KQ1

The Great King Edward, kind ruler of the Kingdom of Daventry, is old and frail. With no heirs, he tasks his loyal knight, Sir Graham, with a quest - hunt down three magic artifacts and bring them back, and he shall bequeth the throne. 

This is about all of the guidance that you get, and Graham is left to wander the land of Daventry in search of the mirror, which can predict the future and is guarded by a fire-breathing dragon; the shield, which can protect the user from mortal harm and has been stolen by a group of leprechauns; and the chest, which has a limitless supply of gold coins and is in the possession of a giant who lives up in the clouds. 

Daventry runs eight screens east and west, and ten screens north and south, wrapping around infinitely. The supplementary documentation explains this bit of video game phenomenon as The Magical Law of "Containment", which prevents characters from leaving the land. At least a few of the essential items are found simply by looking in tree stumps or moving rocks. Some puzzles involve some kind of knowledge of fairy tales - it's quite fun to enter the gingerbread house, open up the stove, hide in the back room, wait for the witch to enter, and then shove her in. Less fun is trying to guess the name of the mysterious gnome. It's pretty clearly supposed to be Rumpelstilskin, with a twist - you're supposed to "think backwards". One would assume that you simply spell his name in reverse, but no - it's his name spelled in the backwards alphabet, with Z being substituted for A, Y for B and so on. Therefore, the correct solution is actually "Ifnkvohgroghprm", which is ridiculous. The 1990 re-release actually fixed this puzzle so the game will accept the more logical "Nikstlitslepmur". 

To the game's credit, this puzzle isn't mandatory - you get a bag of beans, which is used to plant a beanstalk and climb into the sky. But there's another solution too, one which yields less points, but is still as effective. You can also dispose of your enemies in a variety of methods, although the game yields more points for the less violent (and thus arguably more clever) methods. Try dousing the dragon with a bucket of water, for example, rather than throwing a dagger at it.

In an attempt to make the game more arcade-y, there are also other enemies that appear throughout the land. They each inhabit certain screens, although their appearance is random. These baddies include dwarves, who can steal your treasure, effectively sticking you in a dead end situation, since they can't be recovered; enchanters, who can paralyze you for other enemies to take you out; and wolves, who will eat you outright. All of these can be avoided by leaving and re-entering the screen. More perilous are the lakes, rivers and cliffs throughout Daventry. Graham can swim in certain bodies of water, but you need to type "swim" within a few seconds or else he'll stupidly drown. It's extremely easy to walk into the moat right on the first screen, immediately disposing of your hero before he can even talk to the king. More annoying is the bean stalk climbing sequence, which suffers from completely terrible detection and will send you falling to the ground at seemingly random points, or the stair-climbing segment, which requires careful navigation lest you accidentally fall to your doom. These "arcade sequences" were a notorious part of Sierra's AGI games, and it's surprising to say that this, the first King's Quest, is far from the worst of them.

The music is of course pretty sparse, with the main theme being a sparse rendition of "Greensleeves". Outside of occasionaly sound effects and various ditties, the only other music is played when you die, which is the standard death theme with a jaunty little finish. The game over messages include a message from Sierra thanking you for playing and even offers some encouragement if your score is high enough.

King's Quest is, of course, a simple game, one which may seem borderline unplayable compared to the numerous adventure games that succeeded it. Its historical importance can't be denied though. With a bit of patience, transport yourself in the mindset of a computer user in the mid-80s, long before the internet became widespread, hard disks were insanely expensive, and 128k was a helluva lot of RAM. When PCs were mostly used for business applications and games were, at best, shifty arcade ports, Kings Quest was a fantastic world completely inside your computer, one which was more than just a series of static screens, with lush scenery and terrfiying monsters, and which promised hours upon hours of adventure. It might be hard to appreciate it now, but it was an amazing accomplishment at the time.

Kings Quest was initially released for the PCjr in 1984. Due to the unpopularity of the platform, it went largely unnoticed until ported to other PCs, where it sold substantially better. Although it loads instantly when installed on the hard disk on  DOS-based computers, many early ones were not so lucky. In versions such as the Apple II port, disks need to be swapped continously and it takes several seconds to load each screen, as it slowly draws the outline of the scenery and then fills in the color. 

In 1989, Kings Quest was ported to the Sega Master System and published by Parker Brothers, one of the only third-parties to release games for the system. The Master System has both a larger color palette and a higher resolution, so the game doesn't look nearly as blocky. However, due to the limited ROM space and the tile-based nature of console graphics, many of the areas lack some of the details of the PC version. Since there's no keyboard, actions are accomplished by accessing a menu, which lists all possible verbs and nouns available for the present screen. While cumbersome, it makes dealing with the game's limited vocabulary much easier. Since the cartridge lacks a battery backup function, progress is saved via a password.

As the years went on, Sierra eventually upgraded its interpreter to allow for higher resolution and better controls. They also decided to remake some of their earlier games using this improved technology. Kings Quest was the first to receive this treatment, using the SCI0 interpreter. This is the only remake to use this interpreter. The other Sierra remakes, including Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, Mixed Up Mother Goose, and Quest for Glory, used the more advanced SCI1. While still limited to a 16 color palette, the resolution is doubled, allowing for much, much more detailed characters and backgrounds. The visuals have been entirely new, and are a vast improvement over the original's. However, the revised version of Daventry is much darker and more foreboding than the lush, bright greens in the Daventry of old. The enemies still pop up,  but rather than appearing right when you enter the screen, they won't show up until you've wandered into the middle, making it harder to run away from them.

