Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel

The Good
Back in the Eighties, Sierra was on a role with many of their high-profile adventure games becoming successful. In 1987, they hired Jim Walls, a retired California patrol officer who was asked to create a new game based on everyday police life. Hence, it wasn't going to be like any other game that Sierra released, where everything in the game is make believe. Furthermore, the game was used by real police officers as a way to improve their skills.

In this game, you play Officer Sonny Bonds, a cop of the Lytton Police Department who starts his day doing normal police work. Later, he gets promoted to Detective and does bigger things like breaking up a major drug ring and stopping someone nicknamed "The Death Angel". It is nice to play a police officer for once, as you are given an insight of how things operate; and although the cop himself and the city is fictitious, how you go about doing things is not. The game provides plenty of fun and lots of adventuring as you spend your time issuing tickets, arresting criminals, and dealing with biker scum, among other things.

While patrolling the streets, you get to meet a variety of characters. Some characters are good and may help you get through the game, while some are dangerous. Only a few of them have ridiculous names like Morris Fudley, Helen Hots, Hoochie Coochie Hannah, Whipplestick, and Fuddrucker. For a game that focuses on the real world, you would think Sierra made up real names for these characters. Helen Hots, the girl you pull over, lives up to her name. You can get a close-up view of her, and you can see the top of her blouse is unbuttoned. This is a nod to Leisure Suit Larry.

There are quite a few locations you need to drive to. As soon as you start the engine, you are presented with a map that occupies more than one screen. Even under the low resolution Sierra's old engine was capable of, the map is well laid out and each section of it still looks good. Each location you visit is beautifully drawn, and I liked exploring each one.

The game encourages you to perform certain tasks such as inspecting your squad car to make sure there are no flat tires, obeying normal road rules, and locking your gun up before you enter the jail. The game ends if you don't do these things. Most of the reviews I read on here criticize these, but that's real life. If there is a red light blocking my way, I managed to bypass it by leaving the screen then coming back. Simple as that.

You can die in this game, in each situation you are faced with. Death is mainly caused by doing something foolish. Some of the actions you can perform are quite amusing, and so far I have managed to remove my clothes any time during the game, walk out of the locker room wearing nothing but a towel, and call up the girl I just pulled over.

The sound is PC speaker only, which means that you will only hear one voice for the music. That is what sound was like back then, at a time before soundcards were invented. If you have a Tandy computer, the music and sound effects are much better as they have three voices instead of one.

The Bad
I didn't have a problem with the parser in other Sierra adventures, but I found the parser used in Police Quest very strict. Many times did I try to execute an action, only to have the game respond with "How can you do that?" or "You can't do that -- at least, not now". There are no alternate command. You need to type in a specific command to perform the action you want.

Sierra went through a time where they just had to put a poker game here and there, and the player is forced to play them to progress through the game. Police Quest is no different, and in this case, it's a poker game that happens near the very end of the game. I would rather skip and lose points for doing so, which is what you can do in the SCI remake of the game.

The Bottom Line
As I said before, playing Police Quest showed me the day to day operations of a police officer. You spent half of the game patrolling the streets, arresting anyone breaking the law and having a coffee break with one of your colleagues, but eventually you get promoted to Detective where you eventually nab "The Death Angel". I would play this game again because I found situations and other bits about the game interesting. The graphics and sound are okay, but they are better if you happen to have a Tandy computer. The only real turn-off is the poker game that you are forced to play near the end of the game.

The Good
As the game that made me interested in law enforcement, and eventally led me to a career in the field, this game holds a very special place for me. Instead of the normal images of cops (shooting anything that moves and always getting the bad guys), this game presents a more realistic image of the job. The attention to actual police procedure, while not perfect down to the details, is very accure and to my knowledge, the most accure to be presented in a computer game to date. Beginning as a patrol officer, making traffic stops and arresting drunks, you slowly work through small leads to start to gain a picture of what is really going on in the town you work in. A good deal of the first part of the game is actually spent driving a car around the city. And a lot of the time, nothing happens. This is actually real. There is not a blazing gun battle every two minutes and if you are not careful you might miss that drunk on the road or that woman who ran the red light.

The latter part of the game gets a little more fantastic, but is still believable. While adding in elements of what I call "Hollywood" cop movies, you are selected for an undercover job and have to penetrate the underworld of a criminal. This usually is not how police work is done, at least in my experience, but it still presents this in a beleivable manner in which you still have to do things "by the book".

The Bad
The dounut shop. For God's sake, we get a bad enough reputation for this as it is. Give me a break.

The Bottom Line
Anyone who ever wanted to just get a small glimpse of what being a police officer is like should check this game out. Written by a former police officer, Jim Walls, this game shows some things that have never been touched on before or since. How often do you see cops just driving around looking for something, praying that something will happen before they die of boredom? While it is still a computer game, I would recommend someone check this out before they watch "Cops". In addition to that, this is one of the Sierra classic adventure games and shows the reason that Sierra became a great game company.

The Good
Regardless of the game, I like the idea of a text adventure about police work. So you're "fighting evil" like in any other game, but in a more realistic, procedural way. Doing all the preparations, considering safety etc. But I think the game might have been boring if Sonny Bonds hadn't been a bit like Roger Wilco. Sonny is supposed to be a 15 year veteran, but because the average player isn't, Sonny is treated more like a rookie, mocked and told off for making mistakes. Also, there's some light mockery of the police in general, good for those who have run-ins with the cops and I guess, acknowledging that sometimes the law sucks and deserves a bit of mockery. Undoubtedly, any mockery is balanced with deadly seriousness. The encounter with gunman "Marvin Hoffman" was probably the height of the tension in the game, you had to follow step-by-step procedure or be shot dead.

The Bad
The more I played the game, the more I started to feel that, as faithful to police work and police life it might be, it's a bit too black and white when it comes to cops and robbers. There's a bit of a "time to clean the filth from the streets" attitude. As the only villain in the game of any real depth, I think Jason Taselli/Marvin Hoffman is pretty respectable, he doesn't come quietly. One of the biggest problems with the game is Jessie "The Death Angel" Bains. As far as I'm concerned Taselli/Hoffman is the real death angel. Bains is only introduced late in the game as a friend of Taselli's and there's nothing to suggest he's bigger and badder than Taselli.

The Bottom Line
Well I still think it's one of the best text adventures, regardless of what one thinks of the cops. Maybe Space Quest 1 is a little better, because you're playing a very average fellow who is somehow given the chance to become the savior of his race.