King's Quest III: Part 2
KING'S QUEST 3: PART 2
Llet's take another trip to Llewdor, lland of magic and mystery. Llast time we started to hatch a plan to free us from slavery to Mnnananan, taking advantage of his back being turned and discovering the key to some powerful magic that could help us defeat him. We've still got some time before the prickwizard returns from his conference on smashing puppies with hammers or whatever, so let's head south and get off this mountain!
Oh, cobblers. Sierra loved these kinds of screens - winding cliff paths that had to be walked along with the utmost care. (The same was true of the basement stairs, but the path in that case was much wider and simpler to follow.) If you make a wrong move...
You fall down the mountain and are never seen again.
If you'll allow me to digress for a moment, I feel that Sierra's attitude to death in adventure games is an awfully pointless thing - the challenge of an adventure is in logical (or semi-logical, or outright demented) thought, working out the things you need to use on other things to progress in the game. So if you introduce death, all you're doing to the player is testing their memory, making them plod from wherever they last saved through the same things they've already done just to get back to the place where they were - there's no challenge there, it's not like an action game where your achievements are in getting from one safe point across a dangerous stretch to another safe point.
Space Quest (and later King's Quest games) improved on this a bit by making the deaths more interesting - they still make you restore or restart and sometimes come out of absolutely nowhere, but they're funnier in general and you feel like you're the willing butt of a joke - the game takes on a game show host tone similar to Jeremy Beadle after covering you from head to toe in a bolognese explosion, where you know you're at the mercy of a prankster and the joke's on you but you both laugh about it afterwards. (Oddly, at the same time, some of the Space Quest 3 deaths are shockingly bloody - it's a strange juxtaposition.)
And to give Sierra further credit, which is a shocking move for me, their later adventures starting with King's Quest 7 gave you the power to reverse death and go back to just before you made the bad decision. Here, you're asked if you want to try again from the same place, and Torin's Passage adding an "Oops" button in addition to the agonizing "restore/restart/quit" choice. This feels far more sensible - you can keep the funny or creative deaths but avoid punishing the player by making them have to guard constantly against them.
But we're in 1986 with King's Quest 3, so what we have to do is traverse the mountainside very carefully and save at each step of the way. It's not nearly enough to make the game an action-adventure or anything - it's just pointless busywork.
Oh, good, another one.
But with that over with, we have llanded in Llewdor! Llet me zip around for a moment and I'll get back to you soon.
That's more llike it.
Similar to most of the King's Quest environments, Llewdor is a cylindrical world about fifty metres thick with unusually impressive gravity, where you can walk around from north to south in the space of four screens. It's bordered on the west by a randomly-generated desert that stretches off infinitely, and on the east by the sea. The magic map fills in as you enter each screen, and you can use it to teleport from one screen to the other. It's a nice thought, although I feel it would have been a bit more useful in the earlier King's Quest games where the world was much bigger - it's comfortable to just walk between these screens.
Let's start off by going east a bit to a town! Well, I say "town" - it's a couple of buildings at the end of a pier, and the architects had forgotten that they were building houses and not boats and put portholes in them. Nevertheless, let's see if there's anything interesting in the store first.
It looks like we have loads of shelves of items (though it isn't clear if any are useful for adventuring), barrels, a furnace, a pretty ratty-looking dog and a decidedly jaundiced shopkeeper. (King's Quest 3 is the first of the games to use a remotely flesh-coloured tone for its main character - the previous two gave King Graham bright yellow skin like in The Simpsons.)
I take it back - it looks like I'm being blatantly told which ones are useful! You know Gwydion has been living a sheltered life when lard is considered interesting.
But then I remembered a small setback. All right - we'll come back here later.
Just testing the game's morality, don't mind me.
I didn't make a great transition here, but we're in the other building now, which is a tavern. When you enter, the unsavoury gentlemen on the left call to the woman at the bar. You can try to talk to them, but...
They won't give up any information if they can see us, so it's now time to break out the spell that we prepared earlier. The manual - sorry, the tome of the Sorcery of Old - gives us instructions on how to activate it, and I'm not aware of a way to mess it up really badly.
I've gone! Well, I've turned into a fly - I'm on this screen somewhere but I can't see where. When you're a fly you appear as a black dot a couple of pixels wide, which buzzes around in a rough figure of eight - you can move as normal, if a bit slower, and fly over any barriers that were in your way as a human.
Incidentally, I was suddenly inspired to find out why King's Quest uses the strange Commodore 64-style horizontally doubled resolution - it's due to the game's roots on the ill-fated PCjr, where memory concerns were so tight that stretching the screen from a resolution of 160x200 was the only viable way to fit the whole thing on to the disk. To save further space, the graphics are stored as vectors instead of bitmaps - the same approach as was taken for Mystery House, the first graphical adventure ever.
