By John Walker on January 14th, 2011 at 1:12 pm.
Anyone want to take a guess what those pranksters at Good Old Games are up to now? They’ve clearly managed to sign up another game they’re proud of, and as such have created a rather peculiar version of their site. Police tape blocking off access to an ASCII rendition of the regular front page. Are there clues hidden in the text? Apparently more will appear over the weekend. And the official announcement looks set for the 18th of this month. My suggestion: the Police Quest series? They already have King’s Quest and Space Quest, so it would make sense.
Before someone has an aneurysm, note it is only the front page that is affected. Your games and the catalogue are still reachable…
:)
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Woe unto those who don’t circle their car before patrol duty.
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I heard that my friend.
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That an American cop superstition or something?
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Amen
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@Starky: I personally have never heard of it before as a superstition.. I would circle mine though as part of the preliminary check before going out. Check all the lights, siren, tires, and then check the body of the car too for any damage because if there is something there that was not reported before, and the person after you reports it for that vehicle, it now comes back on you because you were the last one to use it.
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Police Quest would be my guess too, and yes the functionality of the page is unaffected but surely nobody would miss that…
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With Police Quest on top of King’s Quest and Space Quest, they’d have a regular Tribe Called Quest.
/awaits applause…
/realises it might be a long wait.
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Golf clap. :)
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Give you the clap…
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With Police Quest on top of King’s Quest and Space Quest, they’d have a regular Tribe Called Quest.
Download all these games and you could have an evening of Electric Relaxation.
:v
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You mean to say “Clap Your Hands”?
I would clap, but I just realized I left my wallet in El Segundo. And now I gotta get, gotta go get it, yo.
But I guess GoG have found their Money Maker.
When I come back, I’m sure we will have 8 Million Stories to tell about their new catalogue!
Etc, etc.
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I’m guessing The Majestic. Or some weird Conspiracy theory game.
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The Infocom back catalogue
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They’re not the only good old text games I can think of, but I don’t know if updating most games from the Text Age is even possible. Go back far enough and (if you can even find source code that still exists) you’ll be running into Pascal and other formerly popular languages if you’re lucky. The Infocom games managed to be preserved because they are fully interpreted virtual machine code that will run with any interpreter designed to be compatible. Most games are not.
Still, I’d play ZZT and/or Super ZZT if they worked with Windows 7.
or.. Dwarf Fortress and/or some other Roguelike? We’ll see.
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I wonder if you’re familiar with DreamZZT?
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I remember buying a helicopter sim about 15 years ago in the bargain bin somewhere. Loaded it up on my 486 and turned out the games time counter went by clock cycles or something, so everything moved about 10x faster and the game was unplayable.
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Police Quest, SWAT or the CSI games.
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If it was the CSI games then surely that would be grounds to have them reomve the first “G” from their names
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Ood Old Ames? :D
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Oozing Old Games
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Oh Oh Ah! I like the sound of that.
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theme hospital
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The password is “Ken sent me”. Oh no wait, wrong Quest.
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The image in the top right is surely a clue.
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I keep staring at that. Why does that look so familiar?
I also like that there’s an instance of ‘WTF’ in the text.
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It’s looking like another salvo of Activision releases to me.
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It reminds me of one of the Colossi for some reason. Dunno why.
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http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/beyond/quendor9.jpg it Sure is
GOG is getting ZORK Games :)
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By Zork games are you including Zork: Grand Inquisitor which I only just remember playing as a child?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYz5qnIkf20
*edit* presumably not seeing as I see no relation between that and the image you’ve shown
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You appear to be correct. The image is of a Dornbeast, taken from this booklet: http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.4869
Edit: That booklet is from Beyond Zork, by the way; here’s the page in question just as an image: http://i53.tinypic.com/28jcx7o.png
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That was my guess after seeing the word ‘eaten’ in the background text :)
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That’s why it looks familiar!!!
…
*idly wonders if his usage of ‘doombeast’ is a misappropriation of ‘dornbeast’, since he’s been using it for so long that it might have come from Zork.*
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Cool. My parents got me The Lost Treasures of Infocom Vol. 1 once, so I played a whole bunch of those, but there were others I never touched because they were only in Volume 2, including some of the critical faves like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. I hope they’ve got the whole catalog.
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I can live with that! It’s been a loooong time since I did me any Zorking.
