The Worst Part of Each King's Quest Game

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

The Worst Part of Each King's Quest Game

Let's take a moment to remember each mediocre King's Quest game in turn. Specifically their individual moments of maximum bullshit.

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[Myrddin]

The 'most bullshit' part of King's Quest I is not their fault; it's a technical limitation of the emulator.

On the original device it was designed for (An Apple II I think) the movement speed was normal. But cpu was so precious back then, they didn't waste time on a timer loop to control the pace of the game... how fast you walked was controlled by how fast the commands were executed on the CPU.

I'm all for the other bullshit you call out, but blaming an old game for running poorly on new hardware is not nice. There are many legitimate reasons to blast them. There were a lot of games that had no inherent timers, and ran faster or slower depending on the CPU speed... that's part of the reason those old 'Turbo' buttons were so common on computers before the Pentium era.

 

[GrumbleGrump]

There's an inn being run by villainous types (i.e. people with facial hair) and if you dare to go inside out of pure explorative curiosity then you get tied up and thrown in the basement. Where you will rot forever if you didn't throw a shoe at a cat earlier during the single opportunity you had to do so. Hope you didn't save after that!

Holy fucking crying jesus. HOW THE FUCK

The 'most bullshit' part of King's Quest I is not their fault; it's a technical limitation of the emulator.

On the original device it was designed for (An Apple II I think) the movement speed was normal. But cpu was so precious back then, they didn't waste time on a timer loop to control the pace of the game... how fast you walked was controlled by how fast the commands were executed on the CPU.

I'm all for the other bullshit you call out, but blaming an old game for running poorly on new hardware is not nice. There are many legitimate reasons to blast them. There were a lot of games that had no inherent timers, and ran faster or slower depending on the CPU speed... that's part of the reason those old 'Turbo' buttons were so common on computers before the Pentium era.

That's probably why he went with the "you die after one step in the wrong direction in the first screen of the game" thing.

 

[Jang]

Can someone explain the "pun" employed by KQ4?

 

[Dalisclock]

There's an inn being run by villainous types (i.e. people with facial hair) and if you dare to go inside out of pure explorative curiosity then you get tied up and thrown in the basement. Where you will rot forever if you didn't throw a shoe at a cat earlier during the single opportunity you had to do so. Hope you didn't save after that!

Holy fucking crying jesus. HOW THE FUCK

What makes it worse is that it's one of the few buildings in first part of the game you can enter and there's NO indication it's an inn run by gangsters(which it always seemed like to me).You have to wonder why they even bothered with the whole INN part, because murdering any random people who just happen to walk into your business doesn't tend to favor repeat customers.

 

[-Dragmire-]

There's an inn being run by villainous types (i.e. people with facial hair) and if you dare to go inside out of pure explorative curiosity then you get tied up and thrown in the basement. Where you will rot forever if you didn't throw a shoe at a cat earlier during the single opportunity you had to do so. Hope you didn't save after that!

Holy fucking crying jesus. HOW THE FUCK

What makes it worse is that it's one of the few buildings in first part of the game you can enter and there's NO indication it's an inn run by gangsters(which it always seemed like to me).You have to wonder why they even bothered with the whole INN part, because murdering any random people who just happen to walk into your business doesn't tend to favor repeat customers.

I wonder if Graham closed the Inn down after saving his family.

Does he even have guards that he could send to arrest those people?

 

[s_h_a_d_o]

Erm... took one look at how this article had been split into seven pages (of less-than-a-handful of paragraphs per page), and immediately refused to engage.

Is The Escapist so desperate for traffic that it feels the need to employ a multi-page format to every contribution now?
Or merely those created by the more popular contributors (and/or those featuring boobies)?

 

[AJvsRonin]

Erm... took one look at how this article had been split into seven pages (of less-than-a-handful of paragraphs per page), and immediately refused to engage.

Is The Escapist so desperate for traffic that it feels the need to employ a multi-page format to every contribution now?
Or merely those created by the more popular contributors (and/or those featuring boobies)?

I did the same. It's interesting, usually the listicles have been written by relative randoms. Which they've copped flak for so I wonder if they decided to get Yahtzee in on it.
I noticed what was up and closed the window at the first page, just popped in here to see if any one else noticed.

It's weird, I've been kind of out of the loop with The Escapist for a while since late last year, and I came back a few months ago to find the place was in disrepair. What happened? Where'd everybody go? And who decided "listicles" were appropriate for a site that used to pride itself on it's integrity?

I'd been an avid fan since I discovered the place back in college in '07. Didn't they have a con a while back? They were doing so well. It's making me feel old. Like going to your old favourite quirky diner and realising it got turned into a Dennys.

