Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon

The Good
Space Quest... part of the 'quest' series of games produced by Sierra, one of the most beloved and well-known video game companies of times past. When I was a kid whenever I heard 'Sierra' it simply meant a fantastic game, no matter what. They had that charm that just sucked you and in and all the cameos and in-jokes (still obvious to the player) made it look like the people who made it, from top to bottom, are just one fun-loving group who want to entertain as much as make a profit... and you knew them all, something not common today.

Space Quest 3 is sequel to everyone's favorite janitor after whatever mess he managed to clean up last time. It's actually a fairly interesting scenario that he's in, and most people don't even notice it. In the previous game, Roger Wilco (which in this game became his official name instead of the default if you didn't enter anything before) was forced to put himself into some kind of hibernation in order to survive since he had so little time left before the life support died. It was a nice ending, really, but it leaves you to wonder... just for HOW long has Roger Wilco been there? In the depths of space, easily decades, or even centuries. That's when the story comes in.

OK, now I'll really start discussing what's good about the game. First of all, the humor that's so common to a lot of Space Quest games is here and in full swing. Just the very first few screens probably reference over half a dozen sci-fi shows and movies of the past and they're very obvious about it. Some of the puzzles are actually quite interesting and do require some thinking and exploration, and not all of them are obvious, which is, in a way, a good thing and a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

The graphics and sound were a bit above average for a 1989, and a lot of the drum tunes were very well done in my opinion. Plus you can't help but laugh at the Microsoft and McDonald jokes found there, and let's not even get started on the 'tourist' spots parodied!

The Bad
All righty then, the bad. As much as I cherish every single Sierra game ever made (I own as many of them as I can, and I just wish I could get more memorabilia), I would have to criticize this game since it does have some short comings. Though in a way they could actually be excused if you saw it from a different angle.

First of all, the game itself is one of the shortest Sierra games I've ever played, and there's not much in way of risk if you know exactly what to do and when... the same cannot be said of most other adventure games. Also there are very few 'extra' points or alternate solutions in the game. This is very important because, as a sort of tradition, Sierra games frequently had a few dozen points that could be obtained by doing things that aren't obvious or finding stuff that most people overlook. In this game, there is only one real situation like that, with another one having two different solutions (one giving more points), but that's it. The game is very straight forward in that regard and the only really difficult part is just in the beginning before you take off in the Aluminum Mallard (an obvious play on 'Millennium Falcon'), the game becomes very simple after that, actually.

And it's simplicity was obvious in the fact that it was the FIRST sierra game me and my brother ever finished without having to look for a walkthrough (and that was in the pre-Internet, not an easy thing to pull off). The only thing that really surprised us was finding the message at the end of the Astro Chicken game... I can still remember my brother's expression and gasp when we saw that coming. But other than that, there's not much challenge in it.

Some parts of the game are completely illogical and glaringly underdone. For example, one vital part of the game involved you having to disable the force field generator. Yet you do this by just grabbing a grenade from a group of surveyors (why'd they need it to begin with?) after they leave the planet with all their equipment just lying there... you don't even do anything, just wait and they're gone! Then you waltz into the compound, climb a ladder that seems to serve no purpose other than getting you into a strategically placed position to destroy the whole generator with just one grenade! Wow, that was really weak.

I love Sierra games a lot and saying stuff like that is not easy for me to do. But in all other Space Quest games that involved sneaking around (i.e. all of them), they had sequences that were far more believable and better done than that. There was really no excuse for them to make something like this. Adding guards and alternate routes and puzzles along the way would have made the game a lot better.

Now that I'm done with the major problems, I want to mention a presumably major problem that I don't believe is worthy of much criticism... the lack of plot. I know that most people critiqued the game for its lack of plot, but I believable it can and should be forgiven. For one thing, the game takes place in an indeterminate period of time after Roger went into hibernation, and it's never given directly, but we could say it's a LLOOONNNGGG time when you hear the joke given by terminator robot. Seriously, in order for the price of a cheap toy to have interest that rose to that kind of money must take centuries at the very least. At that point in time, Roger Wilco had no home, no job, and (probably) no surviving friends or relatives... with the exception of the terminator and his employer. This leaves Wilco to have a reforge everything anew. The only real problem with this is that Wilco had no actual motivation to want to rescue the 2 guys from Andromeda to begin with, and they were only two guys, not a whole planet to save or anything. If they'd have included just a touch more plot about him tangling with scumsoft before all that to give him that motivation, it would have been a lot better.

The Bottom Line
This is a Sierra game! It's great, it's engaging, the main character is the type of guy that you will NEVER forget no matter how hard you try, and it has a staying power beyond words. I played and finished this game at age 8 and I never forgot how to do it. That's what it is. ;)

The Good
This game was the first computer game I ever played. It came out in 1988, but I didn't play it until about 1990, when I was 9. Its mix of space adventure and incredibly funny humor immediately appealed to me, and for years the Space Quest series was my favorite series of computer games. In this game you pick up the story of Roger Wilco where he left off at the end of the second game, drifting through space in an escape pod. Roger gets the first ship that is completely his in this game, which gives him the ability to planet-hop at will, and you get to zip from place to place at will for most of the game (a neat kind of perk for a kid whose bedtime was still 9 PM). It has a rich plot compared to the first two games, as well as improved graphics. When I finally finished it, I just sat in front of the screen with a feeling of accomplishment, and immediately felt like playing the next one. A true pinnacle of early adventure gaming.

The Bad
Not many bad things, in my opinion. It was a challenging game, which would have been good, but my version of the game had a little glitch that didn't let me save the game. Whenever I died, I had to start at the beginning again. This allowed me to get REALLY good at navigating around the trash freighter at the beginning of the game, and increased the feeling of joy when I finally finished it. The arcade-like sequence at the end when you have to destroy Elmo's Scumsoft fighters to get away was kind of repetitive, and seemed really hard to me. Could have done without it, but what are you gonna do? The Astrochicken game at Monolith Burger was also kind of monotonous, but was too hilarious to complain much about.

The Bottom Line
If you don't mind the not-that-great graphics (by today's standards), and have an interest in classic text-parser adventure gaming, go to E-bay and pick a copy of this up for a couple bucks. You have to start it from a DOS prompt, but it still works on today's computers. In my opinion, this kind of adventure gaming went out with the text window. I can't describe it (I don't know if anybody can), but there's a certain something about these kinds of games that I absolutely love. Sierra's different "Quest" games (Space, King's, Police) were about all the games I played for a few years, and they kind of drifted away once spoken voiceovers on CD came in. So while you're enjoying today's adventure games, look back at these incredibly fun pioneers of the genre.

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. ****