I recently discovered that Sierra have recently re-released a number of their old adventure games in Windows-friendly ‘Classic Collection’ packs. UK gamers can now get all of the Space, Police or King’s Quest games in one handy (and legal) collection for the reasonable(ish) sum of £10.

This is the kind of thing that should happen more often. Even though I’m not the greatest fan of the Sierra adventures, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to snap up a couple of these packs when I saw them. LucasArts have been doing something similar, if a little less wallet-friendly, with some of their old adventures for a little while now, and seeing old adventure games back in the shops again is good news as far as I’m concerned.

As ever, there are a few niggles. Sierra purists might baulk at the inclusion of some remakes in place of the original releases, and they might have a point: why can’t we have BOTH the original and the remake included? Also, later releases in each series are excluded – so there’s no Mask of Eternity in the KQ Collection, for example – which is also a bit of a shame. I don’t want to complain too much, but it would be nice if we could have gotten a more comprehensive selection. I shelled out a tenner about eight years ago for a PQ collection that included original releases, remakes and PQ: SWAT (okay, so that was a bit crap, but still…) so for things to have been removed for this latest release seems like a bit of a con.

It’s also worth mentioning as a side-note that these Sierra collections make use of a version of DOSBox. It’s not the first time I’ve seen something like this (the latest Broken Sword re-issues use ScummVM) but it still struck me as slightly unusual. While it’s great for those who want to play the oldies but don’t want to fart around with DOSBox itself, hardened nerds might be frustrated by the fact that some options, such as screen and video capture, are disabled.

Anyway, it’s good that they’re back out there. Some may be slightly irked at the fact that Sierra have just humped some of their oldies onto a CD with a cut-down version of an independently-developed piece of software freely available on the internet, but at the end of the day, they still own the games, and we should pay if we still want to play ’em.