From: jsbr+@andrew.cmu.edu (John Hamilton Slye)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games
Subject: Re: Kings Quest V (How Good)
Date: 11 Apr 92 05:19:18 GMT
	<1740017@hp-vcd.vcd.hp.com>
Organization: Freshman, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA


>From: stevem@hp-vcd.vcd.hp.com (Steve Miller)
>Subject: Re: Kings Quest V (How Good)
>Date: 10 Apr 92 19:06:06 GMT
> 
>> [ How good is King's Quest V?]
> 
>I just bought this game a couple of weeks ago and have only played it
>about 6 hours so far, but here's my initial impressions:
> 
>Graphics:
> 
>Very colorful 256 color hand painted scenes.  BUT, they are low resolution
>approximately 320x200 making me think that they were originally done for
>the PC and ported to the Mac.  You can display the window 1/2 size
>(1/4 area) so that there is a one-to-one correspondence with the graphics
>database and the screen pixels, or blow it up so you get big fat chunky
>pixels over the whole screen.  After awhile, the low resolution screens
>don't really bother me, but what does bother me is that the animation of
>the character and objects is also low resolution.


It is still considerably better than the old AGI graphics! The graphics
do look very similar to the IBM, but I don't care, they were well done
either way.


>To their credit, this game takes up 10 1.4Meg floppys and would probabaly
>have been too expensive to ship if all scenery were of higher resolution
>unless they could come up with a better compression algorithm.
> 
>Animation:
> 
>Scene and character animiation on my Mac IIsi are slow, I often have to
>turn off scene animation to get it to run fast enough to be fun.  If you
>don't, the character doesn't walk through the scenes very quickly.  Since
>the amount of animation is so low, I'm surprised that it was so slow.  Again
>this is evidence of a quick port.


On my IIsi it did not run slow even with background animation. Did you
mess around with the controls? You initially start off slow, but you can
increase animation speed. Everything ran about par with the older games,
which might be slow (but not unbearable).


>User Interface:
> 
>Fair.  Definately a port.  They do use the mouse for movement and actions
>and have their own graphics menu, but if the game was designed for the
>Mac, they would have had a tool palette.  Their custom graphics menu is
>cumbersome, slow, and crude.  Often using the mouse to move around is
>difficult as exiting a scene often requires a very accurate mouse click
>at the right portion of the screen.  More evidence of a quick port.


The interface is unique. Sure, it was first implemented on the IBM (they
made that version first), but it is suited much more to the Mac than
IBM. It is also quick to change cursors, just shift-click to rotate
them; and control-click to alternate between a new one and the last one
used. After 30 minutes I got the hang of them and could get to any
cursor very quickly. You don't even have to use the menus for most
things (tab still does inventory and rotating cursors contains all of
the action menu functions). I believe that there is a keyboard shortcut
for the controls menu (I can't remember what it might be) amd from there
you can control eveything else.


>Game Play:
> 
>Typical Sierra Online adventure game.  You do arbitrary actions and eventually
>get arbitrary results that get you closer to some arbitrary postive outcome.
>I can't believe that they can't think of a better series of logic puzzles
>to solve than they have done with KQ-V.  The puzzles are so arbitrary that
>you end up simply running around poking and prodding at everything until
>something good (or bad) happens, you then just continually save and
>restore the game so that you can try various options more quickly.


How far have you gotten? I admit that there is some luck involved, and
if you miss one particular scene you have to restore to a point before
the scene occurs (it only happens once). Not everything is obvious; a
good portion of the fun of a Sierra game is to try interesting ideas and
using your imagination and creativity to solve the various puzzles. They
are NOT logic puzzles. They are not designed that way! They are there to
spur the imagination and the right brain which a lot of us (including
me) need to have done to us on occasion. We become very drab working in
the left side of our heads all the time.

 
>Also, using the mouse for everything with no text input severly limits your
>options.  I would prefer to have both, with the text input being a small
>window at the bottom of the screen which you could optionally use to 
>attempt more sophisticated actions.


Not really, now you can find out what won't work quicker; instead of
spending all of your time trying to figure out how to word your sentance
so that the parser can figure out what you're trying to say. It makes
the game more fun because you are spending less time trying something
that in the end will not work. Also without typing, the program already
chooses the appropriate verb (e.g. pour instead of put, etc...) I find
that most of the "sophisticated actions" don't work and end up wasting
my time, which, in turn, makes me furious for spending so much time on
something that did not work.

 
>Summary:
> 
>Skip this game.  Some people must enjoy it because Sierra keeps coming
>out with them, but I can't see the attraction.  Some of the (low res)
>scenes are pretty, but that is a terrible reason for buying this game.


I enjoyed this game very much! It would have taken me far longer to
complete it if I had not had some help from people on this bboard; but
it was well worth the money. If you still have your doubts about any of
the topics above, I suggest you see a version of it before you buy.
(Space Quest IV also has the same interface and graphics.)

 
>Steven Miller
>Vancouver Division
>Hewlett Packard
 




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J. Hamilton Slye (jsbr@andrew.cmu.edu) 1071 Morewood Ave., Pgh, Pa. 15213

The opinions stated above do not necessarily reflect those of the author!

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Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games