I'm all installed and ready! And yes, this will be my first GK1 playthrough, since I quit fairly early on. :P

That's an impressive collection, Fien. And that trapezoid box is very unusual.

I take it each time-block for this playthrough will be 1 whole day in the game?

@ Denaron, All of my installers include all relevant patches, both official and fan made (NewRisingSun).

This is an issue with the default output of DOSBox on Vista and 7. The installer configures using an output that will avoid this "color corruption".

In my ignorant youth, I got rid of my trapezoid box and just kept the CD.... I received both GK1 and GK2 as Christmas presents when I was 13 or 14. My parents were cool about me playing "mature" games at that age.

Looking forward to starting the playthrough. It's been many a year since I played GK1 so I'm looking forward to jumping back into the genre with this.

-ozymanhattan

Impressive collection indeed, Fien :)

Gazzoid: almost. Probably we won't need a whole block for Day 4, but we'll cross that bridge when we'll come to it. For now, without further ado, here's a brief introduction to Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers!


Gabriel Knight is a thiry-something year-old writer who also runs an antique bookshop in New Orleans, Louisiana, and precisely on Bourbon Street, the historic rue that runs through the entire French Quarter. His two last books, Fire in the Hills and The Stalker, have been huge commercial flops but he's nonetheless struggling with a third horror novel - spare time isn't an issue, since St. George's Rare Books rarely has a customer -, this time around inspired by the string of killings that is currently terrorizing New Orleans, the so-called Voodoo Murders.

While many believe that the voodoo paraphernalia found around the victims are no more than a scare tactic - an opinion endorsed by the New Orleans Police Department as well as several different newspapers -, Gabriel has "recruited" his old pal Franklin Mosely, whom Gabriel knows since kindergarten and who's now a police detective, to snatch otherwise classified information for his novel - that is, after promising Mosely to make him the protagonist of the story!

Gabriel may well have found the bestseller he's been looking for his entire life, but surely his nightmares have found him first. Every night, the same dream: "The pile of wood that fuels the flames is high and broad, an enormous bonfire. The flames rear up over the heads of the crowd. Then he sees that there is something in the flames, some matter, tall and dark [...] It's a woman. They're burning a woman. It punches into him: shock, horror, guilt. He feels a terrible guilt, although he does not know why. He's afraid, too, as he looks at her. He feels hapless and nasty - like a child caught stealing - but it's a thousand times worse, as if what he'd stolen was... Her life. [...] Then the woman's face begin to melt. The face in the flames restructures itself into the head of a leopard. It screams at him in fury"(1). And then, always the same image: "[...] something spins out, coming toward him, rolling in the air like a slow-motion bullet. He sees that it is only a medallion. The gold surface bears the images of a lion and a snake gripping each other in mortal combat"(2). He always tries to wake up, but he can't, not until the dream has forced him to see a man hanging by the neck from a skeletal tree. Himself. Thay is when he finally comes to his senses, usually screaming and sweating.

Grace Nakimura, his twenty-six year-old Japanese American assistant, blames these nightmares on his research into the Voodoo Murders - bad karma, as she puts it -, but truth is that Gabriel is having this very dream since he was thirteen(3), but never he had it more often than now. Could it really be somehow tied to the killings? And if so, what does the dream mean? Who is the burning woman? And what about the lions and the snakes? Being the guy that he is - jaunty, laid-back and unquestioning -, Gabriel doesn't put much thought in these questions, and while Grace fills him on the messages, he grabs his morning cup of coffee, reads his horoscope and the sets out, fires his Harley Davidson and scour the soultry streets of New Orleans in search both of inspiration and clues...

(1) Jane Jensen, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Roc 1997, pp. 2 - 3
(2) Ivi, p. 4
(3) Gabriel's actual age differs between the game (30) and the novel (33, as stated in Jane Jensen, op. cit., p. 61). In Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, we can see Gabriel's ID and the given year of birth id 1963, making him thirty at the time of Sins, thirty-one in The Beast Within and thirty-six in Blood. However, Blood states that Gabriel is thirty-tree, messing the whole thing up. For the sake of simplicity, thus, I prefer not to indicate a precise age for Gabriel and when it comes to important years of his past - the first occurrence of the dream, for example -, I'll stick to the timeline of the novel rather than the game.