Although it's limited to a text input parser, you can at least use the mouse to control Graham's movement. Although the plot is still sparse, there's more writing when you examine things or when you get killed. This is where the awful death puns that became a Kings Quest trademark first popped up - try getting kidnapped by the witch in the candy home to get turned into a "Graham cracker". There are some more cutscenes too - the part where Graham walks into the castle and talks to the king is controlled entirely by the computer. A few puzzles have changed, and now there's a particular order to find the treasures. You can find the mirror or the chest whenever you like, however, the mirror must always be found last.

In 2001, AGD Interactive remade Kings Quest I using the Adventure Game Studio engine. In addition to using a fully icon-based parser, all of the visuals have been upgraded to 256 colors, looking much like Sierra's VGA games. The artwork is all based on the 1990 remake, so it looks quite similar in style. Most of the text is taken from this version as well, although it's all fully voiced. Josh Mandel, the Sierra designer/writer who voiced King Graham in the CD-ROM version of Kings Quest V, returned to provide the voice of King Graham, which is quite classy. The project has been updated several times since its initial release, substantally improving it over time.



KQ2

Having won the crown of Daventry, King Graham realizes this his rule is a bit lonely without a queen. Rather than taking the usual dating route, he looks into the magic mirror and sees the visage of a beautiful young woman held captive in a quartz spire by a witch named Hagatha. His adventurous spirit leads him to rescue this fair maiden, which takes him to the land of Kolyma.

There's not a huge difference between Kings Quest II and its predecessor. It runs on the same intepreter, looks more or less the same, and has the same basic fetch questing. The overall goal is to find three keys which unlock a mysterious door on the east side of GKolyma. Unlike its predecessor, where you could accomplish any of your tasks anyway you liked, here you need to find each key in order, giving it a more rigid structure. While Kolyma loops around north or south, it has a definite barrier here, with the ocean to the west and a great mountain range to the east.

Despite the change in name and the different geography, Kolyma is much like Daventry, consisting of forests, lakes, swamps, and a mish-mash of allusions to literature, fairy tales, and mythology. You'll find Little Red Riding Hood running around on one screen, and Neptune, God of the Sea, just a few screens over. One task involves find a genie's lamp to grant a series of three (predetermined) wishes, awarding you a magic carpet out of the Arabian Knights, while another quest will put you toe to toe with Dracula. 

Many of the "puzzles" simply involve rooting around in trees, logs, and other holes to find various artifacts, some of which are simply treasures that increase your score but have no other real use. There's a bit of weirdness to some of these - one of them will also cut to an impromptu advertisement for another Sierra game, and if you have the right luck, you can catch the Batmobile driving around outside one of the caves. You'll still randomly be accosted by witches, dwarves and enchanters, although you can be blessed by one of the kingdom's fairies to render yourself temporarily safe from their attacks.

The most remarkably cruel aspect of Kings Quest II is a rickety bridge, which leads to the door you need to unlock. It never clues you in, but you can only across this bridge a very, very limited amount of times - in fact, only enough to allow you to beat the game, so if you cross it one too many times, it'll collapse, and you'll be completely unable to continue. Some kind of hint would at least been nice! (This bridge was later referenced in Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, which warns you that you can only cross a bridge a limited amount of times, but they're empty threats, and you can saunter back and forth as you please.)

There's not much to say about Kings Quest II, except that it's more of the same. 

In 2002, AGD Interactive remade Kings Quest II, updating it to use VGA graphics, a point-and-click interface, MIDI music, and full voice acting, roughly in the style of Kings Quest V. While their remake of Kings Quest I was largely based on Sierra's own revision, they put substantially more work into recreating the sequel, to the point where it far exceeds any of the work Sierra themselves put into any of their VGA remakes. There are numerous cinemas, the script was rewritten from scratch, and it really is practically a whole new game that takes the original and runs in a whole new direction.

There's a brand new intro which shows Graham talking to one of his advisors, and he arrives in Kolyma via boat, rather than simply showing up on its shores. The door is no longer plopped in the middle of the woods, but rather, it's a talking rock formation in the side of a mountain. Rather than three keys, you need to get three stones, hence the change in the subtitle, "Romancing the Stones". 

The geography of the land is similar, but has gone through numerous alterations. It's technically a bit smaller and no longer wraps around at all, but the swamp is its own endless maze, and there's now a small town to the north. The plot is greatly expanded, and many of the other characters have not only been fleshed out considerably, but most have been reimagined, in some cases completely switching their roles. GET SOME OF THESE Even Hagatha's role is fleshed out and tied more closely to the Kings Quest storyline told in later games. Connor Maclyrr, the hero of the final KQ game, Mask of Eternity, even makes an appearance.

The basic tasks are very similar but have been drastically expanded. You still need to go underwater to meet with King Neptune, but here you spent much more time riding the seahorse, including an arcade sequence.  GET MORE OF THESE On the same note, some aspects have been removed - the lamp, the magic carpet, and the fairy are totally gone.

It's a different enough game that it's probably worth playing both side by side to compare and contrast them, but there's no doubt that the remake is a more engrossing, and ultimately much more enjoyable product.



http://www.agdinteractive.com/games/kq2/hints/characterlist.html

KQ3

Kings Quest III leaves behind the adventures of King Graham and instead focuses on the life of a young boy named Gwydion. This poor young orphaned boy lives under the servitude of the evil wizard Mannahan, an abusive bastard who will quite literally kill the boy if he's lax in doing his chores. Obviously needing to escape, your goal is to sneak into Mannanan's study, learn to create some magic spells, and scour the land of Llewder to find the perfect ingredients to get rid of your captor once and for all.

Kings Quest III works on a real-time clock, which is tracked at the top of the screen. This is important for tracking Mannahan's location, because he takes journeys in roughly half-hour cycles. When he's away, it's a race against the timer to collect all of the items you need to find, store them in some place he won't find them, and make sure to cover your tracks so he can't tell that you've been mucking around his room. It's a remarkably tense experience, even though it can get quite frustrating if take too long and inadvertantly get caught.

