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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Daryl
F. Gates / Tammy Dargan |
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Part of series: |
Police
Quest |
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Release: |
November 1993 |
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Main credits: |
Lead programmer: Doug Oldfield Cinematography: Rod Fung Music: Neal Grandstaff |
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Useful links: |
Playthrough:
Complete
Playlist Parts 1-9 (577 mins.) |
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Basic Overview
My own memories of my initial acquaintance with the
game are somewhat blurry; I must have played a pirated copy and I do not even
remember if it was the CD version from 1996, with a full voice recording
soundtrack, or the original floppy disk version from 1993. What I do remember is an initial feeling of
disappointment. While Police Quest
had never been my personal favorite of Sierra’s franchises — has it ever been
for anybody, except possibly a bunch of retired officers? — I did get heavily
invested in the first three games, and, like everybody else, was expecting a
return into the world of Sonny Bonds and his native City of Lytton, as
designed by Jim Walls and his team. Instead, the game told me it was designed by some
guy named Daryl F. Gates — what
could a young Russian student in pre-Internet days know about this name? —
and went on right ahead to stun me with news that (a) all the action would
take place in some grimy slums in downtown L.A.; (b) the protagonist would be
a faceless detective in a brown suit called John Carey, rather than my good
vanilla friend Sonny Bonds; (c) everything would be presented in a depressing
palette of mostly brown and grey (with an occasional mix of police blue),
because where a fictional city like Lytton might be comprised of blue skies,
green parks, and brightly colored buildings, real-life L.A. consists of just
three elements — ashes, shit, and police. Under different circumstances, I
might have put the game down in about five minutes of playing time. However,
most of my context came from the previous three Police Quest games rather than any real-life L.A. experience, so
I just sighed and ploughed on. And, believe it or not, eventually I quite got
into it — yes, I sincerely enjoyed the game (at least, parts of it) without
even suspecting there might be certain «immoral» aspects to that enjoyment. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ken
Williams, Sierra’s president, was being grilled — as time went by and the
game faded out of public memory, less frequently, but far more intensely with
each passing year — for hiring Daryl Gates, former chief of L.A.P.D., the
father of SWAT teams and the person chiefly held responsible for the Rodney
King riots of 1992, to design and supervise the fourth installment in the Police Quest series. According to Ken
himself, he merely "wanted our
police games to transition into tactical simulations more than just being
interactive stories. Chief Gates had knowledge of police procedures and
tactics that were well beyond what any one field officer could bring to the
table." Can’t really argue with that knowledge, can we? Honestly, though, the one thing I am not here to do is to discuss the
sensitive issue of whether it is fully or only partially justified that the
name of Daryl F. Gates, in certain circles at least, has become synonymous
with the concept of police brutality. Perhaps it is, and perhaps, as it often
happens, the actual story is a little more complicated and nuanced. What I’m
more interested in in this
particular context is whether the brief sojourn of Daryl Gates at Sierra did
actually result in the studio, formerly known for its fairly progressive and
humanistic stance on social issues, producing a drastically imbalanced
«right-wing» game with a strong conservative and racist stance, fully
deserving of the progressive hate in today’s moral climate — or whether its
chief goals were more aligned with Ken’s memories, with anything particularly
insensitive about it being more of an unfortunate side effect than anything
else. First and foremost, it is important to remember that
the principal goal of the Police Quest
series in its Jim Walls days had never been the art of «copaganda» —
naturally, with the games written and designed by a former police officer,
they would be on the whole sympathetic to the Department, but their main
purpose was to try and de-romanticize the image of the dashing,
excitement-seeking police officer from the average TV series: players would
spend much more time observing the tedious minutiae of police procedure,
filling out memos, checking car tires, stowing guns in lockers, and reading
out rights than actually chasing dangerous criminals. (And who could forget
that the biggest challenge of working undercover in the first Police Quest game was winning a few
hands of poker?). If anything, Police
Quest: Open Season put even more emphasis on that aspect; even if it were
a game that was desperately trying to be as gung-ho and racist as possible,
there was simply not enough time for the developers to indulge in their worst
instincts, as most of it had to be spent on designing puzzles that could only
be properly solved by strictly clinging to correct police procedure. (The
game even came with a 50-page
«Abridged (!) Manual of the Los Angeles Police Department» — which,
fortunately, you did not have to study in detail to complete it, but which
probably made for some inspired bathroom reading, e.g. "the prescribed trousers belt shall be worn
under the Police Equipment Belt. It shall be adjusted so that no part other
than the top edge is visible". God, I sure wish this game could take
points away from you for flashing your "prescribed trousers belt" in public!). Second, if you really need to alleviate your
conscience, it helps to keep in mind that Chief Gates never really wrote the
game. Proper credit here goes to Tammy Dargan, who had been working as a
producer on various Sierra games since 1991 and, before that, had a bit of
experience with America’s Most Wanted,
meaning that she was probably the only member of the staff «qualified» to
write a police game under Gates’ supervision. Honestly, the exact amount of
Gates’ contribution to Open Season
remains a bit of a mystery (although he does appear in person as an Easter
Egg cameo, provided you do a good job constantly returning to the useless
extra floors of Parker Center). Dargan, on the other hand, was known for a
pretty liberal pedigree, a rather telling indication on how the lines of
demarcation and separation tended to be far more blurrier even back in the
1990s (let alone earlier times) than they are today. (I read a December 1993
interview with both herself and Gates at the same time and they kinda seemed
having a pretty good time together). Anyway, it’s probably safe to say that the principal concern of Police Quest: Open Season was taking
the well-established paradigm of Police
Quest into the new technological realities of the mid-1990s — which, with
all the advances in video and sound capture, storage space, processing power,
and accompanying increases in budget, now allowed for a far more realistic
(and dramatic) approach to game-making. Any potential offensiveness of its
script, dialog, or character depiction is to be taken as an unfortunate side
effect of its day and age that, at least as far as I am concerned, can be
overlooked provided the game itself
is sufficiently fun and involving on other fronts — although this, too, is
quite debatable. Neither should Police
Quest: Open Season be confused with the Police Quest: SWAT series that, under Sierra’s name, would
continue to be released until around the mid-2000s and the first batch of
which continued to be designed by Dargan (but not Gates, even if the first game
in the series still kissed some ass by bearing the full name of Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT).
