Who better to clean up space than Janitors? Space Quest I, II, III

All I ask is that you kill Arnie twice.

Can do! I only recently discovered the 2nd way to kill him myself

You can do that??

Man, I don't want to spoil it for people, but yeah, there's two ways to kill him. One's more complicated than the other, and nets more points. We'll see both ways when we get there!

I think a friend told me about the second way - NES made not a whit of impact amongst my friends, we were all PC gamers in a big way. It was only the N64 and the PSX where they started jumping ship, but a few of them had gotten a SNES.

Looking forward to SQIII, I have fond memories of that one. Must be at least...ten years since my last playthrough? Wow.

Never got further than being locked up in that bloody cage in SQII, which is the point I realised I have no patience for dick moves.

Even though this game was made all the back in 1989 it is a huge leap forward technologically from SQ2! The game uses a new engine, the Sierra Creative Interpreter or SCI, as opposed to the Adventure Game Interpreter or AGI, that the first two SQs used. Also the game had some fantastically composed music which you really didn't hear unless you had a Roland MT-32 soundcard the Tandy version if you had 516k of memory even had digitized special effects and Roger speaking (he said one line "Where am I?"). The new engine always for mouse support which isn't that useful, but the parser is better as it stops the game to let you type in your commands. For more gritty details on Space Quest 3 see here or here.

I've got the Roland Soundtrack and will be putting it up into the posts as we come to the areas that contain the music...

For now here is a video of the introduction to the game.

Space Quest 3 picks up right where the 2nd one left off! And we're diving right into it. I recommend reading this post while listening to these tracks: the introduction and opening theme.



Roger is now ready again to save something, somehow! Where is Roger? How does he get out of here? How long has he been sleeping? What happened to his soiled jockstrap? What is Pestulon, and why does it have Pirates? Why am I talking to myself? These questions and more will be answered as we Let's Play SQ3!

quick sidenote: I've updated the initial entry to this thread to link to the 3 games, though I seem to have linked simply to one entry... Would any of you mind checking the links? and/or letting me know how I link to a particle post in thread as opposed to just it?

The links work for the individual posts to the respective games and to link to the general posts, use

http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime...829#post592829

instead of

http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime...&postcount=187

The important part is the ?p=592829#post592829 at the end, which is the same number that shows up in the individual post. The individual post uses
?p=592829&postcount=187

Also, it may not make a difference but the first two links are through toastyfrog instead of gamespite.

I'm looking forward to reading the further adventures of Roger Wilco.

thanks! I've corrected them!

Oh hey, I've got another request. I feel stupid for not asking this before.

Can you try some random interactions with the world? Things like "look at robot" and such (look/look at will pretty much always work, but sometimes things like 'kiss' or 'hit' or 'smell' will as well). Just.. the kind of stuff you'd do if you were figuring it out for the first time, or just exploring around. There's a lot of text in the game attached to different objects or bits of the environment.

Those are some pretty good graphics.

Yes

Quite the leap from Space Quest 2 huh? They get even better! The graphics in this game just have so much more character than the older games do

That early SCI period made for some of Sierra's strongest games. Sierra were at the height of their creativity, and they hadn't yet gotten to the point where they started to get overly cautious.

PERSONAL SHIT

Not putting this on hiatus, but they're prob be a delay until things are better.

Sorry, everyone!

I know this is a touch on the late side, but: Is it possible in Space Quest II to use the shrinking device to attempt to enlarge yourself again while normal size?

Good luck with your shit.

Game III was the first Sierra Game I ever played. I am looking forward to it.

pretty much what the title says. I'll post at least one section tonight

Roger is back! After stretching his legs he takes in his surroundings:

>look



old spaceware? That sounds boring! What Roger needs is some adventure! He heads south:



Hey! I don't know if Roger recognizes those ships but I sure do!

>look rocket



>look fighter



>look saucer



No cheating! Identify what movies/television shows these three ships are from!

Roger tinkers around with a few of these inspecting the ships as he looks closer at the Jupiter 2 he goes to move the a stray piece of metal:

> get metal



Curiosity kills Roger stop wasting your time with junk! You've got to get out of here! A quick load of a saved game and Roger is back to normal with his blood flowing in his veins instead of out of them. Doing all that he can do here Roger heads east:



>look



>look buckets



>look gear



>look arm



I don't know how helpful that is... Roger heads back to the shuttle to check out that spaceware he passed by before further exploring the junk frieghter

Okay, this LP's just getting started, and I'm already laughing my ass off at how Roger killed himself by just touching a sheet metal piece of the background there. Wouldn't be Sierra without cheap, but awesome deaths for interacting with completely harmless looking objects. XD

This sequence is REALLY great to watch, because the blood is really bright and it gushes out for a few seconds before he dies.