The realm of Llewder is quite small compared to Daventry, consisting mostly of a small town, a cottage inhabited by three bears (you need to steal their porridge for one of the spells, and can sleep in one of their beds, if you feel like causing trouble), and a never ending desert inhabited by the snake woman Medusa. However, you can find a magic map that can warp you anywhere almost instantly, with one small issue. Mannahan's house is on top of a mountain with a narrow, windy path, which needs to be navigated very carefully. The map will only transport you to the base of the mountain - each and every time you want to leave the house, you need to walk this same narrow path, which gets quite harrowing if you're running short on time.

Creating spells is also a gigantic hassle. In addition to the numerous items you need to create the half-dozen or so magic spells, you need to use them in the precise order and speak a number of magical enchantments. Since the original release is entirely text-based, you need to type in each and every one of these commands - as if you forgot to get an item or so much as make a typo, or even a misplaced comma, you'll screw up the process and inflict some comical ailment on yourself, triggering a Game Over. There are about half a dozen spells, and while not all of them are necessary, some of them allow for alternate puzzle solutions. Of course, once you leave Llewder there's no way to create any more spells, so this is an easy way to mess up your game if you find yourself missing a vital enchantment later on.

Once you've finally gotten rid of Mannahan, the game leads you to stumble on its twist - that Gwydion is actually the long-lost song of Graham and Valanice, who had been kidnapped in his youth. An oracle tells him of his twin sister Rosella, who has been kidnapped by a three headed dragon, so Gwydion signs up with a group of pirates to take him back to the land of Daventry to save the kingdom and become reuinted with his family. It's here that Kings Quest III mostly drops its adventure game pretenses and instead turns completely linear, as you navigate a series of mountain paths to find your way to the dragon's lair. Mostly this involves walking along narrow paths or climbing over rocks, always the most clumsily implemented aspects of Sierra's AGI games. The first part of the game is fairly strong, so it's a shame that it ends up on such a lazily developed note.

Like the first two games, Kings Quest III was remade using the Adventure Game Studio to update its interface and graphics. Its overhaul isn't quite as extensive as Kings Quest II's, but it does expand the land of Llewder, and removes the looping in favor of natural boundaries. Some of the puzzles have been changed, the spell enchanting much less irritating, and the magic map will now transport you to the top of Mannahan's mountain than the bottom. Many of these are much more user friendly, although since they make much of the game quicker and easier, it removes some of the tension of the time limit. There are also numerous cutscenes to flesh out the story, including an intro depicting Gwydion's nightmares of being kidnapped, and another that ties the characters from Kings Quest III with the events of Kings Quest V. Since very little has actually been removed from the original game, other than making it easier, the VGA adaptation is definitely the more enjoyable way to experience Kings Quest III.


Kq4

Kings Quest IV begins with Alexander returning home, and the royal family united once again. Before their happiness can truly settle in, King Graham has a heart attack and falls ill. He will die, unless he receives a magical fruit from the land of Tamir. Rosella EXPAND ON PLOT The subtitle, The Perils of Rosella, is said to have been inspired by the classic movie The Perils of Pauline.

Kings Quest IV represents a major step forward in technology for Sierra, as it's their first game to utilize the then-brand-new SCI engine. Although still limited to 16 colors, it doubled the resolution to allow for substantially more detailed graphics, in addition to adding support for MIDI music. Although you still interact with the world using a text parser, you can now command your character to walk with a mouse pointer, although the pathfinding is dreadfully simple. Rosella can also swim on her own without being told to, a great step forward in the intelligence for video game characters.

At the time, Sierra wasn't sure if the PC gaming public had the proper hardware to run this new interpreter, so it also released a separate version of the game using the old AGI engine. This version is much the same as the older games, but is mostly the same as the SCI release. However, the SCI version pauses the action whenever the player types. The AGI version does not, which makes certain puzzles difficult, because you need to pre-type commands before entering certain situations, unless you want to get killed. The AGI version also has a bonus hidden easter egg near the end of the game, where you can visit with the game's development staff in a futuristic room. (There is also a flying hamburger in the background, for some reason or another.)

Regardless of the version, Sierra hyped up Kings Quest IV as one of the most important computer gaming events in its history, a true art of work on par with literature and cinema. As one of their advertisements asked, "Can a Computer Game Make A Person Cry?", before answering its own question with "Kings Quest IV did on June 4, 1988." The back of the box brags about long cutscenes and over 40 minutes of music written by film and TV composer William Goldstein. It sure has a high opinion itself, and takes itself a little too far by popping up Roberta Williams' face whenever you die or try to quit. She's quite an attractive lady, although her portrait in game looks positively horrifying, from her misshapen jaw to her over abundence of eyeliner.

Of course, technology has marched on in the decades since, and what apparently stirred up tremendous emotions from gamers at the time is now positively quaint. What remains is, more or less, another Kings Quest game. Once transported to the land of Tamir, Rosella is ordered to run a number of tasks for an evil witch named Lolotte. These include capturing a unicorn, stealing a golden egg-laying hen, and uncovering Pandora's box. As before, you'll run into characters like the Seven Dwarves (with Rosella playing the part of Snow White), the giant ogre from Jack and the Beanstalk (although without either Jack or the Beanstalk, strangely enough), as well as other brief appearances by Cupid, the arrow-slinging cherub and Pan, the dancing fawn boy. The game also runs on a real-time clock, as Rosella has exactly one in-game day to complete all of the tasks, forcing you to get your act in gear. Certain puzzles can only be completed at different times, which can naturally muck you up if you dawdle or can't figure out what to do.