All of those titles are really police action simulators, not adventure games,
and although there is nothing particularly cop-a-gandish about them either,
they represent the main idea of Police
Quest taken out of its adventure game eggshell completely, working the
same way as if you’d turn Space Quest
into a rocket flight simulator or Leisure
Suit Larry into pure strip poker. I never had any genuine interest in
that stuff, and shall, of course, subject Open
Season to the same general criteria I employ for any other adventure game,
as should you. But it is
somewhat telling, perhaps, that Sierra preferred to turn their police-theme
based adventure game series into a pure simulator even years before they went
out of the adventure game business — above all, it means that Dargan herself
probably did not care all that much about the story, and/or felt that the
customers, too, would be more interested in learning to shoot their guns and
properly cuff their suspects rather than solving inventory-based puzzles or
listening to third-rate police drama dialog. Even with a new setting, a new
character, and an overall positive (at the time) reception of the game, it was
clear that Police Quest had run its
course sooner than any other Sierra franchise, and it was precisely because Police Quest was not a series about doing interesting and
extraordinary detective work — it was first and foremost a series about not
forgetting to store your gun in a locker before stepping on the premises of
the city jail, and just how many games do you need in order to impair the
importance of those kinds of rules to the player? One is probably enough; Police Quest lasted through four, and
even if the fourth one did attempt a drastic change of tone, we all know,
deep down inside, that there is not that much difference between Officer
Sonny Bonds and Detective John Carey. One thing is for certain: the Police Quest series died a natural death, not because of its
ill-fated final association with Chief Gates. In his memoirs, Ken Williams
has almost turned his entire small chapter on the final days of Police Quest into a full-fledged
apology for Gates, which does not at all come across as convincing — at the
same time, he writes almost nothing about the game itself (not surprising,
since Ken always comes across as businessman first, gamer last). We shall try
to rectify this mistake here by concentrating exclusively on the game, rather
than the unsavory aspects of its «godfather». |
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Content evaluation |
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Plotline
Police Quest: Open Season largely dispenses with
that formula. Each of its three predecessors started out in the same way: on
a bright, sunny morning Officer Sonny Bonds parks his vehicle in the cozy
parking lot of Lytton City Department and goes to work, mingling with his cop
buddies, sharing the local news and gossip, adjusting his uniform, and
wasting as much time as possible on the little pleasures of cop life before
actually going out to hunt serious crime. Yes, there are quite a few bad eggs
spoiling the quiet and happy world of Lytton City, but overall it’s a
colorful paradise where your main concern is not to forget to walk around
your police vehicle every time you take it out for a ride, or you’ll end up
with a flat tire and then you’ll just have
to miss that nice coffee break with your friend Steve over at Carol’s Cafe —
game over, man! In stark contrast, Police
Quest: Open Season opens its season in the middle of the night, with your
character parking his car in some dirty, dangerous suburb of downtown L.A. to
investigate a murder scene — a double
murder scene, as you quickly discover, with one of the victims being no less
than another police officer and the other a young boy from the local
(all-black) neighborhood. No previous game in the series threw you right
inside the action from the very start, so, clearly, plot matters much more here than it used to. If
only it were a good plot...
