a shockingly good click em up starring one of the most unlikeable playable characters i've encountered

everyone knows video game protagonists are kleptomaniacal sociopaths but you're not supposed to say the quiet part out loud as a defining feature! you make jokes, you don't make it the entire personality!

i do not like randal

i did really like the setup of the time loop that slowly goes more awry because time loops fuck with reality, that's a fun twist to the conceit!

alas i really do not like randal

an important component of the quantum discriminator: piece of accordion

was liking the game a lot at first, it lacks polish in the animations, but the environments are gorgeous, looks like they were miniature environments constructed by hand and photographed, and i'm a fan of that look! voice acting is great, setup is great!

then it kinda goes off the rails with science gibberish, and gretchen's turn felt like such a fuckin out of nowhere twist, was very cartoonish

that and the sometimes out of tone "point and click adventure gags" kinda turned me off over time

excellent first half of game, subpar second half of game, averages out to kinda good in the end i guess

would love to see more from this team tho, learning from mistakes, maybe!

1: honestly played mostly as a curiosity but it was such a short game i think i could've tried to play without a guide? so i'm gonna try as much of 2 as i can without a guide, although i SUSPECT the text-command nature of it is gonna stump me... anyway, after playing the police quests four, this was a breath of fresh air! funny, still punishing but somehow less annoying because it's funny, etc

2: i did not last long without a guide! probably for the best as i didn't find this game as much fun, for whatever reason, although it was sitll fine enough i suppose, but felt less jokey and light hearted? onward to 3!

3: yo this game has a timer? what. um anyway i... did not finish this one, because i had to dig up a treasure but i couldn't get it to dig up the treasure and i know you need the treasure to win cause the guide says so and i mean... whatever, y'know, even if sierra didn't design these games to be balls-ass hard, this one's just... bad? so much waiting around, and having to be in specific locations at specific times without any real indication what those times are suuucks. i don't feel bad not beating this one

4: wow this game has shading in its art, a wonder what more colors can do! ...there are times while playing through these that i manage to trick myself into thinking "actually i could've figured this out given enough time", but then i come across an instruction in the guide as simple as "take board" and i'm in this room and i'm like... what board?? and i stare at it for a bit and eventually see a line of brown pixels that could be considered a wooden board and sure enough that's it! my... brain does not work for whatever these games are trying to communicate, and that's fine... anyway onto 5 i go!

5: first one of the bunch i'd played before, and beaten as a kid (almost certainly with a guide then, too). i remembered enough to make some progress on my own sometimes, but i also remembered enough to know i would need help. these games are hard and i just don't have the patience to figure shit out on my own! anyway, the voice acting was bad lol, which i'd had subtitles so i could skip, but this is before that became standard. otherwise, a much more pleasant experience, if only because the art was, well, good!

6: i guess i played this once before... baaaarely remember it but hey you know, i did! probably with guide in hand the whole time like i did this time lol, anyway, vast improvement over 5 in every way except that the main character is kind of unbearably a "good guy", but lacks the charm of, say, the modern day's himbo, yeah, i'll say it, i wish he was more of a fuckin idiot, would've made him more likeable! anyway that power love ballad in the credits sure was somethin'

7: aha! here we are at last to the one i should remember best! the one with the prickly pear that i thought was unbeatable if you didn't pick it up in chapter one but it turns out you can just go... get it later if you need it... the first king's quest without an unwinnable state! how does it hold up? well... that style shift! in some ways it's the obvious step, as esp 5 and 6 seemed to get more... cutesy, but in others it's kind of a shame because the things i liked about the rest of the games up til now were the darker fairy tale aspects treated as comedy, not the disney-esque plot lines! still, i remember loving it at the time as a kid, so i expected to like it more than i did this time around. guess i'm too old now, and also it being old the flaws sure do shine through a lot more!

to anybody for whatever reason reading this wondering why i'd bother going through all these games like a psychopath, guide in hand, well, i dunno, i just am, and there's some charm to the writing that i get ot enjoy without suffering, and i just ain't a small child in the 90s with infinite free time anymore!! police quest was... mostly unbearable, but a curiosity, but at least with king's quest the jokes can be pretty fun and/or funny, and there's value in that to me

quick ranking, gut feeling, very little thought, will not reconsider, is now fact: 5 > 6 > 1 > 7 > 2 > 4 > 3

these games have a lot of nostalgic love

none of them hold up

1: awful driving, but thankfully the vga version saved me from typing in commands... pretty standard drug bust cop story, nothing special, nothing TOO offensive, but definitely never would've made it through without a guide

2: thank god no driving! unfortunately, also no vga remake, so we're typing in commands and... this game is cartoonishly more racist than the first one, but only in one-off jokes (why the egyptian terrorists on the plane?) and not as much in the main plot, so that's something i guess

3: we're back to vga! and... back to driving, but somehow even worse... and now there's a satanic cult! because that definitely happened for real and wasn't a bunch of bullshit! yeah it's fiction but this is fiction that's claiming to show what real cops go through, and... well, besides the somewhat interesting beginning to pq1 and the middle of this where you actually roleplay a traffic cop, it's... just being sensational bullshit

4: and now, the infamous introduction of DARRYL GATES as the author of the story! gone are the somewhat (barely, but somewhat) light hearted days of barry bonds and the fictional city of lytton! now we're in REAL LA where REAL CRIME HAPPENS and the only defining feature of the serial killer is CROSS DRESSER

every game in this series (and, indeed, almost every game in sierra's click em up catalog) is defined by obtuse puzzle solving and punishing you for experimentation, and i would've never made it through any of these without a guide, and although i tried very briefly in pq1, i'm glad i didn't continue trying... the games just are not good enough to warrant the effort

thank god whenever i get around to king's and space quest i'll at least be living in a world of fantasy and sci-fi instead of DARRYL GATES

i do admire at least the first game's attempts at committing to Procedure, like having to walk around your car to inspect it before getting into it, or the order you do things when writing a ticket... it's just a shame all my goodwill toward that aspect faded as the games stopped caring about it and got progressively worse

fairly whimsical, and dark, but never exceptionally sad

has a strong sense of foreboding that once it finally hits does a nice lil twist and turn to be more hopeful than anything, i liked it quite a bit

only real criticism is that the story sorta grinds to a halt if you get stuck on a puzzle but that is the way of many of these games, and most of the puzzles in this are pretty straightforward and logical, so it works out

great game

wonderful voice acting, perfectly off-putting close-up art, dreadful music, perfect length

i guess i'm also kind of a sucker for victorian horror, too

great game!!!