Game 7: The Black Cauldron - Abduction is Progress

Taran Wanderer Journal Entry 1: “Today started like every other day. After a nice walk by the lake, I went back to Caer Dallben to complete my morning Assistant Pig-Keeper duties. Hen Wen started to act very strangely after I fed her and she scurried off to Dallben as soon as she finished her brew. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I went back to the old man’s place, as Hen Wen was in some sort of trance, producing a vision as though through magic! Dallben then proceeded to tell me that Hen Wen is indeed a magical pig, and that there’s some guy out there called The Horned King who’s trying to get his hands on her to use her abilities to find a cauldron. I don’t know exactly what he wants the cauldron for, but I do know that Dallben says I need to get Hen Wen to the Fair Folk to make sure he doesn’t get it. Well some hero I am! I hadn’t walked more than 100 yards before an evil gwythaint attacked us and took Hen Wen away. Since then I’ve spent ages trying to get into the Horned King’s castle to get her back. I’ve climbed a mountain, walked across twisting narrow paths, swum through an alligator infested moat and scaled the walls of the castle, but I’m finally in! Sadly, all I can think about is how hungry and thirsty I am!!!!”

We've sure come a long way since King's Quest haven't we!

I have to admit that I assumed The Black Cauldron would be a fairly leisurely adventure game, especially given it was targeted at children and so much effort went into making sure the interface was clean and simple. Well, either I’ve just got used to ripping through games I’ve already played before, or this game is really quite challenging. I’ve played for two hours and have racked up 70 points out of the possible 230, but it certainly hasn’t been easy going. I’m actually beginning to wonder whether reading the books or watching the movie prior to playing would result in the game making more sense. There are a few unexplained things happening and I’m being forced to take options that I otherwise wouldn’t, just to fit in with the way the game wants me to play. Linearity is fine for story driven adventure games, but The Black Cauldron is confusing in that the at times counterintuitive path it wants you to take is not forced, and certainly not very clear. I’ll give you a rundown of my first session of play to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

I would be such a Great Hero that it would demand capital letters

The beginning is all pretty straight forward. Talk to Dallben, pick up all the food and water and feed Hen Wen. From there I was given the quest and sent on my way with Hen Wen in tow. I was then attacked by flying creatures called gwythaint’s on almost every screen. If I let one catch us, it takes Hen Wen away, leaving me wondering whether or not I was supposed to let that happen. If I leave the screen and come back, as I was required to do in numerous similar instances during all the other Sierra games, the creature would no longer be there, and I’d be free to explore with Hen Wen safe next to me. I decided to hang on to Hen Wen as long as I could, in case there was something I was supposed to do with her, staying close to the edge of screens for safety. Pretty quickly I’d covered every screen I could get to and had very little to show for it. I’d pulled a dagger out of a tree and a lute out of a hole, but was already at the point where there wasn’t much else to try. It didn’t help that the game doesn’t seem to award you for finding items the way Sierra games normally do, so I was stuck on a very depressing 5 points which I got for feeding Hen Wen.

Oh wow! It's an evil gwythaint! Hey there, the pig is over here! Come fetch! I didn't want her anyway!

At this point there were three things I was left wondering about. Firstly, it appeared that I could climb up the mountains, but kept being told that Hen Wen wasn’t able to. Secondly, on a particular screen I was continually informed that there was something small moving around just out of view, but no matter what I did I couldn’t find anything. Finally, I could see on the map that there was a house in the south west, but I could not find any way of getting to it. I had no choice but to let Hen Wen be captured to see whether that opened up any further game options to me, despite how counter-intuitive that seemed to my quest of protecting the pig. Well waddaya know, as soon as Hen Wen was out of the way, the small creature that had been scurrying about came into view demanding food. I gave him an apple and was informed that “Gurgi now Taran’s friend for life”. Unfortunately, as nice as it is to have Gurgi’s friendship, I don’t seem to be able to get any information out of him and he doesn’t follow me when I leave the screen. He does appear from time to time on other screens, but I’ve not yet found a use for him. As an aside, I’ve been playing a tune on the lute on every screen I enter to see whether that does anything, but so far it’s achieved nothing.

