Space Quest V: The Next Mutation

aka: Roger Beamish, SQ5, Space Quest 5: Die nächste Mutation, Space Quest 5: La Mutation Suivante, Space Quest 5: La Siguiente Mutación
Moby ID: 144

Description official descriptions

After travelling back and forth through time in the previous game, Roger Wilco is back in the Starfleet Academy, serving as both a cadet and a janitor. Cheating his way through the Starfleet Aptitude Test, Roger is finally given the rank of captain, his own ship (a garbage scow) and a mission: to explore strange new worlds (which no man in his right mind would explore), to seek out new life and new civilizations (which grew out of the massive amounts of trash Roger will collect on his way), to boldly go where no man has gone before. Step by step Roger will have to unveil a galaxy-wide biohazardous material dumping scheme, solve the mystery of the disappearance of a fellow Starfleet captain and his ship, and confront an agent of an old nemesis.

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation is an adventure game in the Space Quest series. Like its brethren, it is characterized by humorous writing and situations, as well as plenty of opportunities for the hero to die horribly. The game is entirely mouse-controlled: the player interacts with the world by clicking on locations, people and objects on the screen, cycling between various actions (walking, looking, touching or taking, talking, etc.), by clicking the right mouse button or using the icon bar. The latter also contains icons that allow the player to access Roger's inventory, quit the game or change the settings.

Commands for smelling and tasting have been removed, but a special icon for giving orders has been added. It can be used on any object or character in the game, but its actual purpose is to issue specific commands to the crew members: Roger's garbage scow, the Eureka, has a crew over which he presides. The game is plot-driven and contains cutscenes done in a comic book-like style. Plot development is linear, but each planet the protagonist visits usually consists of several screens and contains its own objectives and puzzles. There are also hazardous situations that may occur on the spaceship itself and must be dealt with.

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Credits (DOS version)

56 People (54 developers, 2 thanks) · View all

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Average score: 83% (based on 16 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 85 ratings with 6 reviews)

Janitorial romance

The Good
Space Quest V occupies a somewhat unique position within its series. One of the two famed "guys from Andromeda", Mark Crowe, collaborated with his new colleagues at Dynamix to create the only adventure in any of Sierra's major series not to be developed in-house. The result is a rather noticeable change of tone and pace, which has its ups and downs, with the former outweighing the latter in my opinion.

You can feel pretty clearly after a few playing sessions that this game is considerably less chaotic than its predecessors. Sierra's games generally tend to be erratic, moving from open exploration to tensely designed, confined areas; they are moody, rich in contrasts, and unpredictable. Space Quest V, on the other hand, is well-proportioned, well-structured, comfortably flowing forward at its own pace. There are less surprises in the game, but also less uneven occurrences and unpleasantly drastic changes.

That is not to say that Space Quest V has boring and predictable gameplay. On the contrary, it is actually richer and more involving than in the previous entries. The game doesn't have expansive non-linear areas, but every planet you visit presents several screens dedicated to some exploration and diverse activities. Some of the best setpieces include outsmarting a fearsome female terminator relentlessly chasing you through the mountain paths of a sunny planet, and turning into a fly in order to infiltrate a lab concealing important evidence.

In a not-so-subtly implied Star Trek parody, Roger Wilco, the protagonist of the series, commandeers an extravagant garbage-collecting spaceship, complete with a crew, navigation screen with scientific mumbo-jumbo, rooms with different functions, etc. The ship will often get in trouble, and you'll have to use your resources and wits to solve various situations - such as bringing a crew member who is lost in space back onto the ship. Traveling to distant planets on your own accord (or at least within the frames of an overarching assignment) rather than being simply transported there for not very apparent reasons is what distinguishes this game's structure most from its predecessors.

In fact, it is safe to say that Space Quest V is the only installment in the series with a clearly outlined, logically developing plot. Participating in a cohesive narrative tying together the planetary and ship-bound setpieces creates a sense of belonging and also contributes to the growing tension, making you eager to press forward and find out how the whole thing ends. The game, therefore, feels considerably warmer than its rather emotionally detached predecessors, which were mostly focusing on raw adventuring and amusing situations. You don't get as many funny death scenes, but instead there are real characters you can care for. Not to mention that there is even a love story in this game, done in a somewhat comical, but nevertheless endearing and even heart-warming fashion.

