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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Marc
Crowe / Scott Murphy |
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Part of series: |
Space
Quest |
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Release: |
March 24, 1989 |
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Main credits: |
Programming: Ken Koch, Scott Murphy, Doug Oldfield, Christopher
Smith Music: Bob Siebenberg |
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Useful links: |
Playthrough: Part 1 (64 mins.) |
Part 2 (65 mins.) |
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This review should probably
come with a disclaimer stating that Space
Quest III was, in fact, the very first Sierra adventure game that I
played and that this may have something to do with the fact that it has since
become ensconced in my brain as one of the best adventure games of all time, period.
Then again, happy coincidences do
happen, and Sierra On-Line was on a
major roll in the late Eighties, and each time I happen to replay this game I
still find joy in so many of its aspects that this is no more pure nostalgia
than, say, listening to an ABBA album from my deepest childhood. More like I
was just incredibly lucky. Anyway, in my previous
review I did mention that the second game in the Space Quest series was not all that hot, looking and feeling
rushed and not really matching the imaginative and comic standards set by the
first entry; nevertheless, it still found critical and commercial acceptance,
largely through lack of any serious competition — almost any Sierra adventure
game in 1987 would have. Fortunately for the fortunes of the Space Quest
saga, technical progress came along and saved the day: advances in processing
power, graphic resolutions, and digital sound technology led to a new
generation of adventure games, kickstarted with King’s Quest IV, and with the development of Sierra’s Creative
Interpreter everybody at the company had to step up their game or get off the
ship. The Two Guys From Andromeda deemed themselves worthy of the challenge,
and delivered a brand new chapter in the adventures of Roger Wilco, space
janitor — and when I say «brand new», I actually mean what I say, rather than
just stick with an obvious cliché. That the game would be a
major technical improvement over the first two was understood — better
graphics, addition of a musical soundtrack, and a vastly improved parser
system were all Sierra’s trademarks of that era — but the important thing is
that along with technical improvements came substantial ones. Not only did
Roger Wilco finally gain some personality in the game, becoming an iconic
protagonist, but so did his creators, the Two Guys From Andromeda, by daring
to put themselves in the game as its chief McGuffin. For the very first time,
the game got a truly original story, an actual solid plot that managed to
combine intrigue and suspense with acid satire. And, finally, hard as it is
to explain, the game — and the entire Space Quest universe with it — came to life. This was not just an
adventure game in which you had to crack a few puzzles, get from Point A to
Point B and then to Point C, save the world and go home: Space Quest III introduced a parallel reality in which you
actually wanted to spend time, like in a good RPG (OK, I know for sure I actually did, whereas all I wanted
on the planet Labion was to get the hell outta there as soon as possible).
And although the game had not yet slipped into the comfortably winning
formula of the later, talkie-era Space
Quest games, I find this to be the same kind of refreshing blessing which
also made Leisure Suit Larry II
from the same era into arguably the best Larry game — with the creators not
yet obsessed with their own mythology and not yet chained to their own inside
jokes and running gags. |
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Content evaluation |
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Here is the catch: Space Quest III tells the single best
story in all of Space Quest
history, and yet in so many reviews of the game you shall find that the main
complaint is always the same — the game has almost no plot! Yes and no, no
and yes. The thing is, the «plot» is actually not introduced until about the
middle of the game. Before that, Roger Wilco largely wanders around seemingly
without purpose — first, inside the bowels of a huge interstellar garbage
freighter, where his little escape pod has been sucked in as a piece of space
debris; later, once he escapes the freighter, amidst the endless purple dunes
of the lonesome planet Phleebhut, where his ship has brought him for no
particular reason. It is not until a brief pit stop at the Monolith Burger
(«Over 20 Gazillion Served Galaxy Wide!») that Roger, seemingly by sheer
accident, is able to discover the reason fate has landed him in this precise
quadrant, and proceeds to fulfill his mission — free his own creators, the
Two Guys of Andromeda, from the pesky hands of the (software) Pirates of
Pestulon and their terrifying leader, the 14-year old Elmo Pug. This is certainly quite
different from the first two games, where your purpose in life was clearly
established just a few minutes into the game — and, of course, in both cases
it had to do with saving the world from evil guys. If you ask me, though,
saving your own authors from evil guys is a far more cool and creative
purpose, not to mention one free of megalomaniacal clichés.