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Is nobody going to say anything about the 69 “sensitive eyes” and being plastered with round, sticky secretions?
Oh lawd, the ramp-up, the ramp-up..
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Was that drawing in the top right background always there? Might be related.
Also yeah, Police Quest was my first guess. Too easy. I say it’s the entire LucasArts back catalogue!
The power of positive thinking.
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Darn! Ninja’d.
So, for some constructive debate, how do you think they’re going to package them? The original interpreters? Frotz maybe? They work with DosBox a lot, so using a modern shell wouldn’t be out of the question. They might even use the multimedia capabilities of a modern interpreter to put some feelies straight into the game.
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The page source is shamefully lacking usefull hints or such, just this:
input type=”hidden” name=”status_veryfication” value=”gogcomisupandrunningwithoutaproblem”
It does allow you to acces the original background, which allows the top right to be better viewed.
http://www.gog.com/upload/strony_www/1801/en/img/asciibg.jpg
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Oh please, please be SWAT 4. It’d be great to have a site selling it for a decent price with an all in one installer.
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Or SWAT 3 – let’s not forget just how awesome that game is….
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Or the original SWAT!
Just, y’know, not SWAT 2.
*shudder*
(of course, it appears to be Zork, as above, which saddens me)
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frameset: It can’t happen. It would be too great. Things that great don’t happen.
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Direct2Drive sells SWAT 4 Gold for $20 but it is frequently discounted: http://www.direct2drive.com/347/product/Buy-Swat-4-Gold-Download
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I agree.. I have seen it on D2D and I often aaaalmost decide to buy it, but I have had issues with them before which always makes me say “Eeeeeeehh…maybe it will pop up somewhere else..”
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiz8T6vbdY8
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You can already play Police Quest at sarien.net along with a load of other old Sierra games.
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Good Old Text Adventures, maybe for a dollar or so each, would be pretty sweet…
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LA Noire comes to PC as a GOG exclusive!
No, it’s going to be Police Quest, isn’t it? I wish it were Hill Street Blues though. That sounded really interesting in a review I read at the time, but for whatever reason I never played it.
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The best guesses I’ve heard so far are the S.W.A.T series or Police Quest. Personally I’m hoping for the latter.
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A Zork collection of some description is pretty much guaranteed to turn up, however. Wouldn’t rule out a Police Quest collection, however.
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I thought it was Max Payne at first, given the original cover/promo material for that game, but Police Quest/Zork seem to make more sense.
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I doubt they’d make such a big deal about Max Payne seeing as it’s already readily available through many digital distribution outlets.
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If this is going to be another crap joke about DRM I am going to be upset.
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Just remember your nightstick…
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I think the site is stolen. This is the work of a THIEF!
wishful thinking.
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System shock 2 with some kind of alien space police?
Right?
RIGHT?
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I wish :(
Still, if they can get Planescape they can get anything, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before System Shock 2 turns up… same goes for Grim Fandango.
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Keep in mind System Shock in in the evil grasp of EA’s claws
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Maniac Mansion had space police.
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It would be funny if it was the APB MMO thingy …
Not old, not good, but hey ho …
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Where the hell did you get that idea from? Are you getting Good Old Games confused with Gamersfirst?
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… police lines and a Zork doombea–sorry, dornbeast.
You know, this might not exclusively be one thing.
This might be Zork, Police Quest, and SWAT 4.
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Police…
I’m sure they’re adding DRM to all games.
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Liberal Crime Squad.
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I just want Alpha Centauri :-(
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Tex Murphy games mebbe? Or do they already have those..?
Edit: I see that they do. Suggestion retracted.
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If it’s not police quest, I will DROP PANTS.
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My first thought was Police Quest too.
Hopefully It’ll be reasonably priced, like $10 for the whole series.
Although they’ve already got the king’s quest series for $10×3 and space quest for $10×2, while you can get the complete packs for both from steam for $/€ 10 (or a lot cheaper when they’re discounted).
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Syndicate, obviously…….. no?.. ok. Guy can hope, can’t he?
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I also suspect PQ, but in contrary it may be something opposite, like Gangsters: Organized Crime, by Edios.
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The wall of text in the background contains snippets from both Zork I (‘You are likely to be eaten by a grue.’) and Colossal Cave Adventure (‘You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike’), so I’m betting money on classic IF titles.
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