Let us sit upon the ground* and tell merry stories of games with kings!

Apparently hell will freeze over, SNL will make a funny sketch, George R.R. Martin will finish writing Song of Ice and Fire and I will get a date before GOG brings back GOG mixes, but we can still have a little fun with a thread like this.

What titles should be part of a GOGmix with games featuring the best computer game Kings, Queens and other royal personages? I'd start with these:

Thronebreaker: The gameplay is solid, I like the art a lot, but what really makes it a great game is the story, and the protagonist - Queen Meve. It really is a great tale of war, politics and betrayal, and the player gets to make a lot of tough choices as the warrior Queen.

Prince of Persia Trilogy: The Prince doesn't get to do much ruling in these games, but who cares? They are still some of the coolest 3rd person action games ever made.

Heroes of Might and Magic IV: It may not be the best HoMM game, but I do honestly think it has the best story campaigns of the whole series, and The Price of Peace which centres of Queen Emilia Nighthaven is probably my favorite of them. Great story of an earned rise to power and forging of a kingdom

Lands of Lore: Ok, this one score the points mostly for having Patrick Stewart in the role of King Richard. But come, how is it not awesome to go on an epic quest for Patrick Stewart?

King's Bounty: Armored Princess: I like all the installments of the KB reboot (except for KB 2 which I have not yet played), but Armored Princess was probably where it hit it's peak, polished but still fresh, and Princess Amelie was the best protagonist the series had.

King's Quest: To be perfectly honest - I don't like Sierra's adventure games. Never have. Deaths, dead ends, timed puzzles - I hate all that shit. But I still have to recognise their importance to the genre and gaming in general, and King Graham is probably the most iconic royal protagonist in gaming history.

*Sitting on the ground is not obligatory.

Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate Inspired by one of the oldest known games about defending royalty: Chess. But in this case the king is on his own, with no pawns or servants to defend him... But he's got a shotgun. Extra points for the "roguelike" tag, I know Breja loves it :P

Nice GOGmix, by the way :)

https://i.imgur.com/fs2o3Y5.gif

Sierra had a long history of royal stories.

Conquests of Camelot was a King Arthur story about recovering the Holy Grail. I remember it to be an unforgiving royal pain in the arse to play. But it was great for its era.

I see what you did there :)

I knew I was forgetting something Arthurian. I wanted to put King Arthur - The Role-playing Wargame on the list, but while I do think it's a great game, oddly enough Arthur isn't really a character (I guess because the player is the King, in that "omnipresent eye in the sky" way of many strategies).

I'd love to play both Conquest games, for their settings and story, but I'm pretty sure it would end up being an excercise in frustration. And I don't think there's much point to playing anything with walkthrough permanently in my lap.

That is pretty much how to play them these days unless you have a legendary moon logic brain or can stand 1001 ways to die. Longbow iirc had more variance to the story path - I think some characters could die affecting the outcome or something like that. Camelot was thoroughly linear and rather brutal with its combat sequences *grimace*. I remember playing it on the old Tandy machine back in the day and my sister and I had nothing but trouble even beating the first enemy attack (the wild boars). Ahh those old disk-swapping days!

I came to the conclusion that such games are more fit to be experienced by watching someone else playing them.
That way I don't wast any time (because the player knows what they are doing and those games can be unforgiving), I don't suffer any frustration myself, I don't fight the interface, and I get to see the gameplay and the story unfold. A good video will also show interesting dead-ends.

I'm inclined to agree, even though I very rarely enjoy watching other people play games. But when it's something like this, something I;m almost sure I'll never play myself, at least not to completion, and it's mostly story focused, then a let's play may be a good option. Though finding one I'll enjoy is tough.

I did watch a very enjoyable let's play of the entirety of the Quest for Glory series by Paw Dugan. He also made a decent Let's Play of King's Quest 5, and a fun series of retro-reviews of the whole series. It's mostly thanks to hi, now mostly forgotten, videos that I'm sort of a fan-by-proxy of Sierra games that I neverreally enjoyed playing.

Since it was brought up yesterday:

The Elder Scrolls Chapter II: Daggerfall: Taking on the role of the errand boy/intermediary of the kings and queens (and associated nobility) of the Iliac Bay you uncover the intricacies "of a Shakespearean drama with cloaks & daggers, (courtly) intrigue and betrayal ... combined with a whodunit plot and the typical DnD fantasy setting of earliest TES."

Kardboard Kings
King of Retail
Peter Jackson's King Kong The Game

What? That doesn't count? The protagonists aren't royal enough? Pfff...

I'll admit, I never played Daggerfall. Does the Emperor have a decent amount of screen time? I was tempted to put Oblivion on my list, but I decided one "ruler played by Patrick Stewart reads opening narration and sends you on a quest" RPG is enough.

Sidenote: I remember feeling a bit disappointed that I can't take the throne at the end of Oblivion's main storyline.

Besides setting the stage and sending you on your merry way and being involved with one of the seven endings he might not exist just as well. He is of course referenced when necessary but the narrative focus is on the Iliac Bay's nobility.

Didn't even attempt to get into Oblivion, after Morrowind did away with and "streamline" too much mechanics/feature-wise for my taste already.

Ah. I played KQ 3 a bit and it looked very open (but actually it was not) and harsh. Then, later, KQ 5. It looked stunningly beautiful, but also unforgiven and more linear than it seemed. Its gameplay seemed very old-school ("I assume you have nothing better to do than to try every possibility in the game, to see what works.")
I understood that, if I wanted to finish the game, I had to keep notes of all my attempts (especially because of the desert bit, where I think you had to find a special scene by trial-and-error). I gave up because of this. I'll be looking at that video, then; if nothing else, to get closure on the game.
Thanks.