King's Quest
DOS version
The one that started it all...
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.
by Indra was here (20747) on August 5, 2003