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Return to Space (Part 4)

Coming to this flooded part of the map after witnessing the little pink creature picking berries results in it making yet another appearance.  This time it's rubs something on its body before entering the swamp water and swimming away.  Roger needs to do likewise since there is no other way out of the area.  Unsurprisingly, something hungry waits in the shallows for our hero.  What it is exactly is never revealed.  All players ever see is a pair of eye stalks poking above the surface of the murky water.  When Wilco wades into the swamp this monster is quick to catch him, but if he's covered in berry juice the swamp dweller will let him go.  The player can now make their way through the swamp unmolested.  Curiously, there is a section of it that is so deep Roger must swim to cross it.  Diving down here is actually essential because there is an air-filled chamber underneath containing a glowing gemstone.  It's an item that comes in very handy (both in this game and the next).  

After leaving the swamp behind, Roger crosses a chasm by using a rotten tree trunk as a makeshift bridge.  On the very next, screen he's caught in a snare trap very similar to the one that snagged our pink hint-giving friend.  The hunter planting all these traps is actually a big grey-skinned humanoid intent on eating our hero.  With a little determination and ingenuity though Roger is able to escape, and he even manages to steal a length of rope in the process.  This rope is then used to descend into the chasm.  After playing a game of Tarzan versus King Kong, Wilco discovers a village of the little pink creatures at the bottom.  It's actually possible to get this far without helping the one that was in distress from before.  If so, these ones will kill Roger with slings and stones on sight.  Otherwise, they will let him stay as long as the player likes.  There not being much to do here though means that most players will soon leave via the only exit; an underground passage.  Next, Roger must use his recently acquired glowing gem to navigate a dark maze-like section which emerges into an underground river.  These rapids fork in two directions: a waterfall of death and a whirlpool that dumps Roger out the mouth of a massive statue.  This rock carving is covered in overgrowth and perpetually spewing water into an above-ground pond.  At this point Roger is fairly close to the elevated landing platform and shuttle he arrived on.  Unfortunately, the route forward is blocked by a rather huge boulder.  What's more, the way to overcome this obstacle is very unintuitive.

The whistle picked up earlier in the game is actually a "Terror Beast" mating call.  Blowing it, brings one of these small, but ferocious creatures straight through the rock.  Next, the player has to have Wilco toss a puzzle toy he got out of his locker way back at the start.  This distracts the beast such that Roger can move on via the newly created hole.  A common criticism leveled at point-and-click adventure games is "moon logic," in essence, a game that requires the player to make some rather drastic guesswork in order to hit on a solution.  Personally, I think the fundamental issue is simply a lack of hints.  There's no indication that there's a Terror Beast within earshot or that said creatures are naturally curious rock burrowers.  The next challenge is also an odd one, but at least it has two possible solutions.  Part of the support structure for the elevated landing platform consists of a raised walkway.  On this patrols an armed ape-man.  When Roger enters the area, the guard doesn't notice him behind the bushes.  The player can neutralize this threat by slinging a stone at the guard's head with an athletic supporter (another early-game item found in the locker room)...moon logic indeed.  The other solution is to sneak underneath where the guard patrols, then throw a stone to create a diversion.  Either way, Roger ends up riding the elevator up to the top of the landing platform in order to get on the shuttle.

Upon blasting off into space, Sludge Vohaul notices what's up and seizes control of the shuttle remotely.  The shuttle is then guided into the asteroid base where, much to Roger's surprise, no welcoming committee waits to greet him.  In fact the entire station is strangely deserted, aside from some occupied bathroom stalls and prison cells.  In actuality, this final section of the game turns into a house of booby traps.  Roger must disable the robot guards by triggering the fire suppression system, avoid a pool of acid in the floor by clinging to a smooth wall with a toilet plunger, and abstain from coming into contact with an embryo-implanting xenomorph by running away.  After all this our hero is able to confront Sludge Vohaul in his lair...only to be immediately shrunk down to the size of a mouse by an energy beam device hidden in the ceiling.  Trapped in a glass container, Roger is surprisingly undeterred.  While his captor puts the final touches on the immanent invasion of Xenon, Wilco cuts a way out of his glass prison and slips through the cracks of a nearby cooling vent unnoticed.  Inside, he finds some of the life support equipment used to keep his nemesis alive.  By deactivating the equipment, he is able to put an end to the evil scientist (for now).  Making his way over to a keyboard, Roger plays a short game of hopscotch in order to reactivate the beam and enlarge himself back to normal size.  Finally, using a code written on the back of Sludge Vohaul's hand, he is able to set the asteroid base on a de-oribit trajectory.  It's a maneuver that will destroy the station and clone army by burning them up in the planet's atmosphere.

