Category: Blogging Quest

So the story this time around is that Graham has been the prosperous ruler of Daventry for a year, but he’s getting lonely. He knows it’s time to find a wife, and create an heir for his kingdom, so it doesn’t end up like it was before he took over for the last guy. He holds tryouts, but none of the women/girls in his kingdom are good enough for him, and so he talks to his magic mirror. The mirror shows him the beautiful Princess Valanice, from the kingdom of Kolyma, imprisoned by the evil witch, blah blah blah. Graham tosses on his adventuring cap, instead of the crown and shows up on the beach ready to find her and make her his. How romantic.

Getting a tan on the beach is always a good place to start, soI took a stroll down the beach. A lot of nice new touches this time around. The little waves crash up against the rocks, to add a nice sense of immersion. As usual, wandering down the beach nets me a nice bracelet that looks expensive, and a sweet trident. Who’s the king of the sea now?!

Continue reading “King’s Quest II – Day 1”

So I think I’ve realized why I haven?t continued with the end of King’s Quest 1 after all this time. I just didn’t want to go back and take on the same stuff over again. I will someday, but for now, I’m moving on with Blogging Quest. Welcome to King’s Quest II – Romancing the Throne. This time it’s for love.

Released in 1985, it was Sierra’s second game to take advantage of their new AGI system they created for King’s Quest I. It grew the size of the game by 15% over the original, with 92 different rooms to walk to now, and a theoretically easier puzzle system, that left you a little less room to get lost. We’ll see about that.

My experience coming to this one is going to be a lot less than the first. I played the heck out of the first one, but my experience with KQII has all come from my play through of it on a Mac in black and white. Thank you Grandma. I know I’ve completed the quest for love and a wife once long, long ago, but my memories really only recall the fact that there is a trident on a beach, a basket of goodies in a mailbox, the batmobile, and I get to dress up like a vampire! This one could take a bit longer with its play through, as I will be making up my own solution on the fly. Sounds great!

Take a look here for the box art.
Here’s the original manual.
Here’s the Wikipedia acticle on it.
Finally Game Tap has a great retrospective by Joe Rybicki

I have to re-play through KQ1 again, as the system I was using for Blogging Quest was returned and I was unable to get my saves and such off the system before hand. Not to worry. I’m going to be back up and running here soon, and blogging quest will return.

Yes, it’s been a while, but we’ll not talk about that. Let’s jump into King’s Quest 1 Day 2!
When I last played I had found a ton of little treasures and items lying about, but none of the fabled three magic ones that were causing Daventry to go to ruin. In my quest for them I ended up finding a bridge to somewhere, with a troll guarding it. Figuring that I’d need something or someone to help me with it, since the game wouldn’t let me throw a dagger I had in my inventory at it, I went off looking again.

I ran back into the goat in the pens, which reminded me of the carrot I had in my inventory. Giving it to him? He just eats it and lets you go on your merry way. Not much help. Showing him the carrot lead to him following me where I went. Go goat. I took him back to the bridge with me, after which he made short work of the ugly troll and I was free to cross in peace to the other side. Impressively this seems to be one of the more clear puzzles so far in this game. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Here’s the gnome. He wanted me to guess his name and I only have three guesses. I know as a kid when I first played the game I figured it out, or I cheated, or had a friend tell me, but for the life of me I have no clue what his name could really be. Zelda, Rumplestilskin, Dolly or Joe, none of them worked. Not that it mattered much. He dropped a golden key and that’s good enough for me, because it worked on the door I ended my last play with.

Unfortunately it also meant stairs. A little side rant here. Sierra must have loved to put stairs in their games because it was pure evil to force you walk up them; with how your little person walked it was very easy to just fall off the stairs to your death repeatedly. I still have bad memories of the winding staircases in Kings Quest 4 and the many falls, deaths and restores it required. Luckily, I think I’ve improved and only managed to fall to my death twice (once on the way up and once on the way down).

This giant is what greets me in at the top of the stairs in a nice little patch of forest in the clouds. Must suck to be cut off from everyone, carrying around a nice chest of gold, and of course whenever someone comes to visit you get so excited, run over to greet them and stomp them to death. Or at least that’s the way I figured it. Still I needed that chest and he wasn’t going to give it to me.

So after finding a sling and combining it with my sweet little handful of pebbles, I went biblical on him and found myself standing over the now dead giant and in the possession of one of the legendary treasures of Daventry! One third of my way to being king! Back down the stairs and out to the “real” world again since the clouds ended up being empty of anything else to do. Poor giant.

I found the well again, and pulling from old memories I knew I needed to do something with it but couldn’t remember. Cutting the rope? Sure I got a bucket but then I couldn’t climb down the well and I’d fall to my death. Getting in the bucket and going for a ride? Perfect. I cruised on down, got out, cut the rope and took the bucket with me. After all, if I’m sacking Daventry for the crown, I might as well go all the way.

A short swim down the well later, I ended up meeting an old friend.

I remember being stuck on this guy for ages as a kid. What to do with him. How could I beat him? I wisely stayed back from him this time around, and feeling bad about killing the giant with a rock I didn’t want to kill another beast here. So throwing my dagger was out, but then I had a nice bucket of water and after throwing it at him he ran away with his tail tucked under him and I found myself in possession of treasure number 2 – the Magic Mirror. As good enough time to stop for the day before trying to find the last of the three.

