A long time ago in a galaxy just around the corner you are the janitor in space.
Your mission is to scrub dirty floors, to replace burned-out light bulbs, to clean out latrines...
To boldly go where no man has swept the floor.
See what happens yourself as Roger Wilco, intergalactic garbage-man, comes to the rescue.
The pack includes the original Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter, Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge and Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon.
Packed with comedy, tragedy, suspense, horror and many other nouns.
Age requirements: ESRB Rating: EVERYONE with Mild Animated Violence.
Minimum system requirements: Windows XP or Windows Vista, 1 GHz Processor (1.4 GHz recommended), 256MB RAM (512 recommended), 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended), Mouse, Keyboard.
Average customer rating 4.5 out of 5.0
When adventure games ruled the roost
(by
antihippie)
The Space Quest series come from a time in my childhood when PC gaming was largley defined by the adventure. Sierra was the undisputed king of adventure gaming, with such golden franchises as Leisure Suit Larry, King's Quest, Quest for Glory, and yes, Space Quest. Space Quest takes Sierra's noted goofy humor to an all new level, and creates fun, engaging game play.... full review
You play a janitor, who through sheer laziness, incompetence and dumb luck manages to foil the villains in every game. Thus, the gameplay requires you to work and think like a janitor. You have paltry tools, and weird items that you must constantly use in creative ways to solve impossible problems and ridiculous odds. You rarely get to shoot back and the gun toting thugs trying to vaporize you. You'll by doing a lot of typing on the first two, but the games gradually advances to a more intuitive point and click interface. Make no mistake, however, these games are hard. Those who have played through them a thousand times may have forgotten how unforgiving the early adventure games were.
Space Quest, however, is rewarding for all its difficulty. It dishes out ridiculous humor, goofy aliens, and slapstick regularly, and is definitely worth your time whether you want to relive the glory days, or take a trip the mists of gaming time.
The first three entries in the Space Quest series are unique in the early Sierra line-up in their contemporary subject matter, and the rather linear flow of the puzzles and story.
The more linear story progression helped immensely to make these games more fun than some of the others, because early PC games like these were limited by technological constraints. All of these... full review games may have been graphic games, but they were all still parser-driven at this time, so the games were very limited to what words they could process or recognize.
Therefore, most of the puzzles were to figure out what word was the right word to use to advance the story. The other puzzles were pixel hunts, which were excruciatingly boring in these early low-res games, and not so much more fun today.
Basically, I felt as though the logical progression, and far more linear storyline of the Space Quest series greatly helped to mitigate the frustration of the pixel hunts and death scenes.
This is because you had more information to work with, so the puzzles were less obtuse and more contextual.
Furthermore, with the continuation of the series in the next three games, Space Quest really served as a template for action/adventure story interaction in the following three decades more than other popular series of adventure games.
The Space Quest Series, along with "Quest for Glory," are my favorite Sierra titles from their classic period, which I would define as the late 1980's.
The sci-fi and fantasy atmosphere of the Space Quest titles was very in touch with a number of movies and television shows of the time, and they felt more prescient than some of the other adventure games of the day because of it.
Furthermore, Space Quest never took itself too seriously. All three of these games features a fun plot and amusing story elements. You may even find time to laugh at all of the many death scenes that are possible.
Final Verdict: I would recommend these games to any fan of early adventure games, and I would absolutely recommend them as an introduction to the genre to newcomers. The more linear plots and fun pop culture references will doubtlessly be a boon to anyone who has not died over and over in an early Sierra game yet. Furthermore, I would recommend playing these games again to anyone who hasn't played them for a long time because there are so many little easter eggs buried in the story, that it is fun a second time around.
Space quest is one of the great grandaddies to the Adventure genre
(alonside with kings quest).
As stated before, the influence it had on the game industry
cannot be underestimated.
HOWEVER
Do you really remeber these games well?
For you should've played the series a long time ago.
It was a definitive game of my generation, and it... full review
was great fun to play them back then.
On the other way, it doesn't really hold up that well today.
Especially, when you compare them to the latter, more refined
installments, they feel crude, to say the least.
For starters, this first part of the series is punishingly hard.
Literally, because it's going to punish you with DEATH for
the slightest error you make, even if you cannot be aware of
certain obstacles. This makes them not only frustrating, but
but tends to be more of a "trial and error" type of andventure,
which has never been good. Well, at least, the developers
got pretty creative when it came to game overs, but after
a while it gets really tiresome.
On the other hand, one could easily see, how the trilogy
turns better and better with each episode. They get longer,
deeper, less frustrating, more clever and entertaining.
Another aspect is the game grapchis, the parser and the sound.
While I find EGA graphics very charming (especially in SQ 3),
this might put off many newcomers. Why are the VGA remakes
missing from this package? At this price, it'd have been nice to
include them.
antihippie)
tacossmellgood)
rob.liefeld)