Ben X

The Big Adventure Playthrough - Broken Sword (1996)

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Ahhh, Hit The Road. Ostensibly very similar game to DOTT, but it's got the fullscreen (albeit 4:3) graphics, a more wry humour and an anarchic hyperactivity. It's packed full of pointless diversions like feeding Max's cockroaches, brutalising a convenience store robber, having one-sided conversations with carny freaks or even just listening to weird answerphone messages, and the animations are surprisingly detailed and fluid. If DOTT is Chuck Jones cartoons, then HTR is Ren & Stimpy or Duckman.
It's nice as well that in this run of games - DOTT, HTR and Full Throttle - that the gameplay matches the story and tone. In DOTT, the Chuck Jones cartoon, you're endless running through the same space performing variations on actions, setting up contraptions and falling from heights, swapping objects for similar objects and pulling pranks. In Hit The Road, the detective story, you're finding clues and interrogating people to open up new locations. In Full Throttle, the biker action story, there's no inventory-combining and you're performing basic actions, mostly to demolish stuff.

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Finished it! There are a few quibbles - the anarchic nature is a bit of a double-edged sword, collapsing into randomness by the end when new locations are opened up because you happen to see a leaflet, or the final puzzle being a fetch quest for four random items; although it's tricky for me to judge the difficulty having completed the game so many times over the years, some of the puzzles are bizarre and sometimes lack the signposting to make them truly fair; there are a few iffy exit hotspots. Overall, though, the shagginess does fit the Sam & Max style, and the game is so wild and funny and stuffed with character that it's not dampened much by these issues. It's nice how it acts as a sister game to DOTT, too, in a similar way that Monkey Island did to Loom - just as Max cameos in DOTT, Bernard cameos (three times, in various terrible disguises!) as a Stuckey's employee, some easy-listening musak and sound effects are shared, and there's a bunch of other stuff like the founding fathers' appearances that make them feel of a piece.

 

MixNMojoRetro: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-9-Sam-and-Max-Hit-the-Road
Short making of: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/the-making-of-sam-max-hit-the-road/
Laserschwert's (he of the Lucasarts poster fan-remasters) excellent work-in-progress arrangement of the game's music with HD samples (almost makes me want a HtR remaster!): https://soundcloud.com/laserschwert/sets/sam-max-hit-the-road


Now onto the first game in a while that I haven't played before: Gabriel Knight.

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On the one hand, I'm looking forward to this as the second game so far that I've not played any of (the first being Loom). However, I'm also a little trepidatious because I suspect even the lesser Lucasarts games have given me high  general expectations that most other adventures will fail to live up to.
This game was too buggy on ScummVM, surprisingly, so I'm playing directly via Steam, which plays it through DOSBox. The speech audio has a fair amount of pop and crackle on it, unfortunately, but apart from that everything else runs smoothly. Fun voice cast, though, including Tim Curry, Mark Hamill and Michael Dorn.
I've played about two minutes of it so far.  It starts off very abruptly, with you waking up at your bookstore on a regular day and not given any even short-term goals. Also, I didn't realise there was a narrator at first, because she doesn't say anything until you start looking at certain objects, so for a short time I thought that Grace was breaking the fourth wall and mocking Gabriel's item descriptions and accent! It's atmospheric and it looks nice enough, though the sprites for some of the interactive objects are jarringly sharper than the rest of the art. There's already some awful pixel-hunting just perusing the bookstore (e.g. the tiny hair-thin tweezers) and your cursor doesn't change when it's over a hotspot, so I expect to be checking walkthroughs a lot on this one, to be honest.

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I've got a very small way into this, but this is a really frustrating game to play. There are NINE cursor verbs and no keyboard shortcuts, so you have to either cycle through them or go to the top menu every time you want to use them. You can't cycle through while dialogue is playing, to save time, and dialogue keeps getting interrupted or delayed by incidental events like NPCs talking to each other or walking in and out.

