Widescreen Gaming Forum

Saw this in my "Rock, Paper, Shotgun" RSS feed. In the official LA twitter feed, someone actually asked about support for 5040x1050. :D

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/06/steam-lucasarts-global-fangasm/

The most breakingest of breaking news, via the official Lucasarts twitter feed – which has been horribly teasing the poor, frustrated internet for the last few days about what, they promised, was a massively exciting announcement. A Day of the Tentacle remake? A new X-Wing/TIE Fighter game? Officially striking the Star Wars prequels from the record? The Loom 2: Loomier? Nah- they’ve only gone and lobbed a crapload of their classic back catalogue onto Steam. Rejiggered for XP and Vista compatibility too, no less.

What’s that strange noise? It’s thousands of 30-year-old men simultaneously having a Special Wee, that’s what.

This little lot is available from the 8th July:

•Armed and Dangerous
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
• LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventure
• LOOM
• Star Wars Battlefront II
• Star Wars Republic Commando
• Star Wars Starfighter
• The Dig
• Thrillville: Off the Rails

On the 15th, that’s followed up by Secret Of Monkey Island Special Edition (the remake, not the new Telltale episodes).

Pretty cool actually. I was always a Sierra fanboy, and never played many of the LucasArts titles. Will be good to get them as native XP or Vista apps.

Damn it, I wanted Good Old Games to get the release rights, not Steam.

I will bet that with the Steam versions of the Scumm games, you could easily copy the data files and use them in ScummVM, and then they'd be totally DRM free.

Also, by "rejiggered for XP and Vista compatibility," I'm sure all they mean is they include ScummVM and have a script that invokes it silently.

In any event, more exposure of LucasArt's classic games is definitely a good thing. The best of the batch here is definitely Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, though Loom, The Dig, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are classics anyway.

They're also releasing a remake of The Secret of Monkey Island, which based on the previews is both good and bad. The redone backgrounds look nice, if not up to par with Curse of Monkey Island, but the new sprites and character artwork are hideous, and are animated really stiffly. The voice acting I've heard is a mixed bag, even with Guybrush himself - half of the lines I heard sound like someone other than Dominic, including "Hi! My name's Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate!"

The option to play with the original graphics exists, though, and you can switch to them and back in realtime.

Anyway, I would have been happy to re-buy the old CD-ROM version of the game through Steam. I don't really see the point in upgrading graphics that were state of the art in 1990 to something that would have been subpar in 1998. Full voicework is more significant, and could be a nice addition, but it could also get tiresome, as the original game was never intended to be voice acted.

Also, by "rejiggered for XP and Vista compatibility," I'm sure all they mean is they include ScummVM and have a script that invokes it silently.

Pretty sure this is what they're gonna do.

I've got most of the ones they're releasing soon already... little point in buying them again just so I can play them 'through Steam'.

Also, by "rejiggered for XP and Vista compatibility," I'm sure all they mean is they include ScummVM and have a script that invokes it silently.

They posted this on their twitter page

The classic adventure games don't use SCUMMVM or DosBox, instead they all have self-running executables for Windows.

The first batch is here! Currently downloading Indy4, will report later.

Ok, I just tried Indy4. It actually is a native Windows application, and as far as I can tell is not based on DOSBox or ScummVM.

By default, it runs in a 640x480 windowed mode. Alt+Enter switches to a pillarboxed 4:3 fullscreen mode. The game is rendered with an ugly filtered graphics mode, but there's a hidden options menu if you click on the icon in the upper-left corner of the window, where you can disable the graphics filter. You can also disable aspect ratio correction, which makes it run at 640x400, and fullscreen mode will fit a 16:10 screen. Since the game originally ran at 320x200, it's possible that this is a more accurate setting than a corrected 4:3 mode.

Included is a folder "ATLANTIS," which has some data files and a DOS executable. However, ScummVM will not recognize this folder, and if you try to launch it through DOSBox, it will complain that a data file is missing. I'm guessing that this data file is encrypted within the Windows executable as a form of copy protection.

Still, the only real downside is that the game is tied to Steam. Aside from that, it's just as good as playing in ScummVM.