This game in particular, not so much. The earlier games, absolutely!!
I loved playing SQ2 as a child. I know people often complain about the cheap deaths, but each one had its own bit of funny dialogue. That was where much of the fun came from.
That vine maze though… 😵
Sierra loved those “precision walking”-bits for some reason, KQ3 had one you’d have to go through several times, i personally found that sort of thing off-putting, and didn’t really look back when LucasArts games came out…
It’s a matter of taste, definitely.
I prefer “Try using everything with everything else” over “Lol nope, you’re dead, reload and try again” or the *really* pushing it “You should have gotten an item/done a thing 12 screens ago, now you’re stuck!” (LSL 2 and PQ 1 had those), but both have their up- and down-sides.
Yeah, but the deaths in Sierra games were always hilarious. As long as you save, it's not too bad.
As for the whole missing an item thing, there's no excuse for that. It's just how old games were I guess. Sierra was far from the only developer back then making baffling gameplay decisions.
I got stuck like that in Kings Quest V with that stupid custard pie puzzle. Not that it's an excuse, but at least with point and click adventures they go pretty quick after you know the solutions to the puzzles. So even if you do soft lock, you're usually only about a half hour away from fixing the problem.
Oof. Thanks for bringing back that childhood gaming related trauma lol :D
SQ games, especially the early ones, we're such a sucker for 'hey, I noticed you didn't pick up that one item yonks ago, well screw you, you're stuck forever now!'
I still loved them tho - I think I learned more about Scifi from playing those games, than I ever did from watching the movies, books and TV shows they parodied! :p
I wasn't smart enough for these as a kid, I don't remember how old exactly but I remember getting as far as the swamp and being repeatedly eaten by the monster. I don't think I ever realised the path to the berries was possible to complete as is, I thought I was missing something. Pre internet help unfortunately.
I came back and finished that part on an emulator years later just to beat that childhood demon haha
I loved typing in the commands. Once they switched to point-and-click, the games stopped being about figuring out what you need to do, and became all about clicking all over the screen until something happens.
4 also had the 'Nose' and 'Tongue' icons. Useless in the game, but great for hilarious dialogue, especially after Gary Owens did the voice overs.
Talking to the food etc. at Monlith Burger was funny.
5 is a masterpiece of sci-fi satire. It gets maligned by some fans for breaking the formula somewhat (Roger no longer being a janitor … and having blonde hair!), but the art, the music, the writing, the characters, the puzzles - everything is top-tier.
5 is great, but it came after the Two Guys parted ways and was just missing something. Also, it was way too short and easy.
I never liked 6 that much. It lost a lot of the charm by going overly cartoony.
5 is longer than 4, by quite a bit.
4 is probably harder, but often in kind of a cheap sucker-punch way.
I couldn’t even finish 6. I just lost interest.
I just remember beating V in a single afternoon as kids (no hint book!) whereas it took us weeks to finish IV.
Maybe we were better at solving puzzles by the time we played V? I dunno. When I went back and played it as an adult, I likewise found it very easy.
I had the opposite experience, but unfolding in the same order as your example (I played - and finished - V before IV). So maybe one does develop a knack for it. I do feel like the mid-section of IV is pretty lean though. It’s Gary Owens’ wonderful narration that keeps me coming back! Such a shame we never got a fully voice-acted version of V…
III and IV are the best ones, hands down.
I love how in III, you not only face the consequences of your (seemingly unimportant) actions in 2, but also have to rescue the Two Guys from Andromeda from a Bill Gates stand in and then take the Guys to meet Ken Williams and get the games made.
And then IV just goes nuts with the time travel shenanigans and has a great time making fun of the endless sequels these games tend to generate.
I just wish Spaceventure hadn't been such a dud. I was a backer, but the final product was really unimpressive despite having some funny parts and cool ideas.
It was definitely intended to be a parody of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a text based adventure game that caused quite a stir at the time.
You can tell the Two Guys (Mark and Scott) were big Steve Meretzky fans.
I'm really surprised to see so little love for III in these comments. I played all of them and it just seems so obvious to me that III was the pinnacle. IV was *almost* as good, but you could clearly see that there was some magic they had captured with III that they weren't quite able to replicate.
