Zip Zap, Zoobity Wap

Picking this week’s most crucial news to discuss with you, our faithful readers, is difficult. That is a blatant, outright lie. Telltale Games announced that they were going to do a number of new franchises up, including Fables and The Walking Dead, two of the best comics series of the past decade.

But that pales in comparison with annoucement number 3: a reboot of the King’s Quest franchise.

There are two groups of people in the world: people who claim that Monkey Island was the best adventure game series, and the ones who claim King’s Quest is. The first video game I remember playing was King’s Quest V; guess which group I’m in? But it even goes beyond that. I had the King’s Quest bible, a massive book with fanciful, fiction retellings of all the games, that delved into the universe’s massively weird but awesome back story, and fuck if I didn’t love it. I played King’s Quest V over and over again. It’s one of those games I have absolutely memorized, and one of the defining games of my early childhood (along with Agent and Sonic the Hedgehog and Phantasy Star IV).

Basically, I have massive opinions about this game, but they completely balance each other out. On one hand, there is no possible way that this game isn’t fucked up. It’s not a continuation, like the recently released fan series The Silver Lining, but rather a complete remake, which…well, I don’t feel good about. I realize continuing a decades old game is asking for trouble, but so much of the magic will be lost, I fear. On the other hand, *anything* is better than King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity, which torpedoed the goodwill the franchise had generated over the years.

So, tentative excitement. And you, gentle reader who is to young to remember King’s Quest, I would recommend King’s Quest V and VI, though I am, admittedly, partial to King’s Quest VII and IV. I’m not a huge fan of text parsers, so I never got much into the first four titles, but the fifth and sixth games are the cream of the crop of adventure games.