Nowhere Girl (8680) on 3/9/2018 8:55 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

I'm making such an attempt. I'm at the first point where a big bug occurs - I've met Harami at the bazaar. I still can't "formally" offer him help; I'll see what happens at next meetings. HOWEVER, he approached the hero at the bazaar during the day and asked to meet him there at night, which yields points by itself (I didn't know it) - this has never happened to me when playing the game with DOSBox.
I'll let you know what happens further, what about other bugs. There is one new purely graphical bug: the day/night system doesn't work in terms of graphics - it doesn't get dark at night. Only twice it did get dark - on the first night in the inn and room and then when travelling with Rakeesh to the Simbani village. Night-related events happen as they should, but everything looks like during daytime. It is inconvenient to some degree, because it gets harder to keep track of time.
Remember one thing: running the game on Scumm VM is more difficult. It is a bit tricky to get the game to "see"/recognize your character save. It must have the right name (in my case it's qfg2-wizard.sav) and must be in the right place - I couldn't figure it out, so I had to change the program's save path. Of course it doesn't recognize DOSBox saves, Scumm VM superimposes its own save system over the game's system, so it's not an option to import your hero in DOSBox and then switch to Scumm VM. But anyway, it might just be the thing which allows bypassing some bugs (at the price of some new purely esthetic ones and let's hope nothing else). Unfortunately, proposed solutions such as slowing the game down via DOSBox don't work for some users (including me), so let's see if Scumm VM isn't perhaps the better solution in this case.

Update 1: I met Harami for the second time and conversation options changed. Now I'm going to travel back to Simbani village to meet the Leopard Lady, but the way things are going so far, I should be able to tell Harami about Rakeesh during our third meeting.
Do you think that I should write a message to the admins of the Sierra Help website and tell them that Scumm VM works much better at evading the game's bugs?

Update 2: I can't recall if the "What have you come here for, friend of Rakeesh" bug happened when asking the Laibon about bride price or when giving the required items to him, but I'm past the first of these two points and everything is going smoothly. Now I'm going to hang my wash to dry and then I'm heading back to Tarna. ;)

Update 3: I managed to tell Harami about Rakeesh, hurray! I hope that now I can get a perfect score - and that I won't have problems importing my hero to QfG4, since he will surely have somewhat improved statistics.

Update 4: No "friend of Rakeesh" bug and no "They don't seem to be speaking your language" bug (after you ask Uhura how to make the Leopard Lady accept you). This pretty much exhausts the bug stock in this game (unlike QfG4, where the worst bug is at the very end - but at least this one can be overcome by slowing down the game a lot).

Final verdict: despite the somewhat annoying day/night cycle bug (even though night sceneries look nowhere as beautiful as in EGA - everything just gets darker and bluer - it feels strange not to have darkness and, as I said, it makes keeping track of time more difficult - you may travel to the next screen without even realising that it's already almost middle of the night if you don't see darkness fall), Scumm VM definitely surpasses DOSBox when it comes to evading the game's bugs.