•  
  • Talonfire
  • Level: 32 (78%) 
  • Rank: Snake Eater
  • Member since: Jan 1, 2005
  • Last online: 12/17/09 12:59 pm PT
  • My Emblems:
    • Rank: Registered Member
    • Popular
    • Remarkable Member
    • Readers' Choice 2007 Chooser
    • I voted
    • Tagger Flirt
    • Readers' Choice 2005 Chooser
    • PC Aficionado
    • Rank: Registered Member
    • Popular
    • +1 Orator of Distinction
    • Old-School
    • Serious Collector
    • PC Aficionado
    • Readers' Choice 2005 Chooser
    • Tagger Flirt
    • I voted
    • Readers' Choice 2007 Chooser
    • Remarkable Member
     
     
    Close

My Friends

My Recent Ratings

Title Score
Aliens Versus Predator 2: Primal Hunt Expansion Pack 3.5
Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa 9.0
Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta 4.5
King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human (VGA) 8.0
King's Quest II: Romancing The Stones (VGA) 9.0
King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown (VGA Version) 8.5
Fallout 3: Point Lookout 7.0
Fallout 3 8.0
Fallout 3: Broken Steel 7.0
Fallout 3: The Pitt 6.5
21Jun 09

Old School Gamer Chronicles 4 - Kings Quest V (1990)

"Whoops! That last step was a doozey." - KQ5 Narrator

To be honest, I miss all of those old school adventure games. LucasArts made some pretty good ones back in the day, but Sierra was hands down the best of the lot with the King's Quest and Space Quest series'. For this particular article I wanted to take a look at what I consider to be the best installment in the King's Quest series.

Developer: Sierra
Publisher: Sierra On-Line


Gameplay: Adventure games were a big market back in the late 80's up until the mid 90's. The leading developers and publishers in the industry, Sierra and LucasArts both released a legion of these titles. King's Quest V is actually a departure from the first four games where you used a text parser to interact with the game world, instead King's Quest V switched to a newer and less cumbersome point and click interface.

KQ 5's new control system wasn't well received by all fans


Instead of typing in commands, you simply right clicked (or used the toolbar to select a command if you had a one button mouse) to switch between "look at, touch/take, talk to", there was also an option in the toolbar for your inventory.
Like most point and click adventure games King's Quest V focused mainly on item puzzles. You essentially had to pick up everything you could, because chances are it would be required at some point. Unlike LucasArts adventure games, though; Sierra was known for making their titles very, very unforgiving. If you made one mistake it could come back and bite you during the end game, forcing you to start over. There were also many ways for King Graham to die, in fact throughout the King's Quest games where Graham was the star (KQ 1, 2, 5), Graham probably died in every single way imaginable. I'm not talking epic sword deaths either, tripping over a small rock can kill Graham... for a former Knight he's a very fragile man.

Graham's 1337 swimming skills were no match for the calm and steady river's mighty current.

Design: King's Quest V was a pretty fresh take on the adventure genre. Due to the unforgiving gameplay, KQ5 can be a very frustrating experience at times and a lot of old school gamers learned their "use more than one save" habit from titles such as this. Personally, I liked this design as it made the game feel like a more "realistic" adventure. King's Quest V keeps the tradition of being set in a world where fairy tales come to life. There are beautiful backgrounds, and the game world is filled with references to popular fairy tales and fantasy adventures.

This game is also not for people with short attention spans, as it has one of the longest introductions in the history of video games that lasts well over thirteen minutes, that's sixty seconds multiplied by thirteen point twenty, and that's terrible. It also doesn't help that the voice acting was laughably bad; Cedric's (the Owl) voice actor is especially bad. Josh Mandall actually did a good job as Graham, but he's pretty much the only half-decent VA in the game. The music on the other hand was amazing; it really fit in with the fairy tale/fantasy backdrops.

KQ5 has one of the longest introductions in video game history.

Nostalgia Factor: King's Quest V was one of those games that stuck with me even after all of these years. When I sat down and replayed it I didn't find it to be any worse than I remember, in fact it was actually better since I was able to finish it this time around.

Critical Reception: King's Quest V was pretty well received by most critics with the exception of a small few who didn't like the new point and click interface.

How it holds up: Pretty good, there's no longer much of a market for adventure games with Telltale Studios being the only developer still making them. King's Quest V also has a beautiful storybook quality to its graphics making it somewhat timeless compared to, say, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity which was full 3D and is pretty ugly to look at nowadays. Of course, that game was pretty bad all around, anyway.

Useless Trivia:
Unfortunately I can't think of anything. I know I know, you're all tragically disappointed now.