Edit: So... who wants to take bets on how long before Yhatzee leaves? I mean he's the one propping the place up right? According to Alexa.com 20% of search engine traffic directed to this site are searches for "Zero Punctuation" (as opposed to "the escapist" with 11%). Fair to say he's better known than the site that hosts him, that like if PewDiePie was more popular than YouTube.

Either that or he ends up running the place which might be a good thing.

I don't know how accurate Alexa.com is, but if it's to be believed and I'm understanding correctly there has been a pretty serious drop off in viewers over the last 6 months.

 

[Made in China]

Edit: So... who wants to take bets on how long before Yhatzee leaves? I mean he's the one propping the place up right? According to Alexa.com 20% of search engine traffic directed to this site are searches for "Zero Punctuation" (as opposed to "the escapist" with 11%). Fair to say he's better known than the site that hosts him, that like if PewDiePie was more popular than YouTube.

Either that or he ends up running the place which might be a good thing.

I don't know how accurate Alexa.com is, but if it's to be believed and I'm understanding correctly there has been a pretty serious drop off in viewers over the last 6 months.

Isn't that logic a bit flawed? It doesn't mean the Escapist isn't as popular as Yahtzee, because The Escapist is a sum of many different parts - shows, editorials, webcomics, etc. Your results account for 31% of the traffic measured. Even if it were completely accurate, there's still a huge chunk missing - so Yahtzee isn't more popular than the Escapist. Your logic also doesn't account for people who may search for one thing and wander around the site for another, or people who visit the site regularly or don't use search engines.

I think this is kind of a stupid discussion, anyway. When Extra Punctuation started, the standard article was 2 pages long. Nowadays, it's consistently 1 page long. The latest article, while being 7 pages long, really fit the format - it wasn't "to be continued" click bait stuff, but each page was self contained and had a zinger. So I don't think it's the worst thing that could've happened, unless it was commissioned to be 7 pages long from the get go.

The worst thing I think that could've and has happened is something that Yahtzee joked about himself - the addition of a secondary title to his videos. It's just forced and most of them could only work when spoken, so tacking them on seems like a desperate attempt at click bait. That's something I'm mad about.

 

[skylog]

All I know about King's Quest is what I've seen from the Game Grumps' playthroughs. I'll agree a lot of the puzzles are pretty bullshit, but the games have a charm to them that's not in other adventure games. I can't say what exactly, but I guess it's kind of like an extended fantasy cartoon

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

Can someone explain the "pun" employed by KQ4?

Like Yahtzee said, there isn't one. They're just banking on Perils and Rosella sharing a few vaguely similar sounding syllables

 

[cynicalsaint1]

It's weird, I've been kind of out of the loop with The Escapist for a while since late last year, and I came back a few months ago to find the place was in disrepair. What happened? Where'd everybody go? And who decided "listicles" were appropriate for a site that used to pride itself on it's integrity?

I'd been an avid fan since I discovered the place back in college in '07. Didn't they have a con a while back? They were doing so well. It's making me feel old. Like going to your old favourite quirky diner and realising it got turned into a Dennys.

Really I think Jim Sterling leaving was the first hint that things were going wrong - it wasn't too much longer after that they fired Greg Tito and Movie Bob and its basically been a nosedive ever since.

Really I only ever come here for Yahtzee and Critical Miss these days. Experieced Points is still good and worth reading as well.

 

[AJvsRonin]

To clarify, from alexa.com:

Top Keywords from Search Engines
Which search keywords send traffic to this site?

Keyword Percent of Search Traffic
1. zero punctuation 19.57%
2. the escapist 11.24%
3. escapist 4.02%
4. zero 2.07%
5. moviebob 1.00%

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

There's an inn being run by villainous types (i.e. people with facial hair) and if you dare to go inside out of pure explorative curiosity then you get tied up and thrown in the basement. Where you will rot forever if you didn't throw a shoe at a cat earlier during the single opportunity you had to do so. Hope you didn't save after that!

Holy fucking crying jesus. HOW THE FUCK

Rest assured it does get better. Later on in the game you have to defeat a yeti by throwing a custard pie in his face.

 

[Fat Hippo]

There's an inn being run by villainous types (i.e. people with facial hair) and if you dare to go inside out of pure explorative curiosity then you get tied up and thrown in the basement. Where you will rot forever if you didn't throw a shoe at a cat earlier during the single opportunity you had to do so. Hope you didn't save after that!

Holy fucking crying jesus. HOW THE FUCK

Rest assured it does get better. Later on in the game you have to defeat a yeti by throwing a custard pie in his face.

Of course, that's only if you didn't eat the pie. Because what kind of maniac would think eating is a reasonable thing to do with a pie?

 

[Dalisclock]

There's an inn being run by villainous types (i.e. people with facial hair) and if you dare to go inside out of pure explorative curiosity then you get tied up and thrown in the basement. Where you will rot forever if you didn't throw a shoe at a cat earlier during the single opportunity you had to do so. Hope you didn't save after that!