I'll be your friend to the end!

So, with nothing else to do and still not being able to find a way to get to the hidden house, I set about trying to climb the mountain, which I was eventually able to do after struggling to find a path through the rocks. I have to tell you I was pretty shocked to find the Horned King’s castle perched at the top of the mountain. I figured I was setting off on some big adventure that would take me through various locations before I reached the big bad dude, but he was in actuality around six screens away from my house! There I was confronted with a moat filled with alligators and no option but to try to cross it. I eventually made it but not before dying around half a dozen times as they all made a rapid beeline towards me. It’s at this point that I found a bug in the game that hindered my progress. While scaling the wall I was told that “since you’ve removed the vines covering the window, you could climb in the window.” After spending a few minutes attempting to enter the window that I’d apparently made accessible, I tried using my knife on it and was told “this dagger easily cuts through these vines”. It was only then that I was able to enter, so I can only think this is a bug.

You're kidding! The Horned King is my nextdoor neighbour!?

I’ve only spent five minutes in the castle, but already I’ve run into the same confusing counterintuitive plot progression. I entered a room, only to be chased by some sort of guard. Instead of running out of the room the way I normally would, I decided to let him catch me to see what would happen. He dumped me in a cell where I uncovered “a beautiful young girl” called Princess Eilonwy. So once again the game rewards me for doing what in every other Sierra game would result in instant death and the plot progresses only after I choose to be captured. Going back to my comment about the game making more sense to a fan of the books or movie, I assume Hen Wen gets stolen away by a gwythaint and Taran finds Princess Eilonwy in the castle prison cell in the actual story, so these decisions would most likely seem pretty obvious. To me, they go against my instincts and adventure game experience, making the game feel very forced and unsatisfying at this point. Oh, and I haven’t yet mentioned the thing that has really frustrated me about The Black Cauldron.

If you show me your magic bauble, I'll show you mine.

Just as I had to do for my character in Below the Root, I have to manage Taran’s consumption throughout The Black Cauldron. Every time he’s thirsty, I have to give him water and every time he’s hungry, I have to give him food. You pick up a loaf of bread and a bottle of water when you set off on your journey and this is probably enough to get you by long enough to find more, but given I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring screens and trying to figure out what to do next, I’m running out pretty quickly, resulting in death. I’m now at the point where I’m in the Horned King’s castle with Princess Eilonwy, trying to find a way out of the tunnels beneath the prison cell, but I keep dying of starvation. I don’t think I have any choice but to start the game again and get back to where I am as quickly as possible now I know what to do. Food management in Below the Root wasn’t that bad because there were stacks of places you could procure more, but that doesn’t appear to be the case in The Black Cauldron unless I’m missing something (which is very possible). I still have a bad taste in my mouth after having to restart Déjà Vu over and over again (hence the name I guess) due to the harsh time limit (and nearly had to do the same thing for money management reasons), so I’d hate to think that I’ll be doing that again for The Black Cauldron.

Thanks for the tip. Maybe next time you can let me drink the water that I'm standing next to!

I guess the final thing to mention before I start over and get back into it is the interface. As I’ve mentioned previously, The Black Cauldron does away with the text parser found in games like King’s Quest and Space Quest. Instead the player uses function keys to USE something (F4), DO something (F6) or LOOK at something (F8). To USE something, you first need to select it from the inventory by pressing F3 and then ENTER on the specific item. As an example, you fill the water flask by pressing F3, scrolling down to Water Flask and pressing ENTER, then pressing F4 to use it. You drink from the Water Flask by pressing F3, scrolling down to Water and pressing ENTER, then pressing F4. That probably makes it seem confusing but it’s really quite simple. I guess there are positives and negatives to having such a limited interface. On the positive side, you don’t have to figure out what command you’re supposed to type or what it actually is you’re looking at. You simply enter a screen, walk around to anything that looks notable and press F8 to look at it or F6 to do something with it. On the negative side, if there’s something on the other side of the screen that you can’t get to, you have no way of requesting information about it. You just can’t say “look at candle”, so you just have to trust that the candle is not relevant. I wish I could trust the game that much!

