Tags: Infamous Quests; Quest for Infamy
Gamebanshee's Steven Carter has reviewed Blackthorne's Quest for Glory-inspired adventure RPG Quest for Infamy. A large part of the review is just explaing what the game is and how it plays, but here are some of the more evaluative tidbits:
I must admit I'll never understand the "can't recommend over old games" argument -- it just eludes me completely. What if I have already played those old games?
Anyway, we go on:
The reviewer concludes by calling Quest for Infamy "a disappointing misfire". Ouch.
Hopefully we'll have our own Quest for Infamy review sometime in the future, on the condition that esteemed community member Aeschylus finds the time to write down his impressions. You know you can't trust any other site's reviews, right?
Gamebanshee's Steven Carter has reviewed Blackthorne's Quest for Glory-inspired adventure RPG Quest for Infamy. A large part of the review is just explaing what the game is and how it plays, but here are some of the more evaluative tidbits:
Like a lot of RPGs, the combat in Quest for Infamy starts out difficult and then gets easy. The main culprit here is the block skill. As you use your combat skills, you increase their ratings, but once you reach 100 with block, it's guaranteed to be successful, which means you can use it to heal yourself whenever you want -- and thus defeat any enemy in the game, even the end boss, regardless of your other skills or equipment. This completely deflates the RPG aspect of the game, leaving Quest for Infamy as mostly an adventure. [...]
Sadly, though, Quest for Infamy has three major problems that prevented me from enjoying it very much. The first is that it's almost a carbon copy of Quest for Glory I, except with an anti-hero instead of a hero. That doesn't necessarily sound bad, but developer Infamous Quests even copied the interface, and while people often get nostalgic for old games, it's not because of the interfaces. I can still enjoy a game even if it has old VGA-style graphics, but I'd just as soon avoid not having tooltips and scrollbars and quicksaves and context-sensitive cursors and other modern amenities. Plus, the more a new game looks and plays like an old game, the less reason there is for me to recommend it over the old game. In this case, you can buy all five of the Quest for Glory games for about half the price of Quest for Infamy, and no doubt enjoy them more.
Sadly, though, Quest for Infamy has three major problems that prevented me from enjoying it very much. The first is that it's almost a carbon copy of Quest for Glory I, except with an anti-hero instead of a hero. That doesn't necessarily sound bad, but developer Infamous Quests even copied the interface, and while people often get nostalgic for old games, it's not because of the interfaces. I can still enjoy a game even if it has old VGA-style graphics, but I'd just as soon avoid not having tooltips and scrollbars and quicksaves and context-sensitive cursors and other modern amenities. Plus, the more a new game looks and plays like an old game, the less reason there is for me to recommend it over the old game. In this case, you can buy all five of the Quest for Glory games for about half the price of Quest for Infamy, and no doubt enjoy them more.
I must admit I'll never understand the "can't recommend over old games" argument -- it just eludes me completely. What if I have already played those old games?
Anyway, we go on:
The second problem is the writing quality, which doesn't even come close to the level found in the Quest for Glory games. Worse, the tone of the game is dramatically different. I guess because you're playing an anti-hero, Infamous Quests didn't want to have "nice" jokes and instead made a beeline straight for the gutter. In the first hour I played, I saw references to masturbation, drug use, hookers, sex with dogs, and STDs; there's a beheading complete with splurting blood; your character is allowed to urinate on all sorts of things; and "shit" was used almost every other word for some characters. And you don't even want to know about the "bush" jokes.
Infamous Quests was also a little lazy in their writing. Adventures can often create a lot of humor from when players get stuck and start trying out random inventory objects in random places, but in Quest for Infamy you almost always get a generic "you can't do that" response -- or the game calls you an idiot, which is one of its favorite pastimes. I laughed a lot when I played the Quest for Glory games, but not so much with Quest for Infamy.
Finally, the voice acting in Quest for Infamy is sort of odd and annoying. For some reason almost all of the secondary characters use bizarre accents, and even the main character mumbles his lines. If it hadn't been for the subtitles, I wouldn't have known what he was saying about half of the time. Since Quest for Infamy is a budget title, I'm sort of guessing the voice actors weren't professionals, or maybe this was an attempt at humor that just didn't work for me. Luckily, you can turn off the voices if you want and not have to deal with them.
Infamous Quests was also a little lazy in their writing. Adventures can often create a lot of humor from when players get stuck and start trying out random inventory objects in random places, but in Quest for Infamy you almost always get a generic "you can't do that" response -- or the game calls you an idiot, which is one of its favorite pastimes. I laughed a lot when I played the Quest for Glory games, but not so much with Quest for Infamy.
Finally, the voice acting in Quest for Infamy is sort of odd and annoying. For some reason almost all of the secondary characters use bizarre accents, and even the main character mumbles his lines. If it hadn't been for the subtitles, I wouldn't have known what he was saying about half of the time. Since Quest for Infamy is a budget title, I'm sort of guessing the voice actors weren't professionals, or maybe this was an attempt at humor that just didn't work for me. Luckily, you can turn off the voices if you want and not have to deal with them.
The reviewer concludes by calling Quest for Infamy "a disappointing misfire". Ouch.
Hopefully we'll have our own Quest for Infamy review sometime in the future, on the condition that esteemed community member Aeschylus finds the time to write down his impressions. You know you can't trust any other site's reviews, right?
Sorry if I couldn't formulate it properly.