The Bad
I can see why some fans of the series have problem with the fifth installment. No matter how good the game is, it does lack a certain intangible spirit permeating the earlier entries. It is a more focused and coherent comedy - but perhaps that's exactly the problem. Previous Space Quests were silly and nonsensical; but there was more of that wild, abundant energy that Sierra injected into their adventures. Even flaws such as cheap dead ends, disproportional segments, etc. somehow contributed to the charm. Space Quest V is by far more pleasant, and you can feel that sometimes it doesn't dare to be irreverent and wacky enough. Somehow I felt that the game tried too hard to stay within a certain style, to be an "accurate" Star Trek parody rather than just an assortment of bad jokes. It's good that the game tried to have its own style, but sometimes I missed the nonchalant, unrestricted fun of the previous titles.

It did, however, remain faithful to Sierra's notorious programming issues. The crewman-rescuing sequence quickly became unplayable on faster computers. Later all sorts of workarounds (slowdown software, disabling internal cache, etc.) were found, but imagine the pain this inflicted on the poor players whose computer was just too powerful, causing the crewman to shake in convulsions and die before the rescue crew could pull him out of that predicament. And the copy protection is, as always, annoying. You have to input coordinates every time you travel to another planet.

The Bottom Line
Is it the worst or the best Space Quest? Depends on how you look at it. Fans seem to be very divided over this particular installment because of priority differences. If witty one-liners and hilarious situations are what you expect most from these games, then this fifth iteration will probably moderately disappoint you. But if you value balanced gameplay and prefer softer, warmer comedy writing with real characters and a plot you could actually care for, Space Quest V would be just the right thing for you.

Personally, I find myself somewhere in the middle; but I have a feeling that, as I grow older, I get more and more inclined towards games like Space Quest V, and will some day probably consider it my favorite in the series.

DOS · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2014

The Two Guys from Andromeda are no more

The Good
Sierra employees Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy collaborated together to bring us the first four Space Quest games, providing us with many hours of laughs and entertainment. However, this all came to an end after the release of The Time Rippers. Dynamix, Sierra's sister company, agreed to help them with Sierra's workload, taking over a few projects that were in the pipeline. One of these projects was The Next Mutation. Crowe volunteered to relocate to their headquarters in Eugene, Oregon where he would work under a different team. It was a great opportunity for Dynamix to become familiar with a different interface while maintaining the same charm as the previous instalments. The Two Guys would never work on a Space Quest game together again.

After cheating his way through a test, Roger Wilco finds himself commandeered, thing the SCS Eureka. What starts off as simple missions to collect waste scattered across the galaxy turns out (the Eureka is a garbage scow) turns into a mission to save the universe from a substance that turns normal people into hideous beasts called “Pukoids”. Roger and his crew must find the source of the mutation, and stop it from spreading. In between, Roger himself must deal with a killer androidess who's been sent to finish Arnoid's job, fix problems that soon plague the Eureka, and prevent his future wife from being turned into a Pukoid.

A huge amount of detail has been put into the front cover, and in my opinion, it looks much better than the covers for previous Space Quest instalments. Inside, there are either six 3.5” or 5.25” floppy disks or a CD-ROM (if your copy is included in a Space Quest collection). Each copy of the game comes complete with the Galactic Inquirer, and this serves as a form of copy protection for the game. The Inquirer also serves as interesting reading material. I enjoyed reading the story about the two-headed woman who gave birth to a baby with only one head, which resembles no other than Ken Williams.

The engine for The Next Mutation has been upgraded since the last game, so the graphics have improved a bit, and are designed in such a way that they have a comic book feel to them. This is coupled with the speech bubbles with the dialogue inside them, all in uppercase. Some of the hand-painted backgrounds look fantastic as well. Klorox II is impressive; it is a desert planet that has a couple of dwellings, so there is orange sand everywhere you go. Its sky consists of orange moons that blend in with the different shades of blue. (Trivia: Each of the moons are named after The Three Stooges). Also, I like the detail that was put into the Eureka, and it is up there with the space vessel from Star Trek.

