I have only finished Space Quest I-III and am currently in the midst of IV. All this to say I can definitely recommend this package based on my experiences with the first four. Roger Wilco, the janitor protagonist, is a lovable little scamp. The first trilogy are text parser games, and the second point and click. Space Quest I Roger Wilco in: the Sarien Encounter is beautifully intuitive, which definitely caught me by surprise. I thought I would have to be constantly reading a walkthrough to get through the game, (not to say I never looked at a walkthrough, but the puzzles are all incredibly solvable through intuition. Things I would've figured out if I were more stubborn.) The story is fun too. Roger Wilco, Space Janitor, is taking a nap in the closet while his ship is being invaded by the Sariens, a genocidal alien force. As the last living member of the crew he bravely gets the fuck out of there. Roger then just tries not to die, wandering the vast deserts of an unfamiliar planet. When he finally gets a spaceship, he's off to take out those bastards. Don't you want to take out those bastards? Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge is a bit of a harder nut to crack, and not as worth the squeeze as Space Quest I is, but it's still very good. The puzzles are just a bit more obtuse, and the game makes a lot of assumptions you don't. For example, (LIGHT SPOILER HERE, I'LL MARK WHERE IT ENDS,) the manual specifies DIVE as a parser command, but when you actually need to dive in the game, you'll drown because Roger forgot to breath. You have to type TAKE DEEP BREATH to live. I don't know why DIVE doesn't assume TAKE DEEP BREATH, but TAKE DEEP BREATH does assume DIVE. (END SPOILER,) It's obnoxiously inconsistent. However there are slight graphical improvements, and the locales are far prettier than the arid deserts of The Sarien Encounter. The story is as follows, In Vohaul's Revenge it is revealed the leader of the Sariens, Vohaul, is mad Roger foiled his plans to destroy the universe. So he's kidnapped Roger and is going subject you to a life of slavery. Good news for you though, his goons (which are monkeys now, I don't know if the implication is you genocided the Sariens but, yeesh I hope not.) Anyways Roger Wilco obviously has to take out Vohaul and haul ass. Overall the game feels much smaller than the first, but it is more Space Quest, and I quite liked Space Quest. Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon addresses that last concern by giving you your own spaceship, and actually having some interplanetary travel that doesn't just happen to you. You are in the driver's seat, literally. It doesn't let you sit in the passenger seats even though I really wanted to. I've got the whole ship to myself I should be allowed to relax in any seat! Fuck you Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe! I got a little distracted. A little distracted and a little heated. It's not that big of a deal. The puzzles are mostly pretty solvable, though I did find myself defaulting to a walkthrough for some of the late game stuff. The graphics are significantly better than the first two, there's now music and a really cute art style, (consistent with it's contemporaries like Secret of Monkey Island.) That improved fidelity does negatively impact the game in some ways, and I know that sounds contentious but hear me out. Because objects are now largely recognizable facsimiles of real objects, when you type LOOK it's far less descriptive, because the devs would like you to LOOK at a particular object. This makes sense for an adventure game, but it's an adventure game set in space. That object is some shit you guys made up, how am I supposed to know what you called it? The game has rudimentary mouse functionality but you're probably better off ignoring it. The pathing is terrible, Roger will just walk into walls and fall off shit. The story is a lot of fun though, in Pirates of Pestulon, you escape a robot-run trash ship and find you're being chased down by a terminator, (yes, from the movie Terminator.) He wants to track you down for some mail fraud you did in Space Quest II, (Kind of a funny coincidence: The problem I mentioned with trying to name spacified objects, it also happened to me once in Space Quest II. I kept trying to look at this spaceship, and the game kept telling me it was too far away and that pissed me off because it was obviously right there, but it turns out that it was a mailbox. Turns out when I used that mailbox Roger commited mail fraud, he's so cool.) You have to defeat the terminator chasing you, and then suddenly the game becomes about rescuing the game devs from pirates? It's a strange pivot, but the game is good. I haven't finished Space Quest IV yet, and more importantly my fingers are getting tired from what I initially intended to be a short review. These games are great, you should play them, games like these literally don't exist anymore. Not to say modern games are bad, but just because they're good doesn't mean the old ones aren't good too.
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