Sometimes It Is Wise To Think Backwards - Let's Play the King's Quest Series!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Sometimes It Is Wise To Think Backwards - Let's Play the King's Quest Series!

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

oldskool posted:

Sounds like it needed some more ports.

Honestly, that counts as one of the less dickish things this game (and series) will subject you to. Even with the limited number and variety of games available back then, I have no idea how the King's Quest series survived. There was no point in time where they were ever anything but an exercise in futility and frustration.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2017 15:11

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:50

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Charlett posted:

I can't play adventure games. Like other people, I get frustrated when I think I've figured out a puzzle and I feel super happy with myself only to realize that it's not "the game's way" to figure out the puzzle.

Not every adventure game is like this, but unfortunately there' still a demand for this type of bullshit for some reason, and it's basically impossible to know ahead of time whether any particular game is going to be big on adventure-game-logic or not. I'd recommend the Blackwell series, but the first game would probably put you off, so maybe try a let's play to see if it's the sort of thing you might otherwise enjoy and start actually playing with the second game.

I'd also recommend Journey of a Roach. It's not perfect, but it's simple enough that you're not likely to get frustrated.

Mikl posted:

I came into King's Quest late on, and I only played The Princeless Bride. One of the not-good ones, from what I gathered 'round the net.

That one (KQ7) is poo poo for other reasons. As far as dickish puzzles go, the worst I can remember is a tone-based audio puzzle, which I personally found impossible, but you can just look up a walkthrough for that. You can't actually lose progress or reach an unwinnable state in that one; there are still deaths, but the game just resets to right before you did the thing that killed you rather than making you reload a save.

The one that comes closest to being an actually OK game is KQ6 (Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow), but "best King's Quest game" is still damning with faint praise.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 05:00

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Poil posted:

They did that crap in other games as well.

It was so common that there were programs specifically designed to do nothing but slow down your computer, and DOSBox has it as a built-in option.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 14:50

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Waffleman_ posted:

If you're looking for adventure games without dick moves, the majority of Lucasarts' work is for you. They had a specific policy of never allowing their games to become unwinnable or including death states in the games.

Or pretty much just avoid Sierra. Others might have done it, but I think Sierra's pretty much the only company to have made it a standard part of every game they made.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 17:17

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Cythereal posted:

One puzzle game I loved as a kid, Cydonia, took a middle ground: there's an item you can pick up in the first few screens of the game that you need much, MUCH later in the game in order to progress. The puzzle this item solves where you can first find it is optional. The puzzle it solves near the end of the game is not. Didn't pick it up? Hope you enjoy a fuckton of backtracking!

King's Quest 5 contains a puzzle that you can solve in two different ways. Solving it the wrong way leads to being unable to solve a later puzzle at all. You won't realise this until you get to that later puzzle and possibly bash your head against it for hours trying to figure out what you missed.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 17:26

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

DoubleNegative posted:

Since there's a lot of discussion about all sorts of adventure game titles, would other people be interested in doing LPs of those if I turned this into a general adventure games megathread?

I'd love to see more adventure game LPs, but I think they'd be better off just having their own threads rather than all being posted in one.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2017 06:07

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

DoubleNegative posted:

In the original EGA version of the game, the one that came out in 1984, this was the solution to the puzzle. You see, to a normal human brain the hint "Sometimes it's wise to think backwards." means to spell Rumplestiltskin backwards, thus "Nikstlitselpmur". Roberta Williams took "thinking backwards" to mean something entirely different.

She, instead, intended for you to sit down and create an atbash cipher, where you replace all the letters with their reverse. So A=Z, B=Y, C=X, and so on. Spelling Rumplestiltskin through that cipher would get you to the eventual letter jumble "Ifnkovhgroghprm".

Even in 1984, people rightly called bullshit on that. So in the 1990 SCI remake, the game no longer accepted Ifnkovhgroghprm as a valid answer, and only took Nikstlitselpmur or Nikstlitslepmur. Sierra was nice enough, you see, to allow for the E and L to be transposed.

You forgot to mention how the original version of the puzzle didn't just expect you to figure out the cipher, but also used the less common spelling of "Rumpelstiltskin". That's what the switching L and E around in the remake is about. So even if you knew to try the reverse alphabet version, you probably still got told it was the wrong answer. :haw:

GreyjoyBastard posted:

I first did this for the old Magic the Gathering Shandalar game, which I should probably replay since it was awesome.

I never even bothered playing the RPG part of that, it seemed like a bit of a pain. I just played the separate duel mode, which was great. I was tempted to load it up again recently but it turns out i's a bit of a hassle to get running on modern computers.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2017 14:54

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Zeniel posted:

Josh Mandel seems like a pretty good sport, like when Slowbeef got him to tell Cedric to gently caress off.

When/where did this happen?

# ¿ Jun 17, 2017 17:46

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Were the shortcut keys in the original release of the game? I could have sworn you had to type "swim" every time.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2017 17:16

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Xander77 posted:

None. Snakes are venomous.

They could also be poisonous, you don't know.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 05:41

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Psychotic Weasel posted:

Was this not the standard SOP in any adventure game from the early 80's to the late 90's?

