For this 101 Things task, I chose one of my all-time favourite games, King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human. This was released in 1986, during the golden age of Sierra adventure games - all the great series, King's Quest, Space Quest, Hero's Quest... Ah, what a time to be young and geeky, and to own an Apple IIe/IIc...
I own the King's Quest series on CD, but it seems that 64-bit Windows Vista refuses to install and run the games. Boo, Windows. To get around this, I used AppleWin, an Apple IIe emulator for Windows. (Not only did I download King's Quest III, but I also found Adventureland, a purely text-based computer game - one of the very first I ever played! This'll probably be the subject of another post one day...)
Anyway, King's Quest III was a game I played back in the days before the Internet, when if you got stuck, you were stuck - unless you sent away for the hint book, which I may have had to resort to, I can't quite remember. But if I did succumb to the lure of the hint book, it wasn't until many months (years?) had passed with me trying to figure this game out. As such, many of the tricks and secrets to the game are burned indelibly into my brain. This made it a trip down memory lane, and a distinct pleasure, to play again.
I won't go through the whole plot of the story here, but it's your basic escape from slavery, defeat the dragon, rescue the princess type of deal. Here's me beating the dragon near the end of the game...
And here's the shot of the end of the game, with the adventurer's hat being passed on to one of the children...
You'll notice I only got 205 out of 210 points. I thought I did everything, so I had to go online and find which points I missed. Turns out I missed 5 points for "As a fly, enter hole in the tree." Darn. Now that I think about it, I vaguely remember doing that as a kid. Anyway, as it wasn't strictly necessary to beat the game, I'm okay with letting those 5 points slide.
This brought back so many fun memories that I think I'm going to look into playing a bunch of the other Sierra classics, through emulators if I must. They're just too fun to pass up!
3 comments:
I loved King's Quest and Hero's Quest so much! I got horribly stuck on Space Quest, so it wasn't much in the favourites category. Like you said, no Internet to help you cheat.
Oh, and let's not forget the Leisure Suit Larry series and the questions that you had to answer to prove that you were "adult" enough to play the game.
Nice work! Ah, the good old days of Sierra's dynasty. I was a big Leisure Suit Larry fan. I don't think my parents had any idea what I was playing.
@tsk: I also loved those questions. Helped me learn many important facts, like the drink "screwdriver" includes orange juice. You can see the whole list at http://www.allowe.com/Larry/1questions.htm
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