Goblins Quest 3 – Final rating

By Ilmari

My experiences with the Goblins trilogy have been a mix of charm and frustration. The quirky humour and the intriguingly innovative gameplay have been a strong backbone of all of the three games. Then again, the first game had a frustratingly hard interface, with a diminishing health bar forcing you to replay the levels until you nailed it perfectly, and the second game was just too long and repetitive. I feel like the third game has nailed it, since there really was nothing to annoy me – even the length of the game was spot-on, the end coming after the most ingenious levels. We’ll see how far that gets with the PISSED rating.

Let's see where we'll land

Pepper's Adventures in Time – Won!

 By Will Moczarski

400 points in my pocket, and one more act to go. This time around we need to find out how meat was cooked in colonial households, learn about colonial cures for fleas, compositions for the glass armonica, blue dye, and taxation without representation. Sounds like a wicked school day to me.

Actual objectives are as follows: 

• Get into Penn Mansion,
• Rescue Lockjaw,
• Prove General Pugh's a Fraud!

Time to tie up all these loose ends, it seems. If you think back to act 5 you may remember that it involved a bit of time-travelling to the year 1787. Instead of witnessing the Constitutional Convention firsthand we learned about Ben Franklin's troublesome gout. Then we went back in time to 1764 again, which is why middle-aged Ben now looks quite young to Pepper. The jolly founding father, not knowing about our time travel shenanigans, takes that as a compliment, of course, and then the chitchat makes way for some serious plotting. Ben hands Pepper a custom-made kite and wants her to go windsurf across the river with it. After that, she is to distract the sentries at the front bridge with food. While Pepper proceeds to sneak into Penn Mansion, Ben will rally the colonists in order to put pressure on the General. (He does not acknowledge that it was us who did all the legwork for the rallying in the previous act by performing some mind-numbing...well, what's the opposite of a fetch quest? A spread quest?)

The Clue! - They Stole a Hundred Bucks

Written by Menhir Mike

We’re starting the game at Victoria Station and have a first look at the interface. The game has essentially two different modes: Exploration and planning/executing a burglary. I can control the game with either the keyboard or a mouse, but the keyboard is significantly more efficient.

Exploring the surroundings at Victoria Station.

In exploration mode, I can walk to another location, wait (to advance the clock), talk to people (if anyone is around), look at surroundings or people, investigate (more on that later), and think. The “Look” command mostly gives some flavor to a location or person, whereas the “Think” command gives information about everything Matt knows, like how much money we have (3 pounds) or any people that we know (we don’t).

Since there is nothing to do here, I am calling a taxi to go elsewhere. And as luck would have it, we’re the one millionth customer of the taxi company! Our reward is a full year of free taxi rides, which is a very convenient mechanism to make sure we’re not wasting money driving around (and potentially softlocking ourselves) that thematically fits in the game.

King’s Quest VII - Eh, What's Up, Doc?

Written by Michael

More links in this post than you can swing a stick at.

Well, last time we landed in the middle of a desert with the Queen of Daventry, a character we’ve never played before.  In previous games, we’ve controlled King Graham (3 times), his son Alexander (twice), and his daughter Rosella (just once).  No expectations yet about how she will behave.  Will she be as stuffy as Alexander was in the previous game?  Or as easy-going as undercover peasant girl Rosella was in the fourth installment?  Let’s find out.

So, we’ve just been nearly run over by the Daventry equivalent of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, or whatever world we’re in right now.  We’re deposited on a desert screen, and as I walk to the east, my dress gets caught on a cactus, ripping off a swatch.  I’ll pick that up, and I already have a comb in my inventory.  If I try to use the comb on myself, I break down into tears, because it belongs to Rosella (“My daughter!”) who got separated from us during the trip to this world.  

Pepper’s Adventures in Time – Back Without A Vengeance

 by Will Moczarski

Well, on to the penultimate act of Pepper’s Adventures in Time we go! Let’s dive right in...

Act 5: Pepper Visits the Constitutional Convention or The Key to an Old Ben’s Heart

In the fifth act we need to learn about gout, Ben’s raccoon skin cap, unusual uses for a kite, Ben’s role at the Constitutional Convention and eyeglasses invented by Ben. As usual, these will be necessary in order to solve the quiz at the end of the act. The objectives needed to progress to the final act are: 

* Distribute Ben’s Special Editions

* Go to the Constitutional Convention

* Get Advice from Ben

That’s fairly unspecific. Let’s see how we fare with this one! 

On the first screen we see Ben working on a new pamphlet. He wants to help the people get back to the “good old colonial ethics of hard work and diligence”. No more hippy-dippy for Mr. Franklin, it seems. Pepper asks whether Ben couldn’t just go to Penn Mansion and ask for Lockjaw, seeing that he’s a “pretty important guy in Philadelphia”. Ben turns her down, telling her that he was never on good terms with General Pugh and thus his influence doesn’t extend to his mansion. Pepper suggests they just raid the joint but Ben tells her that the Mansion is well guarded. He is positive that he can help her cross the river and sneak into the Mansion – it’s getting her out he’s worried about. Pepper then suggests that the townspeople of Philadelphia might be able to help but Ben tells her they’d need a reason to gather at Penn Mansion because they won’t rally against the General for a dog they don’t even know.