King's Quest V: Absence Makes The Heart Go Yonder!

The fifth game and the first true modern King's Quest game, with a good interface, decent graphics, good music and a.... good attempt at voice acting. This game is probably the one I got the furthest in and might have been able to finish since I can't recall an instance of copy protection. Being on a CD they might have skipped that for this entry. The reason I didn't finish it as a child was due to not daring to enter the desert after finish everything else I could do. I went into the spooky forest with the attacking witch, but not the desert. Really, some pen and paper and I would have finished that game in no time.

Story is that King Graham is walking about in the woods one day when the evil wizard Mordack appears and conjures his castle and family away. Graham meets the owl Cedric who takes him to this other wizard, Crispin and the adventure is on. Travel  trough, deserts, evil swamps, cross a tall snowy mountain, a dangerous ocean and a dark castle to save your family from Mordack, brother of Mannannan. First real appearance of Josh Mandel as King Graham. Good choice.

King's Quest IV: Perills of Rosella

The fourth game in the series and at the moment the one that really needs a remake. Don't need to be fancy as the AGD Interactive once (although it would be nice with the same care and tying together their vision of the King's Quest sage), but the interface and gameplay need an overhaul. This is the last game that still only works by typing in commands and it is obnoxious. Not only that, but this was the hardest of the original games to get working as a child (now with ScummVM that problem is at least solved) and if you got it working it hit you with the copy protection directly as you started. And not as interesting as the third games magic book was, no no no, here it is page X, paragraph y and word z. Someone save us from this... I want to remind everyone that my manual was in FRENCH.

Story follows directly from the third one, the whole family is reunited and King Graham throws his adventure cap toward them... and suffers a heart attack. The magic mirror calls for Rosella and a magic fairy tell her of a fruit that can heal Graham, but the fairy need help against the evil fairy Loloth and so it's off. All in a days work. If you dwadle to long Graham dies or Ganesta (the good fairy) dies and both means a bad ending for you, either trapped where you are or King Graham dead, unable to save you in the fifth game.

Not much else to say then that the graphics was a step up compared to the original games, but the interface still needed a rework until the glory days of Adventure games.

Jurassic World

So my dad wanted to go and watch this movie so I went with him.The little I seen from the trailers I guessed that it would be like Deep Blue Sea and boy, I was right on target with that prediction. Basically the story is set 20 years after the first Jurassic Park where they were able to open up the park and searched for new attractions by gene manipulating dinosaurs to get a shock value. Of course the latest meanest and most dangerous of them is to smart and manage to escape. Threatening all 21 000 tourists on the island. You also have the side story of InGen (the company behind the gene modified dinos wanting to test them as weapons) and the family thing between the two kids that are visiting their aunt that are one of the chiefs at the facility. 

It was a decent movie that was fun to watch. I really liked all the nods to the original film, like recreated set pieces, the statue of John Hammond, the musical themes that popped up at just the right moment, some lines here and there as well as the only recurring actor from the first movie, the doctor that shows them the lab is the same one that heads the research in this movie. That was pretty neat.  Another thing to mention was when watching is that this movie feels like Aliens toward the original Jurassic Parks Alien. The original had more horror/survival feel to it while this was much more of an action movie, which I quite like. The main guy this time isn't a professor or mathematician, but a security officer which looks buff as hell. Of course it feels rather stupid sometimes with the whole "communicating with the raptors". 

This movie might not beat the original movie, but it blows the other two sequels out of the water. The main hero characters you route for, they are competent and the story is logical enough so that it doesn't break the immersion. In Lost Worlds most of the problems are caused by the heroes which have serious trouble understanding basic animal instincts (I'm thinking of bringing the hurt T-rex kid back into your camp putting all of your lives at risk). We shouldn't speak about III, that one is just plain bad. Really, spoilers, but the big bad dino of this movie escapes by fooling everyone it has escaped at first with claw marks and then being able to camouflage it self and it's body temperature. While they try to find where it went it attacks the workers that checked the cage which stil contained the dino. The fat security guard opens the big gate and runs out and start closing the gate again, but the dino smashes through it this time. Another establishing scene is when the director has had enough, loads his helicopter with a machine gun and flies of to hunt it. It goes well until the dino runs for the place with the flying dinos and scares them into the air and they bring down the helicopter (think the Charlemagne scene from the Last Crusade). Really, at first glance it shows us how smart the dino is while human factor caused the problem (aka the security guard being stupid enough to believe he should open the main gate). Although thinking about it causes some problems. First, how did the guard miss the dino clawing the wall since he sat just there? Even so, how did the dino know it would work? They make a point in the movie that he has been sheltered in that cage all its life so how did it adapt that strategy? The helicopter scene causes the same problem, first how did it know it was there in the first place and secondly, while highly logical response to bring down a flying enemy, how did it know birds or flying would do that? I knew because I saw the Last Crusade, but the dino?

This of course is a matter of suspension of disbelief and it worked until I sat in the car on the way home, but the aviary you could explain by observing birds around its cage. That still leaves us with how it knew where it was. Also, what is it with Jurassic Park and killing of fat guys? The espionage hacker in the original and the dinosaur guy in Lost world (you might count the pudgy good guy as well) No fat guy in the III, but two characters in this one, the security guy and the bad guy security boss. Is it some statement about human evolution and weeding out those not fit in some sort of Social Darwinism commentary? At least the black guy survived in this movie. Still, movies watchable and well spent 2 hours.

