Richard's Online Journal

[25/08/08] Trial By Fire

I don’t normally do generic ‘look what’s been released’ posts. Anyone who cares will see them on the gaming news sites. I’ll make an exception this time though, because it’s a game I’ve been looking forward to playing for a long time. Quest for Glory II: Trial By Fire. The long awaited VGA remake of one of the most (deservedly) loved Sierra adventure games of all time. Perfect for a quiet bank holiday Monday…

Before and After

But what is Quest for Glory? Well, that calls for some nostalgia…

Almost everyone who grew up playing adventures has used the same metaphor at some point. Lucasarts created movies, which showed up every few years with a level of polish and care that nobody else could match. Sierra created TV shows. Where Lucasarts put its weight behind one game at a time, it took a more scattershot approach. Its games were rougher round the edges, but much more varied - more able to experiment with new technologies and new concepts, without every release having to be a mass-market hit. If one didn’t do it for you, no problem. There’d be a new Police Quest along soon enough, or Space Quest, or Freddy Pharkas, or Conquests of the Longbow, or whatever else had caught the company’s interest at the time. That caused problems when their interests span into incredibly expensive FMV and failed attempts at 3D, but it worked for over a decade, and we got plenty of classic games out of it.

Quest for Glory was one of the most ambitious undertakings in terms of pure game design. Like all the best Sierra adventures, it took the basic point and click template and made it its own with a fresh spin, an interesting setting, and a reason to exist beyond simply letting people solve puzzles and read dialogue. This was the era when people expected that kind of thing, instead of being happy to swallow the torrent of horseshit currently being shovelled into their gaping maws by the likes of Frogwares.

But that’s another rant.

The QFG games were adventure/RPG hybrids - not the only ones, but some of the very, veryfew that did it well. Compared to the likes of Bureau 13 and Bloodnet, they were borderline masterpieces - the RPG elements boosting the adventure, instead of overwhelming it or filling it with needless cruft. You started out by picking a character class - Fighter (which could be upgraded to Paladin), Thief, or Magic User/Wizard - and many of your abilities were based on stats that could be levelled up in the course of playing the game. You could import your old character at the start of each new game, watching them get tougher and tougher over the course of the decade the series ran.

So far, so good. Can’t climb a cliff? Try levitating up it. Or boosting your climbing skill. That’s about as complex as the core stats bit ever got. Luckily, that was only part of the story. Where the QFG games really scored was in providing different experiences, all in keeping with standard adventure controls and thinking, for each character class. As a Fighter, you might get a particular item by showing off your combat skills, whereas a thief would be given the mission to steal it. Thieves would get several burglary missions - proto stealth sequences geared around avoiding squeaky floorboards or being mugged by an old lady’s cat - to raise cash, while a mage might find himself (there wasn’t a gender choice, unfortunately) playing some magic focused strategy minigame.

The main story stayed the same, but the beats could be very different, to the point that you could play the games at least three times over and still have a very different adventure each time. That’s before hitting up the side-quests, finding alternate solutions to problems, or just plain poking round the world in search of jokes, Easter Eggs, and the other goodies that made Sierra games so much fun to explore.

Ah, the great RPG dilemma. Magic User, Not Magic User, or Other One That Is Not A Magic User? Decisions, decisions…

Each game took the hero to a new location, loosely linked around compass directions and seasons. The first was set in the European town of Spielburg - yes, really - where you had the pretty easy objective of freeing the town from the not particularly tough bandits in a nearby camp. The second, Trial By Fire, moved to an Arabian setting, of djinns and tonics. Wages of War was a fairly half-hearted outing, with an African setting and not much in the way of story or interest. The fifth, Dragon Fire, finished off the series by bringing back damn near every character in it for one last adventure in a Grecian themed world that aimed to end things on a high, but fell afoul of a confused design that started off as a multiplayer thing and ended up a bit of a mess. There was still plenty of good stuff in it, but more in the side-quests like the romances than the often combat heavy main quest and its forced trial-based objectives.

The fourth game, I mention last because even though it’s one of the buggiest adventures in the history of the genre, it’s easily one of my Top 10 of all time. Shadows of Darkness was the horror-themed one, and an absolute masterpiece of game design. Puzzles, setting, humour, everything. It didn’t just go for the obvious targets, like vampires and Elder Gods, but took the time to imbue the setting with proper Slavic folklore - the Rusalka, the Domovoi - and little details like a Russian themed tarot sequence. There was more obvious comedy on the top, like Dr.Cranium (a very, very thinly veiled parody of Sierra’s own Dr. Brain) but for the most part the wordplay based humour bounced perfectly off the dark background to give a very unique atmosphere.

It also took the time to add genuine sentiment to its characters, from the little vampire girl Tanya and the cursed Rusalka (who could be befriended by any character, and only kill you if you gave her no choice, but only saved by the Paladin class), all the way to the ‘villain’, Katrina. Evil, yet very sympathetic, she’s up there with Gabriel Knight’s von Glower as one of Sierra’s best villains. It’s notable that while she dies in the course of the game, the Coles brought her back in the next game as a potential romance partner. It’s not quite as squicky as it sounds, but…

QFG5 was a weird, weird game. 3D wraparound backgrounds, polygon characters, plasticky faces, really bad combat. A sadly disappointing finale.

Designers Lori and Corey Cole did a terrific job on the series. The QFG games are adventures where there’s almost always something new to find, from a particularly terrible pun (and when it comes to puns, they put the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon guys to shame), to a brilliant new way of committing suicide. Simple messages like “That Didn’t Work” were rare - almost everything had a snappy custom response. Try to take out the local ‘ermit with a fireball? Pick your nose with a lockpick? Forget to put out your campfire? The Coles were the masters of Sierra Sudden Death Syndrome, but in a good way. They made dying almost as much fun as winning.

Restore, Restart, Quit?

One of the main reasons I’ve been looking forward to this remake is that QFG2 is the only one of the series I never finished. I always meant to, but the original was just too much of a pain in the neck in a few ways that shouldn’t have been a problem, but were. The copy protection map screen, the basic setting, a lot of early wandering, and the fact that it was the third of the series I played (after the VGA remake of the first game, Wages of War, and the wonderful Shadows of Darkness) all put me off. With this remake, those excuses no longer exist. It’s got shiny new graphics, a wonderful combo interface to pick between dialog and parser puzzles, and all the other cool stuff. I can’t wait, and if you’re an adventure fan who’s never played QFG, you shouldn’t either.

Once again, that link: Quest for Glory II: Trial By Fire. Hurrah!

[19/08/08] In The Name Of The King

Ah, Uwe Boll. Much like American McGee, his name has become a warning label rather than a selling point, but that’s not about to get in his way.

I’d be lying if I said I had a soft spot for his terrible game-to-movie conversions.  Most of the time, they’re intensely boring, regardless of who or what is on screen. Boll has an utter contempt for his source material that’s only matched by the disdain the fan community has of him. They’re not-so-bad-they’re-good. They’re the movie equivalent of the toy in a McDonalds Happy Meal - rushed, cheaply made crap designed to cash in while the iron’s hot. Watch another one? Sure! Sounds awesome…

But first, the obvious question. With a terrible director, an awful license, a pitiful story, a lousy script, and the weight of crappy tradition on its side, just how long can In The Name Of The King go before losing any hope of credibility? Projectionist, if you please…