With Rosella being the first leading woman in adventure gaming, a few aspects playing up her femininity, like having to kiss a frog to turn him into a prince. Lolotte's son Edgar also takes a liking to Rosella - despite him technically being an evil prince, in the same shade of green as his mother, he actually turns out to be a pretty alright guy, although the romance between him and Rosetta is unfortunately brief.

The most infamous section is when Rosella is swallowed by a whale and needs to climb out by scaling its tongue and tickling its uvula with a feather, causing her to be sneezed out of its blowhole. It's not technically all that difficult, but it's impossible to tell what parts of the tongue are climbable and which aren't, so there's no way to do it without lots of trial and error (and save scumming.) The annoyance of this section was acknowledged in Leisuire Suit Larry 3, where the characters break out of their world and witness Rosella repeatedly trying and failing in her climb. The whole point of this is to get shot out into a deserted island, which contains a bridle you need to capture the unicorn. Said bridle isn't even a single pixel - in fact, it's entirely invisible, hidden behind a innocuous piece of wreakage. 

However, simply delivering all of these items only ensures safe passage back to Daventry. In order to actually save King Graham, you need to go on another subquest to find the magical fruit. This task is technically optional, but shirking this responsibility will result in Rosella returning home, only to witness her father, the first true hero of the Kings Quest series, die before her eyes. All of the talk of the game making one cry is definitely overdone, but this is indeed pretty rough to watch, and might actually be interesting than the "good" ending, as cruel as that sounds, just because it's so tragically atypical. (The bad ending is not canon, of course, considering King Graham returns as the hero in the next Kings Quest.)

The original Sierra releases are the only versions of Kings Quest IV available. A fan-made VGA remake has been in the works for a few yeasr, but nothing has been released outside of some demo footage.

Kings Quest V

The fifth Kings Quest game proved to be a turning point in the development of Sierra adventure games. It's the first to use their newly developed SCI1 interpreter, which ditches the text input in favor of a fullly icon based interface, utilizies fully painted and scanned 256 color backgrounds, and for the CD-ROM version, features completely voiced acted dialogue. It also featured more cutscenes and dialogue, in an attempt to further more effective storytelling. But for all of the aesthetic improvements Kings Quest V brings forth, it's filled to the brim with impossibly frustrating dead-ends and illogical puzzles,  completely nullifying any of its improvements.

In the intro cutscene, a maniacal wizard appears in front of the Daventry castle and whisks it away in whirlwind, completely stealing it. King Graham, out for a leisurely stoll, is the only one spared, and is stunned to find not only his house but his family entirely missing. A friendly owl, the familiar of an elderly wizard named Crispin, relates the tale, and brings Graham to the kingdom of Serenia (the same land, at least in name, as in The Wizard and The Princess) to begin his quest. Eventually Graham learns that the culprit is the evil magician Mordrack, who just happens to be the brother of Manannan, the very same crone who had imprisoned Alexander in his youth, and was turned into a cat back in Kings Quest III. Neither of them are pleased with the situation, and seeing how Alexander can't reverse the spell, they seek vengeance on the Graham clan instead.

Kings Quest V is structured a bit differently from its predecessors. The land of Serena is still relatively non-linear, featuring a town center, an enchanted forest, and a bandit-filled desert. There are more people to talk to and interact with, all of whom need aid in some way or another. There's a colony of ants under attack by a dor, a hive of bees under attack by a bear, a moping prince looking for his love, and a group of bandits out in the desert who open the door to their stash, predictably, with a good old fashioned "Open Sesame". Except for the frustrating desert maze, where too many steps in the wrong direction without a source of water will result in death, each screen has a purpose, and there's much less aimless wandering around, as the land no longer loops infinitely. Combined with its enhanced interface, it seems like it's left behind some its old school conventions in favor of something far more modern. 

The only way path out of Serenia is guarded by a poisonous snake, so much of the first segment of the game is running tasks that eventually leads to the item you need to get past it. This in itself feels rather artificial - hours of exploration just to get past a mere reptile? - but that's really the least of the game's concerns. Kings Quest V is absolutely filled with situations where you can get yourself impossibly stuck, unable to proceed without reloading a previous save game. These have always existed up until this point in Sierra's library, but rarely are they so unrelenting as this. 

Shortly into your quest, you'll find a rat being chased by a cat. In the span of a couple of seconds, you need to toss a boot at them, thereby saving the rat from becoming a meal. This might not seem like an important event, but you'll pay for it a little while later, when you're kidnapped and stuck in a basement. If you saved the rat he'll untie your bonds, but if not...oh well! When you enter a temple, you're only given a few seconds to get in, grab the stuff you need and get out before the door closes, trapping you inside. One item is obviously - the other is a mere pixel in size. You leave without grabbing it, you can never open that door again.After you leave Serenia, you must climb through a series of snowy mountains and cross a small lake until you get to Mordrack's castle. This section is far more linear than the first part of the game, but it also requires that you've picked up everything from earlier on. If you've missed any...well, after a certain point you can't go back to retrieve any of them.

Perhaps the most aggravating instance involves a pie you get from a baker. If you eat it, it's gone forever. When crossing the mountains, you're told that Graham is hungry and needs something to eat, so eating the pie seems logical right? Or when you find a starving eagle, the pie might seem like a good choice? The game lets you take both of these courses of action, but they both make the game unwinnable, you're instead meant to munch of leg of lamb which you hopefully stole from the inn while being kidnapped earlier on. Instead, you're supposed to save the pie in order to (get this) throw it in the face of a ferocious yeti, besting him Three Stooges-style. Solving this particular puzzle is fairly illogical if rather comical, but the multiple ways the game sets you up to fail is just remarkably cruel. Walking around Mordrack's castle is hair-pulling, because he can randomly transport around and kill you, without recourse, again forcing you to reload. There's the usual maze sequence, made more frustrating because the viewpoint changes orientation when Graham walks in a different direction, making it more disorienting than need to be.

