Erm, do what now? This is my blog, there are many like it, but this one is mine. You'll find all kinds of random things. A lot of posts related to my massive backloggery of computer games, plus a variety of other things I love such as cats, robots, octopus, star wars and other generally nerdy stuff or anything else that happens to catch my eye.
Kim Han seul  -  https://hanseul-kim.deviantart.com  -  https://twitter.com/edcroo111  -  https://www.patreon.com/haren1125  -  https://www.facebook.com/Haren1125
I’ve always played games pretty much my whole life. I can definitely remember playing a handheld Dracula Electronic game when I must of been about 5 or 6 years old and going round a neighbours to play on some super old TV console thing that was basically Pong. A few years later my family for fortunate enough to get BBC Micro which is what I spent the next few years playing all sorts of games on. If you’re not familiar with the BBC Micro it was an early home computer in the UK built with education in mind and used in schools to teach computer literacy and other IT skills, but it also had some great games too.
It was around this time I can remember talking to my Dad about a game he had played at his work called King’s Quest II. He’d tell me about walking around this fairy tale land, meeting Little Red Riding Hood and talking to her. He told me about how you had to type out what you wanted to do and work out what was the correct solution. I remember stories of him going to Grandma’s cottage, how sometimes you’d walk in and there would be a wolf that would leap up out of the bed and try and eat you, other times you’d enter and find Grandma in her bed. It sounded amazing! At that time I already had a keen interest in fantasy stories, add that to my growing love of computer games and this sounded like the best game ever! Unfortunately it was a PC game and at that time we didn’t own a PC.
Fast forward a year or so and one of my school friends told me how he’d just got a PC and did I want to come over and see it. This was back in the day when no one really had a PC at home and it was definitely my first memory of playing on one. It was a very basic machine and only had a monochrome display so everything was only in black and white. He only had 2 games back then, Silent Service, a WWII submarine simulation game and King’s Quest 2. Needless to say we spent most of time playing King’s Quest.
It was just like my Dad had described, and we’d sit for hours around that black and white display playing this game. Wondering around the forest, picking up random items we’d find trying to solve the puzzles and work out what we were supposed to be doing. We met witches, mermaids, Little Red Riding Hood and lots of other characters. Oh and we’d die an awful lot too. Falling off ladders, down ledges, killed by random enemies. It taught us the importance of saving your game regularly.
The game was built around some random elements, so sometimes you’d enter a location and it would look a certain way or have a certain character in it. Like Grandma’s house, I remember needing to give an item to Grandma. You’d enter her cottage and the room would be empty, so you’d have to walk back out and immediately enter the room again. This time the Big Bad Wolf would be there and try and eat you, so quickly turn around and leave. Repeat this process until finally you enter the room to find Grandma in bed so you could talk to her. Looking back on it today it seems a crazy system to use, I don’t even remember how I knew that you had to keep entering a location to make the right character appear, but I could quite easily imagine people would go in once find the room empty, explore it and then wonder off thinking there was nothing more to be seen in there.
One special event I can remember came after we’d been playing it for sometime, while wondering around the many screens looking for something we might of missed or something new we walked to a cave near the beach, a location we’d been many many times before on our adventures. Suddenly out of nowhere we see this long flat looking shape coming out of the cave. This had never happened before, what the hell was going on. We watched as what looked like a car drover out of the cave, but it wasn’t just any car, it was the Batmobile! It drove forward, turned around on the spot and then drifting back into the cave. We were stunned into amazement at what we’d just seen. So many time we’d been to this cave and never seen that, and no matter how many times we came back to the cave to try and make it appear again it never did.
A little while later my family got their own PC and I got to play the game in colour, admittedly it was only a CGA display so could only have 4 colours on screen at once, but it was better than black and white! The PC they got was second hand and came with a boat load of software including a few other of the Sierra-online Adventure games like Space Quest 2 and Police Quest. Many hours were sat playing through them trying to work out what to do, but I’ll always remember King’s Quest II as the first PC game I played and being this amazing experience that lead to a love of adventure games from then on.
While I never did finish King’s Quest II back then, I feel like I’d gotten pretty far into it, the quest if I remember correctly was to find my true love, who I believe was asleep in a castle in the middle of a lake within the game, I remember finding a way to cross the lake and getting to the castle but it was surrounded by poisonous thorns that kept killing me when I tried to get past. I tried a few things but couldn’t work out what I needed to do from there. Maybe one day we’ll go back and finish it!
areudirty
discoholicmusic
jimmyeatworldofficial
blakekathryn
theartofmadeline
tangentwithtanner
