Holy...! Has anyone else run into this nasty KQVII bug?!

[Nightfall1121]

Hi everyone,

Sorry I haven't posted anything worth posting in a long while. Anyway, the story is this: My friend, it turns out, is also into Sierra Adventure Games! But, he hadn't experienced the Gabriel Knight series yet. So, I quickly remedied that (all that remains to be played of that series is "Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned". We'll get to that later.).

About a week or so back, he brought over his XP collection (Vivendi's... ) for King's Quest (Actually I have the "Collection" version from the 90's, with the extra games like Laura Bow 1 and 2, but---later....)---saves me the process of mounting my KQ collection in Dos Box.

We got through a game a day, though I was sure to show him AGDI's remakes of KQI and KQII, plus Infamous Adventure's remake of KQIII. So, we finished KQVII last night, BUT in chapter 5, there was this incredible bug which I had never encountered before. Not once, even when I was 10 and first got the game for Christmas (Ah, that was a nice Christmas. I got Quest for Glory IV and King's Quest VII... good times...).

Getting to this really, REALLY evil glitch---Remember the point in Chapter 5, in which you obtain the lit firecracker to go blow open Count Tsepish's tomb? Well, when we, my friend and I, picked it up, it exploded almost instantly ! He had never gotten this far before, and I was like, "What the hell?! (excuse my language)". I thought/said, "No problem. It probably won't do that again, once I click the 'try again' button."

Boy, was I wrong! Valanice kept [not quite] spontaneously com-busting almost instantly. True that I finally managed to get her to the tomb, but centimeter by tiny centimeter, or less . Very frustrating. The boogieman actually showed up a couple of times, but no worries there; Valance exploded right after she screamed. You'd almost think she screamed because she was about to explode, if you didn't know better . We were finally given a break when we got to the tomb. The Count made a time saving appearance flying his horse through the screen, and during that time, Valanice could get to the tomb in time to throw that firecracker through the keyhole. If he hadn't shown up, it would've been more of the same traversing bit by bit, exploding and trying again, every step of the way.

SO, has anybody else ever run into this aggravating glitch?

[Erpy]

I haven't experienced it (it's been a while since I played the game), but I've heard of it as it's a very well known bug. Depending on the version you own, it's possible to play it under Dosbox and avoid the issue.

[Spikey]

I remember experiencing this once (never played through windows again after that), but even though you die, the retry function will place you with a fresh cracker on the spot you died, meaning, you should be able to move around a bit every time, no matter how many times you die.

This was a while ago though, so maybe computers got so fast that you're not able to do anything anymore between the retry and the explosion.

[Nightfall1121]

I know, that's exactly how we, my friend and I, got through it. Millimeter by millimeter, and, hmm, I don't know, maybe 14 or 15 explosions later, we finally made it to the tomb-site. Then, the count showed up and that stopped the explosions for some reason.

I've recently found installers for my three disc version of the "King's Quest Collection" (the one with the extra games) on the net, and it runs KQVII in a full-screen (something we couldn't get his XP collection version to do). Later, I'll see if I run into this bug again.

Anyway, thank you for all the suggestions. I appreciate it.