unfortunately, Tammy Dargan is no Jane Jensen (or even Lorelei Shannon, to
think of all those Sierra gal writers with their dark and disturbed
fantasies) when it comes to placing your imagination at the service of the gaming
community — and besides, there’s that little matter of having to conform to
the demands of «police realism» when designing a Police Quest game, so no werewolves, lost Wagner operas, or
strange aliens from Dimension X to help out the unfortunate script writer. Pretty soon it becomes evident that the plot is bifurcating into
two separate detective stories: one that is more grounded in social issues,
being directly related to the problem of gang warfare in suburban L.A., and
one with a thriller / horror twist, dealing with a serial killer on the
loose. The first subplot, centered around the killing of the little boy Bobby
Washington, is taken care of rather quickly and without a whole lot of direct
(more like collateral) involvement on the part of your character; arguably,
though, it is important in setting up the «general context» of the second
subplot, indirectly hinting, perhaps, that the overall atmosphere of violence
and fear, so predominant in those suburbs, is the perfect breeding ground for
psychopathic monsters in human form. This may, in fact, be the chief ideological contribution of
Daryl F. Gates to the game: in the eyes of its new protagonist, Detective
John Carey, the «City of Angels» is nowhere near a happy paradise with a few
bad eggs scattered around, as the fictional Lytton City was for his
predecessor on the job, but is instead a place "full of dirtbags, creeps, and losers", as he bitterly
announces a bare two minutes into the game upon learning that his cop friend
has just been brutally murdered. One might ascribe this remark to a situation
of stress, of course, but the plot of the game does little to dissipate that
impression: indeed, most of the
people you’re going to meet are either dirtbags, creeps, or losers, sometimes
all of those at the same time. Apart from a couple work colleagues, like the
cute SID officer Julie Chester, and the grieving family members of the
victims, there aren’t a whole lot of people you meet in this game that are
going to stir your sympathies. The main plot of the game hardly rises above third-rate TV
police drama, though in its final twists and turns it does try to borrow a
page or two from both Psycho and Silence Of The Lambs (again, in
progressive circles this has earned the game a reputation of being «transphobic»,
but it is hardly any more transphobic than either of the two aforementioned
movies). Along the way, we get more or less stereotypical images of the
various L.A. subcultures — from the hip-hop scene to the red lights district
to the neo-Nazi community — none of which ultimately turn out to be in any
way related to the major crimes of the game, but together constitute a
somewhat coherent, if caricaturesque, depiction of the «seedy side» of the
big city. (Given that we see almost nothing but the seedy side, I’d be more OK calling the game «L.A.-phobic»
than «transphobic» — definitely not sure that its release earned «The Big
Orange» a lot of reputation points). It feels as if either Dargan was much
more interested in having you run through this gallery of stereotypes than in
writing a proper police investigation story. At first, you do get around,
gathering clues on and from various suspects, occasionally running into a red
herring or two (like the neo-Nazi guy); eventually, though, you end up
looking more like an impartial observer of the ongoing horrors, until, at the
end of the game, a lucky turn of events (in the guise of an involuntary
canine assistant) suddenly leads you right to your destination. The ending is
openly bad: ridiculously illogical and blatantly rushed, it pretty much
negates all the effort Detective Carey puts into his investigation — you
might as well simply have done nothing at all and just patiently waited until
your last victim came along — and makes me suspect that the game was running
over budget (the most standard explanation for all the rushed endings in
video games, of which there are plenty). That said, putting aside the corny ending and the stereotypical
characters (on this issue I’ll add some more thoughts below, in the Atmosphere section), the overall
storyline of Police Quest: Open Season
is hardly among the worst I’ve seen in the world of video gaming. You may
very well be disappointed in the ending, but you will probably be intrigued enough, once you’ve started, to see the
whole thing to its end. Along the way, there’ll be at least one shootout, at
least a couple of tense moments where you have to act quickly and decisively
under pressure, and, of course, lots of talking with a variety of characters
— don’t expect any unusually sharp dialog or cleverness, because most of them
generally say what they’re expected to say in ways in which they’re expected
to say it, but then the game is all about ordinary police procedure applied
to ordinary people, and ordinary people don’t really talk the way they do in
Coen brothers’ movies. The main problem with the story is that some people
have the talent to put genius inside the ordinary, and some don’t; Tammy
Dargan, not even with Chief Gates looking over her shoulder, certainly
belonged to the latter category. The actions of her characters do not bear
much individuality, and their dialog typically walks the line between
triteness and corniness, with an occasional quasi-philosophical joke now and
then ("Dude, nothing sticks in my
mind... I’m a product of the Seventies", a corner store owner
confesses to our detective when asked one of the possible questions). It’s
not too bad, and it’s not too good, just okay, really. Mind you, however, that there is NOTHING whatsoever in this game to deserve the death warrant on
the part of The Digital Antiquarian: "this game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight,
and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful".
