Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon

The Good
Well, where do I start; there are so many good things with this one…

After the somewhat lacklustre Space Quest II, things not only bounced back with SQ3, but also seemed to find a new lease of life along the way. Space Quest 3 is much closer to the original that the comparatively static SQ2, returning to having lots of different planets to visit, and lots of curious characters to meet on them – and of course, lots of ridiculous situations to get into.

Although Roger Wilco's name was given in the literature for the first two games, you could enter your own name, and the computer referred to the hero as "you"; this is the first one where you actually PLAY Roger Wilco (did that make sense? I hope so). And with it, the humour really starts to grow and find it’s footing, and the star of the series gains a ton load more character.

Plot-wise things aren’t quite as driven as the first two instalments, with the real villain not really becoming apparent until quite late on in the game, but in this case it really doesn’t matter, as there are enough puzzles and situations to keep you more than occupied as things slowly uncover themselves.

The game smoothly picks up directly from where Space Quest 2 left off (well, give or take a few light years where Roger was in suspended animation, but anyway…)
A great touch is that the several direct tie-ins from that game. A terminator is after you for not paying for a whistle you obtained in that game, and the illuminous gem found and used in that game plays a part in this one too (though quite what happened to the rest of your inventory from that game is anyone’s guess!)

The text interface is much improved and more intelligent. It’s actually the last SQ game to use text interface – I’m one of the group who believes a great chunk of the interactive appeal was lost when they passed it up for a totally point-and-click driven interface.

Considering the year, the graphics in this one are VERY impressive. Everything it a LOT sharper and more detailed than in the first two. Roger inparticular is a lot better – asides from the standard walk animation, there’s also a number of other animations (climbing in / out, tumbling over, etc) that are used at various points, and even more impressive is that when Roger walks into a dark area on a screen, the character falls into shade. Okay, so the shade falls suddenly, not like the multi-shaded graphics of nowadays, but considering things were still in EGA, it’s impressive to say the least.

And sound – supported sound cards made their entrance into the series with this one. Originally when I played this game many years ago, I only had it on the standard PC speaker, but when re-playing the game recently, I heard it through the speaker for the first time, and (again, considering the age) it was very impressive (and am I overusing “impressive” in this review?!).

To put it simply, this is one of the very best (verging on <u>THE</u> best) in the entire Space Quest series.

**The Bad**
In the very early stages of the game is quite probably the most ridiculous, over-the-top death in any of the Space Quest games. Coming to a conspicuous piece of scrap metal lying besides a scrap ship, you only have to try and pick it up, to cut yourself open and bleed to death! (LucasArts seemed to pick up on this and indirectly criticise it in some of the literature for their own games).

The ending was met with some criticism from many fans, and I’m not really sure where I stand on it. In one way its quite a intriguing idea trying to blend reality (the writers) with this actual game; but the final scene (I wont spoil it for anyone who hasn’t got that far) doesn’t really work, and ironically is actually one of the few times in the entire series that it actually feels like you’re playing a game (if you see what I mean!)

In a couple of places of the game, limitations become apparent. For example, on one planet, Phleebhut, if you walk too far in one direction, you get eaten by a giant snake; if you walk too far in the other, you get suddenly struck dead by a bolt of lighting! Well, no-one can accuse them of not being creative at least.

Oh, one other thing. Astro Chicken. Grrr. An irritating, awkward-to-play arcade game in the Monolith Burgers restaurant, that is infuriating verging on boring to play, but has to be completed in order to get a secret code from the machine (in fact, I think it’s possible to finish without beating the Astro Chicken game, but you don’t get full points).

The first stage of the game, set in the intergalactic garbage is great (and should be under the “good” section), and in fact may quite possibly be my favourite section in any Space Quest game I’ve played. But it would have been kewl if they had expanded it even more, and made it bigger. Damn, a whole game on it’s own could have been set inside that place.

But that’s about it on the bad side. Normally I’ll pick holes in anything, but there truly wasn’t much I didn’t like about this one.

**The Bottom Line**
Classic Sierra, Space Quest at it’s very best. One of the best in the entire series (in my opinion, I’d say it about level pegs with SQ4 in as the overall best, as they both have their own strong-points). Although SQ1 is the logical place to start, SQ3 is a good game to start with if you’re new to the series. With – for the time – cutting edge graphics and sound, with some of the series’ strongest humour and ideas, this is one of the very best; one of the finest examples of the heyday of classic Sierra games. If only they made them like this nowadays.