You want me to do what?! After what happened to King Graham?

Game 7: The Black Cauldron - Introduction

Writing black in pink makes it so much more menacing don't you think?

Settle down by the fire fellow adventurers and make yourself comfortable. I have a tale to tell that will undoubtedly bore a lot of you to tears, but there’s always the hope that one or two of you might indulge The Adventure Gamer’s tendency for overmeticulousness, not to mention his talent for using words that don’t exist. This tale begins way back in 1964, when an author by the name of Lloyd Alexander wrote the first novel in a fantasy series targeted at children. The series would eventually be known as The Chronicles of Prydain, and would be made up of five novels that can be considered a bildungsroman (that means they follow the protagonist from youth to maturity over their course for anyone quite reasonably assuming that was another case of me making a word up). The books would go on to win a few awards, and are often spoken about in the same sentence as C.S. Lewis’ similarly titled The Chronicles of Narnia.

Seeing completed book series always makes me want to read them. Am I alone?

The series is thematically tied to Welsh mythology, in particular the tales of the Mabinogion. Based in the magical land of Prydain, the books focus on Taran Wanderer, the Assistant Pig-Keeper at Caer Dallben. Taran and his companions, Eilonwy (a princess), Fflewddur (a bard), Gurgi (a beast-like creature) and Doli (a dwarf that can go invisible), become involved in a battle to save Prydain from evil sorcerers. Unusually dark considering its audience, the Prydain Chronicles series is generally considered a classic in fantasy literature that contains many valuable lessons for children, while satisfying their hunger for heroism. The success of the novels didn’t go unnoticed by film producers and in 1985, Walt Disney Productions created an animated film based on the series called The Black Cauldron (the name of the second book).

You know you're getting old when they're releasing 25th anniversary additions of movies you saw at the cinema!

The movie, which was directed by Ted Berman and Richard Rich, and included voice acting by the likes of Grant Bardsley, Susan Sheridan, Freddie Jones, Nigel Hawthorne and John Hurt, covered the first two novels in the series while taking other bits and pieces from the remainder. The production ran into trouble when company executives (and censors) found the content of the film to be much too violent and dark for children, so Disney was forced to make significant changes just prior to release. The chopped up finished product was heavily criticised on release for being confusing and for lacking the humour and wit of Alexander’s work. Costing $40 million to make and only recouping $21 million, Black Cauldron was an unmitigated failure, and almost bankrupted Disney in the process. This didn’t stop them from approaching Sierra, requesting that they make a game to accompany the film, or perhaps the wheels were put in motion long before the extent of the damage was known.

Disney understood that there's nothing little innocent children love more than skeleton hordes!

Either way, the man they wanted for the job was Al Lowe, and it wasn’t for the good work he’d done for games like King’s Quest II and III. Instead, Disney had been impressed by one of Al’s early games called Troll’s Tale, as it showed that it was possible to make an adventure game with no need for a text parser. Given the Black Cauldron game was going to be targeted mostly at children, it was important that the interface was as simple to use as possible. They gave Al complete access to the original hand painted backgrounds, the animation cells and the original Elmer Bernstein score, and asked that the game follow the movie closely with slight variations here and there to make it interesting for fans. While Al was certainly instrumental in the design and development of the game, he didn’t actually stick around until its completion. He and Ken Williams (co-owner of Sierra and husband to Roberta) bailed towards the end of the project, leaving Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (this is where the Two Guys from Andromeda first worked together) to get it across the line. Perhaps they simply lost interest after the movie’s failure?

The original box artwork of a game based on a film based on books based on Welsh mythology

The game was released in 1986 on various platforms including DOS. I’ve downloaded a DOSBox version and managed to source a PDF game manual, reference sheet and a nice looking map, so I’m pretty much ready to go. Personally, I’ve never read The Chronicles of Prydain, and while I’m sure I saw the movie as a child, I can’t remember a single thing about it. I'm therefore relying on the game manual to give me the back-story of which the following is a summary (the actual backstory is eight pages long):

Dallben, a powerful enchanter, began searching for the prophesized hero that would eventually free Prydain from enslavement. One day he came across a battlefield where many lay dead, including women and children. He heard a cry from the trees where he found an infant whose parents must have been killed. He took the boy in and named him Taran. Like most boys, Taran longed for adventure, but Dallben instead gave him the title of Assistant Pig-Keeper, with his main responsibility being to look after the pig Hen Wen. As it turns out, Hen Wen has special powers that if used by the evil Horned King will assist him in finding the Black Cauldron, which will in turn give him the power to rule or destroy the world. As Taran, the player needs to make sure the Horned King doesn’t find Hen-Wen and ultimately, to destroy the Black Cauldron so he can never use it.

