Friday, August 29, 2008

Quest For Glory 2 VGA! It's about bloody time!


This is a little off topic from the general discussion of strategy board games, but it still kinda fits in for the role playing fans who've been at since the days when Kurt Cobain was still breathing, and cell phones that we'd laugh at someone for owning now were a very HEAVY luxury. Quest for Glory 2 has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Sierra's famous text parser adventure games. It was the last game they ever released in EGA and the story was, and still is, one of the strongest of any game ever produced by that company that owned our childhoods. Quest for Glory 2 is also a game that got cheated out of its destiny by being denied a VGA release, and was lost in the mire of subsequent (and frequently inferior) pointy-clicky games.Well... after 17 long years of waiting, and 8 years of insane amounts of donated labour from some very dedicated programmers and artists over at AGD Interactive we finally get to play this most amazing game in all it's pointy clicky glory, with stunning VGA graphics to match!

I downloaded it just a few hours ago and I'm already stuck in! It has EVERYTHING that made the original game great... and then adds about 500% more awesome to the mix! You can play with the classic parser method for old time sake, or use the point-and-click interface common to the rest of the series. The repetitive plain alleyways are still there, but now they are anything but plain and repetitive. Every section of town has it's own look and feel and there are a lot of added features that are more than just decorative. There are now extra merchants in the streets as well as the plazas, that you can actually buy stuff from, and extra rooms with extra things to do.

The combat is something truly special too. Quest for Glory 2 had a pretty good combat system in my opinion, certainly worked more smoothly than any of it's successors. My only complaint was that it was always just a little too easy to defeat anything. The updated combat system is possibly the best of any Quest for Glory game so far. It's got an added level of strategy and tactics, and the option of switching to a distance weapon midcombat without running away. You have a whole range of combat moves that i can only compare to the early Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games. On the whole the combat is more challenging too which is great!

Quest for Glory 2, like most Sierra games of yore, was always packed with little easter eggs and surprises... All of the classic ones are back and they've added a hefty helping of new ones too! I just watched the infamous Prince of Persia scramble over one of the alley walls. I can't wait to get deeply into this game and relive all my happy memories of the game that I unashamedly wasted my youth on, and even if you weren't around for the first adventure in Shapeir I'd heartily recommend that you have a look at it.

Quest for Glory 2: Trial by Fire VGA is available to download for FREE! Pop over to AGD Interactive and get your hands on it right now! Be warned though, it is a pretty large file at around 85mb so you don't wanna go trying this on a dial-up.
Please share this with friends using the share button below.

1 comment:

Brian the Lion said...

This game is just awesome! I actually can't wait to play it again.

Later,
Brian