The icon interface in the game has been simplified, and the developers decided to drop the smell and taste icons. In their place is the normal talk icon and a command icon (which you will use once you get on board the Eureka). What's great about the talk icon is that more often than not, Roger's opening text is multiple-choice; and there are at least three responses to choose from. The Command icon is useful for ordering your two loyal crew members around.

Sound-wise, the music is excellent, especially if you play the game with a General Midi device. The music is intense in the most situations. The sounds are what you can expect from space comedies, and I can also say that the sound guys ripped sounds from classic television series. Case in point: you can hear Homer Simpson's “D'oh” every time Roger teleports himself up to the Eureka, but something went wrong in the process.

As far as the humor is concerned, well, in my opinion, it is right up there with the previous games in the series. More often than not, Roger will find himself in embarrassing situations. I like the way he releases these Space Monkeys that get out of control at the Space Bar, and how he goes around the Genetix dome as a fly, while his body is scavenging around in the dumpster. Of course, there are some amusing ways to die, and you see some good animations in these death screens.

Each of the Space Quest games (bar the second one) feature mini-games that you can play, whether they were optional or not. In this case, you can play Battle Cruiser, a futuristic version of the famous game where you have to plant your ships across three sectors and you have the option of using probes. You can skip playing the game if you are not a fan, but it's worth playing more than once if you are.

The Bad
Sierra in the early Nineties didn't think about the future when would be introduced to today's “beasts of a PC”. As a result, most of their early games are plagued with timer-related issues that make it impossible to run the game perfectly on modern PCs. Sadly, The Next Mutation is a victim of this. There's this one part in the game where the Eureka receives some damage to the hull, and Cliffy the engineer volunteers to go outside and repair it. Things go wrong and you must use a emergency pod to rescue him. The pod seems almost impossible to control on a PC greater than a Pentium, and you may need to get a vintage PC with a 386 processor built in to it.

The Bottom Line
The fifth instalment in the SQ series may have been created by only One Guy from Andromeda, but it still maintains the same quality of the previous games. The graphics have improved a bit, and the game closely resembles a comic book sometimes. The interface is simplified, and the smell and taste icons are dropped. You can't get those humorous text messages due to their absence, but the game is just as humorous without them.

The development of The Next Mutation is quite interesting. I won't go much into it, but it reminds me of the development for The Adventures of Willy Beamish with the way they handled storyboards and everything in between. Dynamix had plans to add a CD-ROM version and support for multiple languages, but neither came to fruition due to the financial difficulties they were having.

DOS · by Katakis | ă‚«ă‚żă‚­ă‚ą (43092) · 2016

too short and too few puzzles.. finished it in probably two hours

The Good
There were some funny parody bits, and I liked the back-story (referring back to #2)

The Bad
The puzzles were too easy, and obvious. You knew exactly what to do in practically every scene because you had maybe 3 objects in your possession that could actually do anything. And the hard puzzles weren't really puzzles, they were just stupid trial and error things. The tunnels is similar to the catacombs in King's Quest 5 and 6 which were stupid and serve no purpose except to make the game longer. And that panel with the cloaking device? What was that? I can't even consider that a puzzle.

The Bottom Line
It's basically like half a game, a demo of a real Space Quest game. I, II, III, and IV were all wittier, longer, and more fun to play. I'd rather play Astro Chicken or Mrs. Astro Chicken or even that game where you duke it out in 3 a million times more than the stupid Battleship game they had in this one. There is basically no replay value here, although most adventure games don't have any.

DOS · by bertrandom (3) · 2001

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Trivia

Space Quest 5 is the second Sierra adventure game to feature product placement by the US-American telephone company Sprint. The first game was Leisure Suit Larry 5. Instead of text messages like in Larry 5, this time Sprint paid for graphic advertisement. The Sprint logo would end any communication transmissions, as well as appear on a billboard in the Space bar. See the screenshot section for examples.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Andy Roark.

Additional contributors: Tomer Gabel, -Chris, Benoit Lambert, Jeanne, Jayson Firestorm, Pseudo_Intellectual, General Error, 6â…ž of Nine.

Game added May 29, 1999. Last modified January 20, 2024.