This super-strong statement is then backed by exactly two examples: (a) the serial killer is a transvestite (oh gee,
let’s toss Silence Of The Lambs
into the trash bin as well while we’re at it); (b) one of the in-game police
files describes a street gang that consists of "unwed mothers on public assistance" — something that could
certainly be construed as offensive if it was not totally taken out of its
general humorous context; the tradition of thinking up hilariously
exaggerated descriptions for criminals and gangs goes all the way back to the
first Police Quest. Anyway, if one
needs to dig that deep inside the
bowels of the game to find something «hateful» about it — reading those files
is completely optional, for the most part — then it is clear enough that some
people just need to read so much more into this thing than it actually
contains. For sure, if you happen to share some extreme
«defund-the-police-to-solve-all-our-problems» mentality, you’ll find every
bit of the game offensive — but you’ll probably do the same with each of the
previous games in the series as well, and even more probably, you won’t even
be interested in trying any one of them out or reading this review in the first place. |
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Puzzles
The main problem with this (generally logical and meaningful)
design is that, ultimately, it does not matter. Forget to do all these
things, be a sloppy and irresponsible cop all the way through, and all you
end up with at the end of the game is a low overall score that you aren’t
even properly reminded of unless you bother to check the separate and
unintrusive stats screen every once in a while. True, missing a couple of really important things — like having
to go through the same annoying shooting exercises each day of the game —
will eventually result in a permanent game over, but for the most part, you
have nothing but your conscience to worry about. It would have at least been
nice to have some sort of «Sleuth-o-Meter» displayed at the end of the game,
or have some official judgement passed on you by your commanding officer, but
ultimately the game leads either straight to your death if you do something
really stupid or careless, or to your commendation for solving the case
(which, honestly, should have instead gone to the dog, who does most of your
work for you). It certainly does not help that, with all the miriad of
micro-managing mini-tasks set out before Detective Carey, some of the
challenges are hopelessly bugged; for instance, some actions performed at the
«wrong» time (that is, before or after some other actions) can leave you without
the coveted points, even though there is absolutely no logical explanation
for why that is other than an elementary programmer’s mistake, not corrected
in any of the game’s ensuing patches. This is also a part of Police Quest’s legacy — for a game
that prides itself on teaching the player the meaning of discipline, it sure
is ridiculously buggy — and it’s a psychologically nasty blow for
completionists, who can waste hours trying to do everything right only to
discover, at the end of the game, that life is out there to punish you for
your effort, not for your laziness. This is particularly surprising when you realize how much work
went into, for instance, the writing of the game’s dialog when it comes to
interaction with the game’s NPCs. Typically, Sierra games have a very limited
number of reactions when you try to use various random objects from your
inventory on people or things around you; in Open Season, however, you can expect something to happen when flashing your badge — or, for that
matter, even an empty glass jar from your toolkit — not only at your
colleagues, superiors, or witnesses, but even at random patrons in the local
bar. The writers really saw to it that the city came alive, or that you would
not get too bored in the typical
adventure game situation of being stuck on a puzzle and resorting to the «try
everything on everyone» technique to break through. I honestly wouldn’t mind
if a bit of that verve were spent on filtering out bugs instead, but I do
admire the effort. Outside of the usual inventory-based puzzles and dialog trees,
the game does not offer a lot of extra challenges. The driving system,
earlier removed in Police Quest II
and reinstated in Police Quest III,
is once again removed, perhaps because of negative feedback for the third
game. The shooting range, which you have to beat in order to stay alive, is a
trivial task for anybody with relatively decent eyesight, which makes it
particularly annoying when you have to complete it at least three times (they
could have at least varied the challenge, but it’s always the same). There is
one shootout sequence where you have to be just a little bit nimble, and a
few cases where you have to make split-second decisions to avoid near-instant
death, but that’s about it, I think. In this way, Open Season does not break with tradition — Police Quest had always taken pride in being strictly in the
adventure game camp and nowhere else, which makes it all the more surprising
how quick Tammy Dargan would be to break with that tradition when she would
turn the franchise into the S.W.A.T.
simulator the very next year. In terms of «player comfort», Open Season shares Sierra’s general ideology of the mid-1990s,
copied over from LucasArts: relatively few death opportunities (cropping up
in about 4-5 situations which are clearly rife with danger, so you’ll
probably be prepared) and no chances of softlocking yourself out of the game
by doing something you’re not supposed to do, like dropping a key item —
well, except when you fall victim to one of the game’s many bugs, some of
which still remain unpatched. (Like I already said, it’s pretty easy to
softlock yourself out of the highest score, though). You do have a small chance to get stuck near the end of the game,
because both Jim Walls’ and Tammy
Dargan’s Police Quest are typically
at their weakest the moment it comes down to the protagonist having to think
a little outside the box and improvise, instead of rigidly clinging to
prescribed police procedure. As long as 99% of your time is occupied by
investigating crime scenes, talking to witnesses / suspects / work colleagues
etc., filing reports, and practicing your shooting, it’s OK. But the final
set of puzzles, in stark contrast to the general spirit of the game, is
purely nonsensical. The most glaring example (spoiler alert!) is when, for some unexplainable reason, you have
to lasso a suspicious dog in the random hope that it might lead you to the
killer — is that a standard prescribed tactic for an LAPD officer? — and in
order to lasso the dog, you have to procure yourself a barely visible piece
of rope from an inconspicuous paper bag in a garbage dump that you most
likely have already inspected several times in the first part of the game.
Because, you know, it’s a normal thing — in L.A., if you need a piece of rope
for some reason, your obvious destination is the nearest garbage dump.
