Game 3: King's Quest II - Final Rating

It’s time to apply the PISSED rating system again, this time to King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne. I’ll say straight off that I’d be surprised if it doesn’t rate higher than the first game, but I’m still getting  used to this system and am not really sure what to expect. Time will tell whether the scores it produces match my general feeling towards games. Right, let’s do this...

Puzzles and Solvability
The puzzles in King’s Quest II are once again based around discovering items that are loosely hidden around the place and then figuring out how to apply them to certain situations. Where things are different this time around is that the game is more linear, and as a result there are far less opportunities (if any!) to get stuck in a location without any way to pass it. If you’ve made it into the mountains, then you must already have the oil lamp, which is all that’s needed to progress. If you’ve got to the tower where Valanice is located, then you must have at least one way to pass the lion, whether it’s through brains or brawn. With this in mind, there are multiple solutions for many of the puzzles in the game. In all of these cases, the path you choose makes no difference to the outcome of the game, but it does affect the points you receive for it.

Opening sections of the game after completing a certain task was a big step in adventure gaming!

Interestingly, the more violent the solution you perform, the less points you receive for it, which from what I’ve seen so far, is a feature of the series as a whole (I haven’t played past part III). There’s one particular puzzle that I managed to solve the non-violent way without having any real clue as to how I could have figured it out without purposely trying not to be violent. I knew that killing the snake with the sword would probably not achieve maximum points, so I tried throwing the bridle at it (the only other item I received in that area). Without going into too much detail, it worked! This doesn’t rate highly on my solvable scale and is probably the only case in the game of a puzzle solution that isn’t particularly logical (the boatman puzzle could almost fit here I guess). All up, there are definite improvements in the way puzzles are handled, that not only made part II better than part I, but also made their way into the genre as a whole. It’s a 7!

In respect of Chris de Burgh, I ain't paying you until you get me to the other side.

Interface and Inventory
The inventory works the same way it did in King’s Quest I, which is easy to use, so no qualms there. The interface is also very similar; with the two changes I mentioned in an earlier post (the new more suitable speed option and the ability to get a summary of your surroundings by typing “look”) being the obvious improvements. The issues with the parser limitations are still there, as is the immense difficulty in climbing stairs due to the simulated depth perspective giving you absolutely no room for error. Thankfully there are fewer sections that require dexterity, so this latter frustration isn’t as much of an issue. Overall, I feel it’s appropriate to give Interface and Inventory two points more than last time, making it a 5.

I deserve such a reward for being forced to climb another set of steps with this depth perspective.

Story and Setting
As I made clear in my introduction post for the game, it’s easy to take the piss out of the Romancing the Throne story. It’s so filled with cliché that it’s either very bad writing or a Shrek-like parody of old school fairy tales. I’m assuming the latter, and the comedy that was injected in the game, albeit seemingly as an afterthought, probably proves that well enough. It’s the item collecting and puzzle solving that drove me to continue playing and certainly not the romantic urge to find the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, who was tragically locked in a tower guarded by a lion and whom most certainly would fall in love with King Graham on first sight, who was lonely due to no other woman being up to his high standards. I guess it’s slightly more satisfying than the “find three items and become king” quest of the first game, but only just. 5.

Was it now?! Thanks for letting me know.

Sound and Graphics

The sound in King’s Quest II still suffers from the inbuilt PC speaker sound that so horribly tarnished mid eighties games, but it’s a shame as the fourteen different tunes in the game (including Green Sleeves and the theme song to Romeo & Juliet) fit the content like a glove. Sound effects are just as minimal as they were in the first game and not worth discussing. Graphics were once again created by drawing the outline of objects and then filling them with colour, so the game world has a very comparable look to the first one, apart from the pretty awfully coloured landscape that Graham is confronted with after going through the doorway at the conclusion. I think I’ll stick with a 5 here, despite the slight improvements in music selection and character illustrations.

There's a signpost up ahead, your next stop is the twilight zone!