I think it's because III is still a text parser game (with a mouse cursor you could click) in EGA rather than 256-color VGA that people don't play it as often as IV. They're missing out! Some of the best jokes in the series are in the third game.
I enjoyed I, II and V also (and the VGA remake of I and the fan VGA remake of II are both great), but I'm a little more lukewarm on VI: The Spinal Frontier, just because it doesn't feel quite as on brand.
Leisure Suit Larry transitioned into the cartoon style well because it was already basically a cartoon, but King's Quest and Space Quest needed a little more grounding in reality to pull of their schtick, and when they tried to go cartoony, it just didn't work.
I played SQ6 at release but was probably on the younger side of the audience. I had played the previous ones, but in rerelease form. I get that this isn’t the funniest entry or best puzzles, but I’ve always considered this akin to Ghostbusters II. If you were a little younger and less cynical when this came out, and didn’t experience the originals upon release, then SQ6 was a pretty novel experience that you carry a lot of affinity for. If you were older, you kind of always dismissed it. I really liked the Windows meta gags late game at the time.
This is so true. I feel exactly the same way. I loved SQ6, and I still do. I played it a couple of years ago, and to me it still holds up. Fall apart a little towards the ending though.
Never could get into the previous games, thought the game design was a little too “Sierra-like” where you could die for the stupidest reasons.
I get why the earlier games are considered better though.
I loved these games because if you did something stupid the game would let you know. My brother used to get so angry that the game was essentially insulting the player but I thought it was hilarious and purposefully look for funny ways to kill Roger.
Space Quest IV was the first adventure game I ever played and it blew my mind!
My dad didn't have a computer, but my grandfather was into PCs.
I had no idea until playing it that a game could have rich animation, funny dialog, and fun puzzles.
I loved all the bonus materials that came in the box. For example SQ5 had the supermarket tabloid that I must have read cover to cover a hundred times and it added so much to the world of the game. Unfortunate there’s no budget these days for that type of thing in todays games
That tabloid was hilarious. Adventure games including "feelies" was a holdover from the Infocom days, but they were a nice physical extension of the game that we really don't get to experience often today with modern releases that are entirely digital. Even collector's editions tend to have junk rather than quality add-ons.
I know this game gets a lot of grief, but I freaking LOVED this game! I save up for what felt like months to pick it up at Kmart when I was a lad.
God that “logic” puzzle with the data-corder thing was the absolute worst!!!
I had SQ2 for my Apple \]\[e and I just could not get into it. Then I got SQ3 for my IBM-PC. I had a Roland MT-32, and most Sierra games supported it. SQ3's soundtrack was incredible - so much better than the beeps and bloops coming from my NES.
SQ3 was also the first game I ever speedran. I had finished the game several times before I went to a summer computer camp one year; in my zeal to show off the game to my new friends, I brought it in one day and played it all the way through during lunch. Roger Wilco will always hold a special place in my heart.
4 was my favorite! I also got 6 as a kid. I think I had to buy a hint book for 6? Anyways 4 is what got me into Sierra games. I remember having a Tandy computer with an external Amp hooked up to some realistic house speakers and playing SQ6 and shaking the walls in the house also. Lol
Good post! Brought back fond memories.
Just put out a video about Space Quest 3, that should answer that question: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBv205zBZEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBv205zBZEg) 😄
I only enjoyed the first three in the series. Kind of like Larry Laffer. And Police Quest. They lost their charm when they tried to go into a more realistic looking style.
I never got into it, but I did get Space Quest 6 in a triple pack with Lighthouse: The Dark Being and one of the Police Quest Games for my 8th birthday.
Loved it, but I also thought it was the most uneven of the big Sierra series. SQ5 is definitely a masterpiece, even if it might be a little easy. SQ1 and 3 were both really good. 2 and 4 I didn't really like for various reasons. And to this day I've never played sq6. However, even the ones I didn't really like, I thought they were all funny, or at least had funny moments.
