https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCsHcqs9j1k
I’ve actually watched this one already. I watched a 40 minute Pam aka CannotBeEntertaining video. It wasn’t easy. I watched the last 20 minutes with my eyes closed, trying to fall asleep. But I maintained consciousness throughout the entire video.
And now I’m going to watch it again because she made some curious observations. I played Sierra adventure games extensively in my youth so I’m invested in the topic.
1:45 – She says that she doesn’t like “text parser” adventure games. You know, the ones where you have to type everything out. She prefers the ones where you click.
When they started that clicking bullshit, I was done with the genre. I even wrote an angry letter to Sierra about it. But this is the way with things. Everything has to constantly be dumbed down.
When you were able to type shit, it was like you could have done anything. Of course you couldn’t, a lot of shit would give you a “I don’t understand that” message, but there was an illusion of freedom.
With clicking, you realised that the only options are “look”, “give”, “pick up”, this sort of shit. Because those are the only options that you’re given. There was even at least one Leisure Suit Larry game that eschewed even that basic setup and just had a regular arrow for everything. So you just clicked everything using an arrow cursor.
I played Monkey Island years after it was released, shortly after I got the internet, a bootleg version, and I didn’t like it. The LucasArts games are all clicking shit so it’s not for me.
2:30 – She starts with King’s Quest I. She didn’t like it because you have to type.
This was a bit before my time but I played it decades later after I got the internet. I didn’t spend much time on it but I was playing it like 20 years after it was released. It’s tough to play these games today even if you have an appreciation for the genre and the era it was released.
She complains about the loud sounds. It’s true but that’s the case with all IBM or whatever it was sound games. But the Tandy line of computers had a better soundcard (maybe the IBM and clone computers didn’t have a soundcard at all) so it was much more pleasing to the ear. I don’t know if King’s Quest I has a Tandy sound option.
2:45 – She shouts out Roberta Williams. She does this a few times throughout the video. She always shouts out female game developers.
But wasn’t the game co-developed by her husband Ken Williams? Not according to Wikipedia. But he helped on the second game. He has a surprisingly sparse list of games that he worked on, actually. That’s surprising.
Interestingly, Pam aka CannotBeEntertaining never played King’s Quest IV. She might have enjoyed it. Female protagonist. Significantly better graphics. You still have to type, though.
4:00 – Leisure Suit Larry. She’s mentioned this before. Surprisingly, she likes the series.
4:45 – She shouts out the sexism and “casual homophobia.”
I played this game at a friend’s house as a kid and his mother came over and said, “Is that the woman with the big boobs?” and my friend said, “No, this is a different woman.”
It’s weird. I found it weird at the time. Why is his mother okay with us playing this game? We were probably about 12 years old.
God, that was a weird house. The father was always sleeping. And the place was always a huge mess. Clothes all over. Mouse traps everywhere. My friend was a smart guy, though. Did well in school.
I saw him years later. I was in college and he stopped by my house for some reason. We hadn’t spoken since the 9th grade. He was talking about his 40 year old girlfriend and how his parents got divorced and shit like this. That was the last time that I saw him. I think that he’s a crooked cop now.
10:00 – Another Leisure Suit Larry game. Pam tells this weird story, which she’s told before, about being at her aunt’s house and playing this game as a seven year old. And she talks about how excited she was to play it because you could see boobs. She goes on to say that she probably shouldn’t have been allowed to play it.
Well, yeah. It obviously warped Pam. She’s a hardcore lesbian now.
What was this aunt of hers thinking? Why did the aunt even have the game for herself? Pam says that it was the ONLY game that this woman had. So she obviously wasn’t interested in video games. She just had this one game, presumably to masturbate over. I guess. She must have been a lesbian too.
And then Pam shows footage of nudity in this game and calls it “nostalgic”. Completely bizarre.
11:45 – Quest for Glory 1. The VGA remake. Pam never played the original where you had to type.
She mentions that she never played Police Quest or Space Quest. Yeah, I never played any Space Quest games either but I played the Police Quest games.
I had Police Quest 2 and I got pretty far with that. I didn’t like it, though.
Then I got a compilation CD that had all of the Police Quest games. Sierra was doing this for a while. They put out compilation CDs of their games. It was a good deal at the time.
But this was years after these games were released and I couldn’t get into them.
Also in this compilation was Police Quest SWAT or something. It was some FMV game. What a piece of shit that was. I hated that game. And it was in this weird jewel case that made it really hard to get the game out. Maybe I was just an idiot. But I ended up snapping the CD. That never happened before or since.
So I sent it back to Sierra for a replacement (because I bought it directly from Sierra) but they sent back the wrong CD or something. So I was really disappointed with Sierra by this point. They’re making shit games like Police Quest SWAT now, nobody wants fucking FMV games, they put them in this ridiculous jewel case that breaks the game, and then when I inevitably break the game, they send me the wrong fucking replacement CD.
I didn’t even bother trying to rectify this. I didn’t want Police Quest SWAT anyway. So I just decided that I was done with Sierra. They went out of business shortly thereafter anyway.
14:45 – Quest for Glory 2. She doesn’t like it. Because you have to type.
She mentions a VGA remake but she doesn’t seem to know that this was a fan-made remake.