Story-wise, all I have to go on is that I'm researching voodoo for a novel I'm writing, and there happen to be some voodoo-themed murders happening in my neighbourhood. So I'm reduced to wandering around randomly looking at stuff and talking to people, picking up all the loose crap I can find. Every conversation has ten or so general topics that I have no reason to ask about, and look at dialogue is mostly there to show off the research the writers did,  but I have to go through it all in case it opens up a new location. Like, the furthest I've got so far in any one direction is asking my assistant three times about my messages, getting told that my grandmother left one, which opens up her house on the map, so I go there, ask her randomly  to tell me about my mother, and that opens up the cemetery on the map. So far, this is a worse detective game than Sam & Max Hit The Road.
There's also a Day system in place where, presumably, once I've achieved enough things the game moves onto Day 2 and certain new characters show up or whatever. So I'm not sure what I should be interested in now, and what I just need to wait for. Am I supposed to find the latest crime scene, or wait to read about it in tomorrow's paper? And if not, what the hell am I supposed to do? To the walkthrough!
(There is one helpful UI element: the tape recorder that lets you play back your conversations, in case you forgot or missed a bit of information.)

Side-note: it originally came bundled with a short graphic novel. It's not included with the Steam release, though the manual is, so I had to track it down online. It's a nicely illustrated flashback story about a voodoo-related slave revolt in the 17th century, which seems to tie in with the nightmares Gabriel is having. Also, seems like a descendant of the witch-hunter in it has been trying to call me! So that's pretty cool, though it doesn't help me progress right now.
This game is reminding me of Loom, in that they're trying very hard to conjure up a certain atmosphere, and at least partly succeeding, but the clunky gameplay is getting in the way.

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Ugh, so the solution to finding the crime scene was to go to the park, walk past a mime so he'll follow you, then, hoping the mime doesn't get distracted by an NPC and head back to his starting point, walk three screens over to the motorbike cop so he gets annoyed by the mime and chases him off. If you then listen to the police radio (which you've been able to hear anyway) you overhear a conversation about where the crime scene is. This is bullshit. But that gets me somewhere. Later, I ask my detective chum for some photos, he says to ask Officer Franks. When I do that, she tells me she doesn't have time to talk. The solution? Use the second 'talk to' verb on her. This usually just leads to a quip, but here it's what you have to use to open up a dialogue tree instead of the regular 'talk to' verb that normally does this. This is bullshit.

Another issue with the Day system is that you can potentially solve a bunch of puzzles before you have any idea why you want to. This means that a lot of walkthroughs just have you do stuff as soon as possible, so it's tough to work out the one thing you need to get you moving past your current obstacle. Even the Universal Hints System site isn't great with this game. So far the best thing I've found is this walkthrough/fan-novelisation hybrid that puts everything in the order you should be doing it logically: https://lparchive.org/Gabriel-Knight-Sins-of-the-Fathers/ Thanks to that , I now know that there's one puzzle I can solve now, even though I don't need to until a few 'days' later. 'Clues' for it will be dripfed over the next few days, but I will never have any logical reason for following them. Apparently the player's thinking should be:
Gabriel's paintings and sketches have groups of three snakes in them.

Gabriel has a dream where three snakes transform out of a knife.

If you randomly look at a book on snakes, Grace mentions that old stories of dragons were actually about snakes. So maybe 'three snakes' can mean 'three dragons'???

Gabriel gets calls from Wolfgang Ritter, who claims to be family.

If you look on Gabriel's bookshelves for no reason, eventually you'll find a poem, by Heinz Ritter, called "Drei Drakhen," (which, if you find a German to English dictionary by clicking on other shelves, and click on it a few dozen times, you'll learn means 'three dragons'). So if Wolfgang is telling the truth and Gabriel is related to the Ritters and therefore a family member wrote a poem that refers to three dragons.
So taking all this into account, the 'three dragons' motif seems important to Gabriel's family. He should therefore go to his grandmother's attic, look at a little clock, turn the hands to three o clock, and rotate the paintings round the face so that the dragon is at twelve o'clock (??), turn the key, and this will open a hidden drawer.
This, my friends, is bullshit.

I think I'd pretty much be using a walkthrough constantly to get through this game, and due to all the technical issues, design issues, merely adequate visuals and rather shoddy writing, that's not something I fancy doing. So I'm giving up on this one.
I can't find much in the way of ancillary reading materials, except this amazing video from the CD release@

 

And with that, on to Beneath A Steel Sky.

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Got a little way in. I played BASS a few years ago, enjoyed it and got very close to the end but then got stuck and never went back to it for some reason, I think. Anyway, I'm still liking this. It looks great even though the pixel art is a little smeary in places. The opening intro, a motion comic with art by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame, is full of artefacting too. It's kind of disappointing at this stage to not get an animated intro regardless, though. Gabriel Knight used still comic-panel-style art for some of its cutscenes too, and it always feels cheap. Even Revolution's own Lure Of The Temptress found a way to have an animated intro on a budget. (The remastered iOS version of BASS redid it with all the same source art at a high res, and doing a better job with the animation and camera moves, which all makes it feel a little more high-value.) Anyway, the game overall looks good, and there's a fair amount of Gibbons' character in there. The voice acting is cheap and cheerful, with a lot of regional Brit accents in there, giving it a Monty Python or Aardman feel. The writing is great so far - a pulpy dystopian setting that draws on a bunch of influences from 1984 to Mad Max, some gory deaths, lots of British slang, and a robot sidekick who constantly slags you off and complains about you transferring his circuit board to a vacuum cleaner. The puzzles are fine so far, nothing too ridiculous and they make use of the setting well. And I very rarely bump into any of the Virtual Theatre issues that plagued Lure Of The Temptress.

I'm now stuck - I think my prime goal is to get the elevator working, and I've managed to distract a worker elsewhere so I can flip a switch, but that doesn't seem to have affected anything. So either it's a puzzle I don't need to solve yet, or I've missed something. I'm sure I solved most of this game without a walkthrough last time, so I'd really like to manage it again! I'll take a break and see if something clicks when I come back to it...

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Okay, I finally came back to this and finished it off. It really is a very rough diamond - it's full of character, with a strong British feel, loads of cool ideas, some lovely (if hampered) art, and an effective dystopian atmosphere full of death and body horror and small-mindedness, but it often fails to overcome its low production values, a fair few puzzles range from fiddly and confusing to straight-up unfair, and the story is very rushed. 

 

Onto Full Throttle! I've played this umpfty times before, but it's been a few years, I think, so I'll be happy to play it again. I'll be playing from the original CD-ROM via SCUMMVM.

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Well, the difference in production values here are a pretty notable step up from Sam & Max, as Lucasarts' first CD-only adventure game (no floppy version this time round), but coming straight after BASS is a strong reminder of how staggering this was back in the day. Proper full-length licensed songs on the soundtrack, really impressive cutscenes, action, loads of 3D modelling, big fluid 2D animations. I still vividly remember seeing a clip of it on Gamesmaster, where Ben picks a lock and then throws the padlock on the ground, and drooling over it. It's not really fair to compare the two on terms of budget alone, but even outside of the gorgeous art, music, and voice-acting, the levels of polish and presentation here are miles ahead. None of the rough edges in the writing or the UI. Okay, so it's a bit short and easy, but these days that's not so much of an issue.

 

Next game on the list is Discworld, but I've played that fairly recently and also I'm only a few books into my first ever DW readthrough (I finished Mort a while back, just need to get clear my backlog of 8 or so individual novels then I'll get back into it), so it makes sense to leave this one at least until after I've got past the series entries it's loosely based on (mainly Colour Of Magic and Guards! Guards! apparently), then give it a replay. I remember thinking it was pretty good, it captured the feeling of the books well, and the graphics were cute. It could probably be re-released now with very little done to it, outside of getting the voice actors back in to record a few new bits of dialogue here and there to help signpost the more egregiously nonsensical puzzles...

 

Which means that I'm onto... ulp... Gabriel Knight 2. I didn't get on with the first game at all, so I'm immediately disinclined to give this one much of a chance, but we'll see. If nothing else, it had really cool box art.

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Hooooly shit, this is awful. BASS may have been rough around the edges but this is clunky as fuck. It continues the weird menu set-up from the first one where you have to click on a separate menu button to get the opening cutscene, then start a new game to get the second opening cutscene. The FMV here, by the way, is painfully bad. Cheap and ugly as sin, with some rotten acting (they do have Kay E. Kuter in there, though); it feels like a Hammer Horror pastiche someone shot in their backyard. The UI is terrible, too - it's ugly, it takes up most of the screen, and every action requires at least double the clicks it would in any half-competent adventure game.

Standout moment so far: a ten-second cutscene of a pixely man writing a letter then addressing the envelope then licking the envelope then sealing the envelope then putting the envelope on the table then getting up and walking back to the centre of the room.

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Bleck, this is dreadful. I doubt I'll continue with this. The challenge is mostly struggling with the UI, and pixel-hunts (which are worse than most thanks to the UI), but the other puzzle I got stuck on was an incredibly fiddly tape-splicing system where the recorded conversations, which in the previous game was purely a review mechanic to check for missed clues, can be taken apart word by word and rearranged. This is never tutorialised, requires you to assume a character is suddenly going to leave a room as soon as you've created the right fake voice recording of them, and is only used once in the entire game. The whole thing feels like an excuse for Jane Jensen to take a paid holiday, justifying it with a few photos of statues and some hastily copied encyclopedia entries. I am absolutely staggered that these games are so well thought of.

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So yeah, giving up on Gabriel Knight 2.
Have now started Flight Of The Amazon Queen. I've been wanting to play this since it got released as freeware, I guess mainly because it got released as freeware, plus it looked like goofy fun and it had the SCUMMVM Seal Of Approvalᵀᴹ.
I played through the opening 'escape a room' puzzle and into the main jungle hub. So far, the game most reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever - there's lots of energy and stuff going on, lots of custom animations etc, and the production values are fair, but also the art direction is a little disjointed, everything's a bit clunky, and it's a 90s game pastiching 50s B-movies so there's some slightly thoughtless stuff in there (nothing awful yet, but the lead character is the type to get himself in trouble by romancing mobsters' girlfriends, and two of the initial puzzles are waiting for a showgirl to take a shower so you can hand her a towel - at least you look away - and dressing up in drag to get past some goons). It feels like Beneath A Steel Sky but without the ambition. As for the humour - on the one hand, the lead character is called Joe King, most of the jokes are breast and penis related, and there's already been an anachronistic Terminator quote complete with Arnie impression, but on the other hand I did just get past a gorilla by pointing out to him that he shouldn't even be in an Amazonian jungle thereby making him disappear in a puff of logic. So I'll continue through the very Monkey Island-esque jungle for now...

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I've got to the next section. It's all okay, it's just a little unimaginative - the story's bare pastiche and the puzzles are all very basic (the only places I've got stuck have been due to not realising that some dialogue option three levels deep had appeared, or that an item had regenerated in some far-off dead-end of the map). The humour continues to be of the 'these sexy amazon women have captured us to have sex with us, and we don't want to leave!' variety.
There's a joke with a long muzak-backed elevator ride, and that elevator goes down a long shaft to a secret underground lair, so I guess we were making more clever adventure game references in BTDT and LOTCG than we realised! (Our versions are better, obvs.) Besides, there's also a grim reaper type ferryman, so if we get accused of ripping this game off, we're taking Curse Of Monkey Island down with us.

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The next section was a mostly humourless temple section that gave me unpleasant flashbacks to FoA, though it wasn't half as irritating. I'm well-versed enough in Lucasarts games that I instantly figured out the pulley puzzle and the 'follow a guide three times to get through a maze' puzzle. It then chucked me back into the jungle section, and I couldn't be bothered to walk round the whole thing again just to check if anything had changed, so I used a guide. It's a good thing I did, as nothing had changed and all I needed to do was make an utterly random guess that there was a safe was hidden behind a cabinet. After that there were a couple of incredibly easy puzzles and the game abruptly ended.
Overall it was fine. It had some charm, but the irritations (like multiple music tracks having a high-pitched chime every few seconds) and lack of polish (like every area having fullscreen graphics that only fully revealed themselves when the UI changed to make way for a transparent dialogue tree, and certain rooms having a bug where the talk animations went on for ages after the dialogue had stopped playing) really brought it down, and there was nothing about it that particularly stood out. It was pretty cool to hear Penelope Keith doing VO though.

Next game is... oh. Oh no. It's The Dig! I might play this with liberal guide usage so I can enjoy the production values while bypassing all the 'it's alien tech, of course it doesn't make any sense!' puzzles.

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I started on The Dig. The opening is actually not as strong as I remembered it! The FMV cutscenes are high-budget but are aiming for realism which unfortunately means they're hidden behind a dense layer of artefacting, and the relatively clean character close-ups are blandly designed to the point of ugliness.
Into the game, you start off placing nuclear explosives on a giant asteroid, which should be a tense, exciting start but is dragged down by player/character dissonance, where I'm having to work out stuff the character already knows, by examining and using everything in sight, and a lot of busywork. I think it's supposed to be grounded and deliberate, but instead it's just a bit frustrating. Anyway, after doing two bomb-placings, two radio calls, five diggings, three panel-pushings and a ridiculously easy alien jigsaw puzzle, we're off to the alien planet!
A couple more notes: the dialogue is clunky DTV crap (co-written by Orson Scott Card, apparently, who helped with the Monkey Island insults, and also is a massive bigot); the interface is an early example of the stripped down examine/use two-verb approach.

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Walking around the planet is more effective. The in-engine art is a lot more attractive, even if it's not as striking as a DOTT or a BASS, and the game effectively conveys the mix of excitement and trepidation as you wander round yanking at everything you can while rat creatures scurry past, holograms crackle to life and your team-mates rumble mutinously. On the other hand, it's (intentionally) aimless, with the only goal being 'get home' and nowhere to start, and my inventory is already filling up with unidentifiable alien doodads. 
Also, if you're going to have a two-verb system, at least make sure your examine dialogue is full-bodied, not just copied from the interact response or a generic "Hmmm."

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Okay, that didn't last for long. Brink died, which is pretty cool, but then Maggie leaves and you're left in a massive hub full of alien locks and alien control panels that you're supposed to just kind of fumble your way towards a solution for. I haven't actually played Myst, but I feel like this game wants to be Myst.

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Finished it, mostly with a guide. It's a pretty terrible game. A bunch of different art styles slapped together, many of them ugly. Crappy dialogue and story. And awful puzzles - either alien tech that you have to brute force your way through, or bog-standard yet terribly signposted adventure game fare. Plus all the usual adventure design missteps like expecting the player to wander around the huge map just to spot the one thing that changed, or having the player-character (or even the UI) figure something out that the player hasn't. "Hmm, looks like a crypt", says Low as he enters a room just as random and unidentifiable as any of the others. You really can tell they were just trying to get this out of the door to save George the embarrassment of his friend's game getting cancelled.


Next should be Spycraft: The Great Game - I've got it on disc, but there's some issue with running it (predictably, it being a Win '95 game) and I can't be bothered to try and get it going with DOSBOX. It's only £1.50 on GOG but that would still go against the point of this backlog-busting exercise, so I moved onto Space Quest. I don't know why I had this down as a 1996 game, but I should have played all six of these by now! I don't know if I've got it in me to go back to 1986 adventure games. Maybe I'll play each for as long as is fun, and jump to the next one at the first roadbump, do a whistlestop tour of the franchise...

Space Quest 1 starts out as what is essentially a shit stealth game played via text parser. It was far too much of a pain to struggle against the parser, the save system, the control system and the instadeaths, so I gave up pretty quickly on that one. I skimmed through a playthrough and it seems like there was some nice presentation there (the Blues Brothers show up playing in a Mos Eisley type cantina at one point!) but also a lot of bullshit gameplay-wise. For example, to buy a spaceship, save-scumming your way through a fruit machine until you eventually scrape together enough money is the intended solution!

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Onto the second one. It's a little smoother than the first one. I'm a bit more au fait with the controls and how to save, thanks to watching that playthrough of the first one. I guess if I'd found a manual for the first game I might have given it more of a shot, but there was probably too much bullshit still for me to have got far. Anyway, there's also no stealth, they seem to have put more effort into room descriptions and such so that it's clearer what the possibility space is at any given time, and the presentation is nicer. More layers of depth, cutscene animations, and a fun moment where you realise you can walk up the walls and ceiling on the outside of the ship. It eases you in a little easier too, giving you a janitorial task and some easy navigation before you get swept up in the story. It's a little funnier, too. I've chuckled a few times already. The series villain, Sludge Vohaul, gets abruptly introduced as the person behind the events of the first game. (Confusingly, he's also related to someone else called Sludge mentioned in that game, too, though different manuals etc have given different explanations as to how. Back in the days before people worried about franchise continuity!) He bungs you off to a mining planet, you escape your guards and end up in a generic fantasy forest, and now I'm stuck.

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Okay, so this game does also have lots of bullshit! It does bring in stealth (basically, if a message comes up saying you hear footsteps or a craft or whatever then you have a small amount of time to navigate around whatever trees are in the way and get to the next screen, and if you've got too far to go, bad luck, and also sometimes it's actually someone who you need to talk to but there's no way of knowing that), plus now it has dreadful pixel-perfect death mazes to negotiate. Along with not actually being able to tell what is screen exit and what is wall, and also having to figure out if the parser allows you to use "rub on self" at this particular moment, and some crappy puzzles, it's not worth me struggling through even with a guide.
I've just started the third one. It has slightly nicer graphics and continuous background music, and it made me laugh by asking me not to refer to the TIE Fighter in the junkyard by that actual copyrighted term. I doubt I'll last very long in this one either, though. (I think that maybe 4 is the one where it all gets a little more modern, and is also the most well thought-of, so maybe I'll have more luck there...)

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Space Quest 3 is essentially the same as the first two games. Some much nicer graphics in parts - often better-looking than Maniac Mansion, and occasionally equals Last Crusade but is mostly a lot uglier than that game. It's still running on a text parser though, while those games have already moved to the SCUMM verbset, and the puzzles are still very frustrating. The story has fully devolved into random pop culture references and post-modernism now - you get chased around by a Terminator pastiche, then rescue the Space Quest designers and drop them off at Sierra HQ.

 

Onto Space Quest IV, which does indeed take a step up in graphical fidelity, and I think also moves to a cycling verb cursor. But also, Amiga Power gave it 19% so it may not be the series high I thought...

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19% was generous. The production values are relatively impressive - it got a full talkie CR-ROM in '92, and it puts the 256 colours to full use (although it's pretty ugly overall, nothing like the strong, cohesive art direction of MI2 or FoA) - but fucking hell I got stuck even finding the first puzzle and there's 'stealth' stuff AGAIN. You can't get further than picking an item up with out either a robot or a zombie showing up and killing you. The sound was really grating too. The only positives I can find are that having a Jay Ward type narrator for all the descriptions was a good choice, and some of the background art looks quite nice, albeit in that smeary digitised early 90s way.

