the right games for its time, but they were brutal things. Clever, but brutal. They could be beautiful, but when the design itself wasn't fundamentally flawed, often the programming was.

Sierra is responsible for pushing the text adventure out of the primordeal ooze and breathing air with illustrated text adventures, then laying eggs on land with graphical adventures. They're noteworthy because they got in there early and got the infrastructure down to get their goods in all the homes, not because their product was all that and a bag of chips. Eg. Leisure Suit Larry: incredibly significant and important, indicating that games aren't just for kids anymore (not that they ever were) -- but not really any fun.

Sierra's greatest achievement was blazing that trail and then watching Lucasarts run circles around it. This coming from someone who was such a fan that he wrote in to Sierra's magazine with comics of their games' characters interacting.

The only games it's occurred to me to replay were the Quest for Glory ones, which were really visionary dead-ends. If you've played one Space Quest you've played them all, and if you have a YouTube clip of The Many Deaths of Roger Wilco, you don't need to play that one either. King's Quest lacks interesting characters or reasonable puzzles, leaving... a steaming pile of digitized whimsy. Police Quest as a concept was DOA. The Lara Bow games were a good idea, but Sierra was the wrong company to make them happen.

High points: Donald Duck's Playground, Conquests of Camelot, The Incredible Machine, Dr. Brain. Their brand was in the right place at the right time to be associated with meritorious products such as You Don't Know Jack, Half-Life, Spyro, Riddick and Tribes, but it only ended up that way by accident.

I gather that some of Gabriel Knight is worthwhile, and I might investigate the King's Quest remakes with some of the brutality ironed out. There's no case for playing brutal games anymore.

j.raido 【雷堂嬢太朗】 (100658) on 5/8/2013 7:50 PM · Permalink · Report

Of the few Sierra games I played as a kid (KQ5 and 6, Castle of Dr. Brain, Phantasmagoria), Castle of Dr. Brain is the one I remember most fondly. I probably played through that game at least half a dozen times.

Cavalary (11448) on 5/8/2013 8:21 PM · Permalink · Report

I think The Incredible Machine games can still quite hold up even today. Possibly Larry 7 (Love for Sail) too. Definitely steer clear of LSL8 and 9 though.

Otherwise, at the time I really liked the first three Quest for Glory games, with particular emphasis on QfG2 (Trial by Fire), which I replayed loads of times back in the day. The fourth (Shadows of Darkness) really put me off, remember that I poked around the starting location (or first civilized one at least) a bit and then I said that's quite enough, this won't be going anywhere. However, today I doubt I'd care to try anything like even the first three ones again.

Played Larry 1-3 too, and that was definitely something as novelty value. As a game, I recall rather enjoying one, but couldn't tell you which anymore. The others, eye on walkthrough and go through the motions to see what they could come up with next because otherwise they were just painful.

Also played Space Quest 5, but that was meh. And I'm sure I tried an early Police Quest at some point, but was immediately put off by it.

However, one that's not listed here as Sierra having anything to do with it but was by Dynamix after the purchase is Betrayal at Krondor. Now, again, probably won't play anything like that now anymore, but played it around 2000 or 2001, so plenty of years after release anyway, and thought it was just amazing. Sure, showed its age, but it had that rare memorable feeling of playing a book.

chirinea (47516) on 5/8/2013 8:52 PM · Permalink · Report

The first Gabriel Knight is my favorite game of all time, and I like the other two a lot also. But other than that, I guess I've always prefered Lucas Arts adventures. As for other games I played back then, I remember Leisure Suit Larry 6 fondly, and Torin's Passage was OK.

Recently I played King's Quest VII and VIII. KQ7 was a really shallow adventure, and KQ8 is an OK action-RPG.

vedder (71181) on 5/8/2013 10:06 PM · Permalink · Report

I never really cared much for the Sierra adventure games. The only exceptions to the rule are the first Gabriel Knight, which I think is a great, but deeply flawed game and the point & click remake of Leisure Suit Larry, which is also the only Sierra game I managed to finish without giving up to frustration and take a look at a walkthrough or simply giving up. Can't say there's a Quest game that I liked, though I tried them all.

Unicorn Lynx (181769) on 5/9/2013 2:26 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

I adore their adventure games. Larry, Space Quest, Freddy Pharkas, Thorin's Passage, even Phantasmagoria, and above all Gabriel Knight. And of course, the awesome hybrid Quest for Glory.

It would be much easier to list their adventures I don't like. I'm indifferent to most King's Quests except the sixth. And I could never get into their Police Quest games.

I never played Laura Bow games or their early text adventures, so can't comment on that.

vedder (71181) on 5/10/2013 8:15 AM · Permalink · Report

Is this thread bugged for anyone else? The thread overview keeps saying there's one new unread post here, but there isn't. Don't recall having had that before on the forums.

The Fabulous King (1332) on 5/13/2013 9:39 AM · Permalink · Report

It seems that whether somebody likes or hates Sierra games, Gabriel Knight 1 is always given positive credit.

I just played it recently and imo... GK1 is very modern adventure game. Which is probably not a compliment to modern adventure games. But how the puzzles are designed, with a couple of exceptions, to be story and investigation centric... that's quite modern.

What I like about Sierra is it's franchise-driven vision. Creating several different story genres - police procedurals, fairytales. pulp adventure stories, fantasy, historical fiction, sex comedy. They really did approach games as a storytelling medium from the start. That's what I like. Sierra really wanted to be serious about games as art business.

Other developers that time really didn't that much. Full Thottle, the first serious Lucasarts game is from 1995.

In 1991 Sierra had Police Quest 3, where you're wife is dying in a hospital after an attack and your solving satanic murders and Conquests of Longbow where you step into the life of Robin Hood and medieval England.

Granted whether these games are actually good like Gabriel Knight is still good to this day is another matter (Conquests of Longbow is very good though, I've yet to sing it proper praises). But they did take games as storytelling medium seriously and they tried to do their best with it. And they also took a lot of chances. Tried things.

For example, Lucasarts catalogue are mostly in the same vein - comedy. Cartoony comedy at that. And Indiana Jones.

Sierra experimented more with serious adventure gaming. I guess it was until Longest Journey, when it became a norm (Gabriel Knight and Longest Journey are very similar design wise.)

Sierra even experimented to do away with it's classic adventure design with LSL 5 (1991) - no dead ends, no chance of getting stuck, completely player friendly. And future LSL followed that route.

I'm afraid, that except maybe for Roberta Williams, Sierra's classical design flaws are blown out of proportion. Even Space Quest ditched it with SQ5 and SQ6. And one could even argue that with Space Quest, it was part of the experience and that parts 5 and 6 lost something with it.

And then there is of course Quest for Glory, which shares none of the hated Sierra design and is an unmatched masterpiece of it's own.

Which is also what I like about Sierra. They really believed in auteur philosophy - whoever was in charge of a game was given free reign. Sometimes it yielded to great results. Sometimes to horrible.

But they experimented.