King's Quest: Collection Series (King's Quest I-VII / The Colonel's Bequest / The Dagger of Aman Ra / Mixed-Up Mother Goose) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a collection of the first 7 King's Quest game covering a history going back to the mid-80s.Therefore the earliest of these games are quite primative, but have a nostalgic charm to them, and all the games have fun fantasy stories with a wonderful, light sense of humour.
When the first King's Quest came out it was at the vanguard of game design.Unlike the text adventure games common at the time (some of which had a few static graphics), here you could see your character moving around an actual environment and interacting with objects.The games themselves are quite simple (basically, they are just treasure hunts where you have to find the right object and take it back to the correct character to trade for another object, etc.) but charming.The interface on these earliest games are parser, as opposed to point and click, meaning (with the exception of movement by cursor keys) you have to type in commands in order to tell the character what to do.This had its disadvantages (at times, you know what to do but not how to say it), but it also had its advantages (there was less room for guessing by just clicking your inventory objects on the hotspot one at a time).
In KQ1 and 2, the puzzles are mainly based on remembering rhymes and fairy tales (e.g., you know Little Red Riding Hood needs a basket to take to her Grandma's house), but with KQ 3, the storylines start to become more complex and original and interesting, and actual problem solving starts to come into play. And with KQ4, the graphics start to become more artistic (although still primitive by today's standards).
KQ5 is the first one with a point-and-click interface, and suffers from the problem that it is easy to solve puzzles by just clicking inventory items at random instead of by thinking, (and many of the puzzles are obvious at any rate, especially when you find the right object) but the enjoyable storyline makes up for this.KQ6 (designed with the help of Gabriel Knight's Jane Jensen) is clearly the best story-wise, and has some challenging puzzles (save often to avoid frustration).KQ7, the first designed for release exclusively on cd-rom, has the best graphics of the series (even better than the 3D crap in #8) and includes a world straight out of a Tim Burton movie that is especially fun to explore, but is geared towards a younger audience (even then, I enjoyed the story and interesting puzzles with multiple solutions).Unlike Lucasfilm games, the characters in KQ can die and, if this happens, you have to restart from a saved game, but it is sometimes fun to see how many different ways they can die (for #7 it is the most entertaining part of the game).
Included is the newer version of Mixed Up Mother Goose where young players help to recreate mother goose rhymes by reuniting characters with lost objects (no death in this one).The original MUMG had a certain charm, but only toddlers will fail to find this one annoying. Also included are both Laura Bow mysteries (about a girl detective in the 1930s), which are fun to play but are convoluted and very frustrating to solve (especially since they are in real time, so while you observe something important in one room, you often miss something else important in another room).Several text games that came out pre-KQ1 are also included (which will help newer players understand why KQ1 was so revolutionary).
Most of these games would no longer be worthwhile on their own except as nostalgia (KQ6 and 7 (and maybe 5) being the exceptions), but as one package this is a wonderful buy and leaves one hoping that a KQ9 will come out and repair the damage caused by that travesty, KQ8.

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Product Description:
A collection of seven games in the classic King's Quest PC game by Roberta Williams. Also includes several bonus games.

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