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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 4, 1991 |
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Main credits: |
Creative Director: Bill Davis Programming: Scott Murphy, Doug Oldfield Music: Mark Seibert, Ken Allen |
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Useful links: |
Playthrough: Part 1 (65 mins.) |
Part 2 (65 mins.) |
Part 3 (60 mins.) |
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By all accounts, Space Quest IV was the game that
should have properly launched Roger Wilco into the future — the future, that
is, of the gaming industry, rewarding our favorite janitorial anti-hero with
all the benefits that had already been laid upon his more privileged royal
colleague, King Graham: improved, hand-painted, 256-color graphics, brand new
point-and-click interface, and, ultimately, a full speech pack, finally
letting Roger complete his dorky image by talking to players in an
appropriately dorky voice. And the game did all that,
for sure, but not without a certain layer of dark clouds on the horizon.
First, despite nobody being able to tell at the time, it would turn out to be
the very last game that could be strictly credited to the «Two Guys From
Andromeda», whose partnership, allegedly for reasons more technical than
personal, would soon be dissolved, as only Mark Crowe ended up working on Space Quest V and only Scott Murphy on
Space Quest VI (which would
actually be more of a Josh Mandel project anyway). This is not to imply that Mark and
Scott were actually getting bored with their franchise and their parodic
universe, but it might imply that life was taking its heavy toll on the
creators, and that original excitement was slowly giving way to predictable
and exhausting routine. Second, Space Quest IV is precisely the place where you realize that
Space Janitor Roger Wilco has finally begun to exist within the framework of
his own personal mythology. The game was chockful not just with references to
Roger’s past — the plotline makes very little sense if you have not played
the previous three entries — but even to his future, stretching the Space Quest universe to almost
ridiculous dimensions without taking the time to properly populate these
dimensions, like staking a multi-million acre land claim without even taking
the time to investigate what lies within (gold mines or saline deserts).
Although, from a technical perspective, the franchise had just as much to
gain as any other at the time, in terms of actual substantial content the Two
Guys had very little left to prove. All the basic ingredients of the Space Quest universe had been
distilled and combined over the previous three games, and now all that was
left to the authors was to go on playing by their own rules — something which
is, of course, inevitable for any fictional universe if you let it run long
enough, but which may or may not be felt too
bluntly, depending on the artist’s talent and professionalism. In purely formal terms, though, Space Quest IV was an overwhelming
success. The game sold well, as usual; was largely loved by critics; and even
in today’s retro-lists, is often listed as the single best game in the Space
Quest series and one of the finest Sierra games ever. To me, this
evaluation has always seemed inflated — I was definitely not a big fan of the
game when I first played it — but there is no denying, either, that there is
quite a bit to praise about the experience, and not just its technical aspects (at least one of which, the
point-and-click interface, is always a minus rather than a plus in my book,
but you know that already if you have read my thoughts on King’s Quest V). So let us take a more
detailed look at the game’s various aspects, and see just how proverbially
mixed that reaction can be. |
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Content evaluation |
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I have to admit that I
harbor a bit of a distaste for convoluted, anything-can-happen,
time-travel-based plots in general, so if you want a detailed retelling of
the sequence of events in Space Quest
IV, go consult Wikipedia or something like that. In a nutshell, though,
it goes like this: Roger Wilco’s old arch-nemesis, Sludge Vohaul,
mysteriously comes back to life and is about to tear Roger a new one, when a
tall dark stranger appears out of nowhere and saves Roger’s ass by opening a
rift and sending him into another dimension... the dimension of Space Quest XII, to be exact. What happens next — as in,
the actual «plot» — is of very little importance, as Roger gets time-shifted
from one Space Quest sub-universe
to another, and eventually manages to outperform Mr. Vohaul, as well as earn
himself a major surprise when the identity of the tall dark stranger is
finally disclosed. Just as it was in Space
Quest III, for quite a long time you simply wander around without a clear
understanding of your purpose in life; the problem is, it does not feel
particularly satisfactory even when you do
grasp that purpose. In the place of a coherent and sarcastic story about rescuing
a pair of hip programmers from a vile software company of space pirates, Space Quest IV offers you a series of
fun, but disconnected vignettes: «Roger Wilco Is The Last Man On Earth
Alive», «Roger Wilco Is Introduced To Third-Wave Feminism» (actually, looks
more like second-wave, but what can you expect from a couple of old-school
programmers?), «Roger Wilco Is Lost In The Supermarket», etc. Approximately
90% of the game is really spent on these vignettes; each time the game gets
back to its main plot, it is mostly moanin’ and groanin’ time. To add insult
to injury, the final «boss fight» with Vohaul is not even a proper parody of
a proper fight, but rather an incomprehensible and illogical mess whose
design was probably put off until the last day before shipping. In the end, Space Quest IV is the only game in the
series which, if you asked me what it was about, the most I could squeeze out
of myself even after having just replayed it would be, «uhh... about time
travel?» Because you, too, will probably be left behind with memories of