Because, you know, who’d want to spend a chunk of one’s meager police officer
salary on a piece of rope from a local hardware store? Still, I do not want to create the impression that the entire game rides that kind of
ridiculousness; clearly, the final stretch was done in a hurry when the team
discovered it was running over budget or something. For the most part,
puzzle-wise, it’s okay: not great, not terrible, like most Sierra games from
that period. And given how many different types of reactions you can get by
trying out «wrong» solutions to your issues, it seems rather clear that the
main emphasis was on the ambience, rather than on all the brainstorming — so
let’s get to the ambience already. |
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Atmosphere
While
there certainly is a modicum of truth in such an impression, let us also not
forget that this is a (slightly
soapy) police drama, meaning that it has
to concentrate on "dirtbags, creeps, and losers" by its very
definition; condemning Open Season
for sticking to the «police good, scumbags bad» principle would be like
complaining that The Wire never
once gave us a guided tour of The Baltimore Museum of Art. The game does try
quite hard to depict those areas of L.A. that you pass through as a
life-during-wartime zone: the overriding colors are gray and brown, garbage
and gang-related graffiti are everywhere, and absolutely nobody is happy in
any way, other than an occasional crazy or two — attitudes generally range
from openly hostile and aggressive to wary and vigilant. But there are quite
a few characters written and acted out in order to evoke sympathy from the
player: the widow of the downed police officer, the desperate mother of the
black boy who became a collateral victim, even the working ladies in the red
district are all presented as... well, as people worthy to be protected by
Detective Carey, let’s put it that way. Stereotypical, sure, but worthy. Unfortunately,
because you do not get to drive around the city, you only get to experience
isolated «pockets» of it; still, I would say that it manages to paint a more
expressive portrait of an urban environment than the previous two Police Quests, with much more
attention dedicated to specific details. NPCs that are not directly related
to your quest are relatively scarce, but they do exist and can be interacted
with in different ways. The locations themselves are fairly varied — you get
to see suburban residences in both white and black areas of the city, a posh
rapper mansion, a creepy neo-Nazi den, a «working girl» establishment, an
indie movie theater, a barroom where cops like to hang out after work...
well, nothing that rises above the usual tropes, but certainly more diverse
and representative than it used to be in Police
Quest III. One
specific criticism of the game was in its representation of African-American
characters and especially their speech patois ("yo, I be fly today" is the most often quoted example).
According to Dargan, her primary inspiration for writing characters such as
«Raymond Jones The Third» and «Yo Money» was Fab Five Freddy’s Fresh
Fly Favor: Words And Phrases Of The Hip Hop Generation, one of those
humorous «first-source» slang dictionaries whose typical problems are that
(a) it only represents one particular slice of dialect from one particular
location, (b) inevitably gets embellished by its own creator in the most
subjective ways possible, and (c) gets terribly dated a year or two after
publication. On the other hand, I believe that this problem, too, is much
exaggerated — the actual African-American actors who voiced those roles seem
to have had little problem with the jargon, and for about 90% of the time, it
does not deviate too terribly from speech patterns that persist up to this
day (and, in fact, are steadily adopted more and more by
progressively-oriented white folks). If, every once in a while, a "this be my hood" or two creeps
in, well, hell, I’ve seen Instagram photos subtitled "this be my hood" without any
tongue-in-cheek attitude, so let’s not get too riled up about things that
just aren’t worth it. (I have only recently read an interminable discussion
on Reddit about the allegedly embarrassing use of the word hella by a teenage character in Life Is Strange, and couldn’t stop
wondering about how much more productive the discussion would have been if it
tried to keep strictly focused on the sociolinguistic aspects, instead of
constantly derailing into silly emotional outbursts of «who the hell talks like that?» and «what business do those French game designers have trying to mimic
American teen lingo?», even though the actual dialog was written by an
American writer). Stereotypical
or not, I might add that the writers did a pretty good job supplying most of
the characters in the game with some
sort of personality. For Jim Walls, making his city of Lytton come alive
always seemed like an afterthought — even when the game featured bystanding
NPCs, they were, at most, procured with a generic replica or two ("Good day, Officer! Nice weather, isn’t it?");
only in Police Quest III some of
the characters began developing a little character, by which time it was
already too late (and, by the way, I think it was probably Jane Jensen,
rather than Walls, who was responsible for advancing those NPCs from pure
mannequin stage to something slightly advanced). In Police Quest: Open Season, on the other hand, the morgue
assistant will be cracking jokes non-stop, the morgue receptionist will be an
empty-headed girl with nothing but nail polish on her mind ("you have an appointment to shoot your gun?