OK, I think I’ve got it...save the pig, save the world!

This is definitely the nicest map to come with an adventure game thus far

Game 6: Space Quest I - Final Rating

Hmmmm...I’m starting to realise that a lot of these early Sierra games are going to have very similar sounding rating posts. I guess that can’t be helped, as they really do share a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses. I’ll try not to bang on about the same things every game and instead focus on the things that are actually notable and worth discussing.

By the way, there have been a couple of suggestions on how the PISSED rating system might be improved. Obviously if I’m going to change anything, I wouldn’t want to wait too long, as I’d need to make changes to the games I’ve already completed. I’m reasonably ok with how it’s going so far (the games are all scoring pretty similar, but then they are in most cases pretty similar), but I wouldn’t be opposed to tinkering with it if others feel it needs it. Please discuss here.

Puzzles and Solvability
There’s no denying it. Space Quest has numerous puzzles that require trial and error and a good dose of luck, rather than any sort of logic or even lateral thinking. I won’t go into details as I’ve covered it all in the previous posts, but acquiring the data cartridge, the piece of glass and the jetpack, all rely on the player either being in the right place at the right time or making an illogical decision. If luck doesn’t go your way, then you’ll be none the wiser, and find yourself hunting for solutions that are simply not there later on. As Andy_Panthro commented, Sierra used these dead ends as cheap ways to lengthen what are otherwise very short games, but Space Quest is the worst offender so far. It pains me to do it, but I have to give the game a 4 for Puzzles and Solvability.

For many, this would have been the moment they realised they were missing something

Interface and Inventory

Space Quest uses the stock standard Sierra AGI interface and inventory systems. From an inventory point of view, it’s surprising how few items there actually are to pick up in the game. Unlike King’s Quest games where you spend most of your time item hunting, the majority of time in Space Quest is spent just trying to figure out what it is you need to do next. As for the interface, well the parser technology is identical to previous games and thankfully the “look around” command pretty much gives you all the information you need this time around without having to study every item on every screen. It’s hardly worth discussing the interface when it comes to the short action and gambling sections. It’s all pretty straight forward and intuitive (ie. left goes left, right goes right). There’re no improvements to be found in this category so I’ll stick to the 5 I’ve given the last two Sierra games.

Gambling is becoming a regular feature of the genre. Was it a casino marketed scheme?!

Story and Setting

This is where Space Quest does start to make up some ground. So far the graphic adventure games were almost exclusively played out in medieval settings, with Déjà Vu’s noir mystery being the obvious exception, so the science fiction setting that Scott and Mark went with was certainly refreshing. Describing the plot in one sentence makes it pretty obvious how cliché it is: an unknown and not particularly special young man becomes an unlikely hero by stopping an evil race of beings from destroying the planet. However, it’s the comedy and tongue in cheek style of the writing that makes Space Quest utterly enjoyable despite its formulaic nature. It never takes itself too seriously so the player doesn’t either, and its numerous references to Star Trek, Star Wars and pop culture will touch the heart of most prospective players. I’d consider a 7 if it wasn’t for the fact it pretty much clones Planetfall, so will go with 6.

Cliché plus comedy equals parody. Job well done!

