this is all absolutely true. thankyou for weighing in.

it's plants versus zombies wednesday!

we find dave's taco!

dave's so happy with us that he just casually hands us $1000.

then we proceed to play some vasebreaker and do a couple of levels. we also unlock minigames, finally.

for your viewing pleasure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0CXGYPBw0E

I guess we had different levels of nostalgia.

I still kind of like King Quest V, my first KQ after KQ1VGA, but that was a borderline bad game. More the terrible if you had the CD version (and had to listen to Cedric yammer and yammer). Outside of SIERRA's flagship KQ games, (KQ6 was better -- but was at times still unfair) they had the equally frustrating Space Quest (I couldn't even start those games properly).

Quest for Glory (more action than adventure) Leisure Suit Larry (adult themes) were far more feasible adventure titles. (Not to mention the overlooked Willy Beamish, Freddy Pharkas, and Robin Hood.) I heard great things about Police Quest too (never played any of their games). But the thing these have in common was that they were not a Williams' production. I was just looking up Sierra and saw Roberta Williams' did Laura Bow: the Dagger on AMON-RA... and that it had a prequel that was pretty unfair... and that it was made by an entirely new team.

I don't mean to be bashing on Sierra; I did have a lot of their published titles: the Incredible Machine (developed by Dynamix), No One Lives Forever (Monolith), Arcanum (Troika), Thexder (Game Arts; though I played the NES/Famicom version), and my favorite, Betrayal at Krondor (again Dynamix),.. but these were well outside of what Ken and Roberta did, which I consider the sour "core" of Sierra gaming. (Did the animated KQ7 and cgi KQ8 get better?)

that's totally ok. you have different tastes in games and that's cool. if we were all the same, life would be terrifically boring.

first: when i said i wanted ken and roberta to "still have kept their dream going" i should probably have expanded that a little more. what i /really/ meant was that i wish they'd kept the doors of sierra open and that all those designers were still making games of some persuasion.

part of the reason sierra expanded to all those universes, in fact was that ken williams saw that they weren't /really/ going to manage on just that one franchise. king's quest was [for the time] very big, but it was never going to expand their audience, which is why he greenlit space quest in the first place, for example.

also, i'm not going to lie and pretend like these games were "well designed," because frankly, in a lot of cases, the designs were /terrible./ - and a /lot/ of their designers were guilty of this, not just roberta, but i chalk that up to the time-period. remember:

when sierra were a going concern, so were infocom. and OH GOD some of the silly ways to die in infocom games were /truly/ silly as well. sierra were just picking up the reigns from them and learning their design sensibilities from them.

that's how we got lucasarts. they, in turn, looked at the sierra school of design and thought: "there's something very busted about these games" and then fixed all those busted things.

as for king's quest 7 and 8, 7 started fixing some of the more onerous and crazy design faults that had plagued the series up until that point. the problem with seven is that most people pretty much barf at the visual style. we'd had a game with rosella before and people quite liked that, (i believe) but seven was...for most, just not pleasant to look at or play.

8's problems were varied and numerous, but the core fault with eight was that it /completely/ retooled king's quest as we knew it and turned it into an action rpg with lara croft elements and NO ONE wanted that at the time. it was like you'd turned friends from a sitcom into a thriller. the audience just didn't want that. (there are other problems. you no longer play as the royal family, the whole game was pretty drab and what puzzles existed were rudimentary, at best.) - i've found, much to my amusement that i /can/ play it and kind of enjoy it as long as i don't think of it as "a king's quest game." i think of it as sierra spinning off in a different direction and i just tend to call it "mask of eternity."

in the end, you enjoy what you enjoy, and that's a totally valid response and awesome. :)

and i am glad you weighed in here, too. it's always excellent to have conversations.

thanks for watching my videos, too, if you've been doing that.

Roberta Williams wrote the first Laura Bow - the Colonels Bequest. She however had nothing to do with the sequal - The Dagger of Amon-Ra. The first being one of my all time favorite sierra games. The squeal is good but a little more time based to try to see and hear everything.