It's still way too common. At least these days mouse-based interfaces make it much less tedious to try every inventory object on everything in the environment.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2017 05:04

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

idonotlikepeas posted:

every staircase becomes an impassible nightmare zone. You'd think they'd just learn to use elevators in their games instead.

Or just have you step onto the staircase and then transition instantly to the next screen. Making you walk all the way up (or down) has got to be an intentional challenge.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2017 07:55

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

DoubleNegative posted:

Are thimbles even watertight? They don't seem like they would be.

Seems like you answered your own question with the video you linked?

# ¿ Jul 23, 2017 16:00

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

I think the trader in King's Quest 7 has some useless junk, but it's not a problem since he'll happily take them back in exchange for the things you do need. Also I may be misremembering.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2017 08:52

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Psychotic Weasel posted:

Prior to cheap(er) CD-ROM drives games and other enterprise software had already begun to get quite large. I remember some games needing upwards of 15-20 diskettes to install, smaller HDDs also meant you'd be deleting and reinstalling things a lot more often than you do today. God help you when you needed to reformat things. Not to mention all the fun of juggling boot disks.

I installed Windows 95 at least once from 26 floppy disks.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2017 06:46

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

GeminiSun posted:

So, wait, the prince got kidnapped as an infant by an evil wizard and they just... kinda, let it go? Even if Manannan didn't leave a trail, did we not have any passing fairytale soothsayers who could have told us where the prince was taken? Did Graham have too much on his plate to undertake, or send knights on, a quest to FIND AND RESCUE HIS MALE HEIR? For that matter, why did Manannan even kidnap a prince, instead of some poor peasant's son? The disappearance of a royal infant is not inconspicuous!!

Also doesn't Graham have a magic mirror that could have told him exactly where his son had been taken and by whom?

# ¿ Jul 30, 2017 05:55

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

I would absolutely love to hear the designer(s) explain the thought process behind this.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2017 05:45

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

MagusofStars posted:

So you're saying that "Just give the throne to whatever dude happens to get back our treasures regardless of his actual knowledge" isn't a good basis for a system of government? Shocking.

The old king specifically picked Graham to go find the treasures though.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2017 05:29

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Tombstone posted:

1546

Reader, here lies--but forebear
To read more without a tear,
One--I cannot speak the rest,
You may weep. I'll smite my breast,
Grief preventing, and this stone,
Too small to be written on.
Only this--a little boy,
Willy--in Abram's bosom laid.

Is this written badly on purpose or something? Is it a clue? The first and third attempts at rhymes are obviously terrible, but what's with the last line? It's not even trying. Did they originally say "lad" instead of "boy" and change it for some reason?

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 06:57

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Bar Crow posted:

It's unfortunate that adventure games didn't follow the Quest for Glory route and include RPG elements. Combining the two genres fixes a bunch of issues with both. All those bullshit deaths make players want a tool set for finding a solution instead of reading Roberta Williams's mind/calling the Sierra hint line.

Adventure games with RPG elements are garbage. :colbert:

# ¿ Sep 2, 2017 03:45

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Xander77 posted:

Also, it's a shame that the voice version doesn't have an option to have voice AND text. The option was there for later titles, but I think it's fairly obvious it's good to have both even if this is the first voiced game your company produced.

IIRC you could have both in 6, but it was voice-only in 7.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2017 10:20

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Ze Pollack posted:

see, the djinni kind of occupy a similar role in arabic/islamic mythology to the one Lucifer has in european/christian mythology: they were created first, they have awesome supernatural powers, and they are PISSED at the fact that God decided to favor man over them. there was a war. they lost.

Aren't they more like Greek gods, in that some of them are arseholes all the time, some are nice most of the time, but most of them just have their own lives and interests and only occasionally interact with humans in any way? Like basically just more powerful humans.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2017 03:55

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2017 04:17

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Leif. posted:

And even the witch + genie lamp was something you could figure out by trial and error spamming every possible inventory item usage.

I feel like that style of puzzle, where you just end up rubbing every inventory item on every other object until something happens, doesn't get enough criticism. Sure, you can solve things that way, but if more than a tiny fraction of players end up doing that then the puzzle is too difficult/nonsensical. Most players should have a good chance of being able to come up with the solution to most puzzles, otherwise it's not so much a game as a lovely cartoon that makes you do busy-work. But a lot of people seem to think that that kind of interaction is an unavoidable or even desirable feature of the genre.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2017 08:30

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

I've got to say, that yeti puzzle doesn't seem too bad to me. Like, the first time you see the pie you've got to suspect that someone's getting hit in the face with it at some point, right?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 08:07

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

DoubleNegative posted:

"Where are you going" is a complete sentence to everyone but pedants and 9th grade grammar teachers.

I've actually finished this game, and this is the one thing in it that really makes me angry. "Where are you going?" is a full sentence and the word that eventually gets added to "complete" it makes it worse, by turning it into a sentence that no one would actually say. How loving difficult could it possibly have been to come up with an actual incomplete sentence that genuinely needed an additional word? :argh:

# ¿ Nov 11, 2017 06:38

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:50

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Psion posted:

"Yes, you should play KQ6" is probably the one statement everyone here would agree on.

Nah. It's by far the best King's Quest game, but that's really not saying much.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 02:33

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Sometimes It Is Wise To Think Backwards - Let's Play the King's Quest Series!