King's Quest V - Sierra RRP œ39.99-œ44.99
      (Icon-driven graphic adventure for PC and Amiga)

The King's Quest series began back in 1983 and, for the first
time, featured the main hero of the series, King Graham. He wasn't
king back then, in fact it was his adventures in King's Quest I
that gained him the crown when the old king died. In King's Quest
II he searched for, and found, a wife and the series continued
through KQIII and KQIV with a change of major character, Gwydion
in III and Rosella in IV, though the main family storyline
continued throughout. Now we've reached King's Quest V and King
Graham is back as the hero you control - and, boy, is he having
problems.

A nice walk through the woods on such a fine day probably seemed a
good idea to Graham when he set off from his castle on the day the
adventure starts. His walk finished, Graham headed back to the
castle and his family ... but when he got there, all that was left
were the castle grounds! The building, and his family, had gone,
whisked away by forces unknown. What could have happened? he
wondered, and then was startled when a voice from a nearby tree
told him that it had seen what happened.

Turning, Graham saw an owl is a snazzy blue waistcoat sitting in
the tree. The owl, Cedric, told him that the evil wizard Mordack
was responsible for the disappearance of Graham's home and family.
Taking him to his master, the wizard Crispin, Cedric agreed to be
Graham's companion on his travels to search for Mordack and
recover his loved ones and armed with a magic wand given to him by
the wizard, Graham set off on his latest adventure.

The game begins outside the wizard's cottage near to the small but
busy town of Serenia. Woods lie to the west, then scrubland and
desert inhabited by bandits. A small gypsy encampment has been set
up, an old gnome and his young relative sit outside their home in
the woods while colonies of bees and ants have made nests nearby.
The very north part of the wood has an ominous "Keep Out" sign and
in a small lake nearby is a willow tree that really weeps. Add to
all that a prince looking for his lost love, an inn inhabited by
rather shady characters, a bakery and a snake blocking the path
Graham wants to take and you can see there's a lot going on in a
relatively small area.

Once Graham has collected all the necessary equipment for his
trip, he can set off in earnest. The journey to Mordack's castle
will take him through icy wastes to the domain of Queen Icebella
and her wolf guards, by boat to Harpy Island and further across
the sea to Mordack's Castle. His reluctant avian companion is very
wary of danger and tends to stay away from tricky situations so
much of the time, Graham will be on his own.

King's Quest V is the first of the series to use no (repeat, no)
typed input. Yes, the whole game is icon-driven using the
keyboard, a joystick or mouse. I used the mouse and despite some
early moans and groans found it fairly straightforward to use.
Clicking one mouse button cycles through some of the available
options, in each case giving you a different cursor shape - a
walking figure for movement, an eye to look at things, a hand to
manipulate them, a head with a speech bubble for conversation. If
you're holding an object, a cursor representation of that also
appears so it can be "clicked" on other objects or characters eg
for giving something to someone.  Other options can be accessed by
moving the cursor to the top of the screen. From here you can also
check inventory, examine things you're carrying, save/restore,
pause, alter the sound volume and so forth.

The game itself can be fully or partially installed on the hard
drive on the PC. Fully installed it takes a massive 9.7 megs! But
that does at least eliminate the need for disk-swapping and also
speeds the game up. I played the 256 colour, VGA version which
comes on 8 high density disks, so full installation seemed a good
idea though it meant removing a lot of things from the hard drive
and left us with a measly 800K! If you haven't got DOS 5 there
isn't enough memory for the mouse to run and even with DOS 5 it's
essential not to run any programs such as Norton Commander before
loading the game or, once again, you'll run out of memory and get
a fascinating "out of hunk" message.

Why so much memory and so many disks? Well, whereas King's Quest
IV took the series one step further in terms of the appearance and
quality of the graphics compared to I to III, in KQV Sierra have
gone completely overboard with the amount of detail and shading.
The introduction shows this very well with the animation of Cedric
the owl and you can almost feel the texture of the bark on the
tree in which he sits. Further into the game, the scenes in Queen
Icebella's Kingdom are especially well done and the snow and ice
look very realistic. Close-ups of character's faces during
conversation are also effective. But generally the impression
gained is one of washed-out art; there are so many colours and
shades used that the overall effect is lost and one just becomes
aware of the individual pixels ... I think that is why the snow
scenes are so good, fewer colours and good art work.

As for the animation, again I found King's Quest IV better -
Rosella was so beautifully drawn and moved so well. Graham, on the
other hand, is jerky and so thin that when he turns sideways ...
well, you know the old joke! On a couple of occasions I noticed a
very abrupt change in size as he walked from the background to the
foreground; I don't recall ever seeing that in KQIV either. Moving
Graham round the screen is, again, tricky at times. It's easy to
get him stuck on obstacles and if he gets "trapped" in the
scenery, hard to get him moving again despite the introduction of
a "travel" icon which is meant to eliminate this.  Strangely the
other characters moved and looked better.  Perhaps this is because
they just go through set movements whereas Graham needs a more
varied repertoire of actions so must be a simpler figure - who
knows?

Sound? I don't have a sound board so had to make do with the PCs
own sound. No comment, but I turned it down to minimum pretty
quickly before the plinky-plunk music drove me crazy.  Copy
protection uses a "match the symbols from the booklet with those
on the screen" method. Thank goodness it only appears once; I had
awful problems with it.

The game isn't hard and, invariably, you are given a hint when
you're killed so you have an idea where you went wrong (So,
falling off that cliff wasn't a good idea?) Several problems only
seem to appear if you are carrying the object necessary to
solve it which is a dead giveaway. I must admit the game got a bit
harder as it progessed, but not much. Useful objects glint when
possible so you don't miss them.  The desert where the bandits
hang out is a massive excuse for lots of locations. Graham can
only go 7 or so locations without water and there are 80
locations, only 6 of which have water. You spend a lot of time
mapping, dying, mapping, dying, getting cross .....  A similar
situation occurs at sea where death awaits if you go the wrong way
- restore and try again.

Finally, I don't like icon-driven games. It's inevitable that
there won't be the same freedom of actions allowed as in a
typed-entry game. I felt I was being led through the game with not
much free choice as to what I was going to do. Sometimes I (as
Graham) ended up asking characters for things that I (Sue) hadn't
seen on the screen!  In conclusion, Sierra have gone too far along
the visual route and in making it easy for people to play the game
and away from the puzzle side of it ... which, after all, is why
we play these games, isn't it?
                                             Sue