having just visited Space Quest XII:
Vohaul’s Revenge II and Space Quest
X: Latex Babes Of Estros rather than memories of what you actually did to get back to the regular
timeline. Oh, right: apparently there is some planetary-level catastrophe
that you somehow have to remedy by going back and forth through time, and
that catastrophe was caused by... a virus-laden copy of a Leisure Suit Larry game (whether that
had anything to do with Sludge Vohaul or not, I’m still not sure). Anyway, stripping away the
disappointing rubble of the game’s main plot, its events are genuinely
enjoyable only outside of the plot
— such as Roger’s meeting with the «Babes of Estros», a fairly hilarious (and
nasty) jab at overconfident feminism on the part of the Two Guys; Roger’s
re-visiting the planet of Kerona from Space
Quest I, just to contemplate the differences between two eras of computer
graphics; and, most importantly, Roger’s adventures at the shopping mall,
where the Two Guys’ sarcastic attitudes towards all sides of modern pop
culture — be it arcade gaming, clothing, fast food joints, or advertising — really
break through and threaten to drown you in waves of non-stop laughter. These
moments seriously raise the bar on the series’ comedic potential, though at
the expense of completely and thoroughly solidifying the principal character as
a boorish nincompoop rather than a smartass Janitor Ivan that he was in the
previous games. This is, indeed, the
breaking point where Space Quest
became way too self-conscious about itself and began, much too often, falling
back on the inside jokes and tropes of its own mythology rather than
continuously breaking new grounds in storytelling. Sooner or later, even if
Gary Owens does an overall great job as the ridiculously pompous narrator,
you are going to get tired of having Roger’s alleged incompetence and
retardation shoved in your face all the time — even as he keeps quite
cleverly solving one tricky puzzle after another. Where the first three
games, especially the third one, were able to keep up a nice balance between «heroic
action» and comedy, Space Quest IV
plunges way too quickly and way too deeply into the territory of pure farce.
A strong and complex plot could have helped — which is why Space Quest V would be somewhat of an
improvement — but apparently, this time around the laughs were deemed more
important, and the Two Guys simply did not have enough time for much else. |
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One thing you definitely
will not remember Space Quest IV
for is the strength of its puzzles.
The game was made at the asscrack of dawn of Sierra’s point-and-click era,
when the interface had already been remade but its functionality and purposes
still remained somewhat unclear — which means that most of the puzzles just
involve grabbing object A and using it on object B, with your main challenges
defined as pixel-hunting for both objects. The game is about as difficult to
complete as digging the proper hint book out of a pile of other hint books, or having to
backtrack all the way to a shopping mall to buy a necessary ingredient (a
rather tedious segment by itself). You might be duped for a while by all the
extra icons, such as «Smell» and «Lick», into thinking the game offers many
more possibilities, but it soon turns out that all of these extra things are
there just for laughs — we shall get to that later. Three things are added to regular
object-based puzzle-solving, and all three are questionable. One is, of
course, the dreadful copy protection crap — each time you need to fly
somewhere in your time pod, you have to enter some bizarre symbols that you
can only look up in the game’s manual: I can understand doing this once, but
having to do it every time would be seriously annoying for all the honest
players (and a good incentive to download a pirated cracked copy, as I
confess to actually have done at the time). For some reason, this kind of
bullshit was really hot with Sierra at the time — Larry V used precisely the same scheme, and gave a good incentive
to software pirates all over the «uncivilized» world. The second thing is that a lot, and I
really mean it, a lot of your
actions are heavily dependent on perfect timing. Everywhere you go, you have
to avoid something, wait for something, or seize that one tiny window in time
that gets you what you need to accomplish and/or saves you from certain
death. This aspect became particularly frustrating with the appearance of
ever more powerful CPUs, since timed events in Sierra games were often
benchmarked against current CPUs rather than actual time — making the game
virtually unplayable in spots — but even upon release, all these timed events
must have seemed like a cheap copout from the actual challenge to design a
good puzzle. Finally, there are the actual arcade
sequences — for those of us who already hated the timed events, these must
have felt like an extra vicious slap in the face. Granted, they are all
optional; one even actively warns
you about itself and proposes to skip it ("not recommended for die-hard
adventure players, the arcade-squeamish, or those with poor to non-existent
motor skills" — yeah, thanks for rubbing this in my face, buddy!). But you
cannot boast the highest score possible if you do not play these arcades, and
you are still forced to go through those pangs of guilt and self-doubt if you
choose to skip them, right? Granted, they are at least somewhat original,
particularly the Monolith Burger mini-game where you have to flip as many
burgers as possible before the conveyer begins insanely speeding up; the other
game, «Ms. Astro Chicken», is a slightly more complicated variation on «Astro
Chicken» from Space Quest III and
is not really half-bad as an arcade diversion, but I’d still rather it were
just a minor side quest with no effect on the score, and certainly not at the
expense of proper adventure game
puzzles. In the end, if you strip away all the
game-breaking timed crap and all the arcade sequences, you are left with
virtually nothing to challenge your logical skills and adventurist intuition.
