#agd interactive

Those goddamn fan-made "VGA remakes" of the old 16-color Sierra adventures. Because nine outta ten times, if not ten outta ten times, they're not 256 color.

If you're gonna call your game "VGA", have an effective resolution of 320×200 and use at most 256 colors at a time. Offer scaling, offer aspect correction. Hell, use non-indexed graphic assets if you must. But if I take a random screenshot of your so called "VGA" game and see a color count over 256, I'm gonna call you out.

Anything higher than 256 colors wouldn't be VGA any more. That'd be SVGA.

Some might say it's only the fans that call these products "VGA remakes". Well...

[...] plans to remake this game were made even before our first project, King's Quest I VGA.

When will the Quest for Glory II VGA remake be released?

Lovingly recrafted in simulated VGA colors by Infamous Adventures!

Hey, guess what? New kind of entry. Sort of: my KQVI replay screensharing fits here too but tagging-wise, new, because I didn't think of it then.

There are sometimes going to be games I play I want to talk about but not do a full let's play style journal on, so that's what side quests will be.

In this case I got curious about the fan made remakes of King's Quest 1 - 3, which can be acquired here: https://agdinteractive.com/games/games.html.

So yeah here's yet another version of King's Quest 1.

Story and structure it's the same game. It's very faithful in that regard. However, it uses a point and click interface, although you can also walk with keys. It's essentially the same interface as V and VI down to config options and saving. There is also an option to turn off dead-ends. I don't know exactly how that affects puzzles but no doubt a worthwhile option for people who don't want to worry about that.

After talking about them a bit recently, I felt compelled to play through the old KQ fan remakes (1-3 from AGDI and 3 from IA), and I wanted to share my more in depth thoughts for anyone interested in these love letters to the original games.

King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown Remake from AGD Interactive

A lovely update to the original! While clearly the least polished of AGDI's offerings, it's nice to be able to play KQ1 with KQ5-style graphics and voice acting (the original voice of Graham, Josh Mandel, voices him in all four of the games in this post, ftr). There is an option to turn off any chance of softlocking yourself before you even start the game, which is a welcome feature. Puzzle-wise, this one stays the most faithful to the original out of the three from AGDI with a few updates here and there (like that stupid name puzzle! lol). The vocal performances and sound effects can be a bit fuzzy, but I found them enjoyable nonetheless.

Overall a solid fan remake with limited extra bells and whistles!

King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones from AGDI

Easily the most ambitious of the three from AGDI. Pretty much all of the core elements from KQ1 are further polished here - artwork, acting, music, and sound effects. The story and puzzles, however, have been changed enough that the end product is sizably different from the original. In some cases, this is fun and interesting (more lore and character interactions! new and unique puzzles!), but not everyone will enjoy all the changes. I, for example, find the underwater section kind of fun, but the new content around the count... not so much (for reasons I'll avoid due to spoilers, but know they're more mechanical than anything). There's less freedom in when you can do things, the added story making the game far more linear than it originally was. But then I'm sure many would agree that if any KQ game could do with extra content, it'd be 2, so I can't fault them swinging for the fences, even if not every hit was a home run.

All in all, this version of KQ2 doesn't really work if you're simply looking to experience the original game with updated graphics, but it's a fun playthrough nonetheless, and newcomers might enjoy the added lore/story bits. Just be aware that I could probably sum up the original game's story in about two sentences while this one would take far longer. XD

King's Quest III: To Heir is Human Redux from AGDI

If KQ1 wasn't fully polished and KQ2 was a little overworked, then KQ3 is juuuuuust right! (For anyone who knows the game, yes, this is a purposeful pun. XD) The graphics, sounds, music, vocal performances - all are the best yet (though still with some minor hiccups as any fan game is wont to have - the music was sadly cutting out during the climactic sequence for me). It even has a neat little feature where the timer changes color depending on how close you are to being zapped into oblivion that is not only useful but adds a sense of urgency in it's own way (especially if you forgot the item that makes travel a lot easier for like 2 meals I mean what lol). While it does carry over some of the story threads from AGDI's second entry, this game still works well enough on it's own, with the majority of the new content being added in naturally rather than supplanting whole sections of the original. In fact, personally speaking, I think the added content only enhances the game, your encounters with Medusa and the yeti especially getting a nice boost. And the extra lore only helps you feel for the protagonists plight all the more. The ending is a bit drawn out, perhaps, and I may not agree with the order you're supposed to choose the four items in to get the treasure (insert rant here XD), but those are minor nitpicks at best.

This is easily the best of the three, AGDI having perfected their KQ formula at this point. It works as a remake of the original while still adding in a bit of new content that doesn't feel unwelcome. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in giving the King's Quest series a try.

King's Quest III: To Heir is Human Remake from Infamous Adventures

Look. I know that it's not as impressive as AGDI's version. The time limit is laughably long, the spells are impossible to mess up, and some of the clickable areas can be a bit wonky. But I really like this version, ok?? I like the design and voice of Gwydion, I like the storybook quality that the cutscene art has, I like that it feels lonely when it should. And as much as some of the changes in AGDI's version were really nice, I like that it's basically just the original game without extra stuff added in.

I came across a post about Quest for Glory and I started replying to it, and then decided to bring up the AGD Interactive independent remake of Quest for Glory 2: Trial By Fire, which is an immaculate reimagining of the second game in the series. That remake was released 17 years ago!

And this has made me reflect on the past a little bit. While QfG2 VGA was in development, I was actually a member of the Hero6 writing team. Hero6 was a fan-made, quasi-sequel to the Quest for Glory series, which according to them was started in 1999.

That's not when I joined. I joined somewhere around 2001-2003; I can't remember specifically. I was on the team for a couple of years. It really did seem like no one ever got much done.

For my part, I was trying to get things organized better while brainstorming for more events and quests in the game. But as both a very young and very junior member of the team, I didn't get much cooperation and lost my drive as many others seemed to have done.

And then someone on the team introduced the idea of having quarterly elections for the project head and team leads. I lost all interest, and I think everyone else did too when they realized the EXTRA work that would go into the DETAILED election plans, like, an amount of detail that would require at least another person dedicated just to running those elections; not to mention the veering that the project would take as new heads were swapped out.

Looking back, it seems a Hero6 website does still exist, even with a saved legacy version. From what I can tell, a new team took over the project ten years ago, and then scrubbed it clean and even changed engines and styles, which would mean every single asset ever made from it would become reference material. But the last update from them looks like it was just before the pandemic, five years ago.

I did learn there's a reference to Hero6 in Heroine's Quest, a well-made fan spinoff you can buy on Steam. There's a garden you can stumble upon, which is straight from Hero6's assets, right out of the game's setting of Albion. That's nice :)

So King's Quest 2. The AGDI remake (when they were called Tierra) was originally released in 2002. V2.0 was released in 2003, and then they did a bigger update (v3.0) that released in 2009.

There are some *sliiiiggghhhttt* differences between verisons 2.0 and 3.0. The biggest one being the full narration, but some incredibly minor things, like some changed artwork and voices for some characters.

The only solid example I can currently find:

This is the Door of Destiny from how I remember him, from the 2.0 version.

And this is what he looks like in version 3.0.

Long story short, I've been digging so deep to try to find a download, or somebody with a backup of the older 2.0 files, but literally nobody seems to have it anymore. I used to play this SO fucking much as a kid, and the newer update is still incredibly good, but the few things that got changed are driving me bonkers, I feel like I'm being gaslit because I'm like "I KNOW this isn't how it was the last time I played this."