Game:

King's Quest V (1990)

Duration: 12:21

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Sierra's epic PC adventure game Kings Quest V was released for the NES in 1991. Developed by Sierra and Published by Konami (for the NES) Kings Quest V originally came out for DOS PC on floppy disks the previous year in 1990 with a CD-ROM version with full voice acting in 1992.

The original PC version used beautiful hand painted 256 color VGA backgrounds that obviously could not be ported to the NES version due to color and memory restrictions. But considering the aging hardware in the NES and the fact this ROM is 4 Megabits (0.5 MegaBytes) compared to the original PC versions ~10 MegaBytes (it's 1/20th the size!) you can argue that this port (if you can call it a port) is decent, but not great. They made a decent attempt to portray the vast range of background landscapes, convert the music and arguably to convert the controller layout to better suit the console style of gaming. But unfortunately, as I discovered the hard way, the game does NOT use a battery backup. While it has a unique save system that allows the user to save two save states while the NES is powered on, these are erased when the system is reset and a password system is ultimately required.

I've always wondered myself why these type of games (Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 2 or Kings Quest VI) were never released on the SNES but alas what we are left with here is one of the last of the PC "point and click" adventure games to see a mainstream cartridge based (Sega CD did get Monkey Island, Loom and a few Sierra games like Willy Beamish and Rise of the Dragon) console port for some time. This is a decent port as mentioned but it simply can't compare to the more powerful PC version. Back in the day if you didn't have a PC to play KQV then this NES port at least had some relevance, but today if you're looking to play KQV there's little to no reason to choose this version. That is unless you're a hardcore NES fan of course!

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