King's Quest Chapter Two Is Out Now

Most of you are enjoying the latest resurgence of the LucasArts adventures, courtesy of Double Fine. However, for those of you who are interested in their biggest competitor during their adventure heyday, Sierra has been having a bit of a resurgence of its own.

Today, it finally continues with the release of the second chapter of The Odd Gentlemen's King's Quest, Rubble Without A Cause. The first chapter was inspired by the original King's Quest. This chapter is said to be inspired by King's Quest III.

 Although, the gameplay in King's Quest itself is heavily inspired by Telltale Games. However, it bests their current games as it manages to blend choices and consequences together with traditional inventory based puzzles in a way that we all wish Telltale would manage.

ScummVM Testing For Zork Nemesis and Grand Inquisitor

ScummVM has just announced full support of two new games in their daily builds, Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor.  In order to support these games in the next stable release, they need people to help them out by playing through them and reporting any bugs they find to their bug tracker so the ScummVM team can squash them. They also need people to submit screenshots for the games.

When you're done testing, don't forget to let the team know whether you could complete the game and post links to any bugs you submitted to their tracker in this post on the ScummVM forums.

King's Quest Reveal Trailer

The reveal trailer for The Odd Gentlemen's upcoming King's Quest game is here. The game, which is set after the events of Mask of Eternity, has King Graham telling his grand daughter about the adventures he had when he was younger. It is scheduled to be published by Activision's newly revived Sierra label in Fall 2015. The other game that was announced to be published by Sierra when the revival of the brand was revealed, Geometry Wars 3, was released late last month.

Gabriel Knight 20th Anniversary Edition Is Out Now

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition, the high definition remake of the original Gabriel Knight by Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road studio and her regular collaborators, Phoenix Online, has been released.  You can order it now from GOG.com or Steam for $19.99.

Gabriel Knight Anniversary Edition Out October 15

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 25th Anniversary Edition, the high definition remake of the original Gabriel Knight by Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road studio and her regular collaborators, Phoenix Online, will be released on October 15th.  You can pre-order it now from GOG.com or Steam for the pre-order price of $16.99.

Activision Is Bringing Sierra And King's Quest Back

The Sierra website is back online because Activision is bringing Sierra back as their indie label.  Even better, they have announced that The Odd Gentlemen, the developers of the puzzle game The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, are developing a new King's Quest title.  When Telltale Games announced that their King's Quest title was canceled because Activision revoked the license, they stated that Activision had their own plans for the series.  Hopefully, this time King's Quest IX actually comes into being, as fans have been waiting patiently to discover what the Graham clan have been up to after all these years. We'll soon find out if King Graham and his family will have better luck this time, as the game is scheduled to be released in 2015.

Gabriel Knight 20th Anniversary Edition Announced

Gabriel Knight 20th Anniversary Edition is a high definition remake of the original 1993 adventure Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, which will be created by series creator Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road studio and Moebius developer Phoenix Online Studios.

This game is the Mystery Game X which was announced last year.   Jane Jensen has been pitching a Gabriel Knight game many times over the years, to three different rights holders of the series, and she credits the success of the Pinkerton Road kickstarter with finally getting Activision to work out a deal.

The remake’s story and gameplay will remain faithful to the original, but the artwork and voices are being completely redone. According to Jane Jensen, the art will "stay true to the spirit of the original but, since we have such better resolution, [they worked] in a lot more New Orleans flavor and voodoo flavor where we could".  The loss of the original voice recordings required the voices to be re-recorded.  The voice recordings will be handled by Bay Area Sound, the studio responsible for the voice recordings in Telltale's games.

Telltale Cancels King's Quest

In a statement released to Digital Trends, Steve Allison, Telltale's senior vice president of marketing, has confirmed that Telltale's King's Quest series has been cancelled.

“While we deeply love King’s Quest here at Telltale, we can confirm that we are no longer working on the franchise. There was a time last year that we investigated partnering with third party developers to produce the game as a partnership but decided against outsourcing. We are not privy to what plans Activision has for the franchise, if any.”

In the same article, Paul Trowe of Replay Games states that Activision is planning on doing something with the King's Quest license. However, it's unknown just exactly what Activision has planned.

Infocom, Sierra, and Activision Adventures on Sale

GOG.com has a promotion this weekend on Activision adventure games (the referral link supports ScummVM, a program that can run most of these games on modern systems).

This includes not only the Activision developed adventure games such as Zork: Grand Inquisitor, but the properties owned by Activision such as the Infocom and Sierra catalog. There's a lot of classic games on sale here, from the aforementioned Zork series (including the original Zork text adventures/interactive fiction), to Sierra's Quest series (King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory), to the Police Quest and Gabriel Knight series, and lesser known gems such as Torin's Passage.

Monkey Island SE Collection out in Europe

Activision has released a boxed version of the two special editions for the first two Monkey Island games for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in Europe. 

The special edition collection contains bonus features such as the full soundtracks for each game, concept art for the two special edition as well as concept art for the cancelled ILM animated Monkey Island film (which reportedly eventually became the basis for the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series). LucasArts has no plans to release the collection elsewhere.