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King's Quest III Remake Released
Beetle B. writes "Not being content with remaking Sierra's King's Quest I, King's Quest II and Quest for Glory II, the Anonymous Game Developers Interactive have released a remake of King's Quest III. Sure, the graphics may not appeal to the young'uns out there, but it's the gameplay that matters, right? Last year, after several legal battles, another game in the King's Quest series made by fans was released (with more episodes to come). And did I mention that they're all free? What other remakes of old adventure games are floating around out there?"
Seriously, get a life
Best in the series, easily. Will download. Will play.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
For those who don't already know, Infamous Adventures also released a remake of Kings Quest III some time back - http://www.infamous-adventures.com/
I recently re-played Zork I all the way through, and it was a blast.
Infocom released all three of the original text adventures on their website for, in their words, "zero Zorkmids!"
Where did I put that instruction booklet so that I can get the proper ingredients for the spells and not turn myself into a something.
Yet another remake, sequel, re-imagining, mashup, or reinterpretation. Sigh. I never realized at the time that things were so good...I honestly expected that we would keep going onward. For the past 10-20 years, it has just been remake after remake. For every movie like Pulp Fiction or Necronomicon, there are two Karate Kid or McHale's Navy made. Just imagine if all the talented people who spent hundreds or thousands of man-hours making this remake instead spent their energy on something new. It just says that things were better before and imagination has become an unusual quality.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
since their site is only going 50k heres a much faster mirror from google 3
http://gamedaily.newaol.com/pub/2011_demos/KQ3_Redux10.exe
evil fuckers
Uhm, I wish they would stop making their complete sites in PNGs, I mean the whole text is graphic .. wt...?
No Linux version and the OSX version requires X11? hrmm must not have used SDL.
What a massive turnoff.
What's the license of the game? I couldn't find any info on their website...
(By the way, if a web designer ever suggested to me the an entire web site should be created using images instead of text....he/she would be fired)
Both this remake and the one by infamous-adventures have "improved" the UI by removing the need for any typing.
Am I the only one who considered the old text-input Sierra games to be superior to the point-n-click ones?
Sierra games was how I learned English (my second language) as a kid. By the time school started teaching English, I knew enough to be bored by what the school had to offer...
Somehow related but is there an open-source, cross-platform adventure game engine scriptable with a language like Lua. I haven't found one yet and always wished I could write new adventures for Guybrush Threepwood (or create somethin else completely new ). Most of the existing projects are using closed-source win32-only engines which is disappointing. I could help such a project if there is one.
Why, all the Scott Adams classics of course: Mission impossible, Pirate's adventure, Voodoo Castle... Most *definitely* won't be pleasing to the young'uns graphics-wise ;)
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
not really a remake, just a release to the open source community a few years ago..... an absolutely phenomenal game called Star Control 2. Made in 1984, the graphics are lacking, and the gameplay a little slow at first (until you get some cash flow from discovering minerals in new solar systems), but trust me when i tell you, if you like an adventure/rpg game set in the future, exploring space and new alien races, and don't care about graphics, this one is awesome. there's even a little "real-time" space combat mixed in.... epic.
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
Wasn't it already remade once in the 90s? Sierra rereleased all the EGA KQ1, LSL, SQ games with VGA and a modified interface (no typing needed).
It's how we learn.
Take children learning language:
1. Mimic what adults are saying.
2. Try out derivatives and variations of what they're saying.
3. Speak naturally because you understand the language.
Or learning a programming language:
1. Copy examples verbatim from books and the like
2. Make variations on that code
3. Learn the actual syntax and write your own code.
Derivative works are how our culture learns and evolves into something new. You see this pattern time and time again every time something "innovative" or "original" comes out in art. Everyone rushes to copy it, then does their variations on it and then comes up with a radical interpretation of those concepts which is hailed as innovative and the process starts all over. Look deeply enough and all of the work you think is "innovative" is actually derivative of some previous work or artist, which was derived from another work and so on.
You're right about cultural decay, though, but it's setting in because copyright law forbids people from producing derivative works.
Games like King's Quest have relatively low graphics levels, require little computational power, and the interface is generally pretty simple ("Go North", "Look", etc). Wouldn't these make great smartphone games? Just make sure it autosaves all the time, and also add the ability to save manually (to restart something if you get stuck or dead). I'd love to play half an hour of King's Quest on the train. VGA was 640 x 480, and my Moto Droid (sideways) is 854 x 480, more than enough. You'd actually have to letterbox it!
Obvious troll is obvious :(
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I never got to play this one. My friend had it but on a different system so we could never borrow it. I also was never able to get Quest For Glory 5. Is that freeware yet or does anyone know where to buy a copy? Would this run in dosbox or something or is there no hope for running this on a modern computer?
A remake is cool, but I think the more interesting news is that TellTale games is working on a brand new title for the Kings Quest franchise. There's a brief announcement on there blog. (You have to scroll down pretty far).
Cannot... speak... must massage.... my coax cable... to speed up this download
I have a paper and exam due tomorrow. And then I read this. I am fucked.
Thanks a lot!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The thing is... I wasn't trolling. Adventure games inevitably degenerate into either pixel hunting games (i.e. find the pixel in which there's actually something clickable) or into "guess what the hell the developer was thinking so you can do stuff exactly that way" games. Examples include, but aren't limited to, Sam & Max S01E03, where you're supposed to take notice of the minute detail of Sam throwing a card into a rat hole, and can get stuck because of that, even if you've already figured out what you're supposed to do; or Phantasmagoria 2, where, in order to get the wallet your pet rat took under your couch, you need to take it out of its cage, and put a treat under the couch, so the rat can go there and bring it back. 'Cause moving a couch is something really difficult to do...