In this, Space Quest IV is not alone
among its Sierra contemporaries from the early point-and-click years — King’s Quest V and Larry V both suffer from the exact
same problem. Fortunately, at least Space
Quest IV is saved from being a complete disaster by that single important
factor which is intentionally missing in King’s
Quest V and accidentally missing in Larry
V — the humor. |
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At least in terms of spirit, Space Quest IV works more often than
not. Despite spending the first big chunk of the game in a lonesome and
somber environment (the future ruins of Xenon), the game ends up as the most
populated Space Quest title up to
date — from the proud Latex Babes of Estros and all the way to that planet’s
lively supermarket, Roger can finally find plenty of people to interact with,
which, in turn, raises the game’s comedic potential significantly. In
addition, traveling by time pod gives you the ability to create your own
Instant Contrasts wherever you feel like it — you can skedaddle back and
forth between the lively shopping crowds on Estros and the desolate solitude
of Xenon at the blink of an eye (just keep your damn copyright protection
codes close at hand). Through most of the game, you are
actively hunted by the «Sequel Police», a mysterious special force which is
seemingly on Vohaul’s payroll — meaning a lot of tension and a general
directive not to tarry too long in one place. Xenon is never a safe zone, and
neither are the rocky crags of Estros; even the mall, at one point in the
game, becomes one large chase scene, though at most other times you can
stroll through it without too much fear (as long as you do not shoplift or
anything). This is nicely carried over from previous games, where being
stalked by various robotic enemies was also Roger’s favorite pastime, though
occasionally tension spills over into frustration, particularly if you run
into various timing issues (very easy to do both in Vohaul’s fortress on
Xenon and on the rocks of Estros). At the same time, the game is so much
skewed in the direction of humor that «tension» rarely ever stands a chance
of giving you the rightful jiffies, certainly not when you have Gary Owens
triumphantly narrating the viscerous details of each one of your deaths — and
most definitely not when you get around to the shopping mall, where getting
chased by the Sequel Police and dying in the process is just a natural part
of the life-as-a-joke cycle. The mall, with its endless lambasting of pop and
consumer culture, is the high point of the game, be it the sickeningly friendly
bot advertising «CDGIROMTV» or the «Cyber-Depunker» ("works while your
child sleeps to replace black market implants") at the local Radio
Shock, or Roger fiddling through a set of hilarious hintbooks for games like SimSim ("a simulated environment in
which you can create any simulated environment!") or King’s Quest XXXVIII: Quest For Disk Space
(where the joke is now on the Two Guys — who is going to laugh today at a
game "over 12 gigabytes in length"?). And few things are more
hilarious in video games than holding a conversation with a variety of burger
ingredients ("I smell like any other set of 299 year old buns! While I
have absolutely no taste, I do have a shelf life of three centuries"). For me, personally, the highest point
of the game was Roger getting bullied by the alien bikers in the bar on
Kerona — where everything could have gone smoothly were it not for the fact
that the planet remained in the CGA graphic resolution of Space Quest I, while Roger landed on
it in his full VGA 256-color glory, earning himself some serious burns from
the «boomer generation» ("Whatsamatter, monochrome not good enough for
you?"). The allegory of CGA vs. VGA symbolizing the nerd vs. jock
conflict just works so alluringly well, and something tells me that it would
no longer be possible to play on similar oppositions today (what are they
going to do, mock the 2K standard from a 4K-viewpoint? hardly imaginable). This rampant humor, which indeed
surpasses anything the Two Guys
tried out earlier — well, some of the jokes in Space Quest III are quite on the same level, but there simply
aren’t enough of them — is arguably the main reason why fans hold this game
in such high esteem. The fact that they have little, if anything, to do with
the storyline is irrelevant — as is the storyline itself, actually. What is
relevant is that at this point, the Space