The Good
Now I'm not going to spend much time writing a review for this game. Which took 4 hours to finish. You know, like I wouldn't want to spend more time writing the review than actually PLAYING THE GAME?!?

It's fun. OK, I admit it. The graphics are good-looking, really, no kidding. You'll even cast a shadow occasionally. Everything's quite colorful, there's a lovely space burger bar to visit, a cool cheesy space-ship, an amazing incredible fantastic load of junk (it's not really that amazing but you'll spend half the game in it, so there must be something special about it, right?), a hot volcano lava planet, a couple of green planets. Empty black space. Diversity. I liked the new menu style, and the text-box style - it immediately looks a lot more professional and thought-out than in the previous game. I even got to use the mouse to point where I want to go and press some buttons! If only game designers today would think of stuff like that.

The sub-games were fun, the best part for me. Astro-chicken, message ring decoding, battlebot fighting game, the space ship simulation. It was actually very cool to have your own ship. It was also cool that you weren't stuck in the same viewing style the whole time - at times it switched to a bigger scale, another time it switched to pseudo-3d as you're walking through a circling hallway, and the spaceship has its own big screen with just your huge static head indicating your presence. It's things like that make you feel appreciated and loved.

The non-existent plot aside, the writing and scenes were good - at one point you even have to play intergalactic James Bond and infiltrate and blow up a big generator, previously viewing it in a telescope left there by some men who were conducting experiments there and can be seen leaving in their own spaceship (see? it's actually explained why a bunch of objects are there!). The initial junk-yard exercise is also very well thought out, with plausible objects and working mechanisms and a quaint plausible atmosphere, with lots of cool broken thingamajigs lying around to be explored. And one of the greener planets has a neat statue of a huge monster in it, and you can actually get inside and ride a big lift up its leg or something.

As for the humor, I thought that the dying messages weren't quite as funny as in the last game, and I kinda generally don't seem to remember all that huge amount of humor that the other reviewers here have noted (and I just finished it an hour ago so I hardly could've forgotten it). The accountants scene at the end is hilarious and very sarcastic, and the terminator that goes after you because of an unpaid bill from the previous game is amusing, and the Astro-chicken is funny of course but aside from that there weren't all that many jokes there. But it was generally tasteful and well-written (the ending aside), and actually I think that the sort of a mild humorous sheen over it all might've very well influenced the Monkey Island series - for example, the way you shove a ladder in your pants. And the way your character comes across as a big fat dope. (Btw, it's probably the Space Quest series that were parodied in Monkey Island 1 the time you fell off the cliff and "died".) And check out the space burger bar - doesn't that visually remind somewhat of Sam and Max Hit the road? Or maybe I'm just imagining things.

The Bad
Ok, the game is just too short. It's also very badly paced (the seemingly "introductory" scene in the dump in fact takes up about half of the game) and - look people, it HAS NO PLOT! This is just the pits - for most of the game you have no idea whatsoever what you are supposed to be doing, and then it turns out that you must save the game's two designers from the clutches of "ScumSoft" and deliver them back to the Earth so that they can make more Space Quest games for Sierra.

As if that wasn't enough, they managed to make the game both linear and unlinear at the same time, incorporating the worst of each approach with admirable grace and stupidity: for most of the game you're free to do whatever you choose with no purpose being thereby provided, but the key location of the game only becomes available when you succesfully beat the Astro-chicken game and a coded message suddenly appears on the screen. The "plot" thus becomes apparent to you, the fact notwithstanding that you most probably have already blown up the huge generator that imprisons the hapless game designers for no other good reason than that it was standing there and you're supposed to "interact" with things in adventure games. Like Max would say, "we just like blowing up huge force field generators".

