some people (I believe
MRY is one of them) even prefer it to VI.
Regarding the remakes:
The AGDI (formerly Tierra) remakes are uniformly excellent, with the particular standout being King's Quest 2+: Romancing the Stones.
I emphatically disagree! KQII remake is, to me, exactly indicative of why I like KQV more than KQVI. Despite the ridiculous musculature of Graham's arms in closeups, KQV -- like the preceding games -- is not about a fantasy hero; it is much more about a
fairy tale hero. KQVI feels much more like a fantasy story. It's not a black-and-white difference, but everything from Alexander's appearance to LOOK HOW EPIC I AM sequences like the trip into the underworld seems like a move away from the homier, homelier adventures in the first five games. I'm quite confident it is Jane Jensen's influence, story-wise, but also probably market forces, as Sierra was trying to appeal to a somewhat broader demographic by then. I honestly have no views on which is the better designed game. As a kid, I was largely indifferent to design decisions -- Sierra puzzles often felt unfair, but I just kind of put up with it. It's just about feel. KQV feels like the perfect capstone to a series of fairytales. KQVI feels different, and wrong. The goofiness of adventure game puzzles just didn't fit, for me, with the protagonist or with some of the epic themes. Even as a kid I felt that way!
Which brings me to KQII. KQII in its original form is a
very old school adventure -- much more like a text adventure (and not a particularly good one) that just throws different goofball areas together with somewhat arbitrary puzzles and fairly low thematic coherence. It is goofy and random. The single thing that stands out as
worst in this regard is Dracula, because Dracula isn't a fairy tale figure, nor are vampires fairy tale antagonists. (Obviously the Batmobile is even stupider, but the Batmobile is an Easter egg.) Yet the KQII remake basically takes Dracula as its cornerstone and then tries to make some kind of serious, coherent psychodrama around him, with werewolves and an evil monk or something, I can't even remember all the details, only that it was just like a 13-year-old's attempt to make a "cool" fan fiction out of KQII (and I say this as someone who, at 13, tried to make a "cool" fan fiction out of Final Fantasy III!). It utterly misses that the origins of the KQ series were not, actually, adventure stories (let alone fantasy stories), but fairy tales. Fairy tales are not really about coherent psychodramas with robust dialogue and rich characterization. They are about archetypes, magical artifacts and companions, a few outsized monsters, arbitrary rules to obey, etc. KQII is utterly lacking in that feel. If anything, it's closer to a QFG game than a KQ game IMO. It feels like a game made by someone who hasn't ever read a fairy tale, and after having them read to him as a kid quickly realized that paperback fantasy novels were "cooler" and never looked back. Again -- at 13, maybe even at 18, that would be a fair description of me, so these barbs are somewhat self-directed, but I just don't think that someone coming in with that attitude is equipped to make a KQ game.
When Roberta Williams made KQ2 she was 34, had two son (14 and 8), and had spent years raising them. She came at as simultaneously (1) a mother who loved fairy tales, and looked at them not as a childish pursuit she had left behind, but with the wistful perspective of a parent remembering the joy of sharing those stories with a child and (2) an adventure fan who had gotten hooked on goofball text adventures like Colossal Cave. It would be hard to find a more different perspective than the one Daniel Stacey brought in adapting it.
Sadly, I could not find biographical information for Daniel Stacey about his background when he did the adaptation, beyond this on MobyGames: "Daniel has been practising his craft since the age of sixteen, writing fan fiction novels ("Future's History: The Story of Space Quest XII") and fan games (
King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones)." I feel pretty vindicated!
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As to the substance of the thread, I don't know whether PC means "IBM compatible" or what, but my first games on the Apple II/c were Space Quarks, David's Midnight Magic, Choplifter, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? All great games in their own way. Played Brickles and Ancient Art of War at one neighbor's house (he had an early Mac) and King's Quest II at another's (he had a PC). AAOW was the best of this bunch by a country mile. At school, Oregon Trail and some kind of trivia/maze game. Obviously Oregon Trail is a classic. Later, played Ultima V at a friend's house, and while my mind was blown, I don't think I ever really understood how the game worked. First game I bought with my own money was Wasteland.