Furthermore, if the previous plots were in themselves just comically enhanced
facsimiles of every single cheap sci-fi thriller ever written, The Pirates Of Pestulon is the first
(and only) game in the series whose chief satirical target is not so much the
actual field of science of fiction as it is the growing software industry —
the «Pirates» in question are, in fact, software
pirates, running a huge underground organization which kidnaps talented
programmers around the world and exploits their talents for the benefit of
their young and insolent boss, Elmo. (There is a scene in the game where
Roger witnesses ScumSoft executives in action, as they walk around tiny
cubicles stuffed with programmers, cracking whips over their heads — no
better metaphor could be imagined for the state of the software industry, and
I suppose that to a large extent it is just as relevant today as it was back
in 1989). But while there most
definitely is a plot, it is indeed
also true that you have to spend a large part of the game (which is in itself
relatively short) wondering when that plot is going to manifest itself — and
it is perfectly all right. Because in addition to having one of the most
original and biting plots in early adventure games, Space Quest III is also one of adventure gaming’s earliest
experiments in «open world-building». As soon as you get your ship and escape
from the freighter, you are free to go anywhere you like — and even if
«anywhere» only means three or four different locations, it still makes a
huge difference from the strictly linear progression of the first two Space Quests, or even from the
open-world ideology of the King’s
Quest series, where you were also free in your movements but the entire
world was just one huge territory. Space
Quest III actually gives you free rein to travel through space, landing
on different planets, exploring them one after another, returning to old ones
once you got bored with new ones — it creates a truly immersive experience which was sorely lacking in the previous
games, and that is well worth a temporary lack of a storyline, I think. Finally, Space Quest III has probably the most
inventive and satisfying conclusion to a Space
Quest game ever — tying up loose ends by providing a concise and clear
answer to the question of how the heck were the Two Guys From Andromeda able
to end up as programmed characters in their own game, and leaving things
wrapped up well enough to not require a sequel, but open enough to produce
one if necessary. (Unfortunately, the next three games in the series left way
too many questions open for fans to be satisfied). Everything here is on a
small scale — no giant end-of-game explosions, no saving the world, no huge
award ceremony — but that small scale is precisely what makes the refreshing
difference. |
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Like everything else,
puzzle design has been vastly improved in Space Quest III. First, because of the quasi-open-world setting,
there are very few opportunities to get hopelessly stuck — if you forgot to
obtain a vital object on one of the planets before moving on, you can always
go back and retrieve it at any time. Second, the «moon logic» situations of Space Quest II have pretty much been
wiped out: each single action that you have to perform is fully rational and
may be deduced with relative confidence. Some progression is achieved through
accidents, but even these accidents are the results of perfectly reasonable
actions, such as ordering and consuming a meal at the Monolith Burger or
shopping at the souvenir shop on Phleebhut. There is exactly one moment in the entire game when I
remember getting frustrated — after getting mugged by a huge rat in the
bowels of the garbage freighter —what happens after that makes very little
sense and is never properly explained... but one illogical situation in a Sierra adventure game is still a
record of sorts. As was already typical of Sierra games,
some of the challenges have multiple solutions — well, actually, in this case
only one challenge (overwhelming
Terminator Arnoid) has properly multiple solutions, but both are equally
complex and require a bit of creative thinking (as opposed to the «trick the
rat and win some points» vs. «give it some of your treasure and lose points»
dilemma of the previous generation). A few are based on timing (i.e. standing
around and waiting for something to happen), which is never a good thing, but
at least nothing ever depends on random encounters (the bane of early King’s Quest games). There are also several arcade
sequences, but — surprise surprise! — they totally make sense and are even
reasonably enjoyable. At the end of the game there is a monumental robot
battle (the «Nuk’em Duk’em Robots», hilariously preceding Duke Nukem by a
good two years), followed by a frenzied shootout with some of ScumSoft’s
fighter ships sent in pursuit of Roger: both require very modest technical
skill from the player and are won more through intelligence than finger
nimbness (such as not forgetting to set the ship’s speed to Attack before the
battle!). The single most questionable and often criticized challenge is the
«Astro Chicken» arcade that you absolutely have to play in order to set the
plot in motion — but (a) you do not even need to win it in order to advance
(though you do deprive yourself of a nifty amount of points if you keep
losing); (b) most of the time, you can win by holding your finger on one
single key (UP); (c) the Two Guys eventually apologize for the idea by
lambasting themselves at the end of the game when offering their programming
services to Ken Williams («What are your credits?» – «Ever heard of Astro
Chicken?» – «No» – «Good!»). Anyway, this is one of the very, very few Sierra
games in which the incorporated arcade sequences will probably not piss off
adventure gamers too much. |
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Space: the final frontier.