And then there's Cedric the owl. He accompanies you through most of the game, and was probably meant to act as a foil for Graham, providing some accompaniment or at very least some comic relief, but he only suceeds is not only being incredibly useless but also astoundingly annoying. He abstains from following you into dangerous situations, excusing himself for his wussiness. He doesn't offer any useful advice, outside of warning Graham to "look out!" when it's entirely too late to prevent it. The absolute best - or worst, attitude depending - is when you get into a boat and sail out into a lake. A short way into your journey, Cedric remarks "Watch out, there's a whole in the boat", wherein your both immediately sink and die. (You were supposed to have realized there was a hole, even though the game never tells you this until you sink, and patch it up before you set off.) Cedric also manages to get in trouble no less than twice, and while it's mandatory to save him the first time, you can leave him for dead the second time around. However tempting this may be, it also prevents you from winning the game, because the finale is the only - ONLY - time he does anything, and even then it's unintentional.

Cedric's pointless interjections aren't a huge issue in the disk version, where the text boxes can be clicked away without much thought. They are maddening in the CD version, since Cedric's voice is spoken by a man in an extraordinarily high pitched voice with some horrifyingly unidentifiable accent. His constant scoldings, meaningless warnings, perpetual whinings and more-obnoxious-than-usual puns are just about enough to earn him the place as one of the worst characters in all of adventure gaming. But to be fair, it's not like the rest of the voice acting is much better. With all of the money Sierra sunk into the artwork and CD-ROM technology, they forgot to allocate any funds for actual voice acting, instead relying entirely on regular staff members around the office. Not all of them are terrible - writer Josh Mandel does the role of Graham and is somewhat passable - but even at their best moments it all sounds quite amateurish. All of the recording seems to have happened in a bathroom, which each voice sample possessing a distinguishable echo, which is further exacasberated by the extreme audio downsampling. And then there's all of the talking animal characters (Beetrice the Queen Bee, King Antony the Ant) whose voices are run through modulations, making them almost impossible to understand. There's not even an option to disable voice acting in favor of text in the CD-ROM version, forcing all of the pain on you.

You could play the disk version, but even that has issues. At various points throughout the adventure, you're given copy protection quizzes, proclaiming that Graham has become weak and needs magic to be recharged. These are sudden, persistant, and annoying. Its interface is also overly busy, containing two different walk icons. The standard "walk" action is much like the one in the older SCI games - that is, you'll walk in a straight line, but if there's anything that gets in the way, you'll stop. The "Travel" icon features actual pathfinding, so you'll walk around any obstacles to your destination, rendering the other one completely obsolete. The "Save" and "quit" options are also present on the main item bar. In the CD-ROM version, the first "Walk" was removed, and all of the game management functions were condensed into a single secondary screen, which Sierra used for all of its successive SCI games. The CD version also changes some of the death quips, for some reason or another.

There's no doubt that Kings Quest V brings a lot to the trouble, as the background artwork is really quite excellent, and the full screen cutscenes were leagues ahead of anything released around the same time in 1990. The interface is substantially more user-friendly, and it's easy to see areas that probably would've been arcade sequences if done in the older games - navigating the mountain pathes, for one - that barely require any effort here, and the game's much better off for it. But, like KQ4, for all of the effort put into storytelling, the actual plot is only passable, and the characters only exist briefly to present puzzles, give you new items and move on. Combined with the overtly frustrating design, Kings Quest V is a game that, despite its popularity at the time, has aged quite poorly.

Kings Quest V was released for the PC, Macintosh and Amiga. The PC version supports EGA graphics, although it dithers the backgrounds so much to almost totally ruin their impact. Other than some differences in color palette, most of these versions are the same, although the CD-ROM version is only available on the PC.

Beyond the computer version, it was also ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System. The development duties were handled by Novotrade, and the game was published in North America by Konami. The NES saw successful ports on a few adventure games, like Lucasarts' Maniac Mansion and ICOM's Shadowgate, but those were both fairly old games at the time, and the NES could easily handle them. On the other hand, Kings Quest V is substantially more advanced, and more needed to be cut back in order to not only fit in in the system's limited color palette and graphica memory, but also its ROM. The disk version is nearly 9 megabytes - the NES version is nearly 5% of that, with a mere 512k (or 0.5 megabytes) of space.

The size and color depth of the backgrounds weren simply not going to work on the NES at all, so they were completely redrawn. They all look horrendous. Each needed to be constructed out of a tiles, per most 8-bit console games, rather than single bitmaps, and there are barely any screens that don't look like terribly glitchy messes. The color choices are also poor, reducing what was previously a gorgeous game into a total artistic disaster, sometimes almost comically so. In some areas, the clouds are actually green! The full screen cinemas are gone, reduced entirely to text, rendered in the old system font that the AGI-era Sierra games used. Most of the important text remains, although some flavor text is gone, and certain parts are shortened slightly. The two walk options serve a point here - the first "walk" will allow you control Graham directly, while the second will allow you to point and click. Looking at or interacting with items is also handled through the cursor, but it's extremely slow, and almost painful to use.

It is clumsy, and as the port of Maniac Mansion showed, full pointer controlled would've worked well enough. There's almost no music at all either, barring some bits of incidental music. It's a painful game to play, not counting all of the other design issues it inherit from the PC version, and still exists only to be mocked or feared.

Death/Dick Move Count
http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime/showpost.php?p=574964&postcount=34

Kings Quest VI

Kings Quest V is one of those games that was really only terrible in hindsight - everyone at the time marveled at its visuals and storytelling and ignored its many, many dead-ends. Still, someone at Sierra must've felt something was wrong, because Kings Quest VI is a remarkable improvement in almost every possible manner.

