The King’s Quest games are legendary among adventure gamers, and now games 1-7 are put together in a single collection, imaginatively called King’s Quest Collection. The games the helped make Sierra Entertainment (then Sierra On-Line) a force to be reckoned with in the gaming world and made an icon of game developer Roberta Williams are back and running on modern PCs (though the marvel of DosBox, supplied with the games). They are mooted to run on Windows 2000 and XP, though they run fine on Vista after a little tweaking and installing the update (http://tawmis.com/collector/Files/Patches/KingsQuest/KQCollectionDB70.exe). Apart from giving an improved front-end and replacing the odd install file that was missing from the collection before (oops!), this will upgrade DosBox from v0/63 to v0.70, which is quite a big improvement. The runtime environments are stable and run without any problems after what seems like a slightly lengthy start-up. Without the update there was one game I couldn’t get to work at all, and one that I couldn’t get the save game to work. There are Windows versions of a couple of the games, but I found running them under DosBox was far more reliable.

Harking Back to the Great Days of Adventure Gaming…

Sierra with their “Quest” games (Space and Police series as well as King’s) were among the first companies, if not the very first, to incorporate animated graphical representations of the game world into their adventure games. The first four games require to you type in your commands still; the fourth introduces using the mouse for character movement; the last 3 games can all be controlled entirely with the mouse. The graphics for the first 4 games are incredibly primitive, and while 5 and 6 are a massive improvement, only the 7 has graphics that would not look completely terrible by today’s standards (and even that may be pushing it). However you can tell that the graphics were good for the time (particularly 5), and the representations are good enough even on the first game to generally know what’s going on. The sound is also pretty awful until we get to the fifth game, where we finally have fully voiced characters. If you demand great graphics and sound in your games, then just forget about this collection now - it’s very retro, and doesn’t even try not to be.

Of course it’s the game play that really matters, and all seven King’s Quest games are very solid in this regard. There are many locations, characters and puzzles to be found in each game, and the puzzles can be very challenging (occasionally annoying). Several references to various mythologies and nursery rhymes are made throughout the series, often to amusing effect, The Sierra games had you dying fairly frequently, which means that saving the game often is an absolute must. I’ve always preferred the LucasArts games in that respect myself; dying in an adventure game just seems wrong to me. While it does lend a certain immediacy and urgency to some parts of the game, it’s usually rather frustrating; you often have absolutely no idea why you’ve just died, or rather you have no concept of what you could have done differently to avoid being killed. To be fair to the designers though, usually when it’s a matter of needing to get past something that kills you in order to actually complete the game, the reasons and solution are usually clearer to see.

The parser (the mechanism for understanding what the game player is trying to tell the game to do) is quite comprehensive, particularly in the fourth game, the last to use text input. An example of this - if you tell your character to CLIMB TREE, you get a message that it is difficult to climb a tree while wearing a dress. Then type in TAKE OFF DRESS - the responding message is quite funny. This level of comprehension on the game’s part stops the typing of messages becoming too irksome - being constantly told “I don’t understand that command” is very frustrating (anyone who’s ever played an old text adventure will know the feeling!).

The (on-disk) manual that comes with the game is full of fascinating facts and anecdotes about the development of the games, along with some useful pointers and copy protection information (for instance, in King’s Quest 4 you have to give the correct word on a particular page & paragraph in the manual before starting the game). Such technological wonders (at the time) as speech packs and pseudo-3D screens are explored and Rowena Williams gives her views on some of the games. (Interestingly she mirrors the common media assumption that while killing of men in their thousands is so common that nobody blinks an eyelid, she found it far more difficult to kill off a female character in the game than she realised she would.) So much for sexual equality…. On the other hand it was almost unheard of for a game to have a female lead character (talking about the fourth game) back in 1988, and the development team really weren’t sure how the game-playing public would react. Happily they reacted very positively, and the game was instrumental in introducing more women & girls to playing computer games. It’s all very interesting stuff to anyone who’s interested in the history of computer games or old enough to be nostalgic about the early days of computer games.