This is the first game in the series which totally and utterly feels like a Space Quest: even when you are not
spending time sitting in the cockpit of your ship or zipping between planets
at light speed, the game almost never lets you forget about the vastness of
the universe. There’s the huge garbage freighter, full to the brim of various
space garbage and rusty remains of all types of spacecraft. There’s the
lonely planet Phleebhut, consisting of endlessly stretching pink dunes and
dark horizons with thunder and lightning as the only thing to break up the
monotony. There’s Monolith Burger, a tiny fast-food dot in between the
endless stars. There’s the volcanic planet Ortega, consisting of a bunch of
rocks in pools of lava, above which there is still nothing but the starry sky
— and the moon of Pestulon, which you can watch through a telescope. It is
not until you descend into the cramped underground bunkers of ScumSoft that
you, very temporarily, lose touch with the starry skies — but not for long. Just like in Space Quest II, this vast space is
often way too lonesome — nary a living soul in most of the locations you
visit — but in this case, the loneliness comes across naturally, since the
planets in question have harsh conditions (Phleebhut is a near-constant death
trap, with lightning bolts, giant snakes, and venomous scorpazoids haunting
your every step; Ortega generates way too much heat to be survivable without
special equipment). On the other hand, you do encounter colorful aliens from time to time, such as the
unforgettable junk dealer Fester Blatz and a whole crowd of predictably
ridiculous aliens in the Monolith Burger (though, admittedly, most of those
guys do not have much to say other than «Quit crowding JERK!»), and these places provide a nice and
relieving contrast with the dangerous empty spaces all around. As expected, death follows you
everywhere, but almost never in a ridiculous manner — if something looks like
a potential threat, then it most likely is
a threat and you should stay away from it, but Fester Blatz is not going to
gun you down for shoplifting, and even the angry guy in the adjacent airlock
in Monolith Burger dispatches you for good only if you attempt to hijack his
ship twice in a row. Most of the
time you will probably not so much be running away from death as craving for it, just to watch all the
gory splatterfests and read all the hilarious messages that the Two Guys have
in store for you — but sometimes the situation does get tense, most obviously
when you are on the run from the invisible Terminator Arnoid or only have a
limited time to get inside ScumSoft before the guards take you down with
their terrifying Jello guns. However, humor is just as all-pervasive
as terror, be it on the menu of the Monolith Burger («Would you like some
Space Spuds with that?»), on the back of the postcards in Fester’s shop
(«Arrakis holds many delights for the adventurous vacationer... nothing can
compare with being crushed by a sandworm»), or in the obscure graffiti in the
depths of the garbage freighter («For a good time, don’t call HAL!»). The
jokes are funnier than they have ever been, and with the deaths gorier than
they have ever been, Space Quest III
delivers a juicier experience on all counts. At the same time, most of the
jokes still target pop culture, sci-fi clichés, and crass commercialism
rather than the protagonist — by the time of Space Quest IV, too many of them would be insultingly
self-referential, but in this game, Roger Wilco is actually treated with a
modicum of respect: he is a simple, silent, relatively witty and agile protagonist,
almost a space cowboy rather than a space janitor, and this creates a subtle
special bond between the player and the controlled sprite on screen, a bond
that would be hard to replicate in subsequent games just because Roger would
be much more of a «dork» with whom the player would probably not want to
identify. Here, it is all done just about right. |
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Technical features |
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Being the first (and only) Space Quest from Sierra’s second
generation (1988–1990) of adventure games, the third entry in the series
makes a predictably huge leap forward in terms of graphics, with increased
resolutions and larger color palettes; at the same time, Marc Crowe, like
William Skirvin in contemporary King’s
Quest and Larry series, goes
for a relatively austere look when it comes to pixel-populating the screen —
meaning that the game still looks extremely well today even when stretched
across a big chunk of a 1080p display, unlike those titles which tried to
make excessive use of every pixel and now look extremely blurry and painful. This is the first time when
Space Quest achieved a certain
degree of graphic monumentality — the desolate vistas of Phleebhut, the
purple-dune planet, and Ortega, the richly-red-lava planet, are particularly impressive
and vital in creating a general feel of awe; while I may certainly be
mistaken by not taking into consideration the many arcade games of the era, I
think this might have been the very first time in the history of plot-based
video games that computer graphics really showed their potential to compete
with sci-fi movies in a vivid portrayal of the vastness, beauty and
(sometimes) terror of the outer space — the first yellow brick in the road
that leads straight to Mass Effect. The game introduced proper
cut scenes, occasionally providing skilfully done close-ups of characters
(this is the first time we get to really ogle our precious Roger) and nice
animations — that change of look on Fester Blatz’s face when you show him the
glowing gem is beyond priceless. Even the arrogant grin on Elmo Pug’s mug
when he is taunting you before the robot battle is generated with enough
skill to make you really hate the sucker’s guts back in the day. And although
they would obviously improve on this particular art in later games, each and
every one of the bizarre life forms queuing up for their Happy Meal within
the confined space of Monolith Burger is well worth examining, particularly
the «Employee Of The Week» whose face looks like it has been seriously
infested by the Bagpipe Virus.