The hero this time is Alexander once again. It hasn't been long since him and the rest of the Graham family was rescued in Kings Quest V, but he can't forget the face of Cassima, the scullery maid and slave of Mordrack. She, like him, was also was captured royalty, and is actually Princess of the Land of Green Isles. After inviting Alexander to visit her one day, she returns home, only never to be heard from again. Turns out no one in the land of Daventry has even heard of the place. In a mysterious dream, Alexander has a vision of the lovely girl crying for help. Memorizing the vision of the night sky, he uses the positioning of the stars to set sail and set her free. Naturally, a storm rolls in and leaves Alexander alone shipwrecked...conveniently enough, right in the Land of the Green Isles. Here he learns that Cassima has been imprisioned by the Vizier GET NAME and is being forced into marriage, with Alexander being the only hope of rescue. The subtitle is a play on the phrase "Here today, gone tomorrow".

The Land of the Green Isles is, predictably, an assemblage of five islands in close vicinity of each other and each inspired by a different them. Alexander lands on the Isle of the Crown, the capital, whose castle and surrounding town have a flavor similar to Arabian Nights. The Isle of Wonder is full of bizarre characters, vaguely similar to Alice in Wonderland. The Isle of GET NAME is inspired by classic Greek and Roman mythology, complete with its own labrynth and minotaur, as depicted on the game's cover. The Isle of the Beast is a small forest and home to a ferocious monster who desperately wishes for love. And the Isle of the Mist, initially kept hidden, is inhabited by cult of blood thirsty druids. The ferry running between the islands is out of commission, so Alexander warps between them with a magic map, although he needs to be at the island's shore for it to work.

Each island is pretty small, usually consisting of no more than half a dozen screens (not including the labrynth or the castle on the Isle of the Crown), but Alexander needs to travel between all of them constantly throughout the whole game. As in Kings Quest III, many of the quests revolve around finding items for a small handful of magic spells, which are, thankfully, much easier to cast due to the icon-based interface - just combine the items, turn to the proper page of the spell book, click the "Cast" icon, and you're set. It's also a nice modern update of the structure of the old games, as each of the islands has its own unique identity that keeps everything from blending together.


Having learned from some fairly significant mistakes, Kings Quest VI is far, far better designed game than its predecessor. In addition to bringing back the multi-solutions puzzles, depending on what previous actions you've undertaken, and there's a whole long optional subquest that involves rescusing Cassima's deceased parents from the Land of the Dead. The back of the box claims that over half the game is optional - this is a pretty big exaggeration, but it's still a relatively significant chunk of the game for something you don't need to do. There are two different endings, with a handful of minor variations on each, depending on whether you take on this particular quest. Skipping it does not yield a bad ending in any way, but completing it definitely rewards you with an even better one.  There are still ways to get stuck in unwinnable situations, but nowhere near the level of the previous game. You can find yourself stranded in the Minotaur's Labrynth or the Land of the Dead without the items you need, since you can't leave. It's also possible to forget items in places where you can't return to. 

The writing is substantially stronger this time around, largely the result of Roberta Williams' collaboration with Jane Jensen, who later went on to create the Gabriel Knight series. The script to KQ6 is reportedly four times the size of KQ5, which enriches the game world in ways that are immediately evident. Jensen also wrote The Guide to the Land of the Green Islands, GET NAME, which delves further into detail about the game world, and is also required for use in some puzzles on the Cliffs of Logic. 

Alexander, like his father still before him, is still a bit dry, with his own real trait being his remarkable drive to chase after Cassima. The supporting characters, including a friendly pawn shop owner, and a gossipy clown show far more range than in previous games, acting more are personalities to chat with rather than mere devices for puzzles. This most clearly shines through on the Isle of Wonder, where grammatical concepts (Oxymoron, Dangling Participle and Dipthong) are represented by cute and furry animals, and you find yourelf in a middle of a sibling rivlary between a literal stick-in-the-mud and a bump-on-the-log. Although JAFAR is the usual sneering villain of these types of stories, his underling is a rather incompetant genie who gets drunk on peppermints and stages several transparent attempts to trick Alexander into killing himself. 

As a cheeky reminder of Kings Quest rather frustratingly lineage, you can browse the pawn shop and find a number of items that would've helped in the previous games, including a bridge repair kit (KQ2), GET MORE OF THESE

Take whenever Alexander gets killed, where you'll see a short cinema of his ghostly apparition getting a ticket and walking into the gates of the Land of the Dead, forever failing in his quest to find his true love. It's a wholly depressing scene, largely because the design of the place is so damned creepy (although it certainly doesn't skip on the awful death-puns.) Rather than falling back on the fire-and-brimstone stereotype of the biblical Hell, it's a dank cavern with unnaturally brown textures and plainly disturbing architecture, in addition to all of the creatures that would gladly separate Alexander's soul from his still-living flesh. And yet, when you come across the entrance gates during this segment, the ones you've probably scene dozens of times when you've died, you can play a set of bones like a xylophone, triggering a dance number that features skeletons dancing in a chorus line. It completely undermines the dread of the enviroments in an excessively silly way, morphing an entirely dreadful moment into a strangely enjoyable one.

