By Mark Brown, Wired UK
You can now play Sierra's classic sci-fi adventure game, Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter, on your iPad. But there's no point snooping around the App Store for your nostalgia fix: The game is only available through the tablet's browser, Safari.
Instead of wrangling with Apple over the unofficial port, creator Martin Kool has bypassed the iTunes guardians and revived the game in HTML5 and JavaScript. Point your mobile browser at ipad.sarien.net and you'll be asked to create a web link to the page on your home screen. Then, a complete version of the 1987 graphic adventure is available to play on your iPad.
It's a largely faithful port, only missing audio because Kool hasn't "found the time to implement this yet." It uses prewritten commands, so you don't have to type anything in, features save games and is, best of all, completely free. More than anything, it's a very impressive showcase for HTML5.
Going forward, Kool plans to add games like Black Cauldron, King's Quest and Police Quest to the iPad section, and introduce iPhone support too. If you don't have any Apple devices, there's no need to miss out: Sarien.net uses similar web-based technology to offer these ancient Sierra games through most desktop browsers, too.
"Why did I do this?" Kool asks on the website's official forum. "I think Activision [now owner of Sierra] needs to know there is public demand for these games and that we're all willing to cough up some dollars to get them on iOS."
He hopes that Activision will follow the lead of LucasArts -- which has already released point-and-click favorite Monkey Island on Apple's devices in their original forms and as HD remakes -- and release these old classics on the App Store.
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