King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
68A beginning to end playthrough of Sierra Online's 1990 graphic adventure for Dos PCs, King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!
This video was recorded with the original release of the VGA CD version, featuring all-voiced dialogue and a slightly streamlined interface over the original floppy release versions.
KQ5 is one of my all-time favorite graphic adventures, and the game that originally got me into the genre. It was the best-selling game ever at its time of release by a significant margin, and boasted a record-breaking budget for a game released in 1990.
It was also an amazing technological leap ahead of everything else of the time. It had digitzed, hand-painted backgrounds (fantastic looking, even in EGA), fully voiced dialogue (no matter how hammy it might have been), and it was the first King's Quest to make use of a fully mouse driven interface. The animation and sprite-work also deserve special mention - the attention to detail is unbelievable, especially considering it was designed for a 286 w/640k of RAM installed.
Sometimes KQ5 gets railed at because the plot is a bit thin and the puzzles are insanely obtuse by modern standards, but given its age and where the genre was at the time, it really is only in hindsight that people have really leveled those complaints. The sheer quality of the graphics and sound really launched it into the stratosphere, earning huge praise from players and critics, and its gameplay was much better than most of its contemporaries'. It's closest rival and competitor, The Secret of Monkey Island, did make many strides forward in adventure gameplay conventions, but its presentation was outclassed in EVERY way by KQ5. KQ6 did more than enough to equal MI 1 and 2 in the puzzle department, though!
There were several ports released for different PCs, but it also got a Japanese CD release on the FM Towns (redubbed in Japanese) and, probably most surprisingly, an NES release sold by Konami. The NES version is pretty impressive - obviously the graphics and sound never stood a chance on an 8-bit console, but it retained all of the puzzles and only had slight edits and cuts made to the dialogue. Its worth checking out, if only but for the oddity it really is.
Has it really been over 25 years since this came out?
___________________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete