Nerding Day: King’s Quest 5

It’s kind of weird to me that King’s Quest has completely disappeared from the gaming landscape. Remember how the reboot of the series came out ten years ago? If you do, congratulations: You and I are the only two people on planet Earth who played it! Seriously, there was a full five-part game that remixed the series and I think the only cultural memory we have of it is that every GameStop is required to carry a used copy for the Xbox One. I paid money for it, so I’m not the bad guy here! I’d criticize the games for the portions I disliked, but when I was a literal child, I sent a King’s Quest pitch document to Sierra and never heard back, so what the fuck would I know?

The thing is, King’s Quest used to be one of the biggest gaming franchises. It was massive, especially in computer stores, which used to be fun. We don’t need to get into it, but there was a time when walking into a store like Staples or Best Buy meant checking out the weird selection of PC games in giant boxes. Nowadays, you walk in, and you see a group of employees with haunted eyes that both really want and absolutely do not want you to ask them for help. Instead of hundreds of PC games, they have a few dented copies of Luxor: Amun Rising and Skylanders toys that still cost full price. I’ve really been critical of video game retail so far, but that’s only because it represents a simpler time when I didn’t have to pay taxes or face death.

But, back in the early ‘90s, the King’s Quest series had sold - and I’m checking Wikipedia here, which I think is now more reliable than Google? - 2.5 million copies. That’s nothing today. That’s a massive failure for a AAA studio today. That’s mass layoffs and a giant graphic with a block of text on a black background talking about maximizing efficiency and shit. But back in the ‘90s? That made King’s Quest the biggest selling computer game franchise of all time. Mostly because there were maybe fifteen people who actually played PC games.

Jesus Christ, I’ve written so much and so little so far. All you need to know is that King's Quest V was a massive release for the series. The game basically upgraded every part of the series - graphics, sound, and that’s about it. While it was available on floppy disks, the real version was on those new-fangled CD-ROMs that stored more information than anyone knew what to do with. This one had full voice acting and detailed animation. This took a franchise that was basically Wacky Fairy Tales And Terrible Puzzles That Kill You and made it actually look like a storybook. Even playing this version of King’s Quest V today looks good. This is a screenshot from a game from 1990:

Tell me that’s not beautiful! That was 35 years ago and adventure games are still chasing the dragon of this look. True, true, there were other adventure games at the time that also looked great and had fantastic cartoon art, but I’m not getting paid to talk shit about those games, am I? If I was, I’d gratefully and gracefully shit on their version for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

… which might look something like this:

That’s right, there was an NES version! 8-Bit or nothing! And, baby, I made my parents let me rent it. They wouldn’t buy it because… We actually already had the CD-ROM version of King’s Quest V, which we got in some little value pack. To my parents, me asking for a worse version of a game I liked was the dumbest thing possible, even if for my birthday. They didn’t have much money, so there was no way on God’s Earth they were going to buy another copy of the same game but - again - much worse. So we rented it and I had one of the worst weekends of my life.

As with many of the failures and disappointments in my life, this is something I thought I wanted.

Let’s start with the good: King’s Quest V for the Nintendo Entertainment System both turns on and runs. It also does a pretty good job of almost capturing the spirit of the original version. It’s got some moxy, I’ll tell you that for free! And it does follow the same story of King Graham rescuing his family after a wizard shrank them and put their castle in a bottle. He goes on an adventure, which is what we’re here for! Also the game turns on and runs. Did I mention that?

Let’s switch to the bad: Everything else. Well, that’s not fair. This is still King’s Quest V and it’s still better than some of the other games in the series (cough, fucking cough, Mask of Eternity). But, otherwise, everything: graphics, sound, music, gameplay, and even saving are a million times worse. I’m guessing the development process of King’s Quest V for the NES involved a child playing the real game and copying it down from memory and programming it based on the class they took in an after school program for at-risk youths. I’m serious when I say that this game strips everything good from the King’s Quest series and leaves behind the broken bones of impossible puzzles.

There’s also some minor censorship, with any mention of “god” or “gods” kindly erased so no children could have their lives ruined.

And, look, we can’t expect that an NES is going to compete with an Intel 486 PC. Jesus, I just threw out my back remembering that. But the graphics are just… I want to be more positive. I’ve promised myself I’d be more positive this year. But the graphics are yellow. That’s the best way I can describe them: Yellow. A lot of yellow and shades of it therein. And, to be fair, early games in the PC series had a lot of yellow too! In the 1980s, King Graham and the Royal Family of Daventry looked like the Simpsons long before Matt Groening made his millions. But here, there are points when it’s hard to tell what’s a person and what’s scenery. But the good news is: You have to do trial and error while you keep dying.

That’s probably my favorite part of the NES King’s Quest V. Because in King’s Quest, dying is ridiculously unfair and easy. You walk into the wrong pixel, you die. You fall off cliffs. You get attacked by an animal. You get melted. You get kidnapped by a bartender. That’s all real. The gameplay loop, theoretically, is that you try a little bit of everything on everything else and, through trial and error, finish the game. Nobody actually did this. Everybody bought a hint guide. Hell, the games often came with a hint guide.