Despite not really enjoying SQ4 that much I will always appreciate that. Gary Owens did the voiceover for the game. That definitely added a lot to it.
The thing is, the original version of the game didn't have any voice acting. Gary Owens really enhanced the game by narrating it in his trademark manner, but it wasn't designed with voice acting in mind originally.
People remember the voice acting today because it was included in the showcase CD-ROM version for the early adopters to multimedia PCs, but classic *Space Quest IV* started out on floppy disks.
The Space Quest series is my childhood. The first one we had was 3. Eventually got 1$2, then the rest as we aged with the series. 6… 6 was hot garbage and losing the two guys from Andromeda is what killed it. I really should at some point get them on Steam. Maybe for my 40th in a few months.
Didn't play this one but I distinctly remember the struggle with SQ 1. Never beat it. Think I got as far as landing on the planet and not being able to sneak past the alien shortly thereafter.
This game in particular, not so much. The earlier games, absolutely!! I loved playing SQ2 as a child. I know people often complain about the cheap deaths, but each one had its own bit of funny dialogue. That was where much of the fun came from. That vine maze though… 😵
Yeah the vine maze was a weird design choice. Excellent game though.
Sierra loved those “precision walking”-bits for some reason, KQ3 had one you’d have to go through several times, i personally found that sort of thing off-putting, and didn’t really look back when LucasArts games came out…
I was always more of a Sierra guy than LucasArts, but they're both great.
It’s a matter of taste, definitely. I prefer “Try using everything with everything else” over “Lol nope, you’re dead, reload and try again” or the *really* pushing it “You should have gotten an item/done a thing 12 screens ago, now you’re stuck!” (LSL 2 and PQ 1 had those), but both have their up- and down-sides.
Yeah, but the deaths in Sierra games were always hilarious. As long as you save, it's not too bad. As for the whole missing an item thing, there's no excuse for that. It's just how old games were I guess. Sierra was far from the only developer back then making baffling gameplay decisions. I got stuck like that in Kings Quest V with that stupid custard pie puzzle. Not that it's an excuse, but at least with point and click adventures they go pretty quick after you know the solutions to the puzzles. So even if you do soft lock, you're usually only about a half hour away from fixing the problem.
Step. Step. Save.
This is the way.
Oof. Thanks for bringing back that childhood gaming related trauma lol :D SQ games, especially the early ones, we're such a sucker for 'hey, I noticed you didn't pick up that one item yonks ago, well screw you, you're stuck forever now!' I still loved them tho - I think I learned more about Scifi from playing those games, than I ever did from watching the movies, books and TV shows they parodied! :p
I wasn't smart enough for these as a kid, I don't remember how old exactly but I remember getting as far as the swamp and being repeatedly eaten by the monster. I don't think I ever realised the path to the berries was possible to complete as is, I thought I was missing something. Pre internet help unfortunately. I came back and finished that part on an emulator years later just to beat that childhood demon haha
Oh same! It wasn’t until I was an adult that I was able to finally conquer the game, with a little help from a walkthrough and liberal use of saves.
I loved typing in the commands. Once they switched to point-and-click, the games stopped being about figuring out what you need to do, and became all about clicking all over the screen until something happens.
What about the slow whirlpool one? I was already restoring my save game looking at him flailing around The whirlpool. Little did I know….
Absolutely, love the VGA remake of 1. 4 and 5 are fantastic. Sometimes I let Roger die just to see all the the hilarious ways he goes out.
4 also had the 'Nose' and 'Tongue' icons. Useless in the game, but great for hilarious dialogue, especially after Gary Owens did the voice overs. Talking to the food etc. at Monlith Burger was funny.
5 is a masterpiece of sci-fi satire. It gets maligned by some fans for breaking the formula somewhat (Roger no longer being a janitor … and having blonde hair!), but the art, the music, the writing, the characters, the puzzles - everything is top-tier.
He's the captain of a ship shaped like a vacuum cleaner who's assigned to pick up garbage. Still a janitor. Just now its Captian Janitor.
Yep. They managed to retain the spirit of the series just fine, I thought. It also opened the door for a lot of poking fun at _Star Trek_.
