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SierraGamer — WELL WHATTYA KNOW? A GIANT SPIDER!! Icom Uninvited
#death #duh #icom #spider #vgd #videogamedeath #icomsimulations #icomincorporated #icom_computer_games #youwerewarned #uninvited_video_game #computergames #giantspider #uninvited #videogames #nintendogames #videogamesfanart #dosgames #iwarnedyou #icom_simulations
Published: 2014-12-27 23:07:07 +0000 UTC; Views: 1056; Favourites: 5; Downloads: 0
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Description
This is the Infamous GIANT SPIDER from the ICOM game "Uninvited"Anyone who has ever played ICOM'S "UNINVITED" will know INSTANTLY what I'm talking about here.
(Gotta love those sarcastic, sadistic games!) (Icom was well into Sierra's territory when they made this game!)
Of all the MANY Video game deaths I've died this is one of my favorites..... It has that stinging snarky Sierra-Style humor to it.
When you're exploring a chapel, you can find a hole in the floor. Try to go down it and the game will tell you that there's a giant spider down there..... Try again and they'll warn you that it's Bigger than a breadbox....... several warnings later you can ACTUALLY GO DOWN THERE......
Well.... what do you know, It's a GIANT SPIDER! (Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh)
I used ICOM's Spider, and the Spider from the short "Felix Gets the Can" As models, and put my own screwy twist on the whole furshlugginer mess.
I kinda like how it turned out. (Finally)
Please DON'T copy any o' my art work without my permission...... If you have ANYTHING you want to ask me about the picture... ask me in the comments!)
If you wanna ask me 'bout requests, just ask me in the comments!
Peace out! Dudes & Dudettes!
YOU HAVE DIED
RESTORE? RESTART? QUIT?
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Comments: 10
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That is one old, old game, what? I think I remember it from my childhood.
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Awesome to see someone who remembers these snarky sarcastic games..... back when games were actually funny, and didn't use gore and blood for entertainment. (In my opinion, it's just sad when games have to use shock and horror to get kids interested.... nobody goes for the humor aspect anymore.)
Remember Hugo's House of Horrors or Colonel's Bequest?
God.... I'd have to say Sierra and Icom were my favorite software companies. (Even though most people prefer Nintendo or Lucasarts!)
I always loved SPACE QUEST the most..... it's the silliest.
What's your favorite?
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Space Quest. Larry the Lounge Lizard. I do remember Colonel’s Bequest somewhat vaguely - I was very young in those days. And I’m one of the few people in the world who played Sierra’s Black Cauldron, from the Disney movie. I also remember when one of the King’s Quest games came out on 15 floppy discs and the critics were lamenting that this was just too big and complex for a game and Sierra was going to destroy the industry.
The funny thing is that I’m now the project lead for a game development company - I make the fun games that lots of people play but no one talks about. Some time back I saw an interview in which Roberta Williams was lamenting how in the early days of Sierra, three content people and one programmer would go into a room and come out with a completed game six weeks later. Sheesh! I have dozens of artists, modellers, texture and shading artists and programmers working off-site for me in every time zone from Germany to Japan at an average development cost of about 2500Canadian or more a day over two years. And this is a long way from what goes into one of the 'blockbuster' games.
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WOW! What company do you work for?
How hard is it to make adventure games like King's Quest?
I mean a fairly simple game with VGA or SVGA graphocs, and WITHOUT the polyhedronal 3-D stuff. How hard is it to make games like that?
Your job sounds really cool!
If I ever get the chance to design a game it'll probably be a lot like Space Quest...... I love silly stuff!
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Sorry, got lost over the holidays, then had a lot of catch-up work. Anyway I’ve been working for Adventure Associates of Canada for the lat few years - they develop a fair amount of platform games, but always distributed under one of the larger international titles. Right now I’m in pre-development for the reboot of a classic series that started back in the 90's that Activation bought a couple of years ago but can’t fit into their own schedule. Before that I way a consultant for anyone who needed me, usually brought in to solve specific problems, going back to the tabletop days of Mystara and Advanced D&D in the later days of TRS, when I was barely in my 20's.
