Monday, August 10, 2015
Oh by the way, they're rebooting King's Quest
I fondly remember playing King's Quest as a kid (and in fact, I think I still have the original game for my IBM PCjr). The hardest puzzle in the game that neither I nor my friend Bill Lefler could solve was the gnome's name (we ended up having to cheat and look at the answer to get past that puzzle). But the one thing this video of a playthrough (link via Shamus Young) does not show is the screen being drawn (a “feature” of the PCjr version), which is pretty neat the first thousand times you see it, but gets old afterwards. A side effect of that “feature,” though, is that any objects that could be manipulated (or were otherwise significant) would suddenly “pop” into existence once the screen was done drawing.
Ah, this video is more like it (when watching it, notice how the rock just “pops” into existence over the hole). There was also a mode (activated by a key combination—and it's been way too long for me to memeber what it was) that would cause the drawing to go even slower (I suppose it was for debugging purposes). Again, fun to watch for the first hundred times or so.