Quest franchise has fully crystallized as a barrelhouse of laughs, making
its elements of action, suspense, and visual fantasy at best secondary to its
comedy. I can see where people might like that — why does one play Space Quest
if not for the jokes? — but I would still like to have seen the franchise be
able to retain the same balance as, say, Quest
For Glory had managed to preserve until the very end, with its clever-as-heck
mix of the serious and the comical. |
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Technical features |
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It goes without saying that
Space Quest IV benefited hugely
from the transition to 256-color VGA and painted images instead of fully
digital graphics. (There was also a downscaled EGA version for players with
antiquated hardware, but, like all such affairs, it looks downright
horrible). However, the fact that much of the game takes place in cramped
locations, and that the emphasis is consistently on humor rather than on
visuals, I doubt that it would ever end up on anyone’s list of «Top 10
Visually Stunning Sierra-On Line games». Of all the locations,
probably the most visually expressive are the ruins of Xenon in «Space Quest
XII». The lonesome desolation of the place, with huge abandoned drab concrete
structures and rubble contrasting sharply with the red-tinted atmosphere provides
feels that are not unlike the ones experienced in the previous games on
planets such as Phleebhut and Ortega, only this time emphasizing the man-made
nature of the desolation. The nature sights on Estros are also coolly
designed — there is a little maze of natural rocky corridors and stairways
that looks like something out of a whacky Sixties’ fantasy movie — but, alas,
they are there only for a few moments, and you do not really get to enjoy
them much because of the Sequel Police running hot on your trail. Close-up cutscenes are
generally fine: the Latex Babes of Estros have been arduously shaped out with
the diligence worthy of a Leisure Suit
Larry artist, the pigboss manager of Monolith Burger is the evil grin of
capitalism staring you right in the face, and although the ugly bikers of
Kerona normally look like CGI sprites, their own personal close-up lets you
experience all the horror of having to face such a gang of thugs in an
intergalactic drinking environment. They are all, however, few and far
between. As for the animation, extra
resolution and early motion capture techniques have certainly helped Roger
Wilco (and his friends) become more human-like when you walk him across the
screen, but I do not necessarily see this as an improvement in retrospect:
most of those early 1990s Sierra sprites suffer from too many sharp angles
and too much blockiness — in a way, I prefer the «matchstick legs» of earlier
sprites just because they did not even begin to aspire to human likeliness.
Still, you gotta appreciate the effort that the animators put into fleshing
out Roger’s moves during the short segment in which he has to cross-dress —
those little bits when the guy has to keep his balance while moving around
the mall in high heels are priceless. |
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With Bob Siebenberg no
longer in the picture, the musical soundtrack by Mark Seibert and Ken Allen
here is decidedly mediocre: not bad per se, but lacking the futuristic
mystery of Siebenberg’s ambient compositions and more clearly oriented at the
decisive interpretation of Space Quest
as «comedy». Only the
basic theme of the post-apocalyptic Xenon is emotionally intense and
impressive on its own — cold, gruff ice plateaus of synth tones overlaid upon
grim, martial-sounding synth bass and conveying an impression of death and
devastation at your feet and danger
around the corner at the same time. But the musical themes accompanying
lighter and funnier places — the mall, most importantly — are not much to
write home about, except those that are already recycled from the previous
game, such as the Monolith Burger and the Astro Chicken themes. Much more important, of course, is the
fact that in December 1992, Space Quest
IV became the first ever Space
Quest to be fully voiced — mostly by Sierra’s own employees or
little-known names in the voice actor industry, but with one very important
addition: radio host Gary Owens as Narrator. Gary might be the single most important reason
behind the fans’ adulation, since his usual deadpan-nonsense style serves him
so well in a Space Quest setting.
