xarcosis

A short while ago, a remake of Sierra’s early 90s game Quest for Glory II was released.  Unfortunately, the adventure genre of gaming has become a very niche market, mainly because they require a small amount of intelligence to play, which most people do not possess.

If you’re a real gamer, or for some reason you were unaware of the remake, you can get it here.

The remake itself is pretty spectacular.  The combat system was heavily remade and is pretty fun, if a bit slow, and the graphics stay true to what Sierra’s VGA games generally looked like.

The only gripes I had with the entire game was the excruciatingly slow speed of combat, and the fact that even on maximum speed the whole game itself felt like it was playing 50% slower than it should be.  Also, it appeared that the WIT ‘bug’ remained — that is, if you do WIT you can only complete the Wizard’s ending.  I found this to be very annoying, what if I wanted to do WIT and I was a Fighter, Thief, or Paladin?  You can’t.  Bad game design!

Unfortunately, being a remake, there was very little ‘wow’ feeling, simply because I’ve played this game many years ago and remember everything that happens — an unfortunate side-effect of having a good memory.  This wasn’t the case when I played the King’s Quest 1, 2 and 3 remakes because I’m of the age where I wasn’t even born when those originals were released.  My brother actually visited me recently and thought he was cool because he had it on his miniature PC, and even though he also had played the original and was much older than me, he couldn’t remember a thing from it.  I laughed at him and told him how I’ve known about its development for about five years.  This made me feel better than him.

Because being a critic is fun (thanks Zero Punctuation for pointing that out), here is a list of annoyances from the game:

• A handful of default messages were ripped off from QFG3.  While not noticeable to some people, perceptive players like me rolled their eyes a little.
• Some portraits, while not drawn bad, just look plain silly.  No, no, plain RETARDED.  Keapon Luffin and Zayishah are prime examples.  I certainly didn’t imagine Keapon to look like a cross between a squashed egg, a stool, and a square-faced shaved gorilla.

• Some combat sound effects were a bit weird.  Fighting Uhura was almost embarrassing — it was like each sword strike was giving her… uh, strange excitement.
• While the simplified alley system is much less annoying than the original, it reminded me too much of the early Might and Magics, or Elder Scrolls.  I really hated the navigation in those games.
• Some defensive controls seemed to not be very fluid, although may be due to dodge/parry skills.

The problem with the slow pace of the game is that there’s not enough to do in the linear time frame.  This was a problem in the original too, but combat and travel wasn’t so ’slow’ so it felt a lot more fluid.

Sure, you can sleep for days straight, but that doesn’t seem normal and kind of ruins the atmosphere of the game.  There was so little to do I had stupidly high stats by the time the first elemental attacked simply because I had nothing to do so I spent a lot of time enjoying the extremely good combat system.  Other such minor flaws in fluidity exist at the end — it’s very simple, but Shema or Shameen were a bit more animated when they congratulated you.  In the remake they just kind of sit there like stuffed parrots, which really destroyed the emotion that was prevalent in the EGA version.

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Numbers don’t always equate to skill.  Story of my life.

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Anyway, QFG2VGA was highly enjoyable for me, because it reminded me of days where computer games were designed without spending 99% of the budget on graphics, unlike a lot of modern games today, but rather having it spent on game designers and writers.  People will remember games like these forever and have special memories associated with them.  I don’t totally blame the game industry though, I blame people like you for paying for these shitty games with no story or gameplay, because you think they look nice or they give you an erection or some other sub-60 IQ rhetoric.  The producers then think, ‘hey, these morons are giving us money to PRODUCE CRAP so let’s PRODUCE MORE CRAP’.  Barf.  Stop funding these fools, fools.

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I’ll leave you with one of the more appropriate easter eggs in the game. You will thank me for this, trust me.

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If you crave more adventure gaming, I highly recommend A Tale of Two Kingdoms.  This is not a remake, but an entire new game — it is completely original.  I wrote a pile of vomit about it around a year ago.