(re: Adventure Games: Old and New)
Dixie, definately give Kings Quest 2: Romancing the Stones a try. Well worth it.
As Emily says, you may as well consider it an entirely new game if you’d prefer to see it that way. It has a lot of new content, and is a great game.
I adored King’s Quest 2 as a child, but upon playing it again more recently, it definately lacks a strong story, just as is stated on the Tierra site. This fact will never lessen my sense of nostalgia about the game, and the experience of playing the game is still full of joy.
Getting all dogmatic about it just seems absurd to me. Utterly absurd.
But irrelevant of all this, I would LOVE to see someone (such as Tierra) make an original game with the same flavor as the old Sierra games, or Tierra’s remakes.
I’ve tried playing games like Syberia, Dracula, Myst, Riven, The Longest Journey, etc, etc, and although they are obviously good games in many ways, they just don’t have the heart or the magic of the old Sierra games.
Now, getting older doesn’t help the situation, and have an ever increasing expectation on the level of detail and immersiveness in computer games makes it harder and harder to make games that really impress people.
If King’s Quest 1 came out onto store shelves for the first time tomorrow, I seriously doubt that it would have the impression on people that it did in 1984. At the time it was shear magic, and so it holds a special place in people’s hearts now, and was the seed for much of what we now take for granted about computer games. But if you held it up against a top-of-the-line modern adventure game, today’s audience would probably not be very impressed.
That being said, I think that it achieves an open-ended in the design that lacks from most modern games. The best thing about it was just how open the world is, allowing the player to gather objects and explore, and just let the world seep in through their senses as they wander the land.
I’d love to see a modern adventure game created with the sort of love and attention given to each and every detail as the old Sierra games.
And yes, I’d rather see an original game that a remake, but this doesn’t reduce the fantastic work done by Tierra on their own re-interpreted and expended game, “Romancing the Stones”.
– Murray
PS – I was travelling in Europe recently (I’m from Australia), and while in Spain, I was overcome with strong nostalgic emotions related to times spent in my youth playing King’s Quest games (I was travelling with my twin brother who used to play the games with me also). The beautiful Spanish landscape filled my senses and really reminded me of the lands depicted in King’s Quest 1, and other King’s Quest lands. And I started to write down ideas for a King’s Quest styled game, drawing a map and writing down ideas for how the characters, objects and locations could tie together to make “puzzles”.
I could post these notes to this forum if people are interested.