King's Quest II

King's Quest II involves you to undertake the role of Graham again, now King, and a lonely soul it seems. In consulting the magic mirror it shows to him a beautiful maiden in a far away land called Koylma. To provide himself a companion and the kingdom with an heir to the throne, Graham sets out on his quest to find the beautiful maiden. Too bad if she told Graham to take a hike when he finds her at the end of the game!

The last platform that Sierra's AGI adventure scripting development tools were converted to included the addition of fantastic sound and music capabilities - but the same blocky, colourful graphics. No colour palette changes either. As a plus however, all Sierra games do run under any version of the IIGS operating system, including System 6.

As a 3D Adventure Game, you controlled your character on screen with either the mouse (click where you want your alter ego to go) the arrow keys, keypad or even a joystick. You moved your character to avoid danger, or get closer to items or people so you could interact with them. A parser is used to input commands - get, talk, give, use, show, look, etc, that follow standard English conventions: Verbs are used first, then nouns. The parser understands most things you type in and has a relatively good vocabulary that allows for synonyms.

A good way to start adventuring with each new screen is to simply type "look" or "look room" which should supply some background information to what you can already see on screen. It's then a good idea to look at the individual objects given in the information you got from "look". You can never have too much information in a Sierra 3D animated adventure.

I bought King's Quest II for a song in 1993. Unfortunately, both disks were corrupted. I had since been searching tirelessly for the title and downloaded not one, but two more versions, BOTH of which were corrupt. Finally, I obtained a fully working copy from a person whom I told I would have to promise to forget who sent it to me. Thanks to that person! The game itself is quite similar to the original King's Quest, with a lot of free roaming and rooms that hold nothing significant, but add to the depth to the landscape. Personally, I thought the original was better. In King's Quest II there are some classic examples of the most annoying features in Sierra Adventure games, first and foremost, that if you take a wrong action or forget to pick up an object, you could find yourself having no choice but to start over again because you're totally stuck later on.

Save your games regularly and don't write over your old saves. Anyway, I'm still very glad to be finally able to play this game. People were starting to think I was weird staring at the box and two corrupted floppy disks...