Space Quest V: The Next Mutation

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.