So, from the ages of about ten through sixteen, I lived through sort of a personal dark age when it came to video games. We were broke, and had moved to a very rural part of Missouri where access to new games (or even old ones) was pretty limited, and so I made do with the fifteen or so NES and ten or so SNES games we had, as well as whatever I could find or scrounge for our creaking monstrosity of a Macintosh Performa all-in-one.
Mostly, that meant digging through the massive pile of excrement that arrived in our mailbox every month in the form of the MacAddict magazine’s included demo disk. I’d eagerly await the day the magazine would arrive so that I could rip open the plastic, chuck aside the actual magazine, drop the disc in a caddie and slam it into the Performa, thus starting what would usually be around two days of disappointment.
There would be endless clones of Minesweeper, Breakout, various Solitaire games, “shareware” that was mostly demos and unfinished versions of some small studio’s Mac ports, and, of course, full-ass games that, because you didn’t have the manual, you’d be unable to play. DRM is not, it turns out, a new problem. Within a day or two, I’d have scratched and clawed my way through the whole pile and would mournfully remove the demo disc from it’s caddie and drop it onto a spindle with thousands of other demo disks that we kept on a shelf above the computer, never to be looked at again.
Occasionally, though, there’d be a game that… well… it wouldn’t necessarily be GOOD, as such, but it was intriguing enough to exorcize a little bit of my boredom. One such was King’s Quest VI, a point and click from Sierra. You’d load it up and immediately be greeted with the sight of your rotoscoped character standing on a beach. No intro video, very little sound, just this opening screen. Walk to the left? Pick up a ring. Ok. Walk off the screen. Talk to people for a bit. The art was fantastic, with really fluid, Prince of Persia style animation, but it was utterly opaque to me what I was supposed to DO. No action that I took seemed to get me off the little island that the game starts on, and I dreamed about one day acquiring the manual to this game, which surely would help me figure out what the hell to do.
Then, one day, maybe a year or so later, I was at the Half-Price Books in Omaha, browsing their shelf of big box PC games for something, anything Mac compatible. They had this delightful habit of not separating the Windows, DOS, Mac, and Commodore games from each other, so God knows how many people thought they’d found a treasure only to get it home and realize they’d bought a slightly used paperweight (admittedly a good looking one – love big box PC game covers). Anyway, to my shock, there it was – King’s Quest, and it included both the DOS and Mac version! Holy Shit! $5 bucks! I actually could purchase this game. I hurried it up to the counter, got my receipt, and sat down on the bench near the front to begin pouring over the massive, King James Bible-like manual. I would continue to read all the way through dinner and the two hour ride back home, and began to acquire some kind of idea what the actual game was in this game I had purchased. I began to realize that I was meant to acquire objects and then trade them with the characters in the game for other objects that could advance my quest. What’s more, upon loading the game, I was greeted to something new – an intro cinematic! I learned what the hell I was actually doing, how novel! I proceeded to spend the next two or three weeks looting every corner of the island, handing every object to every exotic looking dog man or turban wearing lamp salesman in the desperate search for a way to get to the rest of the game, the other islands that had appeared in the manual, taunting me.
No dice. No combination of actions could seemingly get me out of my digital prison. Defeated, I set the (gorgeous, see picture above) box on the shelf and went back to waiting for for the next MacAddict demo disk to arrive so I could see which weird HyperCard stack disguised as a game I’d be fiddling with next (it was Amazon Trail, I believe).
And that was pretty much the end of it till I was scrolling through GOG the other day and saw King’s Quest IV, V, and VI in a package for 2.99. Sure, I’d give it another shot – after all, now I had the internet. With a guide in hand, I was able to blow through the whole damn thing in about four hours. Finally, I had slayed the dragon (not literally, in this case it’s a minotaur) and put to bed that knawing feeling of not finishing a game that I’d carried around for twenty years. The beast was dead. I had triumphed.
How was it?
Fucking sucked.
The only way, and I mean, the ONLY way, to make point and click games entertaining at all, is to have the script be written by genuinely talented people. Something like the Monkey Island games, which have a sense of humor and fun to them, spring to mind in stark contrast to this turd. The whole thing has the utter lack of imagination and heartbreaking earnestness of those off-brand European 3d animated movies that my girls sometimes stumble into and then, you know, force me to watch. Characters say “Zounds!” without a hint of irony. The dogwood tree barks at you – a pile of books is guarded by a four foot long, stovepipe hat wearing book worm, the villain is a mustache twirling Arab… this was a game that desperately needed a touch of sarcasm and wit. I’m not opposed to earnest, heartfelt games (Ocarina of Time, for example, isn’t exactly a knee-slapper) but they need to have the writing chops to back up their earnestness or it all comes across as twee and grating.
The puzzles are absolutely nonsensical and mostly require the manual or a walkthrough to solve. Even the simplest possible thing, the first thing you would make SURE of in a point and click, the ability for your character to accurately interpret what you mean when you click on something, is totally broken. I’d sit at my desk seething as I clicked on the same sparkly object over and over, while my character glitched out like he was at a rave, jumping back and forth OVER THE FUCKING THING I WANTED HIM TO PICK UP. At least once every five minutes, I’d click off screen, indicating that Prince Alex was meant to leave in that direction, and he’d wander over to the edge of the screen and stop, which has the wonderful side effect of blocking my path to click again. Click back to the center of the screen, wait for him to saunter back, then click off the screen again, wait for him to wander off the screen as intended, oh shit, he’s stopped at the edge of the screen again, ok, back to center, oh God, oh God, oh God, JUST FUCKING WALK, ALEX!
Anyway. It’s over now. The eight total dollars I spent on it over the course of my life are not the worst I’ve ever spent, but they’re in the top ten, for sure.
CoinOpDad 
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