At long last, four much-rumoured-but-never-confirmed classic Sierra compilations are now available for purchase.

It's been well over a year since the online retailer Amazon (U.S.) first created product listings for budget-priced King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, and Space Quest collections, supposedly updated to run on Windows XP. Since then, the bundles have had their ship dates repeatedly pushed back, and as publisher Vivendi Universal refused to make any official statement on the status of the games, many had begun to wonder if they would ever see release.

The uncertainty continued right up to this week, when Amazon began shipping orders to those who pre-ordered the game. With still no announcement or publicity from Vivendi, it was left to the gaming community to confirm the releases once and for all.

Early reports from those who have received the collections bring some bad news with the good. The good news is that the games do indeed appear to be relatively functional on XP, though not without some exceptions. The less-inspiring news is that not all of the bundles contain every game (or original game iteration) in the series, manuals are in disc-only PDF format, and the technical upgrade appears to be little more than a systematic implementation of DOSBox, the free public utility credited with getting many older games to run on modern operating systems.

So while the collections are a convenient way to pick up most of these Sierra classics inexpensively, if you already own previous versions of the games, the bundles may offer little more than what you already have. Be sure to check the above product listings for details on what is included in each collection.