Great games that rock the nostalgia vote, poorly emulated for your playing pleasure!

User Rating: 8.4 | King's Quest Collection PC
By Gourry_Inverse | Review Date:
I have always been a huge fan of adventure games, including (and not limited to) the Sierra-era "point-and-click" adventure games. So, when Windows XP hit and most of the Sierra titles became more and more difficult to work in the WinXP environment, I was heavily saddened, and even kept a Win98 machine around for a while to continue playing these old games. When Sierra basically folded into Vivendi Universal, I almost gave up hope of ever seeing re-toolings (or new installments) of the old classic series like King's Quest.

Well, for those who think like me, I have good news, and I have bad news.

The good news is that Sierra / Vivendi hasn't turned a blind eye to the classics, as proven by this re-release of the King's Quest series in its entirety (minus the abomination that was KQ8). The games are fully emulated to work in a WinXP environment, and will even operate in a Windows Vista environment (for all you riding-the-bleeding-edge techie types).

The bad news is that Sierra / Vivendi's idea of "retooling" the classics to work in Windows XP / Vista is to tack an autorunning and autoconfiguring copy of DOSbox onto each title which, while workable, gives you a lot of audio and graphics glitches during the cutscenes (most noticable in KQ6) due to the program's apparent inability to properly throttle CPU usage. (Note that identical emulation errors occurred on both a WinXP desktop and a WinVista laptop).

Still, the glitches are negligible at worst, and shouldn't stop one's enjoyment of these seven classic games at a wonderful bargain-bin price. Some places have this title on sale for less than $10, if you look hard enough. Even at its full $20 price, however, this package is still very much worth the purchase.

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