Quest for Glory

I’ve mentioned before how I used to love point & click adventure games. The series that really stood out the most for me was Quest for Glory.

I like them, but these games are really pretty strange – part adventure game, part RPG, part parody, and they somehow managed to be both epic and farcical. Not too many games could pull off the sheer number of puns they used. That being said, they aren’t without their problems – the combat ranges from clunky at best to aggravating at worst, although due to the game design fortunately most of it could be avoided.

One of the cool things about these games was how the solutions to most of the puzzles were completely different depending on whether you played the game as a fighter, mage, or thief, and the fact that you could import your character from one game to the next, so your character stats would follow you through every game. Five Quest for Glory games were made, the first four work in Aeon, but the fifth one was made for Windows 95 – there is no DOS version. Unfortunately, it pretty much only runs on Windows 95 too, so you’d have trouble running it outside of a virtual machine or an old PC. The final game is generally considered the weakest in the series, so it’s not that big of a deal, but I still like it as a nice epilogue to the first four adventures.

If you’ve never played these before, I’d still recommend them (if you can find them): simple, goofy fun, with some really great music. I should also mention, however, that Quest for Glory II was the only game in the series to never receive an official VGA makeover – instead, some very dedicated and talented fans created one a few years ago. They made a huge number of improvements over the original, but kept all the charm – and you can download it for free. Best of all, you don’t even need an emulator to run it :)