I for one like Kings Quest 7. I did not mind the visual style that the game had moved forward to. As well as Torn's Passage.
KQ8 I however could not get into with the block 3d style and the very heavy combat.


Willy Beamish, Freddy Pharkas, and Robin Hood are all very great adventure games.

Ken and Roberta were the heart of Seirra but with Al Lowe and Jane Jensen on the team many great games and series were made.

I for one can not wait for the remastered edition of Gabriel Knights Sins of the Father.

(sorry for jumping around my mind is a little cloudy this morning.. think i might be getting sick.)

it's fine. we're all here to discuss awesome games and what we liked about them. don't worry about being cloudy :) - i hope you're not getting sick, though. that would suck. :(

also, in case you've been watching my videos, thankyou so much for that.

laura bow and i never got along very well. mostly it was the time period and the fact that it was a murder mystery. both things i could never get into. [but i /do/ applaud them for going with a lady as a protagonist. that was very awesome.]

king's quest 7 bugged me at the time because it felt like sierra were trying - half-heartedly - for the disney market. and that /may/ have worked if they'd put more effort into - for example - the voice acting. looking at it now, i think they watched disney's "beauty and the beast" and felt like they could do that and then failed abysmally.

king's quest 8 bugged me just because how non-king's-quest it felt. the rpg elements i could handle, and the sorta-kinda puzzle elements i could manage, but connor? no royal family? this sudden made up thing of the mask? guys, this isn't a king's quest :P

and i totally agree. those off the beaten path games you mentioned were all pretty neat. [though the constant deaths in willy beamish were a bit stupid.]

i'm not one for gabriel knight very much. my sister loved it when it came out, and i will buy a copy so i can gift it to her.

evoland saturday [i'm a day late, because the people next door were partying until the wee hours and there was no way i could record properly. i'd get their voices, too ;)]

the latter half of the mines of noria happens and it's...not the most fun place for yours truly. i don't really have twitch reflexes, but somehow, i make do and get through it on my first try. which is /way/ better than my test run.

then we get to kaeris' village, which turns out to be a pre-rendered kind of thing much like what we used to see way back in final fantasy 7. [speaking of, there's a cute nod to that game at the end of the mines of noria.]

i talk to all the villagers and end up having to do a /ton/ of grinding. [you guys won't see the grinding, promise :)]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3tTcvP5suw

hero's quest sunday :)

in this episode, we go and explore that cave we uncovered by beating up on the ogre. we learn that the kobold who has his lair there has some shiny loot, some mushrooms and a key?!

it doesn't take /too/ long to figure out what the key is for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTPJazFmxC8

it's plants versus zombies wednesday.

in this episode, i talk about a game i'm /never/ showing on my channel [demon stone] because it is just filled with a concept i call "developer screw." games like that are bad and the people who make them should feel bad.

apart from that, we tackle two levels and i show off [belatedly] the pumpkin. i then am a silly person and don't show off the magnet. ah well. there's always time for that at some point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jGxKznfyjk

oh boy.

it's evoland friday.

and, well, the results are pretty middling to bad. i do a ton of pretty stupid stuff all around, from forgetting about my timer to falling into lava.

it isn't that evoland suddenly spiked in difficulty, i was just being silly ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e_pMKPGVUc

more hero's quest!

mostly, i show you how i've been doing the stat grind. [it /is/ a bit of a grind, regrettably - especially if you're trying for all stats at 100.]

after that, we visit my two favourite characters in this game, erasmus and fenrus. they're so silly :)

of course, i get trolled by mage's maze and end up losing that game ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XSb5Yp1PJk

plants versus zombies wednesday!

i show off some belated stuff - like the magnet - although, it's in the pitch dark level so it's not - perhaps - visible enough.

along the way, we tackle the first level of the roof. it's a nice, kind of relaxed level and i enjoy myself.

i hope you folks do, too :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r5SHvrpDYw

Just checking in to say +1 and I am watching the vids.

thank you very much. i appreciate it.

a guide to hearthstone's naxxramas content. i walk you through my completely free decks for the arachnid quarter's normal mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26-vPChZ6s0