:crazy:

Hehehe, nice collection dude.

@ Collector, Ohh nice mate. Thanks!

Well, I've been walking around in the game and everything seems to be working fine, at least in day 1.

Sign me in!

Wow, thanks for the info, Andrea! That's very interesting stuff that I didn't know before playing. Not sure if you find it out later in the game, but it really helps understand the beginning better. Now I just wish I hadn't read the graphic novel first. :P

I have the game installed in 5 min with wonderful Dosbox installer :z
Watching the intro and opening scene made me sad a bit and also afraid that i will never play a better game again :frown:

Unless I replay this one of course.

BTE I love Fien's game collection.

Some stuff will be explained later in the game; some other stuff - like the meanders of Gabriel and Mosely's friendship; their relationship with Grandma Knight; Grace's obsessive family and her background - are only explained in details in the books, and I'll try to give you as many of these details as possible :)

Later tonight, I will post the first block with some interesting info.

I love Fien's collection as well. Especially the bookcases to store them on. If only I had the storage space...

I'm using Hendroz' installer and it is setup already. I found that when I tested it, it appeared in a small window. So I turned the resolution to 640, the colors to 256 in the compatibility window and now it works fine as full screen.

I'm ready to get going whenever everyone else is. Really looking forward to this. Thanks for the background information, Andrea.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the box. I got rid of my trapezoidal box early on as space was always a factor. Then I got a square box and that went too.
I still have the manual, a hint book and the graphical novel. However it's missing the first and last page. It would have been in perfect condition if I kept the box. Oh well, that's water under the bridge.

Can't wait to start playing!

Awesome, I already learned a couple of new things about the wonderful world of GK, and the playthrough hasn't even started yet! :D

Got it working in dosbox. There's a a lot of hiss and noise though in the introduction, is that normal?
I found the title music on the cd in the sfx folder (5.wav). It sounds good there, but not in the game... Could this be a dosbox thing?
But other than that everything's cool.

I'll try to install GK and join the community playthrough. I already played it once, some three years ago, but got so frustrated by a bug in day six that I gave it up :( (although it was a tremendous experience while it lasted :)). One more reason to quit was that it was a floppy version (without voices), and now that I have a CD version maybe it's time to finally deal with this unfinished business.

I just noticed Mark Hamill is voicing a character in this game as well. Besides having played in a great movie trilogy he also voiced a lot of great games, The Joker in Batman: Arkham Asylum as his latest voice masterpiece.

You will not be disappointed. The voicework on this game is phenomenal. Some people like to rag on Tim Curry, but I think he brings some cool character and charm, despite the occasional over-the-top embellish.

Gotta love Mark Hamill as well..... and of course the narrator is unique among gaming. Never have I heard a voice like that.

So many memories!!! :D

Okay, I got it up and running. Only...is it possible to play it in full screen under windows? I remember someone saying it was possible, but my last playthrough I played it in small screen, while using Endroz's installer (otherwise I would not be able to save the game). Is there a new version of the installer to play it in full screen or did I miss out on something?

(sorry if it is already in one of your links Andrea, I guess I am a bit lazy at the moment. Blame it on being late.)

Hey Luna, have you tried to alt+enter? I'm able to do that here, but when I play on full screen the colors starts to mess up.

Doesn't work for me...if it were the DOS version I guess it would, but with the windows version I am having no such luck...

Edit: okay, blame this all on tiredness. When I install using Endroz's installer, it IS useful to click the "run configuration wizard" :crazy: There it says all about full screen...Don't ask me why I never saw that before...

Did you use the installer or did you set it up on your own?

My DOSBox installer will allow the game to run full screen with Alt+Enter. It also comes with a small utility to change a couple of basic DOSBox settings, including whether DOSBox starts full screen or a Window. You can also change the size of the Window.

I used the installer but I already have dosbox and it's not in program files, so I skipped that part.
There are no problems with the screensize though, it's the sound. But I found it gets a bit better during gameplay.
I was just surprised that that 5.wav file sounds good on it's own, but when it plays in the game there's a lot of hiss and noise. I also played around a bit with the cycles setting in dosbox, but that didn't do much.