Holy fucking crying jesus. HOW THE FUCK

Rest assured it does get better. Later on in the game you have to defeat a yeti by throwing a custard pie in his face.

Of course, that's only if you didn't eat the pie. Because what kind of maniac would think eating is a reasonable thing to do with a pie?

There's more. So at one point you get a roast turkey leg as well as the pie. At one point you have to eat something to survive while crossing the mountains. You're supposed to eat HALF the turkey leg. If you eat the pie, the Yeti kills you a bit farther on because now you can't throw the pie at it. If you eat the entire turkey leg and not HALF, you won't starve, but you won't have anything to feed the giant bird you meet after that.

Oh, and going back to the mob controlled inn, I just remembered there's more. So when you go in there, you need to have done two things. You need to have saved the rat by throwing a boot at the cat so the rat will chew through your ropes and you need a hammer. Why a hammer? Because there's a padlock on the door to the basement and you need a hammer to bust the lock off so you can escape. This also leads to the fridge logic of "Why would you lock someone in a room with the padlock on the inside of the door, where only the prisoner could hypothically open it?"

Lucasarts games had wierd puzzles, but to their credit, most of their games didn't take themselves seriously either. When Sam and Max need to grab a bucket of Tar by bungie Jumping out of Abe Lincoln's nose at Mt. Rusmore, somehow it makes sense in context. Especially when the entire point of the game is tracking down a bigfoot who escaped from a block of ice at a circus.
That and after the really early LA games(like Zak McCraken and Manic Mansion), it was nearly impossible place yourself in a no-win situation. The only one I can think of offhand was if you got rid of all your money in The Secret of Monkey Island by tediously inserting it coin by coin into an obviously broken vending machine before you bought the few items you need.

 

[MazokuRanma]

There's an inn being run by villainous types (i.e. people with facial hair) and if you dare to go inside out of pure explorative curiosity then you get tied up and thrown in the basement. Where you will rot forever if you didn't throw a shoe at a cat earlier during the single opportunity you had to do so. Hope you didn't save after that!

Holy fucking crying jesus. HOW THE FUCK

What makes it worse is that it's one of the few buildings in first part of the game you can enter and there's NO indication it's an inn run by gangsters(which it always seemed like to me).You have to wonder why they even bothered with the whole INN part, because murdering any random people who just happen to walk into your business doesn't tend to favor repeat customers.

I wonder if Graham closed the Inn down after saving his family.

Does he even have guards that he could send to arrest those people?

He theoretically does, but King's Quest V doesn't take place in Daventry, it's an entire other kingdom. Though at no point does that kingdom apparently have a ruler, so it seems he could simply come back and annex it later...

 

[Fat Hippo]

@Dalisclock: Wait, so when eating the turkey leg, did you specifically need to enter EAT HALF TURKEY LEG into the text parser? Or did you only eat half of it by default when you tried to eat the turkey leg the first time? If it's the first one, that is pure evil, though I'm willing to believe anything of these games at this point.

 

[-Dragmire-]

There's an inn being run by villainous types (i.e. people with facial hair) and if you dare to go inside out of pure explorative curiosity then you get tied up and thrown in the basement. Where you will rot forever if you didn't throw a shoe at a cat earlier during the single opportunity you had to do so. Hope you didn't save after that!

Holy fucking crying jesus. HOW THE FUCK

What makes it worse is that it's one of the few buildings in first part of the game you can enter and there's NO indication it's an inn run by gangsters(which it always seemed like to me).You have to wonder why they even bothered with the whole INN part, because murdering any random people who just happen to walk into your business doesn't tend to favor repeat customers.

I wonder if Graham closed the Inn down after saving his family.

Does he even have guards that he could send to arrest those people?

He theoretically does, but King's Quest V doesn't take place in Daventry, it's an entire other kingdom. Though at no point does that kingdom apparently have a ruler, so it seems he could simply come back and annex it later...

Really? I thought the town he went to was within his Kingdom.

Ah, I guess he had to travel away from the kingdom to get to Crispin's house which was his first lead. For some reason I always assumed most of the game took place in his lands.

 

[Dalisclock]

@Dalisclock: Wait, so when eating the turkey leg, did you specifically need to enter EAT HALF TURKEY LEG into the text parser? Or did you only eat half of it by default when you tried to eat the turkey leg the first time? If it's the first one, that is pure evil, though I'm willing to believe anything of these games at this point.

It's a point and click game, so using the turkey leg once eats half the turkey leg. Using the turkey leg again eats the rest of it. So it wasn't horrible but if you decided "I need to eat the other half to be safe, since Graham is apparently starving" then you screwed yourself.

Also, IIRC, you had to steal the turkey leg while escaping from the mob controlled inn, after you escape from the basement. If you leave without grabbing the turkey leg, you can't come back to get it later.