At this point the player must guide our hero to an escape pod and make a break for it.  Unlike Roger's previous two escape vehicles though, this one is awfully barebones.  With no means of navigation and a very limited supply of air, Wilco has no choice but to climb into a stasis capsule in the corner and take a long nap.  Here ends Space Quest II.  As the Space Quest Historian astutely pointed out, it's a conclusion that bookends nicely with the beginning of the first game in that it started with Roger Wilco waking from a nap and ends with him going back to sleep.  Little does Roger know that when next he awakens he'll be in a whole new graphics engine. 

Return to Space (Part 3)

Considering the development time between the original Space Quest and its sequel was only a little over a year, it's kind of amazing how much The Two Guys from Andromeda were able to accomplish.  Space Quest II: Chapter 2 - Vohaul's Revenge is a notable improvement over its predecessor in a variety of ways despite using the same engine.  It's one of the first video games ever to depict swimming in underwater caverns, as well as one of the first to employ bigger or smaller on-screen character sprites to convey the illusion of distance.  A lot of the pixel art is also quite beautiful with special attention payed to light and shadow.

After the title card and some text filling in events between games, players are treated to a "2001: A Space Odyssey" style shuttle landing on "Xenon Orbital Station 4."  It's here that we find our hero, Roger Wilco in a spacesuit, sweeping the outside of the station's hull with a push broom.  Right off the bat, players are in for an interesting challenge.  Roger gets a call from his boss asking him to come back inside, but the airlock hatch is located on the ceiling in relation to our hero.  The trick here is to simply walk right up the wall and onto the ceiling.  Apparently, Roger's suit has magnetic boots.  Standing on the hatch whisks our hero away to an interior locker room wherein he can swap out his spacesuit for a uniform, as well as pick up a few seemingly unimportant personal effects (more on those later).  Roger then heads over to meet his boss which goes pretty much as expected (given Roger's chronic tendency to slack off at work).  Our hero's next task is to clean up a newly arrived shuttle...which, as fate would have it, is a trap.  Roger is kidnapped and knocked unconscious.  When he awakens he finds himself not only aboard an entirely different space station, but in an entirely different star system as well.  He also finds himself face-to-face with one "Sludge Vohaul."  Players of the first game might remember the name "Slash Vohaul," lead scientist on the Star Generator project.  While never explained anywhere in the Space Quest series, one of The Two Guys from Andromeda has gone on record saying that Sludge is actually Slash's evil brother.  Family connections aside, Sludge looks and acts like a nerdy version of Darth Vader...right down to the life support machinery.  Sludge reveals that he feels wronged by the people of Xenon and is hell-bent on getting revenge.  Since his first attempt using the Star Generator with the help of the Sariens failed, he has devised a new scheme involving an invasion of the planet using a clone army of door-to-door insurance salesmen.  Needless to say, Space Quest II is a bit more goofy than the first game.  Personally, I enjoyed the shift in tone, but I know some fans of the original were turned off by it.

Once Sludge has finished gloating, Roger is taken away from the villain's orbital asteroid base down to the surface of a jungle planet.  There, Wilco is to spend the rest of his days doing slave labor in  Vohaul's mines.  Our hero is delivered by shuttle to a landing platform elevated above the jungle canopy.  Escorted by two ape-men in camo fatigues, he's transferred to a hovering transport that sets off at tree-top level.  After traveling for a few minutes, the engine on the skimmer sputters then abruptly dies.  A brief argument between the two ape-men reveals that one of them forgot to refuel the vehicle, but as the in-game text explains, "the argument between the two guards is cut short as gravity reasserts itself."

Neither of the ape-men survive the crash, although Roger is relatively unscathed thanks to one of the guards inadvertently breaking his fall.  Now, here's where things start to open up a bit for the player.  They can explore the surrounding jungle at their leisure.  Doing so though is fraught with peril.  An emergency beacon has been activated on the crashed transport forcing Roger to play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with arriving patrols.  Climbing trees results in poor Wilco being trapped in sap and eaten by ravenous insects.  A nearby patch of giant mushrooms will devour him whole if he gets too close, and there's even a carefully hidden spiked pit trap right next to the crash site.  To make matters worse still, there are numerous clumps of paralysis-inducing spore pods found all over the jungle floor.  Weirdly enough, there's also a mailbox/vending machine of sorts.  Using a mail-in rebate he just happens to have on his person, Roger can get a free whistle from this seemingly misplaced dispenser.  It's actually an essential item later in the game, but the act of acquiring it is something that will comeback to haunt Roger in Space Quest 3 and 5.

