Classic Adventures in Javascript: sarien.net
link Tuesday 21st of April, 2009
Sarien.net is pretty cool — several of the original Sierra graphical adventure games, entirely emulated in Javascript. Clever as fuck, and commendable both for the technical achievement and for allowing people another chance to play these great games. Currently playable are Space Quest 1, Leisure Suit Larry, and Police Quest — games I have fond memories of, even if my own Golden Age of graphical adventures happened a few years later.
Sadly, considering how text-based these games are, the text is letterspaced so badly as to be almost unreadable. Hopefully this'll get fixed soon — although I suspect a user-defined stylesheet might do the trick just as nicely!
Comments - 2 so far
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Martin Kool. Wednesday 22nd of April, 2009.
I even put effort in there to mimic the original game fonts!!! ;-)
Removing it will make the experience further away from the originals. But hey, it's open source, so test it all you want!
Andi. Wednesday 22nd of April, 2009.
Yeah, I do see what you mean - and it's hardly a simple task, given the vastly different text rendering systems! Could also be platform/browser specific - I've only looked at it on a Mac in Firefox and Safari. All this aside though, I still think the huge letterspacing makes for uncomfortable reading. Essentially the letterforms end up arranged in a grid - equally spaced vertically and horizontally - rather than into lines which draw the eye correctly.
Of course, it's an extremely interesting typographic challenge - remain true to the line length and general layout of the originals, or tweak slightly for modern rendering? Personally I would have been slightly less faithful to the look, but only to help make the games' excellent writing as accessible as possible.
And just so we're clear, I feel pretty bad nitpicking about typography when your project is so amazingly executed and such a worthy cause. I only say so because I care!