15:15 – She complains about the maze-like streets. This was a copyright protection thing. You needed to have the map that came with the game to navigate the streets. But you only had to do this ONCE per game. Once you buy the IN-GAME map, you can just fast travel to places you’ve been before by clicking the location on the map.
Then she mentions a “puzzle” near the end of the game where you have to mention the name of somebody that somebody just mentioned in passing. I don’t remember the name being said in the game but I do remember this name being in the manual. So this was another copy protection thing.
I remember discovering this YEARS after I first got the game. I was just stuck there. But that’s okay. This is how things were back in the day. You played a game for years. That was the mark of a good game. If you beat a game on your first playthrough, that’s a piece of shit game. I want to get my money’s worth. I want to play the same game for many years.
So Pam aka CannotBeEntertaining says that Quest for Glory 2 is the worst game in the franchise.
Totally backwards. It’s the best game. I’ve beaten the first four games many times. I’ve played them for many hours. Over the course of years. From best to worst: 2, 1, 4, 3.
But Pam ranks the games, 3, 4, 1, 2. It’s madness. The complete opposite of reality. Her list is garbage.
Quest for Glory 2 took everything that was great about Quest for Glory 1 (the version where you have to type) and magnified it. Quest for Glory 1 was a four disc game whereas Quest for Glory 2 had nine discs. More than twice as much content.
20:30 – Quest for Glory 3. She doesn’t know the subtitle but I’ll let it go. She obviously has played the game before.
It’s just baffling that this is her favourite game in the series. She cites the combat as being exceptionally good when in reality, it’s exceptionally bad. Clearly the worst in the series. Not that the combat was good in any of them. All you have to do is hold the attack button down for the first two games and that’s basically all that you do in the third one too. The fourth game has a much more elaborate system that I don’t like but fortunately you can set it to “auto”.
She talks about how the different classes in the game impact things. No. Quest for Glory 3’s classes have the LEAST impact on the game than any game in the franchise. I never played Quest for Glory 5 so I don’t know about that game.
There’s no thieves guild. So thieves aren’t particularly useful. They even mention this in the manual. There’s not much to steal from tribal people. The game takes place in an African-like world.
The magic user gets a staff at some point but that’s it.
No. Clearly the least variation between the classes in this game. The other games, even the fourth one, have much more variety.
23:30 – Here’s where I started dozing off in my initial watch so now I get the benefit of watching the video and the always hot Pam. She has purple eyeshadow today. Whoa. Did my pants just get tighter?
24:00 – Quest for Glory IV. It’s a goth-themed game so she liked it. You know, vampires and shit.
She mentions the bugs in the game. It’s true. What a piece of shit. They rushed this out. That really soured me on the game. It would crash if you did certain things. So part of the challenge was trying to get the game not to crash. That’s stupid. That’s not a puzzle that should be in any game.
25:15 – Shout out to her life partner.
Then she talks about FMV games and whatnot. I don’t care. That’s the video.
Oh, I just noticed. She put Quest for Glory IV above Quest for Glory III. Well, my point still stands. The correct order is 2, 1, 4, 3.
– “I rank you best videogame ranker”
John Riggs is crying in his bowl of Star Trek cereal.
Anyway, this video makes me realise that these games were basically for girls. Even Leisure Suit Larry, apparently.
A lot of gamer grrls on Youtube like adventure games. What’s her name…that crazy fat chick…if that narrows things down…PushingUpRoses. She talks about adventure games. I don’t know. It’s just a genre that I think was popular with girls.
Now it’s RPGs, which is a similar genre. All of the genuine gamer grrls who I cover are interested in RPGs. Often exclusively.
So those are my nerdy observations on early Sierra adventure games. I can talk about Quest for Glory II all day. For a long time, I considered it my favourite game. Right up there with Civilization. I loved the original Quest for Glory but Quest for Glory II was even better. I couldn’t believe that I got it. Nine discs. This is amazing.
Then my friend asked to borrow it. The same guy I mentioned earlier. I said no way. I had just recently got the game. I paid for it with my meagre allowance.
So he fucking tells my mother about this and my mother forces me to give him the game. This is what my mother would do. She was more interested in pleasing other people, including total strangers, than her own son.
So a couple weeks later, he comes by with the game. He hands it over but can’t stick around. He has to leave immediately.
The game is broken. I suspect that he was trying to make a bootleg copy of it and something happened.
I call him up. “Hey, my game is broken. What happened?” He says, “It was working when I gave it to you.”
So that’s it. This game that I just spent fifty bucks on or whatever is broken. I just got the game, I was really excited to be playing it, and then it’s broken and this scumbag refused to admit that he broke it.
Did my mother replace the game since she was the one who made me give it to him? No. I was just fucked.
Many years later, I bought the Quest for Glory Anthology, which had Quest for Glory II in it, and I was able to enjoy it. But it wasn’t the same. Years had gone by. The game was really dated by this point. I still enjoyed it and I beat it many times with all of the characters but…I just think about how much more I would have enjoyed this game had my piece of shit mother not made me give it to my scumbag friend. I could have been playing this game when it was cutting edge. I could have been playing it when I was younger and could get more immersed in the game.