By John Walker on August 16th, 2009 at 10:32 am.
Having spent rather a lot of time talking about how unfairly unremembered the Sierra Space Quest series are when people get nostalgic about adventure games, I went back in time to replay my remembered favourite, Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers. The results were an interesting combination of absolute brilliance and maddening failings, with a story more interesting behind the scenes than in front. You can read the results on Eurogamer, which include this:
“The story behind the development of Space Quest IV is certainly more interesting than the story in the game. The tale of Roger Wilco, hapless space janitor, travelling through time to prevent something something, and rescue maybe his son or something, is clumsy at best. In fact, in a throbbingly bad bit of storytelling, you only find out any of the motivating reasons for doing anything you do in the closing cut-scene. However, SQ4 is about gags, lots and lots of gags, everywhere.”
Mmm, it’s the constant deaths which put me off Sierra’s adventure games as a whole back in the day. Death in adventure games can work – Beneath a Steel Sky makes perfect use of it at choice moments to highten tension. Only most Sierra adventure devs seem to be closet serial killers, jerks, or both.
That said, didn’t mind dying in the QFG games, given the RPG elements, and the fact that most of the insta-deaths in it could be seen coming before they happened, and thus avoided by some means (Though the Antwerp can go jump in a lake).
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For old times’ sake: The Many Deaths of Roger Wilco.
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How about looking at an Infocom game next please? I have tried Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Planetfall which were both influential to Space Quest but need some motivation to go back and finish them.
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Space Quest V is really the best of them: not only it avoids half of the unfair sudden deaths, but the story is the most hilarious of all. The problem with Space Quest IV, though, is not the sudden deaths, but the obscurity of the reasons that carries your character to death, as it happened with previous titles of the series.
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Infocom – or maybe the old Legend Entertainment adventures (Gateway is still one of my favourite games, so is the newer Superhero League of Hoboken)? Or a review of Steve Meretzky’s work in general?
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I don’t have the time for the crap that these games think is acceptable. Lucas arts were right. The most recent adventure game i played was overclocked i’ve not reached one fail state(they may exist but i never found them), but the game has always been engaging.
Maybe the jokes are sweeter because of the death. But thats not my idea of a fun time.
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I hate Sierra and I’m glad they’re dead, King’s Quest was pretty damn awful and the fact they were popular enough to spawn a bunch of sequels not only proves there’s no god but that the devil exists and takes an active part in our lives.
Remember that police quest puzzle where you had to use a mirror glued to a drumstick to make a dog in a basement disappear?
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@Hulk Hogan,
yes I remember it or something very like it.
SQ1 & 2 EGA were the first game I ever played through on the families first home computer. They were frustrating they took months. I loved them.
Good review
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the greatness of Sierra adventures is not story, humour, deaths… it’s that some puzzles could be solved in more than 1 way… that put you in constant apprehension and you would strive to imagine different ways to do things, and it also gave those games deeper interaction… if you did THAT one puzzle the wrong way half a game later you would be stuck helplessly. They certainly aren’t fir for today’s gamers(aka wusses)
Space Quest 4 could never be the best Sierra game just because of laughter, that makes you a lucasfilm fan giving a sierra game a go. The best sierra adventures were the ones that in the finale had you face the consequences of ALL your actions(see Laura Bow and Conquests of the Longbow among the others)
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I agree to a certain extent about Space Quest V – it was certainly the most accessible of the SQ series, but really failed for all the same respects that the others did.
I always thought the artwork on IV and V was pretty impressive. The fact that IV was a talkie blew me away as well… I worked diligently for several hours trying to configure my config.sys and autoexec.bat just trying to squeeze out enough memory to get the voices working and when I did I felt like a God.
We need a retrospective on how MS-DOS was and always will be the best operating system Microsoft have ever released.
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If I were to update Space Quest to modern standards (ala the Monkey Island remake recently), I’d make deaths an actual part of the game. Get killed, and you get your obligatory spectacular death animations followed by snarky commentary by the narrator, a bonus point added to your score, and the game would rewind to just before you did whatever stupid thing you did.
