LA X seirra

[gos]

i think most of sierra games are unbalanced

[parabolee]

I have liked some Sierra games, but none of them enough to finish them. And I don't think any of them are even close to as funny as a comedy based LA adventure.

[Udvarnoky]

We're talking graphic adventures only, yes?

 

In general, LEC creams Sierra, though Sierra put out many great titles, including a handful of classics. LEC simply had the production values and the consistency that Sierra didn't, though to be fair, the story goes that the early days of LEC were basically funded by a blank check from George Lucas, with little in the way of enforced management and it being a situation of the inmates running the asylum. It was just a bunch of supremely talented folks who were able to work on creative games without a lot of the real world restrictions everyone else (and eventually, them too) had. Sierra, on the other hand, had to turn a profit.

 

But yeah, whatever the backstory, LEC managed to hit a home run with all of its adventure games. Sierra's library is much more voluminous though, and almost all of it is worth checking out.

[Jeff]

I have probably not played enough Sierra games to give an unbiased answer (a couple King's Quest games when I was younger) but from what I remember, LucasArts games own them.

[purple_tentacle_]

I dont like Sierra Games at all. I just dont like them. And they arent even close to being as funny as some of lucasarts. I have only played on or two of there games but that was enough for me. I am sticking with lucasarts.

[MusicallyInspired]

I have a feeling I'm going to be the only one voting for Sierra here. I've always been a Sierra fan before an LA fan. Yeah, the humour is more appealing in LA games to most people, but Space Quest will always win out in humour for me. And I have much fonder memories of Sierra games as a whole than LA games. They're both good and very close together, though. But Sierra wins the trophy for me. Better music, better atmosphere, all around better experience (for me!).

[Zak McKracken]

In general, LEC creams Sierra, though Sierra put out many great titles, including a handful of classics. LEC simply had the production values and the consistency that Sierra didn't, though to be fair, the story goes that the early days of LEC were basically funded by a blank check from George Lucas, with little in the way of enforced management and it being a situation of the inmates running the asylum. It was just a bunch of supremely talented folks who were able to work on creative games without a lot of the real world restrictions everyone else (and eventually, them too) had. Sierra, on the other hand, had to turn a profit.

 

To chime in on what Udvarnoky said before. Sierra's catalogue was to voluminous I mean how far did Quest For Glory, King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry get up to? 7, 8? For me anyway they didn't have the charm of either characters or universe. Not to say that they are bad games but compared to LucasArts it didn't cut the mustard. Back then LucasArts was like HBO everything they did was different had style, great characters and story and most importantly heart. Sierra also jumped on whatever bandwagon was making the rounds. FMV is in? Let's do 3 of those. Oh, they like Myst? We'll give them Shivers and Lighthouse.

 

To be fair Udvarnokysaid is probably right they were a company first and they needed to thrive where as LucasArts was probably allowed to make art and be really creative without worrying about other things.

 

All this being said I liked some of Sierra's game such as Willy Beamish and Kings Quest VI and Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within is one of the best adventure games ever made, period. The only game where I felt that FMV was properly utilized and fleshed out the characters and the world.

[LordTrilobite]

I actually started with Sierra games, I've played most King's Quest games, but only finished number 8. One of my first ever games was King's Quest 1 actually.

 

First LA game I played was Fate of Atlantis.

 

Overall I like LA adventure games more, but Sierra had some good stuff too.

[SyntheticGerbil]

I've played many Sierra games but the only series I really like are Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Gabriel Knight. There's a few individual games smattered about that are pretty good as well. But even the series I consider the best had major consistency and quality issues.

 

For instance, I found the Dynamix branch to have much better quality control in their games, and while they aren't exactly Sierra, you can consider them to be if you want. To me the Dynamix games were much more cohesive, like the Incredible Machine series, Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon, Heart of China, and whatever else.

 

The other problem with Sierra was presentation. Beyond the boxes, a lot of ugly art, bad voice acting, bugs, and bad design made it through in Sierra games. Especially King's Quest, which I think are all pretty bad, buggy, and poorly designed, except for maybe 6.

 

But, I think people who swear off Sierra games because of quality issues are missing out on some of the best adventure games ever made. Just like it pisses me off when other adventure fans refuse to play LucasArts games because they think they are all about making jokes every second of gameplay. You really just need to know which ones to look out for and which suit your taste. I'm always disappointed when someone recommends King's Quest, because while every King's Quest game had a ton of money pumped into it, the result was mostly **** design and stories filled with trite characters and ridiculously tired cliches, which I would think all has to do with Roberta Williams' incompetence.

 

Ken and Roberta Williams, who seemed to have left a bad taste in many of their former designers mouth, seemed to have been the people who really faltered Sierra's potential, even though it was their company and all. Besides selling their company to have a nice house and boat or whatever while having it completely killed 3 years later under their new ownersm Ken Williams seemed like a major butt who didn't understand what a good game was and seemed more about buying and publishing the best of other niche companies and getting the license to the newest technology than worrying about his own developers. His wife got trumped as their lead designer when there were tons more people at the company who could design and write a better game than she ever would. Those people were unused for obvious reasons (or obvious to males). There's a great Scott Murphy interview which sort of touches on all of this at Adventure Collective.

 

But yeah, so I'm glad LucasArts had the Lucas man's blank check and little pressure from management. That really made them successful in my eyes. The creativity was unbridled and I think it showed.

 

Sierra also jumped on whatever bandwagon was making the rounds. FMV is in? Let's do 3 of those. Oh, they like Myst? We'll give them Shivers and Lighthouse.

 

Well to be fair, that was later in Sierra's life. They really did pioneer many things in the 80s and early 90s. In adventure gaming, they did speech first (besides the crappiness of Access' Realsound), used CDs first, scanned drawn graphics first, used motion capture graphics first, supported adlib first, figured out how to make good art with 16 colors first, used 256 colors first, pioneered the third person graphic adventure, and set the standard on jam packing game boxes and how to make good hintbooks.

 

But at the same time, like I said earlier, Ken Williams' obsession with new technology led to many games having poor quality as a result of clear knowledge of how to use the new tech well. Some games for instance, just feel like test subjects trying very hard to do something different during the time they were made, but look very poor on retrospect.

[MusicallyInspired]

They were also the first to utilize compatibility with sound cards and the MT-32. Their MT-32 support in particular was the best of any company in those days. They created many of their own custom timbre sounds/instruments and they were actually well done and interesting. They also had some pretty impressive MT-32 sound effects (the space ship flyby sound from SQ3/SQ4 in particular is very memorable).

[Giant Graffiti]

One of they reasons why I didn't like Sierra's early (EGA) games was because of this:

 

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Look at that! The whole screen is just dithering. As opposed to the Last Crusade:

 

[SyntheticGerbil]

One of they reasons why I didn't like Sierra's early (EGA) games was because of this:

 

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Look at that! The whole screen is just dithering. As opposed to the Last Crusade:

 

 

Haha, yeah. I recall a lot of cheaper edutainment games from that era getting really into dithering everything as well. It certainly makes your stuff look dated.

[Lagomorph01]

I think it looks beautiful.

Remember that those are only 16 colors on screen.

And they managed to make so many color nuances and shading.

It's amazing what you can do with a gifted team.