Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier

The Good
Janitor Roger Wilco had some great adventures over the years. He retrieved the stolen Star Generator from the hands of the Sariens, dealt with Sludge Vohaul twice, rescued the Two Guys from Andromeda, and even commandeered a garbage scow. Now he's back in the sixth and final chapter in the Space Quest series. After being demoted to Janitor Second Class, he is granted shore leave on Polysorbate LX where things get a bit interesting for Roger.

The Spinal Frontier was made at a time when Sierra developed their games using the SCI-2 engine. SCI-2 was capable of delivering high resolutions, and it was the same one that powered Gabriel Knight, King's Quest VII, and Torin's Passage. The graphics are far more colorful than the previous SQ offerings. There are also 3-D renderings of the spaceships which look damn impressive. When the subtitles are turned on, the green text always stand out against the black background. SVGA cards were the norm back in 1995, so the only way to play the game is by getting one.

There is a lot of humor as well as references to popular culture. I enjoyed playing “Stooge Fighter 3” as one of the three characters who perform amusing special attacks. I also liked Roger executing the Vulga Nerve Pinch on a guard so that you can grab his keys and steal his shuttle. Having Roger walk through a virtual Windows 3.1 desktop is also a nice touch.

Death can come to Roger in a variety of ways. Sierra altered the dialog boxes so that instead of the usual three buttons – Restore, Restart, and Quit – you are given the option to go back to the point where you died. This saves you from saving the game before doing a thing that will lead Roger to his death, so there's no excuse not to die when you have the opportunity.

All the characters you meet have their own personalities, and some of them are willing to help you. My favorite characters from Space Quest III make a return. Elmo Pug has gone from controlling attacking robots to selling cheat sheets, while Fester Blatz has set up the same sort of business on Polysorbate LX. I also like the Endodroid, a take on Schwarzenegger.

The music is just great if you use a General MIDI device such as the Roland SC-88, and if you only have a Sound Blaster, you don't know what you're missing out on. There is some good voice acting in the game. Gary Owens returns as the narrator, delivering the same style as in Space Quest IV. Just examining everything on the screen and doing the impossible generates a hilarious response. Actors voice multiple characters, and they did a good job as well.

The Bad
Roger has made a few enemies during his adventures, and the games which introduced them gives an explanation as to why they want to take revenge on him. Vohaul, for example, plans to infest Roger's home planet with life-insurance salesman as Roger thwarted Vohaul's plans to use the Star Generator for his evil purposes. Having said that, Roger is introduced to Sharpei, his main antagonist he meets early in SQ6, but we have no idea why she is out for Roger's blood since the game provides no explanation why.

Some of the puzzles made no sense to me at all, with the worst one being the Datacorder puzzle, in which you need to flip switches and move things around to turn it into a homing beacon. Not only was it an annoyance, but it is also serves as copy protection which has no place in a CD-ROM game of that era.

Major game companies like Sierra did not foresee what would happen if people tried to run the game on a machine higher than those listed on the box. In this case, if you try to play the game on a Pentium machine, you will encounter timer-related issues like the endodroid hunter ignoring you and the crashes in sickbay. Grab yourself a 486 or use DOSBox if you encounter these.

The Bottom Line
SQ6 has it ups and downs, but the game is pure entertainment at its best. It boasts superb graphics and an excellent soundtrack. As mentioned in the introduction of this review, SQ6 is the final installment of the Space Quest series. Every SQ game is very good, and I have some fond memories of all the games. I enjoyed tip-toeing around Vohaul and listening to his life support in SQ2 (the Apple IIGS version); exploring each of the planets in SQ3, SQ4 and SQ5; the way the game encourages cheating in SQ5; and listening to the excellent soundtrack in SQ6. There was going to be a seventh game, which was going to be in 3-D and would feature characters from past adventures. However, by 1998 when this would be released, more and more game companies started to lose interest in the adventure genre, and the game was officially canceled.

The Good
I honestly like this game. It is definitely the funniest game in the series and one of the most humorous games of all time -- up there with Monkey Island 2 and 3 and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. The graphics are highly effective and, they evoke the proper feeling. The puzzles are definitely some of the series's most challenging and are highly involved; I found this to be a plus, although others may agree.

The Bad
Now, I like the involved puzzles, but a few are quite difficult. While many people complain about the homing beacon puzzle, it is really not all that hard if you concentrate. The puzzles that really gave me problems were the hookah hose problem and some of the puzzles inside Steller's body. Again, like Space Quest IV, there is a strange timing issue in the sickbay when you try to read the results of the DNA test. Disable your CPU's internal cache from the BIOS config and move speed all the way up and detail all the way down. Remember to turn the cache on again when you are finished (don't try this in Windows--trust me).

The Bottom Line
In my opinion, a great game. It has a good story, complex, involving puzzles, and hilarious dialogue and narration. One of personal favorites, I would like for it to get the attention it deserves.

The Good
Notwithstanding the disagreement of some fans, I believe that Space Quest VI, the last of the epic janitorial saga, is a worthy conclusion to the series.

In fact, it has everything that made the series memorable: humorous dialogues and situations, funny sci-fi cliches, parody, wacky gameplay segments, swift changes of locations. To that, it also adds a surprisingly solid narrative, which in my opinion is the most original one in the series.

Space Quest VI will be remembered for being one of the most all-encompassing movie spoofs among video games; plenty of movies are parodied here, from Terminator to Fantastic Voyage, which inspired the most memorable chapter of the game: the travel inside Stellar's body (I hope you know what I mean... for those of you who didn't play the game - it's not what you think!).

As always, there are some very funny situations and creatively designed locations - think of, for example, the part where Roger appeared on a Windows 3 desktop. What really attracted me was the "hub" of the game - the planet Polysorbate. It really gave you some opportunities to explore -something all the previous games in the series were missing. You could visit different locations and solve the puzzles gradually, understanding the situation and getting used to the location and its inhabitants. And you didn't have to worry about dying.

That's right: although you could still technically die in the game, you were automatically restored to life shortly before you tried the lethal experiment, without any penalties. Which means that they retained the funny death screens, but didn't force the player to cringe his teeth when he realized he forgot to save. It's a win/win situation.

Graphically and musically, the game is still very impressive. Perhaps some of the backgrounds and character graphics lacked the charm of Sierra's previous efforts, but for its time, Space Quest VI was certainly very good-looking and perhaps even better-sounding.

The Bad
Perhaps it lacked the sheer wackiness, the dramatic events, and the satiric wit of Space Quest IV; also, the story of the predecessor, while less original, was generally better.

Some of the puzzles were also really incoherent and unnecessary, the worst one being some assembling exercise that turned out to be, among all things, a copy protection! A copy protection for a CD game of that time? Why?

I actually bought this game. I got the original jewel case off eBay or something like that. But lo and behold: the copy protection must have been hidden somewhere in the box, because even though I explored the jewel case with a magnifying glass, I couldn't find anything that resembled it. So I had to look for it online.

Also, the game had a show-stopping bug, at least on the computer I played it on (admittedly, belonging to a more powerful generation): at one point it crashed, refusing to let you continue. A patch corrected it, but I still remember the frustration...

The Bottom Line
It was easy to see why they didn't want to make more Space Quest games; sooner or later, they would run out of creativity, because you can only do harmless sci-fi parodies for so long. The final chapter of Roger Wilco's digital heroics might have begun to show the first signs of decay; but it was still a great classical adventure, with entertaining gameplay and enough wacky ideas to keep you in suspense.

Good-bye, Space Quest! You were fun while you lasted. And you'll always have a place in the adventurer's heart, because they don't make games like this anymore.