Environment and Atmosphere
While Kolyma does wrap around from north to south, the east and west landscape boundaries somehow give the world more presence. The King’s Quest Companion stupidly tries to explain why things are the way they are as follows: “For reasons forgotten, or perhaps it was whimsy on the part of the multiverse--movement to both the north and south in this part of Kolyma eventually turned back upon itself, contained as if inside some transparent cosmic donut. East and west, one could travel at will until confronted by more physical barriers--the sea or mountains for instance--but those that journeyed far enough north of south, would always get back to where they started.” Huh?! Transparent cosmic donut!? Anyway, Kolyma is another 49+ screens of suitably enchanting landscape, objects and characters, so I’ll settle for 6 again.

King Graham would go to any length to escape the transparent cosmic donut!

Dialogue and Acting
There are very few moments in King’s Quest II where someone actually speaks to you, and when they do it’s merely to ask something of you or to thank you for giving them something. The large majority of “dialogue” is really just narrative description of your surroundings and what’s going on in Graham’s near vicinity. It’s all simple stuff, filled with cliché (as expected) and entirely one way traffic, but it gets the job done. There are no real changes to the way the original handled this stuff, so a 4 it was and a 4 it will be.

He turned you into a venomous snake? I hope he received a Darwin Award for that effort!

King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne comes in at 53 on the PISSED rating system, which just beats Below the Root to the top of the leader board. It’s a fun game that improved upon the original, even if it only slightly pushed the evolution of the genre forwards. It’s actually quite funny reading reviews today that were written back in 1985. It’s hard to believe how advanced this game really was for the time! I’ll leave you with a couple of quotes:

“The animated graphics are simply the best we have ever seen on a home computer.” – Computer Gaming World, June 1985

“I still can’t get over the graphics. The trees, buildings, lakes and ocean are all dimensionally correct.” – Antic, May 1986

Game 3: King's Quest II - Won!

My prediction that I’d complete King’s Quest II in around another hour turned out to be correct. While there were a few sections I had no recollection of and had to put some thought into, most of it was fairly straight forward and I imagine wouldn’t pose too much trouble to experienced players. Probably the two most challenging parts were getting the boatman to take me across the lake to Dracula’s castle (he signals that he wants an item, but the solution doesn’t require giving him one), and figuring out what the hell I was supposed to do once I found Valanice. I spent no less than fifteen minutes standing in the tower next to Valanice wondering what it was I was supposed to say to her or what item I was supposed to give her to finish the game! I eventually fell back on studying each item I had in my possession for clues, which turned out to reveal what was required, but I felt a bit stupid there for a while. I had a bad feeling that in all my cockiness and eagerness to complete the game quickly, I’d totally missed an important item somewhere along the way.

So...do you come here often? Um...(whistles)

I’m not sure that I’ve ever finished a Sierra game with full points, and this would have to be the closest I’ve ever got. Finishing on 183 out of 185, I really had no idea on completion where those two points were that I missed. My first thought was that maybe it was possible to cross the bridge two more times (you get 1 point every time you successfully cross it), but a quick restore proved that wasn’t the case (it collapsed with Graham still on it). I resolved to check a walkthrough to see if I could figure out what it was I missed, and it turns out the only thing I didn’t do was cover the nightingale cage when removing it from Hagatha’s cave. I didn’t actually need to do that as Hagatha wasn’t home when I came to fetch it, but apparently you can still take the cage while she’s present if you cover it to avoid the nightingale making any noise. Regardless, I’m pretty happy with 183, and feel no need to go back and complete the game with full points, particularly as I cheated by reading the walkthrough.

No wedding would be complete without everyone that's ever tried to kill you in the audience!

Playing through the first two games in the series back to back has really given me a chance to discern the changes and improvements that occurred between I and II. I’ve already mentioned some of the interface changes that made the game more enjoyable to play, and how the second game’s story progresses in a more linear fashion, but one of the other additions in the sequel is comedy. Admittedly, the comedy is not really found within the story itself, but through various Easter eggs and random events that surprise the player from time to time. If you visit Hagatha’s cave enough times, you’ll eventually be confronted by the bat mobile driving around, backed by the batman theme music. The developers even programmed in a few plugs for their other games that the player can stumble upon occasionally, most tellingly a full blown trailer for Space Quest that bombards a confused Graham when he peers into the hole of a rock. This blatant marketing could perhaps be seen as being in bad taste, but it’s done in such a way that it’s really quite hilarious, and doesn’t at all seem out of place in the anything goes fantastical world of King’s Quest.

Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na,, na, na, na, na, Batman!

It should be apparent by now that I enjoyed King’s Quest II quite a bit, but the truth is a lot of the problems with the first game are still present. Given the technology used to make it was almost identical, I guess that shouldn’t be all that surprising, but it can’t be ignored. I’ll save the pros and cons for my PISSED rating post tomorrow, but I’ll leave you with one particular puzzle that should give you a good idea of just how silly things are in the King’s Quest universe. On finally unlocking all three doors and walking through to a strangely coloured new world, the player finds themselves situated next to the water, with nowhere to go. The only item available is a fishing net, so it makes sense to throw the net in the water and see what happens. Lo and behold, you catch a large golden fish, which then flops around on the ground as if dying. You can try talking to it or picking it up, but the only thing to do is throw it back in the water. The fish is so happy with you for saving it, despite the fact that you ripped it from the water in the first place, that it offers you a ride across the water. That’s like robbing someone of their possessions, giving them back to them, and then having them offer you their thanks along with the aforementioned possessions as a gift!

I assume you're a giant goldfish and have already forgotten the bit where I nearly killed you!

Game 3: King's Quest II - Graham: Treasure Hunter

There’s something extremely comforting about starting these early Sierra games. I don’t know whether it’s just my slight obsessive compulsive disorder (which is what leads me to write a blog like this in the first place) that makes going from screen to screen trying to find hidden items so enjoyable, or whether this process is something the majority of gamers are attracted to. Either way, just as with King’s Quest I, I spent the first hour of the sequel mapping out the game world and adding as many items to my inventory as possible. The creators expanded the standard playing area by only one screen, with the grid being 7 x 7 this around rather than 8 x 6. The main difference is that the game only wraps around north and south, with the west blocked off by the ocean and the east by a tall mountain range. Graham starts his journey on the beach in the west, having apparently travelled to Kolyma in an undisclosed fashion (are we supposed to assume a boat?).

King Graham steps off his hover-rock to begin his quest

There are two interface improvements that are immediately noticeable when playing the game. Firstly, an extra speed option has been added to the menu system. King’s Quest I offered Slow, Normal and Fast, with the first two being unbearably slow, while the latter was unplayably swift. King’s Quest II offers Slow, Normal, Fast and Faster, and it turns out Fast is a perfect speed to play the game without having to wait for Graham to crawl from screen to screen. The second improvement is that the player can now get a fairly detailed overview of the area they’re in by typing “look”. No longer are you required to type in “look at tree”, “look at rock”, “look at painting” etc. attempting to figure out which items on each screen are worthy of attention. If an item isn’t mentioned in the description that comes up, then chances are it’s not relevant. This undoubtedly makes the game quicker to solve for first time players, but it allows you to focus on what’s important rather than concentrating on what’s not.

So chances are I need to do something with the soup and the trunk.

Gameplay itself is very similar to the first one. Most items can be found either sitting out in the open waiting to be picked up, or hidden in fairly obvious hollows such as stumps or mailboxes. There are certain individuals that can randomly appear on particular screens that should be avoided (Hagatha the witch will grab you and put you in a stew, the Dwarf will steal your items and hide them in his home) and a fairy (filling in for the fairy godmother of the first game) that enchants you, making you immune to the aforementioned baddies for a period of time. However, there is one important change in gameplay for King’s Quest II, which is that it has linear story progression. King’s Quest I allowed the player to go anywhere they wanted, even if they didn’t have an item necessary to complete the destination, resulting in instances where the game was not solvable. In King’s Quest II, there are certain areas that only open up once you’ve completed a certain task, such as the Antique Shop, King Neptune’s underwater kingdom, and Dracula’s castle. This is a welcome change and one that would make its way into future adventure games.

Yes, that's Graham in Hagatha's stew. No, that's not supposed to happen.