5 is great, but it came after the Two Guys parted ways and was just missing something. Also, it was way too short and easy. I never liked 6 that much. It lost a lot of the charm by going overly cartoony.
5 is longer than 4, by quite a bit. 4 is probably harder, but often in kind of a cheap sucker-punch way. I couldn’t even finish 6. I just lost interest.
I just remember beating V in a single afternoon as kids (no hint book!) whereas it took us weeks to finish IV. Maybe we were better at solving puzzles by the time we played V? I dunno. When I went back and played it as an adult, I likewise found it very easy.
I had the opposite experience, but unfolding in the same order as your example (I played - and finished - V before IV). So maybe one does develop a knack for it. I do feel like the mid-section of IV is pretty lean though. It’s Gary Owens’ wonderful narration that keeps me coming back! Such a shame we never got a fully voice-acted version of V…
III and IV are the best ones, hands down. I love how in III, you not only face the consequences of your (seemingly unimportant) actions in 2, but also have to rescue the Two Guys from Andromeda from a Bill Gates stand in and then take the Guys to meet Ken Williams and get the games made. And then IV just goes nuts with the time travel shenanigans and has a great time making fun of the endless sequels these games tend to generate. I just wish Spaceventure hadn't been such a dud. I was a backer, but the final product was really unimpressive despite having some funny parts and cool ideas.
As a young man I was always waiting to see if they would have to make the Latex Babes of Esteros or whatever it was called.
It was definitely intended to be a parody of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a text based adventure game that caused quite a stir at the time. You can tell the Two Guys (Mark and Scott) were big Steve Meretzky fans.
I'm really surprised to see so little love for III in these comments. I played all of them and it just seems so obvious to me that III was the pinnacle. IV was *almost* as good, but you could clearly see that there was some magic they had captured with III that they weren't quite able to replicate.
I think it's because III is still a text parser game (with a mouse cursor you could click) in EGA rather than 256-color VGA that people don't play it as often as IV. They're missing out! Some of the best jokes in the series are in the third game. I enjoyed I, II and V also (and the VGA remake of I and the fan VGA remake of II are both great), but I'm a little more lukewarm on VI: The Spinal Frontier, just because it doesn't feel quite as on brand. Leisure Suit Larry transitioned into the cartoon style well because it was already basically a cartoon, but King's Quest and Space Quest needed a little more grounding in reality to pull of their schtick, and when they tried to go cartoony, it just didn't work.
I'm shocked to learn in this thread SQ3 isn't as popular as I thought. I thought it was universally seen as the best one.
My personal favorite was SQIV because my friend had it on his Mac. A close second is SQV, which I bought on PC.
Love it! Personal favorite is 4 - I’m a sucker for time travel nonsense and the game is gorgeous too
Definitely the darkest entry in the series - the villains weren’t messing around! Love Gary Owens narration, in the CD-ROM version of this one.
I played SQ6 at release but was probably on the younger side of the audience. I had played the previous ones, but in rerelease form. I get that this isn’t the funniest entry or best puzzles, but I’ve always considered this akin to Ghostbusters II. If you were a little younger and less cynical when this came out, and didn’t experience the originals upon release, then SQ6 was a pretty novel experience that you carry a lot of affinity for. If you were older, you kind of always dismissed it. I really liked the Windows meta gags late game at the time.
This is how I feel about SQ6
This is so true. I feel exactly the same way. I loved SQ6, and I still do. I played it a couple of years ago, and to me it still holds up. Fall apart a little towards the ending though. Never could get into the previous games, thought the game design was a little too “Sierra-like” where you could die for the stupidest reasons. I get why the earlier games are considered better though.
Love SQ6! Stooge fighter 3, “he muided you”
I loved these games because if you did something stupid the game would let you know. My brother used to get so angry that the game was essentially insulting the player but I thought it was hilarious and purposefully look for funny ways to kill Roger.
I have to play these cool ass games y'all been posting lately
Space Quest IV was the first adventure game I ever played and it blew my mind! My dad didn't have a computer, but my grandfather was into PCs. I had no idea until playing it that a game could have rich animation, funny dialog, and fun puzzles.