Rundown of the Games

Kings Quest I - “Quest for the Crown” - you play Sir Graham of Daventry on a mission to recover three magical objects that will give wealth and stability to the kingdom. (Some idiot’s lost all three!)

Kings Quest II - “Romancing the Throne” - now the king of Daventry, Graham has a vision of a beautiful woman trapped in a town - unoriginal but a compelling enough reason for him to venture into a distant land and go questing again.

King’s Quest III - “To Heir is Human” - some evil wizard dude has an apprentice who plans to escape (good for him, I say). As these things go the apprentice learns that he’s actually the king’s son. So, escape, claim the throne, feed the pigs… it’s all in a day’s work for Alexander.

King’s Quest IV - “The Perils of Rosella” - Princess Rosella has to go off and find some magic fruit to save her dad. King Graham needs more than Aspirin for his malady…

King’s Quest V - “Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder” - King Graham’s back and must go off to find his family, who some pesky evil wizard (again!) has gone and disappeared them. Oh, and Graham’s castle has vanished too. What life he leads!

King’s Quest VI - “Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow” - Alexander again, with memories of a princess who helped in defeating aforementioned evil wizard dude, he goes and gets himself shipwrecked on the way. Tsk. This sort of thing must run in the family…

King’s Quest VII - “The Princeless Bride” - Rosella is in trouble - she may have to marry a troll. Mum turns up to prevent this and help destroy the forces of evil along the way.


Final Verdict

The King’s Quest Collection is an excellent compilation for anyone who likes adventure games, retro games, or who are fans of the series in particular. The game packaging claims that there are “hundreds of hours of thrilling game play” - without cheating the “hundreds of hours” claim may well be true, though I’m not sure all of it will actually be “thrilling”. I’ve resorted to looking online for the solution to one or two puzzles, and found that the answer lay more in being persistent with trying something that at first didn’t appear to do anything than actually any real lateral thinking.

Overall I did enjoy each of the games (though I have to admit that I found 6 quite annoying) and overcame the culture shock of having to go back to typing in commands much more easily than I would have imagined. The games, despite the clunky graphics and sound that in the first couple of games at least are likely to make you reach for the mute button, create a world that really draws you in and characters that you feel involved with. There’s a lot of humour in the games (even without the corny titles!) and they are all well-plotted. It won’t appeal to everyone, but it’s well worth persevering with if you like this sort of game and aren’t put off by retro graphics and sound.


System Specs

OS: Windows 2000 / XP (and, unofficially, Vista)
CPU: PIII 800MHz or higher
RAM: 128Mb
HDD Space: 1.2Gb (the game comes on 2 CD-ROMs)

Any sound card should do the job.


Retro Adventure Game Links

Other adventure games that I really enjoyed and that have very old-style graphics and sound are:

Released by LucasArts:

The Monkey Island Games - that link points you to a collection of the first 3 games (1 is a timeless classic, 2 I wasn’t so keen on, 3 is excellent). The fourth game (there are rumours of a fifth) was in 3D was somewhat disappointing, though I did still enjoy it.
The Dig - a space-themed game with tons of atmosphere.
Day of the Tentacle / Sam & Max Compilation - the sequel to Maniac Mansion, DOTT is a game where you control several characters and travel through time to stop a purple tentacle from taking over the world - awesome! Also a thoughtful bear and hyperkinetic bunny team up to solve crimes in SAM.

Released by Revolution:

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - perhaps not quite as old, but still a fine example of why 2D adventure games are hard to beat.
Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror - the sequel is an even better reason why 2D adventure games are hard to beat! The series went 3D thereafter with mixed results.

Released by Perfect Entertainment:

Discworld 2: Mortality Bytes - the second Discworld game was an improvement on the first, mainly because it wasn’t quite so insanely difficult! The third game in this series also went 3D, though that was probably the best of the three.





Recommended: Yes