Sound and Graphics

Not much to say here. The sound effects are once again minimal, with some bordering on painful (I’m pretty glad the spaceship alarm stops quickly on the Arcada for example), but the music is not too bad. Unlike King’s Quest III which has completely unmemorable tunes, Space Quest has a very Star Wars feeling theme song, and even brings the Blues Brothers and ZZ Top into the bar scene. The music is clearly intended as parody and adds to the entertainment, so that’s a plus. The graphics are basically King’s Quest with colours more suited to the science fiction genre. Most of the greens and yellows are replaced with blues and reds, but the quality of the graphics and animation is unchanged. It certainly doesn’t deserve to be any higher than any of the previous games, so sound and graphics gets a 5.

If science fiction is rated by how many panels and consoles in contains, Space Quest rules!

Environment and Atmosphere

Along with the comedy, this is where Space Quest shines. The environments perfectly encapsulate the space operas fans of TV and movie series such as Star Trek and Star Wars would expect. The Deltaur and Armada spacecrafts with their sliding doors, airlocks and panelled walls are great and the Ulence Flats location is suitably alien and dangerous. Speaking of danger, it becomes clear that death awaits you at regular intervals, which really adds to the atmosphere of the game. Basically the result is a game world that feels exciting, fun and treacherous, which is a credit to the designers. The only game I’ve played so far that had a world so effective was Below the Root with its passive environment and subtle spirituality, so I’ll match that games 7 here.

They're coming out of the goddamn walls!!!!

Dialogue and Acting

The King’s Quest series certainly has its humorous and parodying moments, but Space Quest really took a big step up in this area. This is not achieved through character interaction, as there’s very little of that to be found in the game (probably less than all the other games I’ve played so far apart from Déjà Vu), but through the location and item descriptions, and the effects of your actions that in most cases result in an untimely death. Every time you die, the game mocks you, and it reminds you of your lack of heroic traits throughout, as if assuming that you’re destined to fail. The adventure game genre is a long way from really making great use of this category, but Space Quest is the pick of the bunch so far for being consistently entertaining and humorous. I’ll give it a 6.

Ok, ok, there's no need to rub it in! 



The first Space Quest game overcomes a dodgy P rating and sits on top of the leaderboard after six completed games. This might raise the discussion about whether things like Puzzles and Solvability or Story and Setting should get more weighting than some of the other categories, but somehow it feels right that Space Quest scores higher than the rest so far. Still, it could have really broken away if not for those illogical dead end causers, as it’s a thoroughly enjoyable game that deserves its esteemed place in adventure game history.

Game 6: Space Quest I - Won!

Roger Wilco Journal Entry 2: "Who would have thought? Roger Wilco, the former janitor of the Arcada, saves the planetary system from the Sarien’s evil plot. After barely surviving the skimmer journey to Ulence Flats, I then sold the skimmer for 30 buckazoids with a jetpack thrown in. I knew I needed a lot more money than that however, so I played the pokies and amazingly won enough cash to purchase my own spacecraft and a droid to go with it. I’d overheard some guy at the bar crapping on about an exploding planet in sector HH, so I figured that’s where the Sariens must be. I flew there and used my jetpack to get onboard their ship where I managed to enter the self detonation code into the Star Generator and escape in a shuttle before it exploded into a million pieces. I’m a hero on Xenon and they even gave me a golden mop as a reward! Best...day...ever!!!"

I’ve completed Space Quest I in just less than three hours, but there’s no way anyone playing for the first time without cheating would be able to do so. After the struggles I had in the first half, there were two or three more really very difficult parts to the game in the second half that my memory thankfully assisted in pushing me down the right path. Before I get into that stuff, my last post left off with Roger about to get in a skimmer and travel to Ulence Flats. It’s certainly worth noting that the way this journey is represented is through a racing style (well, dodging anyway) action sub-game. It’s the first example of an action section I’ve come across in an adventure game if you ignore Below the Root which was really a platform game with adventure elements. All you have to do is move the skimmer left and right to dodge rocks. If you hit around four or five of them, you’re dead. My first attempt to get through it met with a very quick end as I was running the game at the Fast speed setting. After setting it to Slow (I guess this is a form of cheating, but the section gets old really quickly at higher speed), I made it through relatively easily.

Most of the hits I took occurred when I tried to take screenshots for the blog. The things I do...

