King's Quest

The Good
This was my first "real game" - finally something that didn't involve shooting or similar arcade-like games. King's Quest was the stepping stone to what adventure games evolved today.

Boy was this game awesome back then! Interactive fiction with graphics was one thing, but having real graphics and manipulating with them was another...and so much color too! It's funny how great the graphics were back then, but looking back, boy do they look crappy...I wonder what graphics will look like in the future...hmmm.

Anyway, this game was THE adventure game. Walk anywhere, do anything, well type anything would be more exact... The educational value of games like this is that if forces you "To Type" and it forces you "To Spell". Sure, using the mouse is easy and faster, but can you type a whole page without looking at the keyboard or the monitor? This game helped me a lot in my learning the English vocabulary...King's Quest and Sesame Street would be my greatest influence...hehe

I also appear to be the only one who actually enjoys those beeping sounds as a poor excuse for music. Yes, honestly it was crappy...but it sure did have a nice tune to it...

The Bad
Hey, it would be nice not to save my game every couple of minutes for the fear of dying...it was fun the few couple of times, but those crocodiles do get irritating when you forget to where your walking to. Sierra has never got over the fact that focusing on game play is a little more important than finding 1001 ways to die.

Were puzzles too hard? Depends, when you were my age...somewhere between 8-10 some puzzles do get a little to hard to understand. I never could figure out what that stupid dwarf's name was, and I find it even more stupid to enter a name longer than the freakin` alphabet.

Well at least I had fun watching that goat wank the troll bridge...

The Bottom Line
Way up there in the Valhalla of legendary classics. If you've never played KQ I before...playing the original may be not quite as exciting. You could play the freeware fan-made VGA version of King's Quest I by Tierra Entertainment. I do believe you can download the game from their website. It's a big download, but it may very well be worth it for nostalgia's sake.

The Good
Well, the title screen is quite nice, what with the beeper song and all... And I guess this game was the first to use Sierra's "move the little Lego-man around and try to guess what to type"-interface, which I quite like. I suppose that if I had played this when it first came out I would have been really impressed with it - the graphics, the gameplay and, indeed, the whole concept of an animated 3D adventure game. Now all I can say is that the yellow geek with the funny hat is pretty smoothly animated. (All right, the graphics aren't all that bad for low-res EGA alltogether.)

The Bad
I didn't like the fact that it's an arcade game with a bad parser and puzzles. I do appreciate the fact that back in those days you really couldn't fit a lot of storyline and a complex parser AND 16-color graphics and animation in an IBM PC. What I don't appreciate is the really pathetic overall plot and mood, and the puzzles that are not only simple but often frustrating instead of puzzling. The idea of adventure games should not be to try everything until you find a solution that doesn't kill you or stop you from advancing - I refer you to the gnome's name puzzle (which was made easier in later versions).

The Bottom Line
King's Quest is not a very good game, and it certainly isn't a good adventure game. It isn't loads of fun to play nor particularly rewarding. However, it is a classic and a ground-breaker, and since its relatively cheap these days, you might as well try it out - its not half as bad as a lot of other games, and not playing it just because its not very good is like not reading "War and Peace" just because its dead boring. (Figure that one out for yourself...)

The Good
This is the game that started the ball rolling for the graphic adventure genre. It was the first game to include a controllable third person avatar AND text parser for interacting with the game environment. Bright and colorful, the game chronicles the efforts of Sir Graham to reclaim the three treasures of Daventry and take his place as heir to the throne.

The Bad
You really can't say anything bad about this game and get away with it. The game is so old, it can't be held to today's standards by any means. That's just the problem with it, though. Some of this game's contemporaries (Zork for one) are still revered and played today. King's Quest is practically unbearable to play anymore -- the characters move excruciatingly slow, the graphics are comical, and the plot/puzzles are not, in all honesty that deep or interesting. The game consists of a conglomeration of fairy tale characters who present puzzles that are mostly easily solved by common sense and folk-lore knowledge.

The Bottom Line
The best thing that can be said for this game is that it paved the way for a classic series and a revered genre. Appreciate it for what its worth, but leave it on the shelf. If you want to re-capture the magic of 25 years ago, download the amazing fan-made remake at agdinteractive.com