Wednesday 30 July 2008

our honored forebears

Adventure Gamers has a retro-review up of Quest For Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness, which is my favorite of the series and would be a strong contender for best Sierra game ever, if not for the BUGGINESS. It was difficult to get through it at the time because a key puzzle didn't work right 9 times out of 10. It got impossible shortly after that, because a hardware timing issue would cause it to crash at important points. Also, there was a godawful annoying copy protection routine that required you to quit the game in order to look things up (although I think this was removed in some versions. It's been so long that I can't REMEMBER what the situation is with the CD of the game I'm carrying around).

I loved the story. I loved the rpg/adventure mix that allowed multiple solutions to puzzles, sometimes having to do with objects, sometimes having to do with your skills. I even liked the combat and the ability to set it to strategy mode so I didn't have to DO the combat. :)

I hear there are enough fan patches around that it should be vaguely playable in DOSBox nowadays... I wonder if I can get it to work in Linux and bully certain people into trying it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

There's a Linux version of DOSBox that seems pretty indistinguishable from the Windows version. I've never tried to run QFG4 on it, but stuff from the same era worked fine. And yes, the fan patch does make it playable. :D

(Hi, by the way. I found your blog awhile ago while I was searching for info about Princess Maker and I've been lurking ever since.