I have an appointment to get my nails done!"), the tow yard guard
will be a personage out of an imaginary Coen Brothers movie, the neo-Nazi
thug will use the F-word more frequently than any hero in any Tarantino
flick, and the psychotherapist at the health care center will say stuff like
"please don’t touch my plant, she
doesn’t like to be handled, she had a bad experience once, she still hasn’t
gotten over it". Much, if not most, of this will be predictable,
some of it will be cringeworthy, a bit of it will be smart, but on the whole,
meeting new people in the game is always accompanied with a touch of
intrigue. And
a touch of tension, too. In an odd way, I cannot help thinking about the
overall atmosphere of Police Quest:
Open Season without placing it in the context of the other Sierra game
that was being polished at the same time and with which it shares quite a few
features in terms of graphic and gameplay design — Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers.
Although the latter is, without any questions, FAR superior to the
Gates-Dargan project, both games focus on adding a permanent sinister layer
on things you’d normally think of as relatively familiar, cuddly, and safe
(New Orleans is no longer the «Big Easy» capital of jazz and Mardi Gras, but
the central residence of the spirit of Black Voodoo; Los Angeles is no longer
an embodiment of the spirit of Hollywood, but a constant reminder of the
aftermath of the Rodney King riots). This was, on the whole, a period when
Sierra On-Line was «going dark», subtly shifting its focus from light comedy to
more mature themes, and Daryl Gates’ vision of contemporary L.A. as a war
zone, regardless of its degree of realism or bigotry, strangely enough, fits
pretty well into this evolving paradigm. I cannot for a moment admit to
really digging this atmosphere, but I get it, and I certainly recognize its
right to existence. Let us now take a brief look at the technical means used
to create it. |
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Technical features |
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Unquestionably the most innovative and — for its time — technically
impressive aspect of Open Season
was its visual artistry. This was Sierra’s first (and, ironically, last)
adventure game that almost completely forsook both hand-painted and pure
digital art in favor of actual photoshots of real exteriors and interiors of
L.A. that would consequently be scanned and edited into digital backdrops;
likewise, all the static and dynamic action for playable and non-playable
characters was produced through motion capture technology used on real
actors. Essentially, this was just one step shy of full-motion video, which
Sierra would endorse two years later, but not quite there yet; however,
compared to the studio’s other games from the same year — such as Gabriel Knight or Leisure Suit Larry 6 — this was a huge step up, not very
revolutionary, perhaps, in terms of the overall video game perspectives (the
animated sprites in something like the original Mortal Kombat put their equivalents in Police Quest to shame), but very much so in terms of a realistic,
immersive approach to adventure games. Alas, like so many other things, these particular technologies
have not aged particularly well; not quite as awfully, that is, as most
instances of early 3D modeling, but still, the hand-painted and animated art
from the above-mentioned games looks much
better on modern day monitors than all the «photo-realistic» stuff in Open Season. For one thing, «realism»
means perfunctory pragmaticism — in 1993, the only reason to admire most of
those shots was how unusually realistic they looked on your screen, but now
that standards for «realism» have jumped sky high compared to those days, we
can only enjoy the vistas of Open
Season if they convey a certain aesthetics, and conveying aesthetics was
probably the last thing on the minds of the game’s developers. What you get
is simply a generic, uninteresting, and poorly pixelated approximation of
various places in Los Angeles. Like Parker Center — you
could argue that the game at least preserves a snapshot of the exterior of
this historical landmark before it was demolished in 2019, but the problem is
that the building always looked terrible (not that you’d expect police
stations to look aesthetically pleasing anywhere other than the Resident Evil universe), and gazing at
a 640x480 representation of a corner of it on a big screen is hardly going to
do much for its looks. Another
thing is the color palette: while the overriding brown and ash-grey colors of
the game clearly have a symbolic importance, it’s ultimately more than a
little depressing to spend the entire game in this setting, as opposed to the
generally bright and uplifting colors of Lytton. The only times this
impression changes are the predictable environments of the morgue (mostly
white, of course) and the Itty-Bitty Club (where everything is drenched in
more red than David Lynch’s Black Lodge). Taken together with the low
resolution, this combination makes certain environments look like a chaotic
mess of drab, vomit-colored pixels (like the interior of Kim’s five-and-dime
store, for instance). In the end, the pictures of the game fail to make it
look memorable, pretty, or sinister; anything it brings to the table in terms
of atmosphere is rather conveyed by means of sound than visuals. The
animated sprites, brought to life with motion capture technology used on real
actors, are also fairly average, even for the standards of 1993. It’s not
nearly as embarrassing as those moments in Sierra’s early FMV games, like Phantasmagoria, where everybody was so
proud of the new technology that you had to waste away lots of precious
seconds watching actors slowly fling back their hair, leisurely stretching in
the middle of the room, or closing an average door with as much cautious
diligence as they could muster, just because, you know, they could. Here, too, you sometimes have
to endure an NPC take a moment or two of vanity before engaging in dialog
with your character, but it is never quite that obvious; even so, it is hard to imagine somebody in this
modern day and age being impressed by those bits of gratuitous gesticulation. Surprisingly,
there are next to no cutscenes and almost no close-ups of characters
throughout the game — and in those few instances when you do get a relatively large realistic
face up on screen, there is nothing particularly attractive or impressive
about it, unlike the highly evocative visual art of the close-ups in, say, Gabriel Knight; again, it’s all simply
about «hey, that’s a real person’s face articulating in the middle of your
monitor, how cool is that?» — well,
it wasn’t even such big news back in 1993, let alone a quarter century later.
