Hi there, lovely Youtube video viewing audience, it's Mickey P here.
And this is the first episode of what I'm hoping will be an ongoing series, where I'm
taking a look at modern releases of retro PC games.
So I'm looking at them from sort of a technical standpoint, in terms of what's actually
included in the package, how it compares to what you originally got, and whether the way
they've set it up to run on modern PC systems is any good or not.
So I'm tentatively going to call this new series Mickey P's Retro Reviews
[theme music noises]
For this first instalment we'll be taking a look at King's Quest.
Specifically the first three King's Quest games, and more specifically this pack on
GOG that contains King's Quest 1, 2, and 3.
On GOG it's currently up for the somewhat awkward price of
13 dollars and 59 cents in fun Australian money…
So I think that's 10 of your American dollars if you're a United Statesian and I guess
the same amount of money in Euroland or Britainland, but yeah.
Money: It's weird and different in different countries.
Like with most games on GOG, once you've purchased it you can download it as a standalone
DRM-free installer, or you can use their GOG Galaxy client, which gives you nice features
like auto-updating and stuff like that.
But either way it's all DRM-free.
Which is great, because DRM is bad and silly.
So from a technical standpoint, all three of these games are basically set up the same
way, so to keep things simple I'll just be talking about all three at once.
And all three of them run through ScummVM, and if you're not familiar with that, it's
an open-source re-implementation of a lot of the old 2D point and click adventure game
type engines… originally it just covered the Lucasarts SCUMM engine but now covers
all sorts of engines from various different companies, including Sierra's AGI engine,
which is what these games use.
So now let's take a look at how these games run with the way GOG's set them up in ScummVM.
So first, let's talk a bit about the graphics.
So if you're familiar with older PCs, you'd know that the monitors aren't widescreen,
they're just 4 by 3. But if you look at this, this ain't 4 by 3.
So essentially, what's happening here is the image is kind of stretched out a bit,
not to the full 16:9 but, like, I think it's to a 16:10 aspect ratio?
So the reason that's happening is basically because of, like, pixel aspect ratios, and
the… the short version is that on a CRT monitor, pixels don't have to be square,
and most games of this era would run at a 320 by 200 resolution, which is not an exact
4 by 3 ratio, but that's how it was displayed on a CRT monitor
because the pixels don't have to be square.
The problem is the default way ScummVM's set up assumes all pixels are square, so it'll
just scale the original image up to the size of your monitor without actually changing
the shape so that it's the proper 4 by 3 ratio.
So this is something you can fix if you want to, in the graphics settings for ScummVM,
but then that means we're getting into the kind of fiddling around with options that
seems like it puts off a lot of more recent gamers from trying out these older games.
So other than that aspect ratio issue, these games all give you nice crispy pixels, without
any filtering or smoothing or any of that silly stuff.
So now, let's talk a bit about the sound.
So the default way ScummVM works with these games is that it uses the Tandy 3-Voice sound
for these games. So let's have a quick listen to how that sounds.
[3 voice beepy game music]
So that might sound pretty, like, primitive and plinky-plonky, but it's actually better
than what a lot of us heard for these games.
So to get this sort of sound, you had to either have a PCjr or a Tandy computer, and the PCjr
was a commercial flop and I'm not even sure if Tandy was a thing outside the US, so the
rest of us were just stuck with the single-voice PC Speaker.
This was before sound cards, so you didn't really have much choice in the matter, you
just had whatever your system came with.
So it's great that we're getting the best option by default here, especially since back
in the day not a lot of people got to hear that.
Now, if you want to, you CAN adjust this in the options too, for example if you wanna
really hear that single voice PC Speaker sound.
[bad pc speaker single voice game music]
So, aside from the looks and sounds, let's have a look at the actual gameplay.
So originally the way these games played was you control your character with the cursor
keys on your keyboard, and then you type in commands to do actions.
So that's still pretty much how they work here, but one thing that ScummVM has added
is mouse support.
So this basically lets you click to move your character around, like in the later point-and-click
style adventure games, and this wasn't something you could do in the original releases of these
games, although I do think the Amiga versions maybe supported it.
And, to be honest, it kind of bugs me a bit because it's sort of inauthentic to how
these games originally came out, but it doesn't really do any harm to have it as a feature
and I think some people probably find it makes the games a bit easier to play.
And, like everything else, it's configurable if you want to poke around in the settings.
So I feel I should point out one slightly weird interface thing that I noticed.
So if you click on the area where you type the text in, you get this sort of weird keypad
interface popping up, and I think it's part of ScummVM's support for, like, tablet devices
or phones or whatnot, like, devices without a keyboard, to let people be able to type
the, um, commands in.
But it feels kind of weird to have it enabled on a release like this, and I didn't have
much luck getting it to actually do anything, but oh well it exists in the engine for some reason.
So another issue that I want to point out with how the game plays is
the loading and saving system.
So rather than having the original interface for the save games,
we get the ScummVM save game interface.