King's Quest III:To Heir Is Human redux

Gaze Into My Crystal Ball!

See What Lies Behind the Wall!

The third game in the series and the third remake by AGD Interactive. The strongest point for this game is, beyond graphics, voices and music, that you get rid of the damn copy protection and need the damn manual to play. I had all the first 6 games in a collection box and with the manual, but in FRENCH (and I took German in elementary school). So if you were able to get it running you would run into the problem that you couldn't read the damn manual and thus not complete the game, especially when you had to mix spell ingredients and recite spells precisely as it was written in the book, or else it would fail.

Story wise you start as a slave at the wizard Mannannans household, Gwydion is your name, and every day you try to appease your master and cat's fickle minds. One day when he is away you venture down to town and finds a hidden book telling you of your predecessor. Realizing time is short before you are "switched out" you search the land after ingredients to release you of your shackles and find out who you are... *spoilers* he's Prince Alexander of Daventry, the son of King Graham and Valancie. After some complaints they also toned down their own overarching villain and such, but he still pops up. Bad parts of this game is also present in the original. The time constraints. You have a timer that goes up, and the gist is that you recorded every time Mannnannan was away or slept and planned out the best way to go around the area. I don't handle stress that well, and it also shows how short these kind of games really are, took me less than 2 hours to finish the game. No, the real play time is that you are supposed to play it over and over again as you learn how to avoid getting caught. I actually managed pretty well in the original, I even found the secret study, but since I couldn't make spells, I didn't get anywhere. On the other hand it took me far to long to find the magic map and realizing that your inventory hinted at what was allowed to have by Mannannan or not. Then again, I didn't realize you could hide your stuff under the bed, so I began avoiding the ingredients since they killed me. 

Still, this game was the first in the series, with an actual story and characters, although at release you didn't know why it starred Gwydion in this strange land of Lewdorr, it might have been setting up a new kingdom and such, but must have been real nice for players getting to the end and realizing that it looked awfully familiar and then seeing King Graham once again. Here we even get a tear-dripping power ballad and I love it. One bad thing though is that the voice of Alexander can be... a bit grating. It's not the one from KQ 6 (which would probably have broken their budget). It could also be as they play him more in character of his current situation, as he sounds submissive all the time compared to the self assured Prince Alexander of KQ 6. I don't know, a bit of a turn off for me. Also, first time I played it the voice of Mannannan was a bit irritating as well, but it grew on me, apparently the same guy who is the narrator. Sadly they didn't get the guy who played Mordack in King's Quest V like the other fan remake of King Quest III got, they also got Josh Mandel for some reason.

King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones

End me adoration, before I leave your eyes!

World in the mirror mirror, Water of amnesia comes!

Played the second game in the series and this was also by AGD Interactive, and like last time you can get the game for free on their website. If the first game was a 1:1 remake of the original this was almost an actual new game with King's Quest character retelling the second game. Basically the second game wasn't more than the first game, but with new puzzles and a little more pointed out story, find the girl in the tower and rescue her so she will be your queen. Fairy tale wife-finding 101. This is told to you at the beginning making it a bit easier to know the objective. In the original, if you didn't realize that you should enter the castle and talk to King Edward, you didn't get the story. Talking about story, i checked up on some of the story elements and to my surprise some other people felt that the changes they made to the very miniscule story in game changed the tone of the original creators all too much. At first I was kinda struck with how stupid that was, things just happened in the game and had very limited logic behind it, but then I noticed it sound like me and the lord of the ring movies, so maybe I shouldn't see too much into it. The changes they made was creating an overarching villain and tying in the other KQ games with this one more than the names Graham and Valanice. In  my opinions doing a rather good job.

So King Graham is feeling lonely, wants someone special in his life and the magic mirror he got last time shows him this strange land, Kolyima, and a portal to a strange world with a quartz tower which is inhabited by one of the fairest maidens. So at once he heads of telling his first minister to keep the peace. Meaniwhile the Shadow Cloak society, led by the mysterious Father, conspires to destroy him. Arrive just a day later you set off to find three gems of Nature to open this stone gate that will take you to your love. The journey will take to the depths of the ocean, above the clouds and into the fangs of death itself as true love will triumph. This game also show a much more stronger Graham who actually puts up a fight, even bringing the royal sword with him and with it he will fight were-wolfs and chase of evil wizards. Probably more action-oriented than many would have liked, but to me it felt more coherent that the older games allowed you to kill the monster in your way, and therefore allow it here, plus he is much more younger than in his appearance in the fifth game so it makes a bit more sense. he was a knight after all before ascending the throne. Although they put up some notice that he dislike violence while slaying a couple were-wolves.

Like the other the graphics are vastly improved, many puzzles have been recreated or streamlined, going for a more railroading approach since the story has to make more sense here. Musically I can't remember if they just translated it over from the original, but the music is rather nice and I can't help but like the cheesy love ballad they put in reminiscing of KQ 6.