In short, this is just another story of how visual realism never really works
if it is turned into a stand-alone value for its own sake. Moving on. |
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|
Sound The original game, released in November 1993, only came out on
floppy disks, with no space for a full audio soundtrack; all the text had to
be read, and the sound was limited to various audio effects and a basic
musical soundtrack thrown together by Neal Grandstaff, one of Sierra’s
composers in residence and a major presence on most of the company’s games
from 1993 to 1995 (you can easily tell when, for instance, the elevator muzak
theme from Leisure Suit Larry 6
unexpectedly crops up inside the elevator in Parker Center, most likely
producing a leery chuckle from any regular Sierra customer at the time). The
score was no better and no worse than it had always been in the Police Quest series: actually, Neal
had a seemingly tough job to follow Jan Hammer’s professional work in Police Quest 3, but I think he did
alright, focusing a little less on making the whole thing sound like a
stereotypically police soap opera and a little more on supporting the
atmosphere of darkness, tragedy, and suspense. The corniest moments are the
ones that take place in public or «culturally marked» locations — such as the
funky theme played in the mansion of «Yo Money», or the strip club muzak, or the
goofy variation on the Horst Wessel Lied playing on the stereo in the
apartment of the neo-Nazi guy — but even those are good enough for a laugh. As for the voice acting, the whole wide world had to wait for
two more years, baited breath and all, for the CD-ROM edition of the game
with full voice coverage. In the end, all of the voice actors were different
from the original actors used for motion capture, and none of the names were
recognizable — apparently, the budget was so small that the studio could only
allow itself a bunch of relative unknowns (at least they managed to avoid
filling in the gaps with Sierra’s own employees, as they had to do in the
earliest days of voice-powered games). The result is a game full of rather
predictable, but not awful performances — I struggle to remember even a
single job that made an actual impression on me, but the only moments of
genuine cringe are associated with the actors working too hard to exaggerate
their accents or speech deficiencies. Bob Liberman’s panicky stuttering for
Russel Marks, the nervous owner of the movie theater, is probably the worst,
and Denise Tapscott also tries way too hard to portray Sherry Moore, the
morgue receptionist, as the quintessential
nothing-but-nail-polish-on-her-mind girl, though the blame should probably
lie on the voice director rather than the recording artist. Unfortunately, Doug Boyd, voicing the main character of the
game, remains throughout the very epitome of mediocrity. One could argue that
completely stripping his hero from any sort of genuine emotionality works
reasonably well in work-related situations (that’s what «professional
conduct» is all about, after all), but this eventually spills even onto
situations where the hero is supposed
to show some rage, and he still comes through like a wet blanket. Almost
every other character in the game has at least one or two emotional states —
for instance, the coroner in the morgue can relatively easily switch between
the «cynically humorous tongue-in-cheek» approach and the
«deadly-serious-and-preoccupied» manner — but Detective Carey is clearly a
rock, an island, and a virtual intelligence interface rolled into one, which
makes playing for him not particularly rewarding. Then again, maybe that’s
exactly the kind of character Chief Gates needed to reflect his vision. Returning to the issue of accents and vernaculars that was
briefly touched upon in the Atmosphere
section, if you’re real sensitive about it you might probably want to
restrict yourself to the non-talkie version of the game, so as to avoid too
much pain from the hyperbolized deliveries of African-American and Asian
characters — I don’t find them as caricaturesque as some of the game’s reviewers,
though; stereotypical, yes, but hardly out there to make the average white
gamer snicker at the goofiness of all them «colored» people. Bottomline is,
everybody is trying quite hard to impersonate precisely the stereotype they
are being thrown — the bratty / arrogant lady of the famous rapper, the
chatty Southern old guy guarding the tow station, the pretentious and snobby
psychotherapist lady at the health center, the sleazy-but-caring Madame of
the house at the club, the list goes on and on and it gets a little tiresome,
but never truly out of hand because, fortunately, all the actors only have a
very limited amount of lines to go on. |
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Interface
On the other hand, the available options beyond the usual
inventory-operating and dialog mechanisms are almost non-existent in the
game. Several times Detective Carey has to go to the shooting range, with a
very trivial and unrewarding shooting mini-game involved (remaining exactly
the same all three times you have to complete it to maximize your score), and
one time there is a shootout where (provided you do pick up the shotgun) it’s
also a rather trivial matter of timely reaction and absolutely nothing else.