Kings Quest VI also benefits from Sierra's experience as a multimedia studio. The voice acting is far, far better, having benefited from professional actors this time around. Alexander is played by Robbie Benson, best known as the Beast from Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and he brings much dignity and enthusiasm to the otherwise standard role. All versions, disk and CD, include a rendered intro showing Alexander's dreams, his conversations with his mother, and his journey across the sea. Each version has slightly different cuts of this movie, with the CD version obviously being the longest. The disk version also uses completely different (and worse) voice actors. While Sierra made a big deal of this at the time, they've aged badly, suffering from ugly characters and an extremely, extremely choppy frame rate. More interesting than the intro was the vocal song, "Girl in the Tower", a love ballad duet clearly trying to ride the coattails of similar Disney songs from Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. It's bland but tolerable, and certain CD versions have it playable as a redbook audio track. The original release had a list of phone numbers of radio stations who'd been provided a copy of the song, urging customers to call it and request the song for on-air play. While it was a neat marketing ploy, the song itself obviously never caught on. The Windows version features high res character portraits, although the rest of the visuals are the same as the other versions.

Kings Quest VI is almost in an entirely different league than its predecessors or sequels. Whereas the older games just slapped together various themes and tropes and ran with them, this installment is just a far richer, detailed, and more wondrous adventure, easily one of Sierra's best.


KQ7

After Kings Quest VI, Roberta Williams took a break from the series and attempted to push forward the gaming medium with Phantasmagoria, a live action full motion video horror game. It was a marked departure from her other games, being that it was frightfully gory in spots, in the name of making games "for adults". When she returned to the Kings Quest series with the seventh game, she went to the total opposite direction of Phantasmagoria, instead turning her series into a Disney cartoon. It is indeed a fantastic looking game, but, like Kings Quest V, the march forward in visuals meant the actual game had to suffer.

Kings Quest VII stars the women of Daventry, with Rosella returning along with Queen Valanice, marking her first (and only) appearance as a playable character. The animated intro depicts Rosella singing a Disney-esque ballad about how she doesn't want to get married yet, while her mother looks on sternly. The flighty princess is then distracted by a flying GET THING, and both are sucked into pool, ending on in separate parts of another foreigh world. The initial goal is, of course, to meet up and find their way home, but during their travels they come upon the scheme of the evil GET NAME, herself an amalgamation of various Disney villainesses, who wishes to unleash a number of evil goods. And, of course, maybe find a groom for Rosella along the way, as the title implies. (It's a reference to the cult classic fantasy adventure movie The Princess Bride.)

The quest is divided up into six chapters, with the viewpoints alternating between Valanice and Rosella. Valance starts off stranded in a desert and eventually ends up into the colorful town of GET NAME. Rosella, in the meanwhile, gets turned into troll and is stuck getting bethrothed to the troll king. Eventually she gets turned back into a human and ends up in Oogie Boogie land, a Halloween-themed town that may have well been lifted from The Nightmare Before Christmas, before eventually meeting up with her mother and foiling GET NAMES plot. Like Phantasmagoria, you can start at the beginning of any of the six chapters at any time, in case you get stuck and want to see the later parts of the game.

GET SOME DETAILS ON THESE

The finale also marks the return of Edgar, Rosella's not-quite love interest from Kings Quest IV. Much the back story explaining his connection was excised from the final game, so his appearance only makes sense upon reading some external documentation.

The Kings Quest series were always meant as family games, but the animated stylings, along with the generally broad themes, makes it feel markedly less mature than Kings Quest VI. In fact, it really does feel remarkably shallow, for way more than seeming "kiddie". It uses the same basic interface as Phantasmagoria, meaning it only uses a single icon for moving your character or interacting with the environment. While perhaps done to make the game easier to play for non-adventure fans, without a "look" icon, it completely removes the details of your surroundings. 

The dialogue, too, is incredibly sparse. Like the rest of the series, it features a number of strange and memorable characters, like an oddly friendly grave digger with a penchant for absurd machinery, a hilariously sexist troll, a snotty archduke poodle named Fifi, and a slightly obnoxious take on Chicken Little. But when the script barely gives them more than a dozen lines to shine, it makes them seem remarkably thin. The leading ladies are fairly unremarkable too - here Rosella is a whiny spoiled girl with a slight valley accent and Valanice barely has a personality at her beyond her motherly mannerisms.

Although there are technically death sequences, you can pick up immediately before your fatal move. While this reduces some frustration, the save system has been  cut down so you can only record one game at a time anyway. Instead of saving your progress in multile spots, you simply move the "bookmark" to the new spot when you quit. It is also entirely impossible to make the game unwinnable, one of the few steps KQVII makes in the right direction. However, in keeping with the spirit of the older games, in certain areas it will randomly bringing a dangerous character on screen, forcing you to exit quickly or be killed. 

Beyond its general sparseness, Kings Quest VII is just astoundingly dull. As per standard procedures, you spend much of your quest running back and forth across the lands, gathering new items. Both your characters both move remarkably slowly, requiring roughly thirty seconds to saunter across a single screen, and running a simple singular fetch quest can take several minutes of aimless walking, walking, walking. Nearly all of the Sierra games from the past decade had implemented speed controls to give the pacing a kick in the rear, so why is this absent from Kings Quest VII, forcing you to watch the same tortuous animations? The puzzles themselves are unimagantive at their best or stupidly illogical at their worst. SOME OF THESE? 

The developers at the time probably figured no one would mind, because it looks so gorgeous. Because hey! You're literally PLAYING a cartoon! To its credit, the game does look pretty damn good. The backgrounds are gorgeous, now that the visuals support SVGA graphics, and the paintings no longer suffering from the dithering that permeated the older SCI games. And for all of the time you spend watching people trot along, they are remarkably well animated, to the point where each action has incredibly fluid, unique frames of animation. And from a distance, the character artwork looks pretty good too - not on par with Disney, or even Don Bluth, but a fair bit better than the average Saturday morning cartoon. The few full motion video cutscenes don't fare as well, though, as they're hastily drawn, badly detailed, and suffer from both a low resolution and a dismal frame rate.

