Pestulon's Impressions...

[AndreaDraco]

Yesterday, after three rough months, I finally finished Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon.

I've never been a SQ fan, primary 'cause I'm not a sci-fi fan nor a fan of comedic adventures. I didn't like the first two games in the series - particularly the second one, which I found poorly executed and not funny at all - and the first half of SQ3 left me with pretty much the same impression: wacky without any real sense (as opposed, in this regard, to LSL in which, for example, comedy was always a medium, not an end); zany and extremely superficial (LSL, at least the first trilogy, was always very human, and Larry always had a coherent, moving personality); incoherent and (way too much) unforgiving.

Then I landed on planet Pestulon and things changed.

The game gained a new dimension, thank to the humor that, from meaningless (in my opinion) parody of everything, becomes sharp sarcasm and to Roger that finally starts to show hints of a personality. Moreover, the meta-game finale, with Ken Williams welcoming the Two Guys from Andromeda, really drove me away, since I'm a total sucker for this kind of things (and that's one of the reason I love so much LSL3, for its marvelous finale!).

Following the wave, and curious to see how things would have unfolded, I fired up Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers and started playing it. Now, the main reason I disliked the first two games was a certain lack of continuity (same reason I'm not a fan of LSL6-LSL7, otherwise great games), with Roger that seemed to retain scarce or no memory of its previous efforts, but from the very beginning of SQ4 I felt this sense of continuity - the game clearly shows that time has passed, that something has happened on Xenon from Roger's last visit; to cut it, the game really gave me the impression of a vivid, coherent world - and now I can't wait to play it (add to this that I adore time travels and I found ingenious how the Two Guys treated them in this one!)

[Tawmis]

If you like time travel and you have played the previous SQ games - SQIV holds a few very special treats for you.

[MusicallyInspired]

Space Quest IV is by far the best of all of them. The masterpiece. I love time travel stories as well. SQ4 didn't disappoint in any way. Space Quest 5 and 6, however, seem to be the funniest and make me laugh the most. SQ5 was done by Mark Crowe without Scott Murphy and SQ6 was done by Josh Mandel and finished up (a little poorly) by Scott Murphy. As such SQ6 is pretty weird. There's a lot of things I don't like about it and I don't totally know if I consider it part of the SQ canon, but it is probably the funniest out of all of them.