King's Quest VI Unplayable

edited November 2010 in Game Support
Hi. I'm having trouble playing through King's Quest VI in the adventure bundle.

The game inexplicably crashes in numerous areas. The problem with troubleshooting this kind of thing is that when I go looking for answers, I see all kinds of game spoilers, which devalue the game for me.

At any rate, here are two places where the game crashes:

1. When I talk to the bookworm, and his little rabbit-like buddy pops out of the stack of books.
2. When I talk to the snapdragons, or when I look through the hole in the wall and am returned to the garden screen. The snapdragons' animation plays endlessly.

In both situations, my cursor is stuck as a "loading" crown, and the only thing I can do is access the save/restore menu.

In another forum (maybe the Steam one?), people were suggesting it has to do with the order of events in the game. They said it's connected to the spider, and that to overcome the problem, I just had to do things in a certain (mysterious) order.

I restored my game back to the beginning of the Isle of Wonders, just after getting past the senses gnomes, and bee-lined it for the bookworm. No good. Then I restored to the gnomes, and made straight for the snapdragons. The crash still happens.

This is a tricky situation, because it's a very old game, and I appreciate that no one's going to be writing a patch for it. But the fact remains that I paid for this thing, and it doesn't work. Thanks for your help in resolving this issue.

Vista Home Premium SP1 32 bit
Intel Core Duo CPU 2.20 ghz
4 GB RAM

I'm running KQ6 through DOSBox in windowed mode.

- Ryan

Comments

  • edited November 2010
    Try running it with ScummVM.
  • edited November 2010
    Not only does ScummVM seem to fix the problem, but the Windows version is nicer than the DOS version (the character portraits look much better). Boo-urns to you, TellTale.

    - Ryan
  • edited November 2010
    You can't blame Telltale for this as it's not their game, they've just used the collection that Vivendi Universal created, which wasn't very well made (in that they just stuck a version of each game on a disc with a basic windows frontend and DOSBox).

    But I have to thank you for this thread as it reminded me to check the ScummVM website to see if a new version was out and it was. What makes it even better is that it's the first stable release that support for SCI games, like some of the ones in this very collection. So cheers for that!
  • edited November 2010
    If i decide to sell a product, i'm responsible for the quality of and customer support for that product, regardless of who originally manufactured/bundled/produced it. If the KQ product was crummy, why would I, TellTale, want to risk alienating my customers by selling it?

    This was only the second time i've paid money for a TellTale product, and i'm left with the impression that the Adventure Bundle was just a quick cash-grab aimed at churning more customers through the machine.
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