Long ago in a land of five Kingdoms an amulet, known as the Hand of Mobus, was shattered into five pieces and hidden throughout the Far Reaches. Dark Magic spread throughout the land and the evil wizard Torlok began his reign of terror.
Now the fate of the Five Kingdoms rests upon Lathan, the last of the Argent Kings. To restore freedom he must first recover the broken pieces of the amulet, but his journey is filled with many challenges. Danger and evil forces await as you guide Lathan on his quest of power and magic.
Age requirements: ESRB Rating: TEEN with Mild Cartoon Violence.
Minimum system requirements: Windows XP or Windows Vista, 1 GHz Processor (1.4 GHz recommended), 512MB RAM (1 GB recommended), 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended), Mouse, Keyboard.
Like Dragon's Lair - Only With Less Action and More Suck
(by
imbarkus)
Seriously this curio is only for the hardcore. It's an animated "video game" much like Dragon's Lair, originally entitles "Thayer's Quest." I remember seeing the thing running in a Tilt back in the day, in a cabinet very much like a Neo-Geo--designed with misplaced optimism for future "titles" to be added into this laser-disk cabinet system. Thayer's... full review Quest was unique in that you had to acquire items through your actions to best certain obstacles, apparently, though I never succeeded in doing so. To evidence the fact that the game was, in fact, designed to be progressed through, it saved your progress with some sort of code or something. Like a Play-Choice, you paid quarters for time to play it, which made watching slow, often repeated animated cutscenes as much fun as swallowing your quarters whole. There was no joystick, only a series of context sensitive buttons. It was a mess, and it was broken and unplayable within a week or two. Never got anywhere with it.
Things fare a little better on the PC version (I actually have the Mac) for control and game-saving, but the game remains a historical curiosity--a wanna-be Dragon's Lair. The animation is really awful, the voices are intolerable, and at least the Mac version adds enough compression distortion to each to make the experience somehow worse. There is no Don Bluth artwork to admire here. As I said, this is a curio. For weirdos like me, apparently. Of course, here you are, reading my thoughts on the thing. Buy it if you must. I did. Maybe write me a strategy guide?
animated adventure game is good enough
(by
madcartoonist)
I decided to give this one a go while buying a lot of interplay games thanks to the anniversary sale. Having now played through it I have to say that I did enjoy myself. There are definitely better games to buy first on gog.com but it still satisfied my adventure game urge.... full review
Essentially the game mechanics work like this: You go to a location, watch an animation, and then if you have the right item you use it. You also die a lot for going into the wrong play unprepared. The death over and over did annoy me at first as I prefer a game that lets you walk around, explore, and just try things to see what happens. This game gives you three lives before you get a game over although there are spots were you can regain lives. Once I stared to get a hang of it and really listen to the clues things did go much smoother.
The animations weren't super great. If you returned to the same spot and there was new information it usually showed you the same animation with a different speaking line put over it. The main problem with the animation is that I don't think it was meant to be shown on big computer screens like we have now. It just gets very pixelated. I know because of the animation people like to compare this to Dragons Lair but really that isn't fair. Dragons Lair was more of an action game were you pressed up, down, left, or right at the correct moment in order to advance to the next room. This game comes across more as an adventure game were you get items to obtain more items and get past obstacles.
The length of the games wasn't as long as I would of liked. I didn't keep track of exactly how long it took me, but I did play it over the course of two evenings.
In the end I enjoyed myself and I don't feel like my 5 bucks was wasted (one less trip to McDonalds) but if you are an adventure game fan there are a number of better choices to buy first.
imbarkus)
madcartoonist)