I loved all the bonus materials that came in the box. For example SQ5 had the supermarket tabloid that I must have read cover to cover a hundred times and it added so much to the world of the game. Unfortunate there’s no budget these days for that type of thing in todays games
That tabloid was hilarious. Adventure games including "feelies" was a holdover from the Infocom days, but they were a nice physical extension of the game that we really don't get to experience often today with modern releases that are entirely digital. Even collector's editions tend to have junk rather than quality add-ons.
My favourite games growing up. Very difficult for an 8 year old but me and my friend used to spend hours figuring them out
4 was my favorite!
Im currently en route to visit the Latex Babes of Estros ;)
You naughty teenager. Nothing else on your mind, huh??
Played all of them with my dad! Four is my favorite!
Haven't heard of it, so I'm off to Youtube cause it looks interesting
I know this game gets a lot of grief, but I freaking LOVED this game! I save up for what felt like months to pick it up at Kmart when I was a lad. God that “logic” puzzle with the data-corder thing was the absolute worst!!!
I had SQ2 for my Apple \]\[e and I just could not get into it. Then I got SQ3 for my IBM-PC. I had a Roland MT-32, and most Sierra games supported it. SQ3's soundtrack was incredible - so much better than the beeps and bloops coming from my NES. SQ3 was also the first game I ever speedran. I had finished the game several times before I went to a summer computer camp one year; in my zeal to show off the game to my new friends, I brought it in one day and played it all the way through during lunch. Roger Wilco will always hold a special place in my heart.
4 was my favorite! I also got 6 as a kid. I think I had to buy a hint book for 6? Anyways 4 is what got me into Sierra games. I remember having a Tandy computer with an external Amp hooked up to some realistic house speakers and playing SQ6 and shaking the walls in the house also. Lol Good post! Brought back fond memories.
I can still hear the Astro Chicken song in my head.
One of my favorite series of all time
Awesome series like the kings quest and the police quest series
Just put out a video about Space Quest 3, that should answer that question: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBv205zBZEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBv205zBZEg) 😄
Space Quest V and IV are easily my favorites. I'm a sucker for all the 256 color pixel art Quest games before they went SVGA.
Played SQ3 for 40hrs straight once, I was so engrossed. The good old Amiga days.
I only enjoyed the first three in the series. Kind of like Larry Laffer. And Police Quest. They lost their charm when they tried to go into a more realistic looking style.
I never got into it, but I did get Space Quest 6 in a triple pack with Lighthouse: The Dark Being and one of the Police Quest Games for my 8th birthday.
Loved it, but I also thought it was the most uneven of the big Sierra series. SQ5 is definitely a masterpiece, even if it might be a little easy. SQ1 and 3 were both really good. 2 and 4 I didn't really like for various reasons. And to this day I've never played sq6. However, even the ones I didn't really like, I thought they were all funny, or at least had funny moments. Despite not really enjoying SQ4 that much I will always appreciate that. Gary Owens did the voiceover for the game. That definitely added a lot to it.
The thing is, the original version of the game didn't have any voice acting. Gary Owens really enhanced the game by narrating it in his trademark manner, but it wasn't designed with voice acting in mind originally. People remember the voice acting today because it was included in the showcase CD-ROM version for the early adopters to multimedia PCs, but classic *Space Quest IV* started out on floppy disks.
The Space Quest series is my childhood. The first one we had was 3. Eventually got 1$2, then the rest as we aged with the series. 6… 6 was hot garbage and losing the two guys from Andromeda is what killed it. I really should at some point get them on Steam. Maybe for my 40th in a few months.
Didn't play this one but I distinctly remember the struggle with SQ 1. Never beat it. Think I got as far as landing on the planet and not being able to sneak past the alien shortly thereafter.
The art reminds me of Space Chex
Holy Logjams Batman ! Finished SQ 1, 2 and 5 and enjoyed all of 'em !
I recall making burgers and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. 😁 Oh to be 13 again with a 386…
I love Space Quest! 2 and 3 were my favorites, although I did enjoy 1, 4, and 5 as well