Rumor Mill - The Roberta Report

I left off the last article with the teaser that Roberta Williams was hard at work on a multi-megabyte monster that would again set the industry on its collective ear the way that King's Quest VI did this Christmas season. What's the big release? It's King's Quest VI for MultiMcdia CD of course!

I know. I know. You lucky CD ROM drive owners are now all groaning as you've played King's Quest V for CD and it was great and all that, but it wasn't that amazingly super special. Perhaps you're accusing the Magpie of being guilty of taking payola from a Sierra PR flack or maybe |ust a little guilty of a little too much hype. Well, King's Quest VI is special. That special. Why? Read on.

Lets start with the voices. Yes, all CD's have had voices, but not from Robby Benson, voice of the beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. (Any of you folks see that

movie?) Robby bellows the lead voice for Prince Alexander and turns in a great performance. I his talk of audio shouldn't hide the visual improvements of the game, either. For players operating in WmdouH . the talkers (close-ups of speaking characters), inventory, and icon bar have all been re-illustrated and re-animated in Super-VGA.

And the opening cartoon has swelled from eight megl to over 50 megs in size! The new cartoon is longer, more involved, and features more of the amazing 3-D rendering that awed critics on the disk version.

But the really big news is that King's Quest VI CD is the first Sierra title to take advantage of the Bright Star patented lip-sync technology. Bright Star, the Seattle company that became part of the Sierra Family last year, produced the lip-sync masterpiece Alphabet Blocks. This same technique is making the new King's Quest VI CD the closest thing yet to an interactive movie.

For those of you without CD-ROMS (I refer to you kindly as "peripherally deprived"), now is the time to upgrade. The game will ship as soon as Roberta Williams is satisfied that it's the best ever ("she'll sell no Quest until it's the best").