My point was: adventure games don't focus on goals, they focus on the exact steps you need to take in order to accomplish them. That's what makes their gameplay weak. Even so, their story and humor can make them worthwhile.
http://golchest.sourceforge.net/
Still in alpha but making progress.
Also I like Tunnels of Doom Reboot http://www.dreamcodex.com/todr.php
How on earth did they accomplish this in less than ten years???
I thought this was a joke when I first saw the title. The King's Quest III remake has been out for about 3 years now. Did they just re-release it for publicity?
Then I realize that the people who have been making this game are separate. The first KQ3 remix is here:
http://www.infamous-adventures.com/kq3/index.php?page=screens
So I am dumbfounded that these developers worked so hard and for so long for so many years on doing something that's already been done. I can't imagine there is much difference between the first remake and this new second remake.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Ah my apologies then, if you had said this instead of that one-liner, you wouldn't even have gotten that moderation that you did.
Gameplay in an adventure is often difficult to do, a lot of it is filled in by puzzles, quick time events and action sequences.
The trick is to balance them correctly. More often than not, that balance just isn't there.
Personally, I quite like adventure games, I have been playing them since Larry 1 in holy-smokes-batman 4 colour cga.
Learning english to type the correct things to make the story go forward, feeling that accomplishment when I solved a difficult puzzle and laughing at all the jokes.
The games I enjoyed the most are adventure games, with such gems as Day of the Tentacle and basically all of the Lucasarts franchise before they only released Star Wars games, Quest for Glory because of the added action and rpg elements, Space Quest because of all the comedy, including all the different ways you could die (the only game where you wanted to die, just to see the joke), etc.
These days adventure games do not live up to their heritage, are less fun and more predictable, so now I play RPG's, good stories, fun strategic battles and comedy here and there (Praise Bioware).
P.S. See if you can borrow or rent Heavy Rain for the PS3, it's mostly good for 1 playthrough, but it is 10 kinds of awesome :)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Fair points. The P.S. is where I really cringed, though. I'm not really interested in a game where you can fail at sitting down, or shaving, or doing all sorts of boring, mundane things. This time, I'm actually half-trolling. :)
Just imagine if all the talented people who spent hundreds or thousands of man-hours making this remake instead spent their energy on something new.
I haven't seen it mentioned in the comments yet, but AGD Interactive's commercial arm, Himalaya Studios, announced during the KQ3 release that they are working on something new: a role-playing adventure called Mages's Initiation. From the official announcement on their forum, their promo page, and a thread on the AGDI forum, it looks like in will leverage a lot of their knowledge in creating the Quest for Glory II remake to really bring that unique genre into the present day and future. I still haven't found a game that followed up on the promise of Quest for Glory II in my mind, so I'm personally looking forward to it quite a bit.
So I am dumbfounded that these developers worked so hard and for so long for so many years on doing something that's already been done.
There's a story there. AGD1 is a beautiful young woman of about 30 now. She looks very similar to Angelina Jolie. Her family history is one of co-dependence for generations: a very nice person marrying and trying to placate a very mean one. Her mother probably has borderline personality disorder, like a cruel stepmother from a story book. Nothing AGD1 ever did was good enough. Not taking home straight As. Not deadlifting 200 pounds on the track team in middle school. Anything she ever did that might remotely threaten to outshine her mother was met with harsh words and other random punishments such as randomly giving away beloved family pets. Her father was the kindly one trying to soothe the wicked witch, she was distant and cruel to him most of the time as well. But the human heart isn't meant to trade love for cruelty forever. Her father died of cancer in her early teen years. Her last sight of him was water-swollen +100 pounds, saying he wanted to see his daughters. She was led out of the room by nurses and never saw him alive again.
One of AGD1's relatively few loving memories from her childhood is playing adventure games with her father. Together they would explore magical worlds where noble heroes can overthrow wicked witches, where the rules are fair and not arbitrary punitive and ever-changing, where good can win. She carried that feeling inside her after her father's death, when her mother was scrubbing her skin until it bled "because it wasn't pretty enough" or driving at 120 miles an hour, screaming that it would be better if they all just died.
So now AGD1 wants to share what was good about those memories of love in her heart with others. That feeling drove her to secure the rights to make not-for-profit remakes for the Sierra games. She draws each and every scene by hand, often at dozens of hours of effort per background, with dozens of backgrounds per game. She is quite driven, but something is holding her back in life from achieving her full potential so far. Knowing only her mother's hate as a replacement for love, she has had a string of abusive boyfriends in her past. Her mind has Body Dysmorphic Disorder and refuses to let her see her reflection in the mirror as beautiful. She turned down offered modeling jobs in LA when her boyfriend at the time convinced her the calls were hoaxes. Although she has a college degree, she saw working as a security guard in Phoenix's dangerous neighborhoods for single digits per hour as about as much as she was worthy to do. Her own game, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine, didn't sell as well as it could have for a variety of reasons. Her art style is heartfelt, but probably wouldn't pass a Blizzard Art Test as it is now....
So what to do? Wanting to help others, but a pain in her heart telling her there are few ways she can. She tries then to give others the gift of adventure games. And so she draws, and draws, and draws.....