It's weird that a game meant for a younger (or at least wider) audience is so incredibly boring - its intended charms are almost all but completely lost amidst all the drudgery. Unfortunately The Princeless Bride was also the last "true" Kings Quest game, before ditching the adventure game framework in favor of action gaming in its next (and final) installment.

bull in a china shop???

KQ8

By 1998, adventure gaming was dead, or so everyone seemed to be saying. With the shift in the computer gaming marketplace targetting faster paced action games, Sierra decided to completely revamp Kings Quest, ditch nearly all of the adventure elements, and turn it into an action-RPG. The result is a game that's almost entirely unfamiliar. The lack of a roman numeral suggests that this eighth and final installment was meant to be spinoff rather than a true sequel, but it is known as Kings Quest VIII in some European territories, shattering that particular excuse. 

The eponymous Mask of Eternity, held in the GET NAME and watched over by GET NAME, has shattered and brought ruin to Daventry. It has cursed all of its inhabitants and turned them all to stone except one - a young tanner named Connor Maclyrr, who finds a piece of the mask and is tasked with finding the other four. 

Kings Quest has fully moved into 3D with this installment, with incredibly limited success. The blocky character models have aged terribly, although they're animated fairly well for the era. But far more offensive is the drastically limited draw distance, which puts even the most fog-ridden Nintendo 64 games to total shame. The character movements are controlled with the keyboard, using the Resident Evil tank-style controls, with up moving forward, down moving backward, and left and right turning side to side. All actions are handled with the mouse cursor, including fighting - accomplished merely by clicking rapidly - and picking stuff up.

Nearly all of the traditional adventure elements are gone. The land is divided up into seven different territories, with the goal simply being to explore them completely, hack some enemies to gain some levels, and move onward. There are occasionally people to talk to, but interactions with them are fairly sparse. Your inventory consists entirely of weapons, potions, and other restoratives, along with a grappling hook. These items are almost never used for puzzles, which here involve the jumping or block pushing variety. 

There's barely anything here that could signify this as a Kings Quest game - sure, the hokey intro movie refers to the king as "King Graham" and the opening level is Daventry, bearing absolutely no resemblance to how it appeared in the first game. One of the levels, the Dimensions of Death, even seems redundant after the Land of the Dead in Kings Quest VI. (Apparently they're different, being legends particular to each land's mythology.) There's no trace of any fairy tales or classic mythology or even any sense of humor. About the only laughes come from how comically bloody it is, as enemies' heads will fall right off after being punched a few times, or cough up streams of blood before falling face first into the dirt, or walking in on a goblin farting in an outhouse. This game is not exactly a class act.

It's hard to see who Mask of Eternity is really aimed at. Action fans will be bored by its slow pace and simple combat. RPG fans will find it too stripped down and straightforward compared to purer experiences like Baldur's Gate. And, as established, adventure fans will find none of the puzzle solving, storytelling, or atmosphere that they would come to expect. It's not unplayable by any means, 

KQ9 - The Silver Lining

The AGD developed Kings Quest games were fantastic and all, but ultimately, they were just remakes. A group of fans called Phoenix Interactive (GET THIS?), unhappy with the way the series ended with Mask of Eternity, decided to create a whole new game more in line with the series tradition. Alas, it has hit a number of legal speed bumps.

The first came with Vivendi Universal, the company that had purchased Sierra's intellectual properties. While they seemingly had no problems with the fan remakes, they didn't like the concept of a brand new game, as it could potentially be seen as competiting with one of their own, if they chose to make one. They had no plans too, of course, but eventually they hashed out an agreement with Phoenix that the game could be released if it removed the Kings Quest name. Development then proceeded on and off up until 2010. By this point Sierra's properties had been transferred to Activision, which, in light of their exploitation of the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises, had early a reputation of being something of a huge corporate bully. Despite Phoenix's previous agreement with Vivendi, Activision demanded that development be stopped once again, putting a total halt to the project. As of this writing, they are still in negotiations to hash out some kind of agreement to get it released.

In 2007, a playable demo of Kings Quest IX was released, and is still available around the internet, giving a glimpse of what was meant to be. Prince Alexander and Princess Rosella have fallen ill, and it's once again up to King Graham to save them. The demo takes place in the Land of the Green Isles, as Graham changes out of his kingly attire and into his classic adventuring outfit, before heading out to the docks to set sail. The game is entirely in 3D, and while it doesn't look great by modern standards, it's not totally terrible either. It features a mouse-based interface with the usual icons, and static cameras that switch as you move to different screens. Most of the castle and the Isle of the Crown from Kings Quest VI is replicated here with polygons. There is some voice acting, although clearly it hadn't been finished as many lines remain unvoiced. Alas, the demo ends once you leave the island, without much in the way of real puzzles, exploration or exposition. Still, it was a nice taste of what was planned, and hopefully Phoenix can work out something to get it released. That is, assuming they finish the project anyway - as of 2010, the game had already been in development for MANY years, and is clearly quite ambitious by fan game standards.


KQ Companion / Novels

While Sierra often published its own hint books, more interesting were the Companion books. Rather than just having standard walkthroughs, they contained novelizations of the games, allowing the reader to experience the story and events without having to play the game, although it obviously gave useful hints. This was not unique amongst Kings Quest, but this particualr book is far more well written than the rest. Many others told the events from the first person view of the characters, which read terribly. Here, the viewpoint is told from the third person. The author, Peter Spear, made up a character named GET NAME, a historian, and all of the stories are meant to be interviews told from the viewpoint of the hero. They're actually quite enjoyable and worth reading alongside the games. The first edition was released in 1989 and covers the first four games. Each successive edition added new games, with the fourth and final edition covering every game up until Kings Quest VII.

Bonus Games/Compilations/etc