King's Quest:
Quest for the Crown
Review
Storyline and
Gameplay
Anyone who's ever
played an adventure game knows that the story of the game is a key part
of the experience. King's Quest: Quest of the Crown is a very classic fairy-tale
without an intricate plot or a detailed cast of characters. Right from
the beginning you know what your mission is: Find the three stolen treasures
of Daventry and return them to the king. That's basically it! No unexpected
plot twists, no interesting character personalities: The whole game is
basically a simple puzzle hunt. But that doesn't mean it's a bad game.
The sheer simplicity of it is very likable, and you can have much fun with
it just walking around, finding puzzles and solving them. The fact that
you can die at many times or get into situations where you're stuck because
you did something wrong makes it pretty hard and challenging. Early adventure
games were usually pretty hard to solve, and it's a real intellectual challenge
to finish this game. The gameplay is very non-linear, something that's
hard to achieve in an adventure game. You can find the three treasures
and solve the other puzzles in the game in almost any order, so there's
a great deal of freedom and choice for the player. Also, the game has a
scoring system and there are are usually multiple solutions to the puzzles
in the game. The smarter your solution, the more points you get. This makes
King's Quest: Quest for the Crown very replayable. You can recover the
three treasures pretty fast with "quick-and-dirty" solutions, but then
you can go back later and try alternate solutions, find more items and
thereby going for a higher score. Getting the full 158 points possible
is very, very hard.
There's one
especially nasty puzzle in this game that has become quite (in)famous:
You meet a gnome and are asked to guess his name. There cannot be many
people that have actually guessed it correctly without cheating, but fortunately
it's not necessary for completing the game.
There is one
annoying thing with the game though: Walking around takes a lot of time
and it quickly becomes boring to watch Graham walking between scenes. The
game has three speed options: Slow is good when you're in some sort of
time-based danger, Normal is your standard, realistic speed setting but
it's much too slow when you want to walk long distances. Fast is a speed
setting where the game makes no delays based on the internal CPU clock.
This worked well in the original PCjr version, but on modern computers
this option makes the game run at lightning-speed. If you walk Graham in
any direction with this speed setting on a modern computer, you'll probably
be drowning in a lake four screens away before you've managed to stop him.
Later AGI games has four speed options: Slow, Medium, Fast and Fastest,
where Fast now works well even on a modern computer.
Graphics
When
compared to modern computer games, the graphics of King's Quest: Quest
for the Crown seems very outdated. Only 16 colors and a resolution of 160x200
pixels is today considered a very low graphic quality. The 160x200 pixel
resolution appears very odd today, but it was actually one of the possible
16-color resolutions on the PCjr. They could have used the more familiar
320x200 resolution with almost quadratic pixels instead, but that would
have required too much memory. On the later IBM PC version, the game uses
the standard 320x200 EGA resolution with doubled pixels in the horizontal
direction to get the same look as the original game. This also explains
why all of the subsequent AGI games had 160x200 graphics.
King's Quest
actually looks pretty good in CGA as well, given that it only has four
colors. With a 320x200 resolution using color patterns to approximate the
16-color look, the result is very impressive. But of course, the game should
rather be experienced in its original 16-color glory.
But regardless
of how much better modern computer games look, it's important to remember
what an incredibly impressive-looking game this was for 1984 when it debuted
on the IBM PCjr. At the time, few computers had the capability to display
16 colors simultaneously and the fluent animation and colorful scenarios
of King's Quest: Quest for the Crown was far ahead of its time. Even today,
the graphics of this game can be appreciated if one doesn't compare it
to current standards. It's all drawn on computers and is sometimes pretty
crude, with mismatching sizes of objects and unprofessionally drawn details,
but that's only a minor issue. Still, it's pretty amazing that all of the
backgrounds are actually drawn with vector graphics. They could easily
go for real bitmaps! At a time when memory limitations made it necessary
to go back and optimize the pictures, removing a dot here and a line there
to save space, one cannot avoid being impressed by the attention to detail
in many of the scenes in the game. Of course, the low resolution also made
it hard to draw small things that could still be recognizable, but the
artists managed to do it anyway. The animation of creatures, flowing water
and other things brings life to the different environments, who could easily
have been feeling very dead and empty. Most of the later AGI games have
better graphics than this, using the same resolution and number of colors,
but considering that this was the first AGI game ever written and that
it looked so much better than anything else available at the time, one
still has to give the graphics a high rating.
Music and Sound
Effects
King's Quest:
Quest for the Crown contains a few short musical pieces and sound effects,
but they're very scarce. Sound and music wasn't considered a very important
part of a computer game in the early 80's, especially since most computers
at the time had very simple sound hardware that wasn't able to play anything
that was sounding good. The IBM PCjr had a pretty simple three-channel
sound system that was actually intended for music and sound effects and
of course IBM wanted King's Quest: Quest for the Crown to use it.
No one is credited for the music and sound effects in the game. It was
probably the programmers who made it themselves along with the logic code,
according to Roberta's wishes. My guess is that the AGI system didn't even
have any sophisticated sound creation tools, so the music and sound effects
were probably hard-coded as frequency and time-delay numbers directly into
the game.
The IBM PC
had only a single voice speaker, designed for the occasional beeps when
something was wrong. This infamous PC Speaker still sits in modern computers,
mainly for backward compatibility reasons. Without the luxury of a volume
control it usually makes a horrible noise that few people used to modern
sound cards can bare to listen to. King's Quest: Quest for the Crown
still supports this system in the IBM PC versions, but then you only get
to listen to single-voice versions of the music and sound effects.
The game introduction
features a version of the traditional classic Greensleaves, making up the
theme song for the game. Dying is accompanied by a funny jingle version
of the well-known funeral theme. There are also a few sound effects here
and there, but that's it.
The music
of King's Quest: Quest for the Crown can therefore not get a very high
rating.
Technical issues
Playing a game
designed in the early 80's on a modern computer can be a big problem. Many
old games are dependent on the performances of old CPU:s and other hardware.
Still, the 1987 PC version of King's Quest: Quest for the Crown
runs perfectly on a modern PC. Its memory requirements are very humble
by today's standards, and the full size of the game (less than 400k) is
about 0.05% the size of an average modern computer game.
Final verdict
King's Quest:
Quest for the Crown is a classic computer game. It was a landmark achievement
and it set the standards for adventure games in the future. Everyone that
played the original version back in the early 80's looks at it today with
great nostalgia.
Golden Moment
Having all the
Three Treasures in possession and walking triumphantly back to the castle.
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