By what I remember, King’s Quest grew a lot in the first years of Sierra and On-line Games. Roberta and Ken Williams literally made their first games themselves at their kitchen table in their spare time. Even by Larry the Lounge Lizard, like I said before, the core development team was still only three people. Of course, the later King’s Quest games and others from that time had teams the had grown into dozens, probably just two or three dozen, still massive for the time. Of course, it was size that killed Sierra in the 90's. They were reluctant to move past the ‘we’re just a bunch of friends’ approach and their games were starting to look small and simple when they had to start competing with things like the Final Fantasy series.
The last Sierra game I played was The Hobbit in 2003. Most of the actual work was outsourced to other companies, but it still had a bit of that old Sierra feel to it. And with the exception of warrior elf maidens in furry miniskitrs, it somehow stayed close to the original story even though the actual gameplay was almost entirely a series of original sidequests rather than events from the story. Last I heard, Activision has just resurrected Sierra mostly to republish updates of its classic games.
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I've heard about Activision resurrecting Sierra! I truthfully cannot WAIT to see what King's Quest IX is gonna look like! (I really DO hope they keep the icon bar and mouse-driven interfaces.... those are easy to use... that and the 3rd person perspective.... that made it SO much easier to navigate than anything like Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask!)
(I also hope they make a VGA version of Space Quest III!)
I always thought it was the radical shift Sierra went through in the mid '90s that did them in...... they'd been cranking out progressively better and better Adventure games (and VGA remakes!).... everyone knew what to expect from them...... Save Early, Save Often and Don't Overwrite your saves. You could die VERY easily, and they WOULD (without a doubt) laugh at you for your stupidity if you died.... but they didn't take death too seriously.... .and neither did the players
Then along comes Phantasmagoria, Shivers, and Lighthouse...... (The big "What the @#$%?!?" in my opinion)
The interface is different, just a curser, no "Look, Touch/manipulate, Talk to, Smell, taste, use item on" Right away you know something's up. Already they've eliminated the ability to run around touching/tasting/Smelling everything.
Nothing Kills you.... what's up with that? Isn't half the humor in these games from stupid deaths? is this like LSL5?
Oh wait.... You CAN die..... but it's NOT funny..... in fact it's sometimes disturbing... no "snarky comment on your demise" or even the "Restart? Restore? At least one More!" Just a Restore, Retry Quit option.
THIS in my opinion is what did them in. They pushed into serious games too quickly, and probably ticked off some of their loyal fans before they had built up a real huge customer base of Serious gamers..... Worst of all they sort of STUMBLED into the horror genre at first.... they cut a lot of corners on the Ixupi in SHIVERS...... their whole GAME is pretty creepy... but then you see the monsters which are NOT cute... but not TRULY SCARY either.... they look like some sort of cartoonish monsters...
Had they made the whole game goofy cartoony satire of the horror genre like "Day of the tentacle" I imagine it would have gone better..... or made the monsters really CREEPY like in "Quest for Glory IV" or something, again, it probably would've worked out better... Half-and-Half REEEEAAALLY doesn't work!
I always thought what killed the was pushing into the more serious/horror genre without a clear idea of it, and NOT keeping up a steady production of silly games is what did them in...... by driving their longtime adventure fans batty with that rapid shift... and newcomer fans not finding their games 'creepy' enough.... because they were just getting into it.
But that's just my opinion..... I never worked for any game company before..... I just speak as a fan of their games.
Truth be told I think it's the humor in a game that really counts.... not a buncha fancy graphics or effects..... I've always preferred the "Adventure" style games that don't have a lot of outrageous gory bloodshed or fighting...... if you have a plot that doesn't involve horrific monsters/zombies/aliens/whatevers that the 'hero/heroine' has to kill or battle.... you realize that you really DO have a lot of freedom to do whatever you want with the character. humorous scenes, sidequests, maze sequences, 'treasure hunt' fetch quests, minigames, chases, etc.
For example, My sister plays PORTAL and AMNESIA.... and yes I will admit that they have very good effects and graphics... but aside from that, it's like they're pushing you forward, the plotline is waaaaay to forced (especially in Portal).