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Sound Deciding that their
renovation of Space Quest for the
new age of computing should show no inferiority whatsoever to King’s Quest, the Two Guys also got
hold of a professional composer — who somehow turned out to be no less than Bob
Siebenberg, the drummer for Supertramp. Actually, the main reason was that
Siebenberg happened to live in Oakhurst and was looking for some extra
musical jobs in between touring; he had never had any prior experience
working with computers, but the fresh excitement of the enterprise helped
generate some magic, and come up with a full soundtrack which is, indeed,
probably the second best soundtrack from Sierra’s second generation — after King’s Quest IV, of course. But where the King’s Quest IV soundtrack was understandably folk-and-Renaissance-based,
with MIDI flutes, lutes, and harps creating a suitable fairy-tale atmosphere,
the music of Space Quest III,
which also accompanies you for most of the game, is suitably electronic,
cold, and sonically distant. Thus, the "Garbage Freighter" theme
sounds like a beginner robot composer’s take on a slow funky dance, with a
subtle hint of constant unseen menace running through its bass pulses; the
Ortega theme is a grumbling, creaky, sluggish industrial-ambient composition,
with its mix of moody electronic hum and booming metal gear sounding not
unlike something off David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy; and the corridors of
ScumSoft are «enlivened» with spooky bass taps, scattered percussion bursts,
and occasional nonchalant whistlings of a couple bars from Roger’s theme to
get a combination of suspense and relief at the same time. The lighter moments in the game get
plenty of musical support, too — for instance, pushing forward through the
deadly pink dunes of Phleebhut is accompanied only by the sounds of gushing
winds, but as soon as you get to the safe haven of Fester’s World O’ Wonders,
a hilarious carnival theme begins playing, urging you to finally drop your
guard and relax. The easy-listening muzak of Monolith Burger quickly turns
out to be an elevator version of Roger’s own theme — and, of course, who
could ever forget the theme of Astro Chicken, which is essentially just one
bar of an old country theme looped for eternity... or at least until you
finally land all the bloody chickens? As a minor added bonus, Space Quest III features the first
ever spoken line in a Sierra game —
in the introduction scene, when Roger awakens in his pod and utters a single
"Where am I?" (Something I never got to experience until having
replayed the entire game thirty years later — because I, of course, played
the PC DOS version, and the digitized vocal audio was only working on Tandys,
Amigas, and Macs). This is, of course, little more than just a slight bit of
trivia — regular voiceover work would not start until more than a year later,
with Sierra’s third generation of games — but somehow in retrospect it still
adds a bit of gravity to the proceedings. And while I might be just imagining
things, it seems as if there is definitely something special to these early
full soundtracks — after they had become the normal state of affairs for
video games, they usually ceased to draw that much attention to themselves,
but back in 1988-89, it was very much about the challenge, with people really going all the way to prove that
digital music in video games can make all the difference there is, with King’s Quest IV and Space Quest III as the strongest
evidence for that. |
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Like
all Sierra games of its generation, Space
Quest III runs in Sierra’s Creative Interpreter, which means a cooler
font than before and the ability to pause the game while typing commands into
the parser.