Speaking of shootouts, death situations are rare in the game, but they do
exist and sometimes crop up in the least expected situations (such as repeatedly
«harrassing» the photographer at the station — see, the game actually gives a
shit about woman rights!), although the accompanying animations are
surprisingly timid (usually the screen just dissolves to red-and-gray around
you — lazy as heck). The challenge of driving around, as I have already mentioned,
has disappeared; moving from one location to another is accomplished by means
of an in-game map where points of interest are gradually unlocked through the
game — again, quite similar to moving around in Gabriel Knight, though nowhere near as stylish (for instance,
different locations on the GK map
were all marked with symbolic icons, helping you to quickly and efficiently
identify them, whereas the ones in Police
Quest are all presented as boring red dots, and you have to hop from one
to another to check their pop-up tags — annoying!). Most of the locations,
once you have indicated the desire to check them out, are introduced with a
static animation, which is cute the first time around and then, of course,
becomes time-consuming — you’ll have to take in the sights of the butt-ugly
exterior of Parker Center so many times while playing, you might start
considering a career in the demolition business. On the whole, everything about the game’s interface serves the
same «pragmatic» goals as the game’s script and mechanics: even the font of
the subtitles is arguably the least aesthetic font ever to be found in a
Sierra game — a small, ugly, typewriter-style monstrosity to emphasize the
procedural routine-ness of Detective Carey’s work. Since this was an
intentional part of the design, it’s hard to blame the game for that, and it does do a pretty good job at making
you feel bored, drab, and miserable with all these visual and stylistic
settings — the only question is, do
you want to feel this kind of miserable? |
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|
«Good» or «bad», Police Quest: Open Season is, at the least, a
very revealing product of its time — and, in being that, is a curious
document of the American state of mind in the early 1990s.
While it is nowhere near a true classic of the adventure game genre — next to
titles like Gabriel Knight or Day Of The Tentacle from the same
year, it can at best limp along like an inconspicuous lapdog — it has one
serious advantage over everything else in sticking to realism and true
relevance rather than escapist artistic fantasy; and, with the advent of new
technical possibilities as well as the «maturation» of the adventure game
genre as a whole, it has the chance of enhancing that realism in more
detailed and psychologically subtle fashion than any of the Jim Walls-led
games in the franchise. The only problem is,
transitioning from fantasy to realism in a video game rather dramatically
raises the stakes, because this is where the video game market enters into
straightforward competition with «serious» art, a competition in which it is
almost inevitably bound to lose. The plot, the dialog, the atmosphere of Open Season could hardly be on par
with even a mid-level police-themed soap, and the advantageous factor of
personal immersion is hardly enough to compensate for that. Ultimately, the
game fails because it is too boring, clichéd, and predictable, not
because it tries to enforce Daryl F. Gates’ vision of the black-and-white contrast
between the Corrupted Criminal and the Courageous Cop. In trying to show us
the ordinary routine of the law enforcement universe, Gates and Dargan set
the same serious challenge for themselves as Jim Walls did earlier — try to
make us find excitement and fun in the ordinary — but lack the talent to even
begin overcoming that challenge. It does not help
matters, either, that the game ultimately violates its own consistency and,
when it comes to the denouement, chucks all that police realism outside the
window, going for an absurd, cheap horror movie vibe at the end that suddenly
brings it onto the turf of contemporary ridiculously titillating experiences
like Night Trap. It is not even the
corny vibe of the ending that feels wrong, but rather its blatant incongruity
with the rest of the game — whose main message during its first 80% seems to
have been along the lines of "Look
at me! I’m tedious and generic, but at least I’m not cheesy!", but
then the final 20% are like "Okay,
now I’m cheesy and there’s nothing wrong with it!". It’s downright
the equivalent of trying to quench a raging fire with a can of gasoline. And yet, despite all
that, I still found myself entertained while replaying the game for this
review. Perhaps it is just the usual predictable bias of an adventure game
fan, but somehow I find some odd value in disasters such as these from the
early days of videogaming. I can see that, while it is difficult to throw the
tag of «labor of love», the Police Quest team really made a
serious effort to push forward some boundaries, and I appreciate the fact
that they were not simply imitating the legacy of Jim Walls, but deliberately
tried to combine its fundamental principles with a more realistic and gritty
take on the darker side of life in the big American city. There is no doubt
that, if given a chance to be handled properly, the franchise could transform
into something genuinely great — transitioning from the video game market
answer to Miami Vice into an
equivalent of The Wire. Instead,
Sierra preferred to go the technical-tactical route and turn the whole thing
into a series of straightforward simulators, squashing any further
aspirations at intelligent story-telling long before becoming squashed
itself. Ultimately, this has
resulted in a situation where the adventure game genre, having begotten so
many first-rate detective games
(e.g. the Tex Murphy or Nancy Drew series), has remained
deprived of an equally first-rate police
game — and with both the police theme and the point-and-click genre not going
through the best of times at the moment, there’s little chance of remedying
that situation in the foreseeable future. Which, in turn, is a bit of a
saving grace for Police Quest: Open
Season, a game that I do not really like a lot but still open-heartedly
recommend to those seeking to expand their gaming horizons. You probably
won’t fall in love, either, but you will
be in for something... «different». I think even the self-professed haters
would confess to getting an unforgettable impression, or else how could they
generate so much bile? |
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