King's Quest 1

I have always been a fan of the King's Quest franchise, but I never played the one that started it all. There's a perfectly good reason for that. It was released in 1984, and I wasn't...you know...born.

This is one of the earliest graphical adventure games, and the story is pretty simple. There's a castle with a king in it. That king is perfectly cool with people just waltzing into his castle, apparently. When you talk to him, he's like, "Bro, there's a mirror, sceptre, and shield that I want you to find. I don't know you, but if you find this stuff, I'm p. sure you'll make a good king." Paraphrasing but trust me, it wasn't much deeper than that.

The story's simple, yes, but you have to walk before you run. This game is the grandpappy of all the other graphical adventure games that were to come, and I appreciate it in all it's 16-color pixelated glory. It's interesting going back to early titles like this and seeing the evolution of these games. There are certain things that surprised me during the course of the game. For one, I was surprised by the number of items you can pick up that do absolutely nothing. Red herrings out the wazoo. I'm more used to the concept of if you can pick it up, you're gonna need it at some point. I was also surprised that multiple solutions were possible for some of the "puzzles". This seems like a more advanced concept.

I must confess, I know there were multiple solutions because I cheated a couple times. Give me a break. I know adventure games. Sometimes the solutions are ridiculous, especially in these old ones. I was only going to spin my wheels for so long.

You want an example? K, fine. There is a giant. I have a sling and pebbles that I picked up along the way. Logic would dictate that I fling a pebble in the giant's face to end him. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out the correct word combination to actually do that. Turns out, the solution is to run around a tree for a couple minutes, avoiding the giant while he's chasing you, and the dude will fall asleep eventually. Uh...what? Perhaps the dude has narcolepsy. I don't know his life. But who in their right mind would think playing Ring Around the Rosie with a giant for 2 minutes would accomplish anything? I never would have gotten that. I regret nothing!

Long story short...I defeated a dragon with a quart of water, made some leprechaun's dance a jig, and may have inadvertently caused the king to drop dead by merely showing him the items he asked me to find. All in all, it was a very eventful day in Daventry.

I intend to play through the remaining King's Quest games in the coming months. I remember playing through the 7th one as a kid and watching my brother play those earlier in the series. He used to call me Lolotte to make me mad when I was around three or four... Yep, King's Quest has been a part of my life for a while, and I think I'll enjoy revisiting them. After all, Telltale Games is supposed to be rebooting the franchise in the near future. Ohboyohboyohboy!

Puzzle Agent

I feel super efficient right now. In the past week, I have beaten "Resonance", "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1", and moments ago, I beat "Puzzle Agent" from Telltale Games.

"Puzzle Agent" was interesting. I enjoyed it overall, but the ending is very sudden and open ended. There is a second game in this series, however, so I'm guessing it picks up where this one left off. Most of the game was enjoyable. The puzzles for the most part were fun. I liked the fact that I had to whip out pen and paper at times to figure out some of them. There were 3 or 4 of them that pissed me off though. There were either too many instructions or not enough instructions, that I felt no matter how long I looked at it, I wouldn't get it because the puzzle seemed flawed in my mind. Of course, it's quite possible that I just wasn't comprehending what I was supposed to be doing. I am very tired after all... In these instances, the Hints didn't seem to help much. The hints either told me stuff that I already had gathered or it essentially just threw up its hands and was like, here's the solution, dipshit. Begone.

It's nearly 2AM, so I'm not going to go on and on here. Puzzle Agent was fun enough that I'll bother with the sequel. That's all I could hope for for a game I bought on sale for 2 dollars. Well done.

Now sleep.

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1

Next up, I decided to take a crack at "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1", developed by Hothead Games and based on the world of Penny Arcade. I didn't really know what to expect from this game because I was mostly interested in what I saw about Episode 3, which is made by an entirely different developer in an entirely different style. BUT...I have the inability to start a series somewhere in the middle, so here we are.

It's kind of a bizarre game. The main gameplay is 3D, but the dialogue/in between bits are 2D, more in line with the style of the comic. The guiding force in the game is that there's a giant robot running around breaking shit, including your house, and you're chasing after it...because you're pissed at it, I guess. It's not the strongest of objectives, but whatever. I'll go with it.

You run around somewhat simplistic and linear environments where you run into robots, mimes, hobos, etc, and you fight them via an Active Time Battle system similar to what you've seen in Final Fantasy games. The battles seem rather repetitive, and I got bored of them quickly. I think one of the problems with the battle system is that when you unlock these new attacks, the icons are tiny and not very distinct. I can't remember what does what, so I'm just clicking blindly, knowing whatever that attack is, it will do something better than the standard attack. How's that for strategy!

There's no real compelling objective leading you from one place to the other. I'm following a robot. Okay. And on my way, I run into people that want me to kill some mutant trash, find some meat, and stuff like that. These things just seem disconnected from the primary task, which I'm not all that into anyhow. The "cases" just seem like uninspired MMO quests. Gather 10 of this. Kill 15 of that. It makes me sad how disinterested I am.

Putting aside the complaints I have about combat, I do enjoy the 2D cinematics and the humorous dialogue between characters. These are in the style of the Penny Arcade comic, and the humor is probably what you came to this game for anyhow. The majority of the game though is sloughing through the kind of meh bits. This was a pretty short game. I finished it in just under six hours. I'm sad to say, I kept playing this game merely to check it off my list of things to play rather than for the sheer joy of it. I'll probably play the subsequent two games at some point, but I'm not real eager to at this point.