Wait, let me stop there again. The Nintendo version does not come with a hint guide. I checked. Instead, the manual is almost mean to the player? Seriously, the way the manual talks, you’re almost an asshole if you’re stuck in a game that features such puzzle solutions as “throw a pie to stop a yeti” and “throw a shoe at a cat to get a rat to save you from that bartender who kidnapped you.” A lot of throwing in this game, to be honest. Seriously, this is from the manual:

So, you’re not only playing a worse version, you’re getting less information on how to beat it. This is especially nice because, with the smaller resolution and worse graphics, a lot of the game is hard to figure out because a lot of the game is hard to see! Is that part of the background? Part of the foreground? Is that a treasure chest or a wall decoration? Better click on everything using the world’s slowest mouse cursor controlled by an NES d-pad. Does that cabinet open? No. Wait. What about this one? Yes! I found some emeralds I’ll have to guess when I use later. What else, what else? Ohhhh. I have to check the chandelier for the key - of course. Why didn’t I think of checking a hanging light fixture?

This is frustrating in the regular game. In the NES game, again, you’re using the d-pad as a mouse. In the original, there’s a user interface with different actions like, LOOK, TALK, and TOUCH (or grab or use or whatever the fuck). It was easier to use these computer mouse features because computers had, and I don’t want to alarm you, computer mice. Computer mouses? Computers mouse? Am I dying?

I can’t stress enough how frustrating it is using this interface with a controller. The cursor mocks you as it crawls across the screen. But don’t worry, it’s also frustrating because you have to use the A and B buttons to switch between different parts of the interface and - just for fun - half of the time it won’t recognize the input. You really need to press the button down to make a selection. You gotta give it a giant, long squeeze like you haven’t seen it since before the war. Think “resetting Bluetooth on a device” length button holding. This may or may not register.

But it gets better: A few of the events in the game are timed. Remember throwing a shoe at a cat? Yeah, man, you get one shot at it and maybe three seconds to pull it off. And because choosing an item in the inventory and using it on the right pixel takes some time and effort, you will almost definitely fuck this up many, many times. On the bright side, without a guide, half the time you probably won’t know when you just made the game completely unwinnable. I’m talking about one mistake and you won’t know you’re screwed until the very end. Or when you just hit an unsolvable wall.

Now, this was still a little bit the case in King’s Quest V on PC. But at least saving and loading there was easier. Here it’s, well, weird. You can save in game - but only when the console is still turned on. If you want to turn off the console, you need to record a massive, long password. There is no battery save. So, you can save scum - a little - but like everything else in the game, if you get it wrong, you’re screwed. And god help you if you need to go back further in the game, because those temporary saves are gone and your password doesn’t tell you shit about your status. If you play this now, you’ll definitely use save states, but I’m trying to capture the actual essence of the original: Saving sucks in a game featuring instant and long term failure.

Oh, another fun thing, the end of the game is nearly broken. The big bad, Mordack, appears randomly and kills you. This is supposed to create a meta game where you need to hurry your royal ass up. In practice, it just makes you think you’re doing everything wrong while you’re doing absolutely nothing wrong. Again, if you don’t have a walkthrough, you’d just think you’ve fucked up and should start over. Playing through this game for this piece - and I did play through the entire game, for you - I almost gave up at the end. Right before the last fight, he kept teleporting into the room and killing me. I worried if I was glitched out or I’d forgotten something earlier. Nope! I loaded a save state from about twenty minutes earlier and cleared the section with the same exact processes I was using when I got screwed.

But you’ll be fine if you use a walkthrough, right? Wrong again, motherfucker! King’s Quest V for NES and King’s Quest V for PC are a little different. And I mean that literally. They’re just slightly different. So, you might find yourself making handy progress using the wrong guide and hit one of the weird fucking mazes (there’s a desert maze, a water maze, and a literal maze). The mazes are different. For some reason they have a different layout, making strategy books like The King’s Quest Companion worthless. I’m lucky GameFAQs has one - I think only one - walkthrough of the NES version. I would’ve driven a corkscrew into my goddamn head otherwise. When I say it was a terrible weekend as a kid, this is why. I was using a PC walkthrough and just doing my best to muscle through it. I’m surprised I did, to be honest, because I’d never fucking do that today.

What else, what else? Oh, man. When I first played this game, I was charmed by the King’s Quest V musical theme downgraded for the NES. It’s a fun little theme! And… that’s almost all the music in the game. Oh, music pops up here or there, but a lot of the game is absolutely fucking silent outside of chiptune bird tweets. It’s almost surprising when music comes in. And kind of random? There probably wasn’t enough space. Even the ending of the game is abrupt and without fanfare. It’s almost like nobody expected you to beat the NES version of King’s Quest V, so they figured that they could throw up a “the end” screen and be done with it.

I’d love to say that playing this game again was a walk down memory lane. That it made me feel like a kid again. But it didn’t. It made me feel like an adult holding a controller wondering why I keep falling off a cliff that doesn’t seem to actually exist on the screen. It’s such a strange, weird port. It’s impressive they got it all in there, but impressive in the way all demakes are impressive: You think it’s cool they exist and remember that a worse version of a game is sometimes less fun.

I’m often critical of my parents and their violent ways, but they were probably right about this one. It was stupid to ask for this game. It was stupid to rent this game. And it was stupid to replay this game. I’m less of a person for it.

HOT HOT DOG CONTRIBUTOR NEWS: Mike's new book, Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made in Video Games launched yesterday! You can buy it right now!

If you're in the NYC area, there is a launch event on April 9th at Barnes & Noble in Park Slope moderated by Anthony Atamanuik. Then Mike will be signing at his hometown Barnes & Noble in Coral Springs, Florida on April 18th as well as another signing on May 5th at Book Soup in Los Angeles moderated by Adam Conover.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham, who never rented the NES version of a game they already owned on CD-ROM, because they’re better than us.

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