As soon as you arrive at Ulence Flat you are confronted by a salesman asking if you’d accept 30 buckazoids for the skimmer. If you accept this offer, I don’t really see how you could finish the game, but I’d love to hear from anyone that knows any different. If you decline his offer, he will appear later with another more inviting one, which is the 30 buckazoids plus a jetpack. I only remember bits and pieces from the first time I played the game, but one thing I do remember is that this is what caused me a lot of trouble. Since you need the jetpack a fair bit later in the game, it’s pretty unreasonable to expect any player that accepted his first offer to realise that’s where they made a mistake. As soon as the guy made the first offer, my instincts told me not to accept it, so I assume the pain I went through the first time round is still stabbing me somewhere deep in my subconscious mind.

Ulence Flats: A bar, a space ship store and a droid store. What else could you need?!

The poker machine sub-game is done quite well, although having the ability to save after every big win kind of makes it only a matter of time before you get enough buckazoids to buy a spaceship and a droid. It’s typical of the game, given its penchant for killing Roger as many times as possible, that if three skulls come up on the machine, it instantly disintegrates you with a laser. It’s not the first case of gambling to appear in an adventure game, as I first came across it in Déjà Vu, with similar results (use the small amount of cash you have to win enough to last the rest of the game). Amusingly, different performers appear on stage in the bar where the poker machine is, including ZZ Top playing one of their recognisable tunes. The band actually sued Sierra for putting them in the game without their permission, as did Toys R Us after Sierra named the droid store Droids R Us. Interestingly, the game company clearly didn’t care, as they used both ZZ Top and Droids B Us (notice the small change) in the remake a few years later, and even made a parody of the Toys R Us mascot Geoffrey Giraffe.

It's like the Cantina Bar in Star Wars, except with ZZ Top cranking out Sharp Dressed Man

Once you get everything you need and fly to the Deltaur, it’s only a matter of time before you save the day and are rewarded with the golden mop. Well, it is if you were fortunate enough to meet the scientist way back on the Armada to get the cartridge which contains the detonation code for the Star Generator and accepted the second offer of the salesman with the jetpack thrown in. Otherwise you’re screwed! What I’m about to describe to you pretty much sums up the tone of Space Quest. After entering the Sarien’s ship, which is called the Deltaur, you very quickly arrive in a laundry with a message telling you that footsteps are approaching. Given the dryer is the only item of any note in the room, the logical thing to do is to hide in it. A Sarien crewman walks into the room but doesn’t see you tumbling round and round in the dryer, so departs. When you get out of the dryer, you’ve miraculously changed clothes from your spacesuit into a Sarien outfit complete with helmet, meaning you can wander around the ship without drawing attention.

A stroke of genius you say!? It's not exactly the sort of thing you can plan to happen.

It’s completely silly stuff, but you just can’t help but have a good belly laugh and accept it. In the end that’s what Space Quest is all about. Entertainment! It certainly succeeds on that front, which is probably why the game and series gained such a huge following (it has sold over 200,000 copies, not including the many compilations it’s part of). It also must be why so many pushed on despite some really very nasty puzzles that would otherwise make it too frustrating to finish. I’m looking forward to playing the second game in the series, but not as much as I am to playing something I’ve never completed previously. Thankfully, the next game on the list is Black Cauldron, another Sierra game, but one I’ve never even seen. I’ll get straight into that as soon as I give Space Quest I a PISSED rating. Should be interesting...

194 out of 202 and a golden mop. I feel adequately rewarded for my efforts.

Game 6: Space Quest I - The Hilarity of Death

Roger Wilco Journal Entry 1: "What a shitty day! Just when everything was finally going to plan (cruisy job, free travel), I find myself caught up in some villainous scheme having to save the planetary system. I don’t have much idea about how this Star Generator gizmo works, but these Sariens clearly wanted it. They’ve killed everyone on the Arcada to get it, but somehow I managed to get away in an escape pod. Now I’m stuck on some strange planet called Kerona, where I have to avoid death at every turn. Thankfully I’ve just made contact with some aliens that seem rather friendly, and after killing a really ugly monster called Orat, they’ve offered to assist me with transportation. It’s a good thing too, as if the data I took from Arcada is correct, the Sariens are going to use the Star Generator to destroy Xenon and all its inhabitants. I don’t know what I can do to stop them, but I have to try! Damn it...I don’t get paid enough to do this!"

