Space Quest I: Roger Wilco in the Sarien Encounter (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
113A playthrough of Sierra On-line's 1991 graphic adventure for PCs running Dos, Space Quest I: Roger Wilco in the Sarien Encounter.
Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter was first released in 1986, making it the second of Sierra's pillar "Quest" series of games, following 1984's King's Quest and predating the original games in Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, and Quest for Glory series.
And what King's Quest did for merging computer story telling with classic fairy tales, Space Quest does with an extremely tongue-in-cheek approach to sci-fi movies. Riffing on everything from 50s B-movies to Star Trek and Star Wars, there are myriad references to find for fans of the original works. And just about all of them are hilariously irreverent.
Roger Wilco is a spaceship janitor (an intersrallar sanitation engineer?) who wakes up after a nap in a broom closet only to find that his ship has been taken over by an evil alien race. Once he figures that out and manages to not look like his now inside-out shipmates, he escapes as the lone survivor to the planet Kerona, where further off-color hilarity ensues. To discuss it too much is to spoil the magic of the storytelling and the writing, so forgive me for not going into more detail.
This 1991 VGA remake is a fantastic reenvisioning of the 1986 original. Not limited by EGA graphics, 256k of memory, and a text-parser, Roger Wilco in the Sarien Encounter offers up a pretty fantastic looking rendition of the game world. Of course purists will prefer the original 1986 release, but I loved the style that they went with here. It's almost note-for-note the same game, but the hand-painted backgrounds, Adlib music, and heavy increase on the amount of descriptive text in-game made it a much more vivid experience for me.
Either way, you can't go wrong. Space Quest is an epic love-letter to the most well-worn set of Hollywood tropes imaginable, yet still creates something quite fresh and entertaining from it. Even managing to surpass the early King's Quest games in many ways, it's an undeniable classic in EGA or VGA.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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