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<\/a>For one thing, it had \u201c3d\u201d \u2013 of a sort, anyway. What this meant in practical terms was that you could move in front of and behind certain objects. It informed the design a little \u2013 in quite small ways \u2013 but this first step toward the third dimension mattered. If Sierra could do it, so could other games makers.<\/p>\n
The second thing was the game\u2019s presentation. Yeah, 160×200 was a crazy resolution and sure, sixteen colours seems anaemic by today\u2019s standards, but it helps to view this in terms of it\u2019s contemporaries.<\/p>\n
Many of the adventure games of the age were either text-based \u2013 like the Infocom ones, or they had static images that took up some part of the screen that would help the user to visualize what the text was trying to convey, such as the hobbit.<\/p>\n
While various other game designers were trying to utilize the ideas of animation and a text parser, few of them married the two together as successfully as Sierra did for this first adventure.<\/p>\n
From that perspective this is all win-win.<\/p>\n
From a more modern perspective \u2013 if we look past the graphics, the scope of the game is pretty amazing. Being able to free-roam in this world and being able to tackle one of the big sub quests in any order was a great design decision that probably helped the game shift units. It is \u2013 also \u2013 one of the things that got stripped away from future iterations of the game. [And subsequent sequels.]<\/p>\n
You see, Sierra moved into it\u2019s \u201csecond age\u201d during around 1988\/1989 or so and it wanted to re-introduce these old games to a new user base. Five years in computer terms was an aeon, then and much had changed between 1983, when the game was released and 1989, when they wanted to re-release it.<\/p>\n
For one thing, sound was now a definite possibility. You\u2019ll note that throughout this review, I\u2019ve been praising the graphics and the idea of the game, but the sound…well, the sound was abysmal. It was PC-Speaker, loud as all get out [because the PC-Speaker only had one setting: On\/Loud, unless you physically disconnected the speaker\u2019s connections on the inside of the computer] and completely obnoxious.<\/p>\n
So Sierra designed a modernised version of the game. To do this, they changed around a handful of things, making the game far more linear, but introducing proper sound to the canvas of things that this game bought to the table. As far as it goes, the sound in the enhanced edition is rather pleasant, adding more [and certainly some beautiful] musical queues to a game that had been largely silent.<\/p>\n Some of this upgrade came at a price. The original game, as I mentioned, let you free-roam more-or-less wherever you wanted. It also let you tackle any \u201cbig\u201d part of the quest in any order you wanted, so long as you had the pieces to do so, but the modernization strips some of that away. It also moves puzzle pieces around and \u2013 on very rare occasions \u2013 changes a puzzle solution to \u201cbeing more modern.\u201d [most notably, the gnome riddle puzzle. The original game had a far scarier and more elaborate solution than the one presented in the remake.<\/p>\n So, there are differences, but they\u2019re not terrifically marked \u2013 especially when it comes to game play.<\/p>\n So, let\u2019s actually talk about playing the game. Part of the biggest problem for a modern audience with King\u2019s Quest 1 is that the game just dumps you into the world with no context and no direction. It blithely assumes that you\u2019ve read the manual, and, further, assumes that you\u2019re at least passably aware of how adventure games work. Some of the game functions \u2013 duck, jump and swim are, unhelpfully, tucked away in keybinds that are impossible to reset. They\u2019re also hidden unless you read the manual, had one of the early versions of the keyboard template, had one of the slightly revised versions of the game [which presented you with a menu if you pressed escape] or happened to hit f1 out of sheer desperation [because f1 always got you help in older programs.]<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>