Thorton02 wrote:

Did anyone play the Adventures of Willy Beamish?

Yep, it's on my list of games to walkthrough.

I still think anyone who "enjoys" an old King's Quest is looking through nostaliga-covered glasses. Those things were incredibly fucking frustrating. Particularly when you found out you missed an item you can't go back for, with no hint at all, and need to start over. After you paid 10 bucks for the hint book and found this out.

My favorites are the LucasArts ones...Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango in particular.

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That made winning more fulfilling though. Modern games like Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk are divided into chapters, and you can't advance until you've done everything you're supposed to do. They're still fun, but not as fun, because there's not really any way to lose.

Yeah. This right here was worth having to restart the game because you forgot the iron bar on the beach or the near-invisible shell on the island.

And don't get me started on that fucking cheese puzzle.

I see your point, though. Honestly, I think the LucasArts games were still pretty fun despite having "no way to lose". But really, some of the shit the King's Quest games was blatantly unfair and/or just designed to make you buy the walkthrough. And really, isn't a puzzle where you die the same as a puzzle where you can't progress, just with less "reloading"?

I don't think death or no-death matters in graphic-adventure, it's how well the game is designed.

Atma wrote:

I remember as a kid, one of the King's Quests, you had to drop a bag of peas or something like that to make this blue monster that was coming after you slip and fall.

That would be 5. I already did my Youtube Whoring for this thread, but you can see that in part 7 if you want to find it.

If not, let me explain this whole puzzle, and why it is universally hated. In the final castle, you could have 3 things randomly happen: The evil wizard shows up (you die, no save), the cat shows up (if he sees you he runs off to tell the evil wizard, but you can take him out with a fish and an empty sack, see below), and the blue monster can show up (he takes you to the dungeon).

Now, you -need- to have the blue monster take you to the dungeon once, since you need an item in the dungeon, the cheese. To get it, you need a fish hook, something tiny you only have one chance to get and you can't go back for it. If you miss it here, you've borked your game, since you can only be rescued from the dungeon one time. So if the blue monster gets you twice, you're stuck in the dungeon forever.

To defeat the blue monster, you throw a sack of peas at it. It trips, breaks it's neck, and dies. However, if you do this the first time you see him, you lose the game...he never comes back, and you need the cheese to win. And to get that sack to tie up the cat, you need to beat the blue monster first.

So, this part of the game is: Wander around, hope to fuck the wizard or cat doesn't show up before the monster, when the monster shows up DON'T kill it, get the cheese with the fish hook, get rescued, wander around, hope to fuck the wizard or cat doesn't show up before the monster again, kill the monster, bag up the cat, then all you need to do is hope to fuck the wizard doesn't show up. One stroke of bad luck, and it's restore time. Screw it up, and you're going back at least a half hour of gameplay, which includes at least one maze.

Who the fuck remembers shit like this fondly?

In all honesty, most of King's Quest V plays it fair (maybe 80%, the other KQ game I've played through wasn't nearly as intuitive and also had random death in the end), and it's still a pretty fun game so long as you know what not to forget at the points of no return. Still.