Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier

The Good
Janitor Roger Wilco had some great adventures over the years. He retrieved the stolen Star Generator from the hands of the Sariens, dealt with Sludge Vohaul twice, rescued the Two Guys from Andromeda, and even commandeered a garbage scow. Now he's back in the sixth and final chapter in the Space Quest series. After being demoted to Janitor Second Class, he is granted shore leave on Polysorbate LX where things get a bit interesting for Roger.

The Spinal Frontier was made at a time when Sierra developed their games using the SCI-2 engine. SCI-2 was capable of delivering high resolutions, and it was the same one that powered Gabriel Knight, King's Quest VII, and Torin's Passage. The graphics are far more colorful than the previous SQ offerings. There are also 3-D renderings of the spaceships which look damn impressive. When the subtitles are turned on, the green text always stand out against the black background. SVGA cards were the norm back in 1995, so the only way to play the game is by getting one.

There is a lot of humor as well as references to popular culture. I enjoyed playing “Stooge Fighter 3” as one of the three characters who perform amusing special attacks. I also liked Roger executing the Vulga Nerve Pinch on a guard so that you can grab his keys and steal his shuttle. Having Roger walk through a virtual Windows 3.1 desktop is also a nice touch.

Death can come to Roger in a variety of ways. Sierra altered the dialog boxes so that instead of the usual three buttons – Restore, Restart, and Quit – you are given the option to go back to the point where you died. This saves you from saving the game before doing a thing that will lead Roger to his death, so there's no excuse not to die when you have the opportunity.

All the characters you meet have their own personalities, and some of them are willing to help you. My favorite characters from Space Quest III make a return. Elmo Pug has gone from controlling attacking robots to selling cheat sheets, while Fester Blatz has set up the same sort of business on Polysorbate LX. I also like the Endodroid, a take on Schwarzenegger.

The music is just great if you use a General MIDI device such as the Roland SC-88, and if you only have a Sound Blaster, you don't know what you're missing out on. There is some good voice acting in the game. Gary Owens returns as the narrator, delivering the same style as in Space Quest IV. Just examining everything on the screen and doing the impossible generates a hilarious response. Actors voice multiple characters, and they did a good job as well.

The Bad
Roger has made a few enemies during his adventures, and the games which introduced them gives an explanation as to why they want to take revenge on him. Vohaul, for example, plans to infest Roger's home planet with life-insurance salesman as Roger thwarted Vohaul's plans to use the Star Generator for his evil purposes. Having said that, Roger is introduced to Sharpei, his main antagonist he meets early in SQ6, but we have no idea why she is out for Roger's blood since the game provides no explanation why.

Some of the puzzles made no sense to me at all, with the worst one being the Datacorder puzzle, in which you need to flip switches and move things around to turn it into a homing beacon. Not only was it an annoyance, but it is also serves as copy protection which has no place in a CD-ROM game of that era.

Major game companies like Sierra did not foresee what would happen if people tried to run the game on a machine higher than those listed on the box. In this case, if you try to play the game on a Pentium machine, you will encounter timer-related issues like the endodroid hunter ignoring you and the crashes in sickbay. Grab yourself a 486 or use DOSBox if you encounter these.

The Bottom Line
SQ6 has it ups and downs, but the game is pure entertainment at its best. It boasts superb graphics and an excellent soundtrack. As mentioned in the introduction of this review, SQ6 is the final installment of the Space Quest series. Every SQ game is very good, and I have some fond memories of all the games. I enjoyed tip-toeing around Vohaul and listening to his life support in SQ2 (the Apple IIGS version); exploring each of the planets in SQ3, SQ4 and SQ5; the way the game encourages cheating in SQ5; and listening to the excellent soundtrack in SQ6. There was going to be a seventh game, which was going to be in 3-D and would feature characters from past adventures. However, by 1998 when this would be released, more and more game companies started to lose interest in the adventure genre, and the game was officially canceled.

The Good
This is a great spoof on sci fi! Sporting numerous major sci-fi movie/games/etc. sequences that will have you chuckling and laughing nonstop, making full use of a great and often wacky sense of humor.

The graphics are nicely made using plain 2D sprites which give the game a unique feeling and a great sense of humor (those aliens wouldn't be nearly as humorous if they were digitized or pre-rendered characters). And there's also a nice sense of exploration thrown into the game, as you don't get to die as often as before. Finally, the puzzles are usually on the good side of things, which is a must for these types of games.

The Bad
Unfortunately it's not that good a game. The fun is there, but the game at times feels like a Frankensteinian creature made of disjointed parts that don't really fit well together. Some of the sequences are fun (Polysorbate!) and others are merely ok (inside Santiago) but the problem is that these sequences seem to be stitched together using nothing but chicken wire and duct tape! You spend 3/4 of the game playing one game, and then somehow you are thrusted into a crappy "Fantastic Voyage" spoof and then a hasty ending that leaves you high and dry. Add to that the usual problems of graphic adventures (hunt the pixel!) a more cookie cutter and less edgy approach (family friendly Wilco!!) and a mostly simplistic design (they even got rid of most action-like sequences!) and you've got yourself a merely ok graphic adventure that tries but never quite manages to reach it's predecessors.

The Bottom Line
Very funny but ill-conceived game. Quite frankly SQV was much more entertaining, and this game simply fails to achieve the level of cohesiveness that made it's prequels not just funny spoofs, but good games too.

Still it's worth the shot for the sake of all the sci-fi references and in-jokes.

The Good
The humor. Period. This is almost certainly the funniest SQ game released, and almost every text box read by Gary Owens is hysterical. Their radio commercial jingle for "Soylent Clear" is an absolute classic. ("Less people too, like me and you, and less reprocessed waste!") There's nary a sci-fi movie (or game) made which isn't lampooned. And, unlike previous adventures, this is a rather lengthy game.

The Bad
The gameplay just didn't feel like Space Quest. The puzzles were way too convoluted for my taste, often with very little payoff. We're talking some on the level of Monkey Island 2, with you having to spend two days, solving a half-dozen puzzles (each with multiple steps), just to turn a lousy dial or something. (which, in turn, is just part of a bigger puzzle) The cartoony graphics sometimes worked really well, and sometimes fell flat.

The Bottom Line
If you can find it for cheap, it's worth picking up JUST for the humor. It's a shame this couldn't be made into a movie; it's far funnier than Spaceballs or any other parody.