Time Played: 1:55
Deaths: 6 (wolf, stairsx2, giant, drowning, falling in a well)
Score: 88 of 158

Ahh, King’s Quest. Thanks to DOSBOX and a little bit of help from a front end (DFend) and I’m up and running with a beautiful PC speaker representation of Greensleeves. Thanks Sierra!

So, here’s the first thing you’ll see when you start your game. That’s you, Sir Graham, in his jaunty traveling hat. You’re in the Kingdom of Daventry. Seems like a nice enough, pleasant sort of place. Nice castle, with a moat, and even alligators to help keep the peace. First things first, I wanted to go and see who was in the castle. I’m assuming it’s the King, who’s going to give me a clue as to what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s been long enough since I’ve played this game that I’m going to need all the help I can get.

So crossing the bridge, I end up in the moat, and my first death. Probably one of many dozens that I?ll encounter along the way.

Restarting my game, I navigate across the bridge successfully this time around and I make my way into the castle and talk with the king. It seems Daventry had 3 magic items – a mirror, a shield, and a chest – that helped keep it safe and prosperous. King Edward lost them through shady deals and if I can find them I will be appointed his heir.

Leaving the castle I wander about the countryside. I find a shack, which seems to have the kingdom?s only other human residents so far, and they are dirt poor. Just sitting at the empty table and waving their arms around madly when I talk with them. They are hungry, or so they say.

With a bit more traveling, I run into a ton of great treasure just laying about the kingdom. Graham finds an elf who just gives him a magic ring, a fairy who blesses him for being nice, a dagger, a golden egg, a four leaf clover, a carrot (maybe I should clue the woodcutter into the field of carrots behind the castle…), a bag of diamonds, and my favorite, a never-ending bowl of stew just sitting on the ground in the woods. What’s up with Daventry anyways? Why is this laying about? The king could get back to his prosperity if he just took a walk through his countryside picking up the things that must be garbage in this magical place.

Of course I run into lots of things to kill Graham as well. A witch. A wolf. A wizard. A troll blocks my way on a bridge. Graham also drowned while taking a quick dip in a lake, because I didn’t type swim fast enough. I’ve learned to travel on the edges of the screens just in case something pops up to try and kill me. That and lots and lots of saving.

The graphics are very dated. Sometimes you wonder what you are really looking at. It’s a battle trying to find out exactly what you need to type to actually look, or take anything on a screen. Still it?s impressive when you think this is 20+ years old and state of the art at the time. Take a look at the tree above. I thought they were pine cones at first, but a simple “take nut” rewarded me with a nut. Eating it also yielded me a gold nugget as well. I’m starting to like this place. What else might be lying around once I take over?

I took my magic bowl of stew to the woodcutter as he seemed hungry. If he couldn’t be bothered to pick a few carrots, why not bring the food to him! With some energetic arm waving, he and his wife were hungry no more and Graham was able to take their fiddle in thanks and play them a jig, and I’m also rewarded with more points!

After a bit more exploration of the countryside, I think it’s about time to get down to figuring out how to acquire the 3 magic items. Maybe figuring out how to get into the door in the mountain would be a good first step?

Time played: 1:03 hours
Deaths: 7
Score: 51 of 158 (Sweet, almost 1/3 of the way there!)

Welcome to Blogging Quest. This is going to be my attempt to play through all of the Sierra ?Quest? games, one by one, and blogging everything along the way. Where better to start than with King’s Quest I – Quest for the Crown, the very first of the many Quest?s we?ll undertake.

Where to start with Sierra and me? I’ve talked previously about my love of Sierra games, and blogged my memories of playing Kings Quest 4 and Space Quest 3. They were the first games company that I really knew and was a fan of as a kid. I didn’t realize it at first, but my first exposure to Sierra was in the Apple/Commodore lab at my elementary school. Troll’s Tale was what we got to play after finishing up with Oregon Trail, or other educational games. And my next experience was on my grandma’s Apple IIe, with Cranston Manor. These games settled me into an irrational love of adventure games.

My first introduction to King’s Quest must have been around 1985/1986. My nerdy friends and I all played computer games, with only a few of them having a NES, so computer games were the common language of games between us all. A friend, Jeff if I remember right, came to school one day and was going on and on about this game he’d just played. It was great! You could walk around behind things, in front of them. You typed in what you wanted to do. You wanted to open a door? Type “Open Door” and it opened, right there on the screen! It understood you! (You could even type in bad words and it would chastise you.) Sweet!

Of course during the days of old, everyone traded and copied games for each other, so he quickly gave me the disk, which thanks to his IMB PCjr wouldn’t work on my sweet Amstrad 1512. Nevertheless, we played it at his place, and I learned the simple joys of the never ending Sierra deaths, and found to save early, save often was essential when playing a Sierra game (and even then, you could screw up and have to restart!). I began my love of the Sierra adventure game that would last me for many many years to come.

King’s Quest I was originally created to be a showcase piece for IBM’s new PCjr line of computers. It was to take advantage of the great new graphics and sound that the PCjr was offering over the competition. It was amazing at the time for an adventure game. You could see the protagonist. You could walk through the scenes and interact with them, where before they were just static screens. It wasn’t long before the game was ported to other systems, including a wide PC release, along with the Apple II, Amiga and others.

I’ll be playing the 1987 wide release of the game for DOS, it’s essentially the same as the original 1984 release, but made to run on EGA computers, and not just on the Tandy 1000 or PCjr. For a bit more history on the game and other info check out the Wikipedia page on it.

Coming soon! Day 1 of Blogging Quest – King’s Quest I – Quest for the Crown!