Quote:
Originally Posted by MisterKerr
When I was a kid we had what in retrospect must have been a beta copy of KQII for some reason. On each screen the colors would flood fill in seperately before you could move, all of the text appeared at the bottom where the cursor goes, and most importantly, you couldn't save the game! I still remember nights when all of the kids in my family would be huddled around our old Tandy, watching my oldest sister pick her way through the poison brambles around Dracula's castle (since we always killed the snake instead of giving it the bridle to get the invincibility sugar cube), cheering her on as she picked her way through, pixel by pixel, knowing that any single misstep would force us all to completely restart the game. And then, half of the time, if we made it through that, it was almost a sure thing that Graham would die falling down the stairs at the end of the game.
THAT was torturous gameplay. KQV has nothing on that mess.
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You must have really had a beta version, indeed! All of the narrative text appearing in the black space at the bottom of the screen was also what happened in the original IBM PCjr release of KQ1, waaaaay back in 1984. 27 years ago now!
The "modern" 16-color DOS version of KQ1 AGI, with white pop-up text boxes for narration, came out only in 1987; the first PC release, in 1984, was CGA 4-color and followed the mold of the PCjr version. Of course, by 1987, KQ2 had already been released, back in 1985. So it would seem KQ2 was the first Sierra game to use a separate, special pop-up window for narrative text, instead of cramming it down into the parser field.