As for the length issue - I admit that I took the occasional peak in the walkthrough and didn't spend the obligatory 2 weeks trying to figure out which burger bar menu item has the decoder ring in it or that you - thank god for point-and-click interfaces - have to STAND UP before JUMPing to safety whilst being gently nudged into a shredding machine. But - brilliant mind-benders like this just can't compensate for the fact that most of the locations here have at best 2 or 3 things you can interact with (allowing for the fact that interaction with at least one of these will result in the death of your character), and mostly don't have even that. The objects you can have in your inventory probably total under a dozen, and there are virtually no "use this with that" puzzles which IMO is one of the basic ingredients of any adventure game worthy of the name. All the objects in this game have only the most obvious of uses, and unless you count "using invisibility belt when you have to pass a bunch of guards" a challenge, then you're probably bound to start wondering at some point as to whether this isn't some sort of a predecessor to the interactive movie, mini-games and all.

The Bottom Line
A definite improvement over the previous games in terms of graphics and production values (there is even appropriate midi mood music for most of the scenes), but the game still has obvious trouble taking itself seriously (and even humorous games should do that, as Monkey Island proved), and, while some of the seperate locations are involving and very nicely done, as a whole the game doesn't even begin to make any sense. Still, its commitment to being (mildly) humorous and providing various unusual and eye-catching locations was probably quite influential, and can be appreciated even in this day and age.

The Good
the Two Guys from Andromeda has brought us a fine addition to the ever-popular Space Quest series. In Space Quest 2, Roger Wilco entered the asteroid of his arch nemesis, Vohaul, and thwarted his plans to infest his home planet, Xenon, with genetically-engineered life insurance salesman, and in the process, shut down Vohaul's nervous system. He then escaped by a pod and slumbered in its sleep chamber. Space Quest 3: The Pirates of Pestulon picks up right where the previous adventure left off. While the pod was cruising driftlessly through space, another pod controlled by robots beams up Roger's pod, and the robot pod crash-lands in a nearby junk freighter. Roger's first mission is to find a ship so that he can escape this pile of junk.

But that's only half the plot. You see, Roger later discovers a hidden message inside a video game that the two guys themselves have landed themselves in trouble by ScumSoft, the evil pirate software company whose headquarters are on the planet Pestulon, hence the game's subtitle, but only if he wins the game. Roger must make a dash for Pestulon and rescue the two guys from ScumSoft, but to do this, Roger must play a series of mini-games at several stops. More on these shortly.

Like Leisure Suit Larry 2, King's Quest IV, and Police Quest II, SQ3 was designed using Sierra's old SCI0 engine, where the player must use the arrow keys to control Roger around and type commands into a text box in order to perform actions like picking up an object and talking to someone. A menu provides the ability to get help; save, restore, and restart games, or quit SQ3. Like Sierra's older games, there is the so-called "boss" key, which is an option inside the game that you can select when your boss is in the same room as you, and allows the game to behave like an application until you press another key. Sadly, in this game, pressing the "boss" key will tell you that it won't function.

Unlike the previous SQ's, there are quite a few planets to explore. This includes Phleebhut, a planet where he meets a terminator sent by the Gippazoid Novelty Co. to assassinate him for failing to pay for the Labion Mating Whistle back in SQ2, and is the planet where he exchanges his glowing gem for three items at the World-O-Wonders. Then it's off to Ortega where he discovers Pestulon and blows up the force field surrounding it, as well as Ortega.

As I said earlier, to complete his mission, travel around the SQ universe for the planet that holds the two guys, Roger must play a series of mini-games and win, and the first game he must play is Astro Chicken, where the object is to guide a chicken to safety as you direct it to land on its pad and nowhere else (without exhausting its feed), or else the chicken blows up and loses one of its lives. Then when Roger manages to rescue the two guys at ScumSoft, he gets treated to a game where the object is to beat the ScumSoft employer in a robot suit. If that wasn't enough, he has to play Star Wars with ScumSoft's ships in the game's finale.

The graphics are highly detailed than those in SQ1 (the AGI version) and SQ2, meaning that they were done in 16-color EGA, and the game has support for various sound cards such as the Adlib and the Roland MT32/LAPC1. I heard that SQ3 sounds good if you have the Roland. I just brought a soundcard that emulates the MT32, so when I ran SQ3 with MT32 enabled, it sounds great.

The Bad
I didn't really like Astro Chicken, partly because it wastes more of your time trying to win just to get further through the game, when you can spend that time exploring the rest of the SQ3 universe.

The Bottom Line
SQ3 is much better than the previous Space Quest's because of its colorful graphics and excellent sounds. Not to be missed. ****