Another point of interest is what I can only describe as a hairless pink ewok caught in a snare trap.  Letting it down causes it to run off.  However, in a clearing not far away, it's possible to encounter it again picking berries.  Between the berries and Roger is a massive plant with pale, tentacle-like roots.  The little pink creature soon runs off again, but in order for Roger to get some berries of his own, he must navigate the interposing maze of plant growth.  I found this to be a rather tricky part of the game because, unlike other versions of Space Quest II, the Apple IIc port doesn't allow the player to adjust character movement speeds.  As one might guess, it took me a lot of feathered inputs and save-scumming to get through this part of the game.  Any error in movement results in Roger becoming carnivorous plant food, but assuming the player manages to get in, grab some berries, and get out, they'll have what they need to cross the nearby swamp. 

Return to Space (Part 2)

Picking up where we left off in the last blog post...around this time is when the game starts to introduce some more movement-based challenges.  Avoiding a tentacle monster under a grating and acid drops falling from above, the player has to navigate an underground passage only to discover a race of pale four-armed humanoids.  After doing them a favor (getting rid of that pesky Orat on the surface), they provide Roger with a sand skimmer that he pilots to the only permanent settlement on the entire planet.  It's all very reminiscent of Mos Eisley and the trip there involves the player having to dodge rocks like they're playing some kind of futuristic off-road version of Out Run.  Upon arrival at his destination, Roger Wilco receives an offer from one of locals to buy his ride.  For awhile I used to think that the amount of money offered had to do with the condition that the skimmer was in (i.e. how many rocks the player hit on the way there), but that turns out not to be the case.

Moving on, this location has several points of interest: a cantina, a used starship dealership, and a "Droids 'R' Us" (changed to "Droids 'B' Us" in later versions of the game for copyright reasons)...kind of funny considering the store chain it was parodying, "Toys 'R' Us" is now out of business in America.  Other than that there are opportunities to interact with other characters a bit and acquire additional funds via a very deadly slot machine.  Much like real slot machines it's very hard to get a significant amount of money out of it, so instead players are pretty much expected to cheese their way to riches by save scumming each crank of the handle.  There's also a way to "hack" the mini-game by using certain four-letter words, but let's not get into that...

Roger needs to buy one particular ship and droid in order to advance the plot.  It's actually possible to get a discount for both of these purchases using coupons not listed in his inventory.  In actuality these coupons come printed on real paper in the boxes Space Quest was sold in...yet another example of the game breaking the fourth wall.  When it comes time to blast off, the player needs to inform his astro-navigation droid where to go.  This is one particular puzzle that really stumped me as a child.  The solution is to have a couple of beers at the bar.  Doing so makes the other patrons relax enough for Roger to overhear a conversation about a Sarien battlecruiser performing strange weapons tests on asteroids in sector "HH"...not being much of a drinker now, let alone when I was a child, it seemed to me that buying beer was a waste of buckazoids and should be avoided.  Thank goodness for hint books showing me the error of my ways.

After being treated to a non-interactive spaceflight sequence to sector HH, Roger's droid skillfully pilots the craft close to the Deltaur undetected.  From here Roger Wilco instructs the droid to rendezvous with him later, then dons a zero-g jet pack a slips aboard the battlecruiser through an airlock hatch undetected.  Sariens might be sloppy when it comes to security, but they're still the type to shoot first and ask questions later.  Because of this the player must guide Roger around using the air ducts or else by stowing away in a trunk until he reaches a laundry room.  In order to avoid being spotted Roger is forced to hide in a washing machine.  As fate would have it the washer gets activated with him still inside.  Somehow he manages to survive the cleaning process and more implausibly emerges decked out in a Sarien uniform; including helmet and boots!  Thus disguised, Roger is able to infiltrate the bowels of the ship and reach the place the Star Generator is being kept.  It's too big to move, however, clever players will have discovered earlier in the game that the Star Generator has a built-in self-destruct system that can be activated by entering a special code.  This is one of those "guide-dang-it!" puzzles that Sierra adventure games are well known for.  Back in the beginning of the game Roger has to recover a particular data cartridge from the library room aboard the Arcada (a dying crew mate hints at its importance).  The cartridge contains the blueprints for the Star Generator along with a log entry by one "Slash Vohaul" explaining how to arm the self-destruct system.  

Once activated there isn't much time before detonation so, in what feels like a story come full circle, Roger once again hastily escapes a starship before it explodes by commandeering a Sarien emergency escape craft.  The game time skips at this point, jumping ahead to an award ceremony on "Xenon"; Roger Wilco's homeworld and the place the Arcada was returning to.  The astro-navigation droid is present and Roger is awarded a golden mop along with the words "Once a janitor, always a janitor."

It's possible to forget the data cartridge back on Kerona or, through the magic of save game manipulation and out-of-game knowledge, never get it to begin with.  Aside from a lower score and few changes to the ending text though it doesn't affect the conclusion.  Supposedly, there are a number of ways the player can abandon the quest, but I can honestly say I've never experienced any of them.  I have always liked the idea of a janitor turned hero.  All it requires (according to Space Quest) is a little bit of ingenuity and whole lot of dumb luck.