If you tried to do the same thing again, the game shouldn’t let you, and will flat-out tell you that it’s a dumb idea and wouldn’t end well.
Death would then be a 10 second setback with collectible points, rather than a point of deep frustration. In the case of scenarios where you’d die just by NOT acting, have a hint come up after the third death, and offer to give the solution outright by the fifth.
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Best this Sierra ever did was TSN (The Sierra Network). I was a beta tester and played it for about 4 years. Agreed that the constant deaths were annoying looking back on Space Quest series, but looking back I’m glad as it made me a very quick typist!
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The best part of Sierra games is something so awefully overlooked today in games: they were extremelly well written, and mostly everything that youn tried had some text explaining why it failed. Descriptions were wonderfully detailed, near the level of Legend games.
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Has it really been 18 years? I played that game to death, completing it countless times. My dad’s friends all used to ask my 8 year old self for help with it. Hehehe!
SQ5 felt soulless for some reason.
The QFG games, Laura Bow and KQ 6 were all totally superb.
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I still shudder when thinking of the shopping mall chase sequence.
I quite enjoyed this game, once, but I just can’t bring myself to replay it, because my lasting memory is of dying again, and again, and again.
And again.
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That and the bug I encountered that screwed with me on the planet where you have to defeat the invisible assassin dude. Or whatever it was. My memory is failing me.
But yeah, worth playing once :).
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It wasn’t just the constant deaths that put me off, it was how they would have several dead ends, where there even would be dialogue or some other indication where the developers knew when they were deliberately making it that you would be screwed into replaying huge chunks of the extremely linear game if you forgot to do something hours before.
This was before the days of online walkthroughs, so I know several people, myself included, would spend hours walking back and forth between locations trying to figure out what we missed before finally paying $3.99 a minute to the Sierra helpline and be told we need to start from scratch again.
Don’t miss them at all.
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Conquests of the Longbow is possibly the most underrated (and probably my favourite). Many other sierra adventures are pretty dire, though.
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And this is exactly where SQ went to shit for me. I didn’t enjoy any SQ beyond SQ3 (which is totally amazing to this day). “Realistic Roger” was a terrible idea. Sierra should’ve gone the Lucasarts route and gone exaggerated stylist.
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I don’t remember these getting very good reviews back in the day.
I’m not sure it’s a case of them being overlooked… it’s a case of rose-tinted-spectacles thinking they’re better than they were.
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I may well echo myself from last time:
Basically, I agree with John, although the deaths were where many of the jokes were. The most annoying one IME was trying to sneak into the damn scout ship to get off the street, which required turning up the walk speed to get there in time. Gah.
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Also, you lot bitching about deaths: learn to save. Those of you bitching about making the game unfinishable: you’re thinking of King’s Quest. SQ generally avoided that particular quirk of idiotic design.
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bill – your comment bemuses me. It’s an article about how the game isn’t brilliant, but is extremely funny. A game I played this week. That is often overlooked.
LionsPhil – you can never defend a game’s killing you at random by saying someone should have saved.
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SunJummer: am I nuts, or I’ve just read that Space Quest V, which was better designed, which had better clues, which had the most brilliant graphic design of them all (and not realistic at all, look at screenshots) was a bad game? And you said that… the first three were brilliant? You are including the SECOND ONE? The second one was not a game, it was a sadistic piece of software!
And the third one could be much better if half of the time you weren’t thinking of falling and dying.
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Good stuff, but I would also highly recommend reading Hardcore Gaming 101′s coverage of the entire Space Quest series:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/spacequest/spacequest.htm
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and even the wii
Really? I know it isn’t a powerhouse, but it gets compared to an iPhone and the DS? Anyways, if adventure games have any future, the Wii should have provided it. Huge appropriate player base and perfect controller scheme.
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I don’t understand the hate for dying in adventure games. It’s the one thing I wish they still had. Finding a dead end and replaying a large portion of the game is, of course, horrible. But dying and reloading was never a problem. And death was one of the fun things to find, especially in the Space Quest series. The commenter’s idea above about making it part of the game is a good idea.
