Platform: MS-DOS

Onward on my journey through the King’s Quest saga I go. Part III was the first in the series to really try to present a narrative. There are many more non-player characters to contend with, most notably Manannan the wizard, who has enslaved you to a life of household chores. These characters don’t just run on to the screen and steal your possessions (although there still is that in this game). There’s a genuine attempt to give them personality.

With all the new found attention to story telling, the designers seemed to not be paying much attention to game play. There are stretches of the game where you have to wait forever for a timed trigger event to occur. In the meantime you are stuck doing virtual dusting for fifteen minutes. Very boring.

Also, like most of these Sierra 3-D adventures, this game is really cruel when it comes to killing you off without a hint of advanced warning. These frustrating game play elements had me seeking out hints very early in the game. I found a website that was invaluable in getting me through the game. Universal Hint System guides you very gently through a invisiclues style hint system that does its best to avoid revealing to many spoilers.

Oh, and one more thing. The game requires you to have the manual to get anything important done. There is a section of the game when your mixing recipes for spells, following the manual, and, if you have one small typo during the tedious, drawn-out process, you die. As some consolation, they do take the time to show you a goofy animation of the spells going horribly wrong.

This was the last of the classic, mouse-free King’s Quest games. I think I am going to take a break from the series before attempting to tackle King’s Quest IV (which I got 75% through on my Apple ][gs back in the day).

I’m continuing to play the King’s Quest games in DosBox these days. Tonight I just completed King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne with 175 points out of 185.

To me, the art of these games is, in many ways, vastly more impressive than your modern 3D modeled game. The fact that every pixel on the screen was hand drawn and not rendered with some world generating algorithm just astounds me. Furthermore, even more so than King’s Quest I, the artists get tons of animation mileage out of so few pixels. They are not going for realism, rather they were trying to communicate a narrative, ideas and emotions. Yeah, that’s right. Video game romanticism.

In these first two installments, storytelling hasn’t been as much of the focus. They seem to be more geared towards exploration and object hunting. Although I had to look for hints twice (one of those times I had the right idea, I just forgot to re trigger an event during my many restores and saves), the adventuring is not so much about complex puzzle solving. That’s not such a bad thing since these days I don’t have the time to scratch my head for hours (I couldn’t get more than 2 or 3 rooms into Graham Nelson’s Curses, although in theory I liked that game). Perhaps as I play through these games I will get better at thinking through puzzles and then I can go back and attempt to take on an Infocom classic.

I am currently reveling in Sierra 3-D adventure games like the King’s Quest series and Leisure Suit Larry. As a kid, these were the only PC games that could draw me away from our family’s Apple ][. The economy of pixel usage in the art and animation is truly brilliant and the game play still holds up pretty well. I just finished King’s Quest I this evening for the first time. I finished with 136 points of a total 158. Made in 1984, this was the first of the Sierra 3-D adventures. It doesn’t quite hold up to some of the later entries in the series in terms of story and puzzle complexity. Without warning, the game can also be rendered un-winnable if you eat/use certain items at the wrong time. This is a big adventure game no-no in my opinion. But aside from these gripes, it was still fun twenty years after its release.