Return to Space (Part 1)

 

I've recently been watching some play-throughs of the Space Quest series with Gaming Grumps and the Space Quest Historian over on Youtube.  So now I feel motivated to share my own impressions of the IP here.  In order to organize things, and establish some sort of structure, I will do this in chronological order.

In the early days of PC gaming pure text-based adventures were quite common.  Eventually, developers started to include some in-game artwork (typically a few static POV shots of various environments described in the text).  Gradually this gave way to games wherein the player had an on-screen avatar that could be moved about using a joystick or arrow key inputs.  One might be tempted to call this the start of the point-and-click adventure game, but it really wasn't.  Mouse controls were extremely rare at the time outside of a few Apple products.  So instead of utilizing a mouse cursor, the player had to type out text-based commands.  Words like "open", "close", "look", "take", "use" plus a noun identifying an on-screen object were the most common kind of interactions.  It was very much an extension of the text-based games that had come before, but since they also had visuals these types of games were often referred to as "graphic adventures".  In the early 1980s Sierra On-line had helped pioneer this new genre with two landmark titles, King's Quest I, and II.  In order to further capitalize on these two commercial successes, the studio allowed two of its in-house programmers (Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe; A.K.A. The Two Guys from Andromeda) to create a sci-fi counterpart to the fantasy-themed King's Quest.  The result of this endeavor was Space Quest Chapter 1: The Sarien Encounter.  Much like how King's Quest borrowed from well-known fairly tales and mythology, Space Quest took a lot of inspiration from famous science fiction films (particularly "Star Wars").  Unlike King's Quest, which had players taking the role of someone important (a knight, a king, or in later games a prince or princess), Space Quest had a lowly janitor as the protagonist and unlikely hero of each story.  Of course audiences love rooting for the underdog, but Space Quest takes it one step further by also addressing a glaring hole in most space sci-fi settings by offing an answer to the question "who keeps all this stuff clean?"  After all, dust is going to accumulate in an enclosed environment from the constant shedding of hair and skin cells...waste matter and fluid has to be extruded and when it comes to ingesting nutrients accidents are bound to happen sooner or later...who's going to clean up?  Roger Wilco space janitor second-class, that's who!

In truth, players can choose any name for their character provided it is 18 letters or less.  However, if one simply presses the enter/return key without typing in anything the game will default to "Roger Wilco", a somewhat humorous fourth-wall breaking reference in the form of an often used abbreviation of radio communications meaning "Roger, will comply."  Anecdotal information aside, the game begins in-media res aboard the starship "Arcada."  Roger (let's call him that because it became his de facto name from the third entry onward) awakens from a nap to find the ship has been boarded.  The hallways are littered with the corpses of his fellow crew members.  Hostiles, dressed in crimson uniforms and helmets, stalk the corridors armed with lethal energy weapons which they use on-sight.  Needless to say, it is a rather dark and nerve-wracking start, but with some intrepid exploring the player can find out that the Star Generator has been stolen.  The backstory here is that the Arcada, a science vessel, was returning home after successfully testing that phone-booth sized device.  Incidentally, it proved capable of converting a planet into a sun.  Further exploring also reveals that the Arcada's engines are rigged to blow.  This leads to the player having to hastily guide Roger to an airlock shuttle bay where he is able to make an exit via a small escape craft.  What follows is a bit convoluted, but apparently the Sariens (the hostile race of intelligent green-skinned humanoids who boarded the Arcada and took the Star Generator) remained in the vicinity aboard the battlecruiser "Deltaur."  Detecting our hero's flight, they dispatch an autonomous robot to deal with him.  Meanwhile, the escape craft's AutoNav feature brings Roger to the nearest habitat planet, a hot desert world called "Kerona" (no relation to the beer..or virus).  

From here things become an out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire situation.  Aside from a 40 degree Celsius surface temperature, Kerona is also home to whale-sized sand worms.  I have a distinct childhood memory of my friend and I yelling in shock as poor Roger was devoured in a single bite by one of these things.  Thankfully, if the player is careful they can avoid coming in contact with these creatures provided they stick to a rocky escarpment near the escape craft crash site.  Unfortunately there are many more ways the player can get poor Roger Wilco killed: dehydration, crushed by a deadly "Orat" beast living here, or even eaten by something in a hole in a cliff face.  Adding to the challenge is a Sarien spider droid that falls from the sky and upon touchdown springs into action with the intent of hunting down and killing our hero.  True to Sierra game standards there are a lot of ways to die in Space Quest.  Some people find this annoying and overly difficult, but personally I consider it part of the fun that comes with playing these sorts of games.  A lot of special character animations were created for Roger's many deaths so not experiencing them would mean that the player is missing out on a sizable chunk of content.  Provided that one saves often there isn't really any penalty for dying either.  Anyway, we will continue with the adventures of Roger Wilco in the next blog post.