On the other hand, with stuff like King's Quest and Space Quest and of course, Leisure Suit Larry, you have time to putz around, mess with stuff, and generally just blunder around at your own pace without constantly having to go through the whole "go through the door, fight the monster/solve the puzzle/solve the puzzle while fighting monsters, search the room, advance to the next door.... then do it all over again" type of scenario.
It's really nice when you have a game like Leisure Suit Larry I VGA.... It DOES have a very LOOSE plot that keeps it from being like Minecraft.... devoid of any plot and not just total chaos... but it isn't forcing you forward like Portal does..... basically you're free to mess with ANYTHING and ANYBODY, but you DO have a plotline to keep you from being totally lost in it all.
I really think we need more games like that.... think there's any future in WACKY SILLY Adventure games?
(Well that's my two cents worth, and I hope it doesn't bore you!)
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Cleaning up and re-issuing classic games has been very big business, although I don’t know what plans Activision has for the original games. I believe that they will be PC only for modern Windows, I suspect that they would remain keyboard/mouse games and that the older ones would be text-based, although there might be compilation editions for the consoles. Just guessing. Activision is trusting me to reboot one of the iconic characters of the 90s, updating both the character designs and their back stories, the way Ocarina rebooted Zelda. I’m impressed with their trust, although I’m not sure if they’re just crazy!
About what brought down Sierra, all I know is what I’ve heard from others. I didn’t really play video games of any type during most of the 90s. I had an Intellivision when I was really young - it didn’t really do much, although my sister and I played a lot of Tank Battle and Strip Poker (Probably not what you’re thinking!) I didn’t even touch consoles again until I received a Nintendo 64 with a copy of Mario 64 and Ocarina. Of course, these days I get complimentary copies of just about every game in existence. I can’t begin to play them all, but I try to at least look at the most popular titles (whether I like them or not) just to have a sense of what’s going on.
What you said about ‘save early, save often’ - reminds me of when I first played Ocarina. I would scarf all my potions when things got difficult, so I figured out that old trick of learning how to solve the problem the easy way, then reset without saving and do it again conserving my resources. I really turned that into an art working my way through Sly Cooper. I’ve learned a lot from games that were too hard or too easy, because it means that someone misjudged their target audience. I had to give up on Final Fantasy X2 because it was significantly harder than FFX, and I learned that too many people had that same problem. It hurt Final Fantasy a bit in sales for several years after because many people believed that the series had become too hard for them.
Well, back to Sierra. The 90's were in a way a hard time to be a game developer. The technology was changing quickly, old consoles that had seemed indestructible suddenly disappeared and new ones took over, and later in the decade developing for multiple platforms, once unheard of, was becoming standard. It was hard to judge your target audience because the rules kept changing and past market history was more or less worthless. Times changed too quickly for a lot of people to keep up, and for whatever reason it caught up with Sierra. I can’t blame them too much.
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No kiddin' huh? You're workin' for ACTIVISION?
What's the character you've been tasked with rebooting? (Alas.....Something tells me it's not Roger Wilco.)
I know Activision owns Sierra...... Do they also own Hasbro? (I know SOMEONE bought Hasbro awhile back.)
Those are some deep thoughts you've given the industry.... but since you're a developer/programmer/writer, I suppose you have a LOT more insight into what goes on there. (Me I'm just a oldschool game fan...... never like the creepy blood-spattering horror games..... just the silly old ones.)
Out of curiosity, do You think that SPACE QUEST is 'too far gone' for any sequels or VGA remakes? Or do you think there are still a lotta fans out there?
(I would LOVE to see Space Quest VII..... it got cut with the whole "Chainsaw Monday" thing... .they were all ready for it but then everything went downhill.)
I got into videogames late in life too...... I pretty much only played "FOOD FIGHT" "PAC MAN" and "JUMP BUG" down at various arcades.... until I discovered KING'S QUEST in 2012! I pretty much grew up without video games! Only after I bought my $40.00 Windows XP did I get into gaming! I have to say there are a lotta GOOD games out there.... and there are a lotta games that are just mindless slaughter-em, shoot-em-up games.
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