This has the advantage of giving you more save slots, attaching screenshots of the saved
game and stuff, but it has the huge disadvantage of being an ugly gaudy bright orange.
And I personally feel that this clashes pretty badly with the aesthetic of the rest of the
game, and while I don't necessarily object to the extra features it gives you, I do wish
they'd maybe skinned it to look a bit less out of place or something.
And yes, you can adjust this in the settings as well, but then you're missing out on, like, the
screenshots and the extra save slots and all that stuff.
So let's talk a bit about manuals, because with older games like this, the manual can
be somewhat important, especially in King's Quest 3 where you actually need it to finish the game.
So the good news is all three of these games have the full manuals included as full-colour
PDF scans, including the all-important spell recipes from King's Quest 3.
But what's not included here is the technical reference cards that came in the original
boxes, but that being said, these technical reference cards aren't really that useful
these days, since it's unlikely anyone's really going to need information on making
backups of install disks or whatever, so I don't think this is really a great loss.
So I want to touch a bit on versions.
So essentially, the games as released on GOG are based on the MS-DOS releases which came
out in about 1987, in these brownish-gold boxes.
So, there were earlier releases that booted directly off the disk which I think were in
these grey boxes, and the first game actually had this PCjr only release that was published by IBM.
So I think the earlier releases of the games didn't have, like, nice features like menus
for example, but really they're historical curiosities more than anything else.
Basically, the versions you're getting here are the most easily usable versions of the
games, since emulating the old boot disk versions could be a bit fiddly, and they're not really
supported by ScummVM or anything.
So one other funny version thing is that the version of King's Quest 2 included here
shows up as Version 2.1, but on my original floppy disks I've got Version 2.2, so I'm
not really sure what the difference is, and I think version 2.1 is what made it onto the
earlier releases of collections that Sierra did in the 90s, like this one, so I guess
this is just more of a weird curious thing.
In terms of versions, I kind of suspect that they may have just used one of these old Sierra
collections as their source material for the copies of the games, and that kind of makes
sense because it's probably a lot easier to get hold of than finding old floppy disks.
But what is a real issue in terms of versions is the missing King's Quest 1 remake.
So back in 1990, Sierra remade the first King's Quest in their new SCI engine, which gave
higher resolution graphics, and actual sound card support,
and they made quite a lot of enhancements to the gameplay.
I've got no idea why this is missing here, because all the collections released in Sierra's
heyday included both versions, and with the 2006 Vivendi release
this was actually the only one they included.
So I think it's a real shame that this version is missing, and I don't really understand
why, since a lot of the other Sierra game re-releases on GOG will have both originals
and remakes, so it's just a really odd omission, I think.
I feel like a lot of people are going to be asking things like "So, is this pack worth getting?"
And I haven't really talked much about the games themselves so far, because I really
want to take a more technical focus to the, like, re-release aspects with this series,
but I feel like I should say something so I guess my take is that the King's Quest
series was a really influential part of PC gaming, like it kind of defined this sort
of graphic adventure game, so if you're curious about the
history of games you should definitely check this out.
And the point that sort of goes along with that is that
you SHOULD be curious about the history of games.
And I feel like a lot of PC gaming history kind of gets ignored, either because people
only care about the latest and greatest or because the nostalgia that gets marketed to
us is a very sort of specific console game oriented nostalgia.
So I really hope that people are still interested enough in these games that they want to try
them for themselves and see what they're like
As for whether the games are any good to play these days, I mean personally I'm actually
most experienced with the AGD Interactive fan-made remakes of the first two games, and
I only... I've really only played bits of the originals to try them out.
But that's not the point about whether you're able to finish them
or if they're any good by modern standards.
Whether you like them or not, it's important to know about them and what they're like,
and the best way to do that is to try play them for yourselves.
And as for whether this pack is a good way to play the games…
I know I've been pretty critical in this video, but to be honest this setup works fine,
and you don't really need to tinker.
If you do want to tinker, one thing I'd definitely recommend is tweaking the graphics
settings to fix the aspect ratio, and the rest of it is really just personal preference.
But if you don't want to tinker, that's totally fine, and I want to reiterate that
the games run absolutely fine out of the box.
The missing 1990 remake is also a pretty glaring omission, but that being said it is arguably
a separate game, I mean there's lots of games that GOG doesn't have.
So all I can really recommend with that is try and get hold of your own copy or hope
that GOG gives this pack an update someday.
So I guess to sum up, you should indulge your curiosity, and you should try out the original
King's Quest games. And if you do that, this pack works absolutely fine for that.
Thanks so much for watching the first episode of Mickey P's Retro Reviews.
Since it's kind of a new thing I'm doing with this series, I'd really appreciate any
feedback you can give me, like anything you particularly like or didn't like, or if I've
made any errors please let me know.
And you can either do that in the comments or you can find me on Twitter: @micpp42.
I'm Mickey P. Bye.
[ending music]
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