I’ve played the game for just over an hour, and I’m pretty sure I’ve collected everything there is to get without reading the first inscription on the magic door that hovers near the eastern mountains. One thing I do remember from last time I played the game is that you can only cross the bridge that leads to the door a finite amount of times before it collapses, so with that in mind I decided to complete as much as I can elsewhere before going across and setting the main quest wheels in motion. There’s no doubt that King’s Quest II is a better game than the first one in almost every respect, and it reminds me of just why I loved these games so much as a young boy. Once again I remember far more from those early years than I expected to, and I figure I’ll be able to finish the game in another hour or so. Then again, anyone that plays adventure games will know how stuck you get just when things are going so well. I must admit, I’m looking forward to playing a game I’ve never played before, for the challenge as much as the new experience.

It's time to cross the bridge and get things moving.

Game 3: King's Quest II - Introduction

It looks like our King Graham has been working out between games.

After ripping my way through King’s Quest I, it’s now time to move onto the next game on the list, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne. This is another game that I’ve played through previously, but again that was a long, long time ago. Unlike the first game, I can’t recall ever playing King’s Quest II a second time, so perhaps I’ll find it a little more challenging. Developed way back in 1985, it wasn’t particularly surprising to find Sierra quickly pumping out a sequel after the success of the first game in the King’s Quest series. Roberta Williams decided she wouldn’t try to push the technology too far with the sequel, particularly as disk space and memory restrictions couldn’t cope with any dramatic improvements. The graphics and animations would be created the same way and the text parser would also use the same technology as were used first time round. She did feel however that there was one area in particular that she could build on while staying within the restrictions of the time, and that’s the story.

Of course he's loved by his people! He's got a chest that never runs out of gold!

The story of King’s Quest 1 was a rather simplistic affair. Find three magical items for the King and be rewarded with the kingdom itself. The King of course very conveniently passes away the very moment the player returns with the items, leaving Graham seated on the throne as King of Daventry at the conclusion of the game. King’s Quest II picks up one year later. The year that has past was one of great prosperity for Daventry, ruled by a King who possessed a bottomless chest, an invincible shield and a mirror that tells the future. When looking in the mirror one day, Graham is shocked to see former King Edward, who warns him that Daventry will soon become weak if he fails to find an heir. The Prime Minister of Daventry, Gerwain, suggests to Graham that he hold a celebration where women from all over the land can come and try to win his favour. Unfortunately, while Graham does take Gerwain’s advice, he doesn’t manage to find his perfect match. Amusingly, his reasons for rejecting them are fairly finicky, such as “one maid squinted, another tripped over everything in sight”.

I feel for the guy. He has everything, but no woman reaches the level of awesomeness he demands!

While standing in front of the magic mirror, Graham wonders aloud why he can’t find a woman that touches his heart and his dreams, despite there being hundreds of lovely maidens in the kingdom. The mirror immediately displays the most beautiful woman Graham had ever seen, and yet she looks sad, with a tear rolling down her face. The mirror tells him that this woman is Valanice and that she has been imprisoned in a tower by a witch called Hagatha and which is guarded by a ferocious beast in a land called Kolyma. To rescue her, he must venture forth and find three keys which unlock the doors to Kolyma. So…it should be pretty clear by now that Roberta spent a little bit more time on the story this time round, but that merely makes it longer rather than more intelligent or less cliché than the first. It will be interesting to see whether the in-game dialogue is improved upon, or whether the characters that pop up throughout have more personality than they did in the previous effort. I really can’t remember.

It really was hard to make chicks look hot in EGA.

King’s Quest II was the game that kick started the tradition of using the series as a training ground for future designers. Scott Murphy (game logic) and Mark Crowe (graphics) were amongst the developers of the game, and would go on to create their own successful series, Space Quest, a year later. Al Lowe (music) is another recognisable name, who would eventually be the man behind yet another classic Sierra adventure series, Leisure Suit Larry. Before I crank up DOSbox and return to Daventry, I should mention that I’m once again playing the re-released and slightly improved 1987 version of the game, which is the one most people have played in the various collections over the years. Sierra initially intended to remake the game in 1990, just as they did for part one the same year, but the poor sales of all the remakes that released convinced them not to go ahead with the plan (there is a fan made one out there however). Enough talk, I’ve got an imprisoned maiden to save!

Requires 128K, Colour/Graphics Adaptor, and Double Sided Disk Drive. Steep requirements!