pakopakojr: 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.
