Space Quest starts out as what is essentially a shit stealth game played via text parser. It was far too much of a pain to struggle against the parser, the save system, the control system and the instadeaths, so I gave up pretty quickly on that one. I skimmed through a playthrough and it seems like there was some nice presentation there (the Blues Brothers show up playing in a Mos Eisley type cantina at one point!) but also a lot of bullshit gameplay-wise. For example, to buy a spaceship, save-scumming your way through a fruit machine until you eventually scrape together enough money is the intended solution!
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Space Quest II is a little smoother than the first one. I'm a bit more au fait with the controls and how to save, thanks to watching that playthrough of the first one. I guess if I'd found a manual for the first game I might have given it more of a shot, but there was probably too much bullshit still for me to have got far. Anyway, there's also no stealth, they seem to have put more effort into room descriptions and such so that it's clearer what the possibility space is at any given time, and the presentation is nicer. More layers of depth, cutscene animations, and a fun moment where you realise you can walk up the walls and ceiling on the outside of the ship. It eases you in a little easier too, giving you a janitorial task and some easy navigation before you get swept up in the story. It's a little funnier, too. I've chuckled a few times already. The series villain, Sludge Vohaul, gets abruptly introduced as the person behind the events of the first game. (Confusingly, he's also related to someone else called Sludge mentioned in that game, too, though different manuals etc have given different explanations as to how. Back in the days before people worried about franchise continuity!) He bungs you off to a mining planet, you escape your guards and end up in a generic fantasy forest, and now I'm stuck.
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Okay, so this game does also have lots of bullshit! It does bring in stealth (basically, if a message comes up saying you hear footsteps or a craft or whatever then you have a small amount of time to navigate around whatever trees are in the way and get to the next screen, and if you've got too far to go, bad luck, and also sometimes it's actually someone who you need to talk to but there's no way of knowing that), plus now it has dreadful pixel-perfect death mazes to negotiate. Along with not actually being able to tell what is screen exit and what is wall, and also having to figure out if the parser allows you to use "rub on self" at this particular moment, and some crappy puzzles, it's not worth me struggling through even with a guide.
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Space Quest III has slightly nicer graphics and continuous background music, and it made me laugh by asking me not to refer to the TIE Fighter in the junkyard by that actual copyrighted term. I doubt I'll last very long in this one either, though. (I think that maybe 4 is the one where it all gets a little more modern, and is also the most well thought-of, so maybe I'll have more luck there...)
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This is essentially the same as the first two games. Some much nicer graphics in parts - often better-looking than Maniac Mansion, and occasionally equals Last Crusade but is mostly a lot uglier than that game. It's still running on a text parser though, while those games have already moved to the SCUMM verbset, and the puzzles are still very frustrating. The story has fully devolved into random pop culture references and post-modernism now - you get chased around by a Terminator pastiche, then rescue the Space Quest designers and drop them off at Sierra HQ.
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Space Quest IV does indeed take a step up in graphical fidelity, and I think also moves to a cycling verb cursor. But also, Amiga Power gave it 19% so it may not be the series high I thought...
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19% was generous. The production values are relatively impressive - it got a full talkie CR-ROM in '92, and it puts the 256 colours to full use (although it's pretty ugly overall, nothing like the strong, cohesive art direction of MI2 or FoA) - but fucking hell I got stuck even finding the first puzzle and there's 'stealth' stuff AGAIN. You can't get further than picking an item up with out either a robot or a zombie showing up and killing you. The sound was really grating too. The only positives I can find are that having a Jay Ward type narrator for all the descriptions was a good choice, and some of the background art looks quite nice, albeit in that smeary digitised early 90s way.
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Space Quest V - I got a bit further in this one, but I'm giving up. They've now decided to be a Star Trek spoof (mostly TOS, though they clumsily throw in some TNG as well, plus some Alien and Predator - I'd say this is the Spaceballs of adventure games, but it's closer to Epic Movie), which might not be too bad an idea if it weren't all so fiddly and boring. You spend the first part of the game cleaning a floor, then collecting garbage pods - this wouldn't be so bad if it were a quick tutorial section like in SQ2, but here you have to laboriously clean every pixel of that floor, and then to collect the garbage pods you have to sit in your chair (it farts EVERY TIME) tell your pilot to set a course, get coordinates from the manual (copy protection that they decided to leave in for the CD edition to "preserve the Space Quest experience"), type them in, tell your pilot to go to "lite speed", wait for thirty seconds while you travel, then when you approach the planet tell the pilot to go to regular speed, then activate the garbage collection. Every single time you want to go somewhere, you have to do this. Then there are all the other usual issues - you don't have any way of knowing what's an interactive item so you have to click on every 10x10 group of pixels just in case, there's no feedback on why something won't work, you have to walk in and out of rooms to trigger random stuff, everything's incredibly slow and the hotspots are so small that even with a guide and a video playthrough I found it difficult to successfully solve puzzles. The sound is still crap and there's not even any voice acting this time. The graphics aren't awful but they're cheap and unpolished. Laughably, for such a cheap game, it's also plastered with product placement for Sprint. It's got shitty minigames (like a battleships clone where you play on three boards at once) and QTEs. The latter is what caused me to quit the game.
In retrospect, I can't believe anyone has the temerity to throw accusations of 'inscrutable logic' and 'pixelhunting' at games like DOTT (or even the D&B games) when stuff like this is out there. I now suspect a lot of that is because people have heard these are common issues with adventure games and so feel obliged to apply them to every single one just to sound smart.
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Space Quest 6 arbitrarily gets rid of the Star Trek thing and makes you a janitor again. It looks okay, even though it doesn't stand up to the better-looking games of even four years earlier - it's got a Gobliiins type look and is generally more attractive and cohesive than the past couple of entries, even if the heavily dithered backgrounds clash a little and there's still the occasional ugly 3D model plonked on top. The narrator is back, and there are other bits and pieces of voice acting. The sound's a little nicer, and the music is still the same 20 second minimalist loops, but at least the synths are a little nicer. Unfortunately, the gameplay's still crap. It's the same engine, so all the UI issues are still there, and It starts off with a very irritating puzzle, and then chucking you into one of those galling, sprawling hubs but with zero direction - 'you're on shore-leave, have a wander', that's it.
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Right, I had a look at a walkthrough and apparently there really is nothing to the game, either puzzle- or story-wise, except 'wander about, click on absolutely everything, and try everything with everything else in the hope that something happens'. So bugger it, that's me done with the Space Quest games. They could occasionally be funny, but they played like shit, sounded like shit and mostly looked like shit.
Overall rating: Red.
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