I’m ninety minutes into Space Quest and really enjoying it. My previous experience with the game is definitely helping me get through it pretty quickly, but that’s not to say it’s easy. In fact, there have already been two instances where I’ve been totally stuck, and had to restore back to earlier save games, realising I’d missed something. The first thing to mention is that the game jumps from location to location much quicker than any of the King’s Quest games, so there really isn’t any need (or benefit) to drawing a map, despite the manual suggesting you do so. There are only a handful of screens on the Arcada before you rocket off to Kerona, where there are only a handful of screens before you go underground, and so on. For this reason, the game feels a lot more linear than the King’s Quest games where you spent the first hour wandering the land looking for items, but that does allow the plot to play out in a more satisfying fashion.

It's no Tie Fighter, but it will do

Apart from the science fiction setting, the main difference between King’s Quest and Space Quest is the comedy. Nothing is taken seriously in Space Quest and I find myself chuckling regularly at the stupidity of it all. The Two Guys from Andromeda understood very well that adventure games can be frustrating, particularly when your character dies every few minutes, so with this in mind they put a lot of effort into making the player’s failures enjoyable. Whether it’s being bounced like a basketball and then eaten by Orat or blown into a thousand bits by a Sarien Spider Droid, the deaths and the game’s mocking messages that come after them are both grotesque and funny. Even though I’ve played the game before and know how to avoid the majority of places and things that can kill Roger, I’ve still died plenty of times already, including around thirty seconds after starting. It’s credit to the developers that you not only happily restore and try again, but you do so with a big smile on your face.

Orat may not be pretty, but he sure got game!

The game does however suffer from a lot of the same flaws that marred the King’s Quest games, but that’s not surprising given it’s using the same technology. That being said, the main issues I’ve had so far have been to do with game design rather than the technology itself, suggesting the creators didn’t think these elements were broken to begin with. Of particular note, the overly difficult line of sight challenge that made finding the key on the closet in King’s Quest III so difficult returns in Space Quest. If you “look at pod” after crashing on Kerona, but are standing on the left or right side of it, you get a message saying “the pod seems to be semi-destroyed”. Yet if you’re standing directly in front of it when you type the command, you get “A glimmering catches your eye. Upon closer inspection you see that a piece of highly reflective glass has broken out of the pod window”.

Look, I know it makes sense that I wouldn't see it from the side, but...

Considering you absolutely need this piece of glass to get through the underground section, and have no way of returning to the surface once you’re down there without it, that’s a pretty harsh puzzle that surely would have caused a few Rubik’s Cubes to be thrown across the room in disgust back in the late eighties. One of my other Sierra pet hates that returns for Space Quest is the way NPCs appear randomly when entering screens. It’s fine that Sariens are sometimes there to shoot you in sections of the Arcada while other times they’re not, but having a character that you actually need to talk to (the dying scientist in the library) appear only occasionally gives luck too much of a place in a game that should be based around problem solving (and the occasional use of reflexes). I realise that you don’t have to get the cartridge to finish the game (I don’t think I ever saw the scientist the first time I played the game), but it sure makes it easier and less confusing.

Where were you in 1992? In fact, where were you the last three times I walked through here?

While on that subject, I mentioned in my introduction post for the game that there are combinations and codes that are only available in the manual. Well, as much as I was led to believe that was the case by articles on the net such as Wikipedia, that hasn’t turned out to be the case. I was surprised to find that there’s nothing of the sort to be found in the manual, and that everything I’ve needed (including the name of the cartridge and the Star Generator activation code) can be found in-game. I seem to recall needing coordinates when travelling through space later in the game and I can only assume I need to keep an eye out for those too. Anyway, I’m keen to get back to it. I’ve just been given a skimmer by the aliens on Kerona and am about to travel to Ulence Flats to try to get myself a spaceship. If all goes well, I’ll be back tomorrow with a Won post. Even if that’s not the case, I’m sure I’ll have a few humorous disasters and death scenes to report on.

You are obviously in need of a body of some sort.