And the wizard pride flag that was hung throughout Mnnnnnnnn's house is on the east wall here, too! I think the entire population of this town is a shopkeeper, a tavern wench, a couple of shady inhabitants and one very unimaginative modern artist.
Where were we? Oh yes - buzzing.
That sounds promising! Be more careful with your secrets - even the flies have ears. Or do they? They probably don't. Let's buzz off.
I'm just below the tavern's doorhandle on this screen. We're going to fly a couple of screens to the west.
This is the tree they were talking about - there's a hole in the bottom there that could easily be interpreted as just part of the graphics. Amusingly, when you try to type in an action that you could reasonably do as a human, you just get "Bzzzzzz" in response.
With no commands at your disposal, you just have to touch the hole at the base of the tree to fly inside. And inside, you find this:
You can't actually do anything here - it isn't very obvious, but what matters is that you now have knowledge of the existence of that rope. Let's turn back into a human, once again reciting instructions found in the manual.
"heading for what you hope is a safe place to land" sounds awfully dodgy, but I don't think I'm in any danger here - the fly flies over to one of a couple of what appear to be predetermined points on the ground and with a puff of smoke, you're your old self again, with a temporarily enhanced craving for sugary drinks.
Looking in the hole still doesn't do a whole lot for us, but reaching inside lets us tug on the rope and reveals a rope ladder. Up we go!
The tree, which has expanded in size considerably since we were looking up at it from the ground, hides a ramshackle treehouse! So let's take a look inside, and...
Er, actually, Gwydion forgot to stop climbing the ladder - I had assumed he would stop once he reached the top, but he kept on climbing, eventually ran out of rungs and then fell with a splat back on to the ground. It's time to reload and try that again.
We made it off the ladder and on to the platform, and...
...we find ourselves in the centre of a Gwydion-shaped crater once again. This is going to take some more creativity to work out.
Actually, it isn't. The walkthrough tells me that this is just another situation where if things don't go your way, you come back later and hope they do so next time. In this particular case, you can use "look in house" or a similar command to examine the inside - if there's a bandit in there, then you just have to leave and re-enter the screen by climbing down the ladder and back up (which as we've established is a more dangerous feat than you might think). If it tells you that the bandit is asleep, though, then you're safe to go in.
I'll have that - thanks! There's also a bin at the back of the treehouse that you can't really see with the text window there. The bandits can randomly appear around Llewdor when you're walking through a screen, and steal an item from you if they touch you - if something gets stolen, then this is where you have to go to get it back. They work in a similar way to the dwarves in King's Quest 1, except they just took a random item from you and it disappeared from the game forever. This is a rare case of Sierra learning a bit of fairness in game design. Not nearly fast enough, but learning nonetheless.
And as soon as I mentioned the roaming bandits - they leap out from behind the trees as soon as I've alighted on the ground.
But I got away from them by walking down a screen. They're not very determined.
Looking at the top bar, time seems to be getting on a bit - we'd better start thinking about hiding our activities. So regrettably, it's time to go back to the house!
Climbing back up the mountain highlights something I didn't notice before - you can't even see Gwydion when he's behind this rock! And you have to stick close because the path is to thin - you can only glimpse the top of his head peeking out from behind it a split-second before you go too far over and fall down the chasm. As a result I had to set the speed to slow here so that I had time to react, inching my way forward to align myself with the path going north. It's bollocks.
Okay, we're finally home - quick, let's cover up our naughty activities the same way you did after smuggling those girl's magazines into your room as a teenager. (Again, though I can't remember how I hit on this particular noun, it's nice that you can specify "inventory" here instead of having to go through every last thing.)
And indeed, our inventory is now empty. Manabanana never ventures into here so everything is safe - even though there's a pretty clear line of sight into the room and the view of the legs at the base of the bed hovering a few inches off the floor on top of the vast mound of items that Gwydion has crammed under it.
With the wizard due back any minute now, we zoom around the study, closing the trapdoor, putting everything back into place and straightening everything up like the last minutes of an episode of Changing Rooms.
Leaving us just enough time to scamper into the kitchen and look innocent.
Forty seconds after the half-hour mark, Mnmnmnnrn appears in a puff of smoke, and... oh. I forgot about that, after specifically pointing it out in the first part - the wand was part of the collection of inventory that I stuffed under the bed, and the wizard has noticed its absence from his cabinet.
ZAP!, and he reduces you to a pile of salt or ash or something, thus ending the game. Presumably he's just going to have to feed his own damn chickens from now on, or until he kidnaps some other child. In the meantime, just like in Red Dwarf, your only use to him now is if it snows and he needs something to grit the path with.
We'll leave it here for now - next time we'll do this properly, deal with what we need to do and explore the outside world again.