External Links:
King's Quest V on Moby Games

  • Posted Jun 21, 2009 10:15 am PT
  • Category: Editorial
  • 6 Comments

6 Comments

  • fastpunk

    Posted Jun 24, 2009 1:03 pm PT

    "I know I know, you're all tragically disappointed now." - Damn right we are!

    Hey man! What's up? Twas a nice blog, even though I know next to nothing about the King's Quest series. Judging from those screenshots KQ5 looks pretty good. I imagine you use DOS-Box for this, thus being able to run it in windowed mode. Going full screen with older games is often painful, specially if you have a widescreen monitor.


    Can't say I'll try it for sure, but who knows. As far as adventure games are concerned, I'm focused on Blade Runner right now, then I'll probably try Dreamfall, or the Monkey Island series.


    Speaking of which, you heard they're going to remake Monkey Island? Jesus Christ, what's up with all the franchise necromancy? 10 years from now we'll try to find something new to play but we'll bump into the same names we do today if this keeps up.

    Blah, whatever. Be seeing you around!

  • Talonfire

    Posted Jun 24, 2009 2:32 pm PT

    Yeah I used DOS Box, the "Windows" version doesn't even work on Windows 95 let alone Vista.

    If you're interested in learning about King's Quest there are actually free VGA remakes of the first three, I finished all of them recently and they were very nice. I'll be doing a blog review of all three of them this weekend.

    I heard about the Monkey Island remake, I actually haven't finished the first two, let alone touched 3 and 4. I'd really like to sometime as I enjoyed Sam & Max: Hit the Road and Maniac Mansion, but if they only plan on re-releasing the first Monkey Island then I probably won't bother.

  • jepsen1977

    Posted Jun 25, 2009 4:26 am PT

    Nice blog, mate! Ah, adventure games - they used to be my sworn enemy. I hated them due to some bad experiences with them (Phantasmogoria 2, 7th Guest, Monkey Island) that had some stupid puzzles. But now that I have matured some I have retried several adventure games and really liked them. Games like The Longest Journey, Broken Sword 2+3, Sam & Max Season 1 etc. are really great games.

    The King's Quest series never made it to Denmark and I have only recently read about them as part of the history of gaming. But it cannot be denied that companies like Sierra, Infocom, Lucas Arts and others really did so much creative work with adventure games that had a deep storyline and great puzzles. It's too bad that we don't see much of that dedication in todays dev teams simply because they want to make a buck.

    There are so many old but great adventure games that are worthy of being played today and we all learn something new each time. I learned in Broken Sword 2 that you can actually die in adventure games! I never knew you could do that :-)

  • Talonfire

    Posted Jun 25, 2009 6:42 am PT

    I haven't tried either of the Longest Journey games admittedly, I keep meaning to. Sam and Max Seasons One and Two were great, though.

    As long as it isn't Telltale or one of LucasArts' old adventure games, you can probably die. Sierra is the only AG developer I know of that had inane and often hilarious deaths in their games, though. I believe they're called "Sierra Deaths" by adventure gamers.

  • weedman1985

    Posted Jun 27, 2009 9:37 am PT

    Great blog, and I must say I was rather surprised that there was an adventure game I haven't heard of

    King's quest looks like a very memorable game by your description. Adventure games, to me, were always a memorable experience since these games were mainly story driven. It's a shame that Lucas Arts decided they could slap star wars in all their games and let the cash roll in. It seems that even sierra has quit the whole adventure game busyness, and the whole genre basically disappeared. A damn shame indeed.

    I would also recommend titles such as: Sanitarium, Grim Fandango, Diskworld (if you can get your hands on that one), Any "Goblins" game which is very witty and fun, and of course any game in the Myst series. Also, as mentioned earlier, Blade Runner was a truly rare occasion when a game based on a movie that was based on a book turned out to be a good game (so was the book and the movie).

    I miss the good old days. Adventure games always had witty humor, metaphors, sarcasm, irony, references to movies and really superb writing.
    Today, in contrast we got games like Gears of War where the only dialogues are "**** **** shoot that mother****er in the balls" variations while spewing out testosterone by the buckets and acting like overly muscular gorrilas with no brains.

    Also, I'm very disappointed there is no trivia!

My Recent Ratings

Title Score
Aliens Versus Predator 2: Primal Hunt Expansion Pack 3.5
Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa 9.0
Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta 4.5
King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human (VGA) 8.0
King's Quest II: Romancing The Stones (VGA) 9.0
King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown (VGA Version) 8.5
Fallout 3: Point Lookout 7.0
Fallout 3 8.0
Fallout 3: Broken Steel 7.0
Fallout 3: The Pitt 6.5
advertisement