Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

The Good
The overall plot was a riot. What happens if a game character is bounced around within his own gaming universe? ("With a glance at the status bar, you notice you're now in Space Quest Twelve") It also has some of the funnier (and sicker) gags of the series, especially if you're inclined to run around using the "tongue" icon on everything you see. Gary Owen's narration (on the CD-ROM) is spot-on perfect. The VGA graphics were very oddly stylizing, as though they couldn't decide if they wanted to be realistic or cartoony, so they tried both at once.

The Bad
The rest of the voice acting was pretty painful, as Sierra was still pulling programmers out of their cubicles to do the voices at this point. It's too short, and while a couple of the puzzles are nasty, overall it's a bit on the easy side. (although better than some of the other icon-based games they wrote) For modern gamers, good luck getting it to work - the timing of many of the bad guys is based on the system clock. In the opening scene, a kills-you-on-sight robot, which is only supposed to show up every 30 seconds to a minute, appears every four seconds on my 300 mhz machine. While it's possible to play it through, that's only if you know ahead of time exactly what to do. First time playing is probably impossible on a fast machine.

The Bottom Line
If you can disable your processor's internal cache (definately a "don't try this at home" stunt) or pull some other trick to slow down your machine, it's great fun to play, and one of the better entries in the SQ series.