I got a bit further in SQ5, but I'm giving up with this one as well. They've now decided to be a Star Trek spoof (mostly TOS, though they clumsily throw in some TNG as well, plus some Alien and Predator - I'd say this is the Spaceballs of adventure games, but it's closer to Epic Movie), which might not be too bad an idea if it weren't all so fiddly and boring. You spend the first part of the game cleaning a floor, then collecting garbage pods - this wouldn't be so bad if it were a quick tutorial section like in SQ2, but here you have to laboriously clean every pixel of that floor, and then to collect the garbage pods you have to sit in your chair (it farts EVERY TIME) tell your pilot to set a course, get coordinates from the manual (copy protection that they decided to leave in for the CD edition to "preserve the Space Quest experience"), type them in, tell your pilot to go to "lite speed", wait for thirty seconds while you travel, then when you approach the planet tell the pilot to go to regular speed, then activate the garbage collection. Every single time you want to go somewhere, you have to do this. Then there are all the other usual issues - you don't have any way of knowing what's an interactive item so you have to click on every 10x10 group of pixels just in case, there's no feedback on why something won't work, you have to walk in and out of rooms to trigger random stuff, everything's incredibly slow and the hotspots are so small that even with a guide and a video playthrough I found it difficult to successfully solve puzzles. The sound is still crap and there's not even any voice acting this time. The graphics aren't awful but they're cheap and unpolished. Laughably, for such a cheap game, it's also plastered with product placement for Sprint. It's got shitty minigames (like a battleships clone where you play on three boards at once) and QTEs. The latter is what caused me to quit the game. 
In retrospect, I can't believe anyone has the temerity to throw accusations of 'inscrutable logic' and 'pixelhunting' at games like DOTT (or even the D&B games) when stuff like this is out there. I now suspect a lot of that is because people have heard these are common issues with adventure games and so feel obliged to apply them to every single one just to sound smart.


Anyway, one more to go, then I'm onto Broken Sword, which I played before and didn't love but at least will be decently made.

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Space Quest 6 arbitrarily gets rid of the Star Trek thing and makes you a janitor again. It looks okay, even though it doesn't stand up to the better-looking games of even four years earlier - it's got a Gobliiins type look and is generally more attractive and cohesive than the past couple of entries, even if the heavily dithered backgrounds clash a little and there's still the occasional ugly 3D model plonked on top. The narrator is back, and there are other bits and pieces of voice acting. The sound's a little nicer, and the music is still the same 20 second minimalist loops, but at least the synths are a little nicer. Unfortunately, the gameplay's still crap. It's the same engine, so all the UI issues are still there, and It starts off with a very irritating puzzle, and then chucking you into one of those galling, sprawling hubs but with zero direction - 'you're on shore-leave, have a wander', that's it.

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Right, I had a look at a walkthrough and apparently there really is nothing to the game, either puzzle- or story-wise, except 'wander about, click on absolutely everything, and try everything with everything else in the hope that something happens'. So bugger it, that's me done with the Space Quest games. They could occasionally be funny, but they played like shit, sounded like shit and mostly looked like shit.

I played a tiny bit of Broken Sword, and wow it's a breath of fresh air after all that Space Quest (and even The Dig, Amazon Queen and Gabriel Knight 2 tbh). It starts off with a lovely opening cutscene full of kinetic, cohesive animation. Very Don Bluth, and clearly expensive even though it's quite low definition, of course, and a few of the shots could do with being a bit longer. And then quickly into the main game, where the art all looks great and there are a bunch of nice animations. The music and sound are very organic, and the acting is good. The story is intriguing and the writing is deft and gently witty - it feels like a Tintin cartoon or something. And a nice simple cursor-only interface, with context-sensitive verb on left button and examine on right button. Ahhh, so refreshing!


Anyway, I'll leave it there for now. Something nice to come back to.

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