It'd be awesome if the "lol Sierra dick move" comments could be restrained to the King's Quest V LP, where it's become entrenched and is apparently the absolute pinnacle of wit. HINT: it's fucking retarded

HOW TO PLAY A SIERRA GAME:

1) Know that death lurks around every corner! Usually they're meant to be funny or goofy.
2) SAVE. SAVE ALL THE TIME. MAKE LOTS OF SAVE GAMES. DO NOT OVERWRITE UNLESS YOU REALLY MUST
3) Did you get killed? Load your last saved game, which should be from <5 minutes or 5 actions ago, whichever is greater.

I know that's not quite what you said, MMM, but I reaaaaaally want to avoid that nonsense.

re: the ships: Jupiter is from Lost in Space, there's a TIE Fighter, and.. I'm not sure about the rocket. My guess would be Flash Gordon, maybe--

d'oh, I just saw the ACME on it, so Marvin the Martin or something?

Don't worry I feel the same way about the dick move thing as you do so I won't be noting them.

These game pretty much created the adventure genre and part of the game design was finding really weird, bizarre ways to die. Every manual that Sierra put out mentioned saving and saving often. I don't ever recall seeing any reviewer complain about "dick moves" because they weren't, it was an integral part of the game.

In fact these Sierra games often won Game of the Year awards!

Oh and on identifying the ships you got them all right!

My apologies, my intention wasn't to offend. "Dick move" wasn't exactly the best term there, because that death rules. It's awesome that the first thing that can kill Roger is an inanimate scrap of metal that he cuts himself on. No disintegration by invaders or falling off the outside of a ship here, just massive blood loss from trying to get a background object.

I'm already looking forward to the other deaths in this chapter of the Space Quest saga now.

Okay, sorry to jump then. =) To be fair, you have to actually try to pick it up (that was the >get metal above the screenshot), so it's not just touch-and-die.

falselogic, is that in fact the first death of the game? I guess it must be.

It depends on whether you go south from the pod or east (which I'll be doing in the next post.) It is a very early death and I don't know how many people actually get it, as it isn't that obvious

Oh, I found that one. I think I was a bit traumatized by it, though in my defense I was probably 10 when I played Space Quest III for the first time.

And this is why I like your LP so much.

You know, it didn't occur to me that this series really created the adventure game genre. King's Quest came first, and it was Sierra's flagship franchise, but it was Space Quest that broadened the possibilities for the genre and it's there that some of the conventions of the genre got encoded - the focus on humour, death being not completely punitive. The only puzzle I can think of in the Space Quest series that's really unreasonable was the slot machine - most of the rest of the puzzles throughout the series have a logic to them, and I think there's only a couple in the entire series that violate Ron Gilbert's principle that the player shouldn't have to know things to progress that they can't find out without dying. Death is frequent and incredibly common, but if Sierra had made a "deathless" mode the game would still have all the hints.

This LP has made me appreciate SQ even more.

From the useless escape pod Roger heads east, after finding nothing of interest south of the ship (if you don't count all that neat junk!)



>look around



I tried to look at the skull and the arm in the foreground but Roger seems unable to see them, and or I didn't type the right combination of words, when that happens SQ3 kicks this back at you:



With nothing more here Roger heads into the tube:



>look around



(I like to think that this is one of the corridors from Vohual Sludge's asteroid base)

Not much to look at really, there do seem to be a lot of wires though

>look wire



Wires are stupid and Roger still hasn't forgiven it for choking him several times while he was playing with his 'My First Space Electrician' kit his mom got him when he was six, Onward!



>look around



>look head



Even Roger's not that dense! He heads (get it?) over to the Robot and tries to climb through the open eye, but not seeing any immediate attention Roger lets his mind wander... and slips:



*rewind*

>climb eye

yessssssss

I actually love this next part of the game. It's an incredibly well designed scavenger hunt, and getting everything put back together and working is really satisfying.

Well there's plenty of things to look at here!

>look around



>look small ship



>look small ship



(There might be more, these were the only two I got)

>Look large ship



>look toys (or legos, or tinker toys)



Roger pokes around but isn't able to get in the ship, there is a hatch up there but the ship is too slick/high to climb up, he begins looking for an exit

>look head



Looks like a ladder to me! Roger heads over to it

>climb



As Roger climbs out of the eye of the giant robot he remembers his original reason for returning to the escape pod, the space junk, he hurries through the tube back to the pod:

>look around



>look spaceware



>look motivator



How very fascinating, and useless! Roger begins to think he'll never get out of here... If only there was some way to get over these mountains of junk... some way to get above... Aha! Those junk buckets! Roger heads southeast:



As Roger stands in front of where the buckets emerge from the ground he frantically attempts to get in one, but nothing seems to work, until, he just happens to find himself standing in a bucket?! (yup, no command necessary you just have to stand in the right place)



Roger is slowly taken up into the air and then unceremoniously dumped onto a conveyor:



Sorry I don't have a screen capture of look around for these screens, you can't type anything while the bucket is lifting you and then you only have so much time to get off the belt before... well you get the idea, those grinders aren't made for hugging!