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Death worked in Space Quest because it was almost always funny, and there were valid reasons to die.
In Kings Quest it was often due to a lack of dexterity, or unreasonable “windows of opportunity” to avoid some nasty bugger about to carve you up… usually 2 seconds after entering a new screen.
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Interestingly, Discworld II did a similar trick by having the hi-res (ish) Rincewind of that game appear in the opening room of the first game, having a brief fourth-wall-breaking chat about better graphics and more sophisticated gameplay. Problem was that Discworld II was, despite being pretty, not a very good game. Every major puzzle handed you a shopping list of items to collect and hand in to one of the NPCs. The first Discworld game at least managed to mask this a little.
Oh, and both games were just dull, insipid re-tellings of plots from the books. Thank god(s) they never did Small Gods. Still, I’d quite like to have a nostalgic bash at them both. They did, at least, have a decent cast.
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Hulk Hogan (7th comment from the top): I could do without King’s Quest, but my growing up would’ve been infinitely less rich without Space Quest and, more-so, Quest for Glory.
Sierra also published the first Half-Life, so may have had a part in bringing to the world what is, to my mind, the ultimate story-telling FPS of the last few years, and enriching the modification / indie scene. Imagine if EA had published Valve’s games first, and of course bought them out and forced them to make The Sims expansion packs instead of Half-Life 2.
So no, I wouldn’t damn Sierra to hell just because the King’s Quest’s that I played were nothing but a non-stop fetch puzzle, and the other 9 that came out I simply had no interest in playing. SWAT 3 and 4 were also pretty good I think, though Police Quest: SWAT 2 was just frustrating.
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Responding mostly to the LucasArts vs. Sierra comments in the article itself:
It’s worth noting, in regards to the different reputations of LucasArts and Sierra adventure game, that (so far as I’m aware) LucasArts put out slightly over a dozen graphic adventure games from their start until the mid-90s. Sierra put out two or three times that number (arguably more, depending on where you want to draw the line). The Sierra catalog was far from flawless, and it’s natural that a larger number of titles would tend to bring the average down. It’s also easier to point to gems in the LucasArts lineup because, well, everyone who played the LucasArts games played pretty much the same ones. A possible factor in history’s judgment.
Nonetheless, the best Sierra titles (and I wouldn’t necessarily put Space Quest 4 among them, for the reasons John elaborates on–it’s got moments of sheer brilliance, but plenty of frustrations, as well) hold up pretty well today. Gabriel Knight 1 and 2, the Quest for Glory series (it’s not Police Quest, but QfG was a major influence on me when I got into the games industry), King’s Quest 6… I’m sure we could all compile our lists of legitimate classics.
Of course, my view is colored by nostalgia as well. Space Quest 1 and 2 were among the first games my dad bought for our home computer, so my feelings for them are very fond. (Even though, as people wholly unfamiliar with how adventure games worked, it took us ages to even get off the starting ship.)
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Oh, come on Bobsy, the first Discworld was stellar! Except for the showstopper bug at the end, where the dragon never shows up.
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great article!
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I think “stellar” is going a little far. My great regret is never having played Discworld Noir, which was the only Discworld* game to feature an original plot. Oh, other than the Discworld MUD.
*I’m having a very hard time not typing “Discoworld”.
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Overall I’d also rate Conquest of the Longbow and Gabriel Knight 1 as much better than any SQ, even though I enjoyed all the SQ’s.
SQ5 tended to go too much towards their green eco shift, but it had a lot of great bits like the facehugger pet etc.
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@LionsPhil: Actually, that horrible design of dead-ends was in most of their games, not just the KQ series. The game this article is about, for example, contains at least two of them.
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Discworld Noir is one of my favorite adventure games ever made. The clue/inventory/smell system is incredibly engrossing.
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That falling chappie looks like Dave Jones…
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The best Sierra games from each series, as remembered by my 10-year-old self:
Kings Quest IV, VI, and VII
Police Quest I and III
Space Quest I, V, and VI
Quest for Glory III and IV
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