You most certainly have heard nothing until you have heard Gary declare
"It’s against the Third Law of Mall Security to be caught licking mall
components!" or "Take it from someone who knows sick: licking
corpses is going way beond simple dementia!" And the good news is that
he has approximately 90% of the game’s lines — Roger himself speaks only in
the rarest of situations, and most of the other characters are restricted to,
at best, one or two scenes. (Interestingly enough, Scott Murphy himself
voices Sludge Vohaul, but since the vocals are electronically encoded for
Terrifying Effect, you do not really get a whole lot of personality from the
experience). That said, as great as Gary’s
contribution to the game is, he is also one of the biggest reasons why the
entire game feels like one big vaudeville show — when that ridiculously
arch-pompous intonation crops up even in the most terrifying places (Xenon),
nothing de-terrifies the experience better than yet another Gary Owens bomb.
I am very happy to see the man’s voice talent preserved in such a form in
this game — but I am also very happy that Space
Quest III came out before the digital speech era, and before the Two Guys felt like every single line in the game
needed a comedic flair to it, rather than just a certain percentage of them. |
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Interface As
one of the first Sierra games with the brand new point-and-click interface, Space
Quest IV shares all the benefits and disadvantages of King’s Quest V. The text parser is gone
for good, but in your actions you are essentially limited to three operations
— «look», «talk», «take / use» something, with fairly generic responses for
the latter two when applied to the majority of objects. Perhaps somewhat
dissatisfied with the crude limitations of such an interface, the Two Guys
got a wee bit more creative than Roberta Williams and added two more icons —
«Smell» (a nose) and «Taste» (a tongue). Unfortunately, they are there mostly
for the laughs, never serving any important purpose — again, giving a boring
generic response when applied to most objects, but occasionally quite amusing
indeed (don’t forget to smell and taste all the burger ingredients, for instance).
Still, their addition feels more like an early parody of the point-and-click
ideology than an attempt to intellectualize the interface, if you know what I
mean. Other than «Smell» and
«Taste», however, there is nothing out of ordinary about the interface (no
boss key, no special options other than the usual save / restore / quit,
etc.). The gameplay is almost fully predictable, too, with the exception of
the already mentioned arcade sequences — of which Ms. Astro Chicken is the
actually smoothly functioning one, well programmed for anybody with a soft
spot for archaic arcade games. (The Monolith Burger sequence, though, is only
good for all the laughs from talking with Ketchup and Mustard). Do watch out,
however, for timing-related bugs — the escape from the Sequel Police in the
mall can, in particularly, be a really tough challenge even for those who
have properly configured their DOSBox for playing in the modern age. Shame on
you, Two Guys, for spending so much time thinking on the future of Space Quest and not so much on the
future of computer processing power! |
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A brief survey shows that people usually have fond memories of Space Quest IV and tepid memories of Space Quest VI, despite the two games
having much in common (the presence of Gary Owens, for one thing): the
defended point of view here is that IV
was funny and fresh, while VI truly
passed the point of self-parody. Personally, though, I think that VI simply took all the flaws that were
already present in IV and amplified
them — but then at least VI had
something resembling a coherent plot, whereas IV was there largely for the laughs. (Not to mention I’d much
rather play Stooge Fighter any time
of day than Ms. Astro Chicken!) Anyway,
in the end I still like the game —
enough to heartily recommend it to anybody, young or old, who hasn’t played
it yet. Its good points — the humor, the sarcasm, the occasional wittiness,
the pervasive Gary Owens — outweigh the bad points or, at least, render them
forgivable. However, along with Leisure
Suit Larry, Space Quest IV is
one of the two strongest arguments that the Founding Fathers of Sierra
On-Line had really lived through their Golden Age in the second half of the
Eighties. While there would still be fresh blood, most notably Lori Cole and
Jane Jensen, who understood how to bring adventure games properly up to the
standards of a new decade, the old blood, like the Two Guys and Al Lowe (and
Roberta Williams, for that matter), found itself too heavily weighted down by
its glorious legacy and coasting on its achievements. Curiously
(running a bit ahead), while Space
Quest IV and VI would indeed be
quite similar in tone and atmosphere, the fifth game in the series would be
significantly different — and unquestionably superior to both of these even
while completely lacking voice acting. The reason? The fifth game was far
more focused on the plot (a genuine
StarTrek-ish adventure) than on the humorous mini-vignettes that constitute
the majority of both of those other games. With that much invested in the
story, there was less time to be spent on silly inside jokes and the
ever-annoying deprecation of Roger Wilco’s character (though there would
still be plenty of humor). In a way, Space
Quest V would feel more like the proper sequel to Space Quest III to me than its predecessor — proving that the
cruel course of history is not really irreversible as long as there is the
proper will to reverse it. |
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