The parser itself is relatively well designed (no silly bugs such as were
present in Larry II, for
instance), and allows for a limited amount of experimentation, usually on the
humorous side (e.g. if you type in "look
at girl" while staring at the Monolith Burger employee, you get this
response: "The clerk is offended
that you would think he’s a female. Any idiot should be able to tell the
difference"). Action sequences are pretty
minimalistic — control your Astro Chicken with arrow keys, punch and block
punches with your robot during the Nuk’em Duk’em sequence with Elmo, track
and shoot down fighter ships on your control hud, nothing special or particularly
difficult / frustrating about any of that. Some agility is required while
navigating the tricky paths of Ortega, and there is a somewhat boring, if
altogether funny, sequence in the ScumSoft offices where, so as not to
attract attention to yourself, you have to empty («vaporize») the garbage
basket of every employee on your way to Elmo’s office — this one can get a
bit tricky if you miss a few pixels when correctly positioning Roger, but
nothing to lose sleep about. The overhead menu is
typical SCI, minimalistic and pragmatic; extra features include «VaporCalc»,
a non-functioning abacus intended to make fun of the calculator function
included in just about every piece of software at the time, and, of course,
the «Boss Key» which, this time around, really puts you sulking in the
corner. In other words, just don’t bother snooping around the menu and get on
with playing the game — a principle that would be somewhat violated in
subsequent installments, with their extra icons and stuff, but here it works
just fine. |
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Although in many retrospective ratings it is Space Quest IV, not III,
which is typically extolled as the pinnacle of the series, I think it mainly
has to do with the technical excellence of that game — better graphics and
addition voice acting, including Gary Owens’ fabulous narration, would be
objective improvements that cannot be neglected. However, the disadvantage of
all later Space Quest games would
be that they were comfortably set in an already well established formula,
with running gags and self-referential jokes that could get stale and
annoying. In this game, on the
other hand, nothing as of yet is set in stone, and, in particular, Roger
Wilco is still more of an ingenious space traveler than the parodic space
loser he would become in the next three games (in a very similar manner to
Larry Laffer, whose portrayal in 1988-89 was also distinctly different from
later games along the very same lines). This implies a delicate and efficient
balance between humor, action, and suspense which would be seriously skewed
towards humor (and not always genuinely funny humor) in later games. Other
than technical antiquity (which, come to think of it, is not a problem now
that all Sierra games look like
museum pieces), the only common criticisms of Space Quest III which I am aware of is the late-plot-arrival (not
so much of a problem, in my opinion, as an interesting and rare artistic
feature) and the fact that the game is short — indeed, a complete playthrough
exploring every nook and cranny barely covers two hours of gameplay, but the
curious thing is that, due to the many different locations covered in the
game, it does not feel particularly
short: in fact, upon completion there is a distinct feeling that you have
just emerged from a fairly lengthy Odyssey. You found your way out of a giant
garbage freighter, you defeated a terrifying killer machine on a desert
planet, you accepted a rescue mission at a fast food joint, you caused a
volcanic eruption on the hottest planet in the universe, you infiltrated the
underground lair of the galaxy’s vilest software pirate company, you survived
a robotic battle in the arena, you emerged victorious from a major battle in
the skies, and you even helped your own creators get employment at Sierra
On-Line — just how long does a game
like this need to be? In
all seriousness, I could never find any major flaws with this game; to me, it
is as close to utmost perfection as an adventure game can get. The length,
the diversity of settings, the action, the humor, the satire, the suspense,
the beauty of the graphics and the music, all in just the right proportions —
a textbook example of how to make an adventure game into a piece of art, even
at a stage when you do not yet have the blessing of properly advanced
technology to go along with your imagination and creativity. Incidentally, Space Quest III is the only game in
the series which, up to this day, has not received a complete remake, either
from Sierra itself or the independent fan community: there have been
occasional attempts and partial results (including a fairly awful-looking 3D
reimagination), but nothing that has ever been brought to completion — and
the reason, I think, is that the original game is just so well-rounded in all
of its aspects (and still looks and sounds so good today!), that people
instinctively cower before the challenge. If you ever want to try one of
those rusty old classics, yet remain unsure if you will be able to handle
EGA-era graphics instead of modern 3D, text boxes instead of voice acting,
and command parsers instead of controllers, Space Quest III is probably the very first title that would end
up on my recommendation list. |
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