Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier (DOS) - Longplay + death showcase - No Commentary

You can view my other Sierra adventure games on PC in the playlist here:
• Sierra Adventure Games...
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My longplay of the DOS classic point and click adventure game Space Quest VI: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier, played on ScummVM. I love Space Quest 1-5. Space Quest 6 though, I have at best mixed feelings for and if I'm totally honest I somewhat dislike this one. This game was originally released for both DOS and Windows 3.1 and you can kind of tell from the way they changed how the interface looks versus all of the earlier games. When I first had this in the mid-90s, I didn't really like the change in art style. In recent years I've grown to appreciate the look and in particular, the amount of effort they put into making the animated lip-sync for all of the character dialogue actually line up with the voiced lines, it's pretty impressive when you consider they would have had to hand key all of those animations back then. I just wish they'd put as much effort into ironing out the bugs and maybe fleshing out some of the puzzles a bit more. Some of the bugs broke the game completely making it unplayable if you bought a new computer just a year or two after the game was released because they programmed in some timing checks that reported incorrectly if your processor was too fast and would crash the game. The worst of these was when you first go to the sickbay. Since the game was released in the infancy of the internet, they did have a couple of patches on the Sierra website, but for some reason they never bothered to actually fix the timing bugs and opted to instead just make players download a save game just past the timing checks they'd set in the game. That always left a sour taste in my mouth for the game and made me incredibly disappointed in Sierra, though this would also have been around the time that Sierra was about to collapse completely, so I guess it makes sense. ScummVM takes care of the timing bugs at least. I originally had a 486SX/33 and the game ran fine on it except for the Stooge Fighter mini-game, which bizarrely ran at 1 frame every 10 seconds. Yes that's 1 frame every 10 seconds, NOT 10FPS. It took around 30-45 minutes to get through that stupid game on that computer with it being a literal slide show. Then I upgraded to a P2/233 and the mini-game ran fine, but I had all of the timing bugs as a replacement. I've also found the puzzles in this game to be oddly forgettable. I can beat Space Quest 1-5 without having to look up a single thing, even more than a decade after having played one of them last. Every time I play 6, I get stuck in at least one spot if not multiple spots in the very first area and have to read through a guide to see what I'm missing. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. There's a few of the later puzzles that I forget most of the time as well, but it's incredibly frustrating to just get walled at the beginning of the game because there was no indication I needed to show the security card to the bartender or that I had to click the walk icon on the door in the bar to open it instead of the hand icon like you would everywhere else. GRRRRRR.
As usual, I try to showcase most of the deaths possible in the game, there's more than likely a few that I missed along the way. I also try to get as many of the general descriptions for things in the area and as much of the character dialogue as I can. I somehow forgot when I was in cyberspace that I could use the board to cross the gap in the road, so I ended up taking the entire long pathway back to the entrance. As I mentioned earlier, this game has quite a few bugs, and I ran into several during recording (they have been cut out) including a script error crash trying to buy Coldsorian Brandy, a script error crash browsing the lifeform data list at the ComPost in the ship, and the alveoli becoming non-interactable after placing it in the blockage. The last one caused me to have to replay the entire first 90% of the game to get back to the same spot since not being able to blow up the alveoli softlocks the game. I have no idea what the maximum score in this one is, Sierra didn't care to list it anywhere in game as far as I can tell. I've always been kind of sad that this was the final official game in the Space Quest series, with Space Quest 7 having been axed when Sierra got bought by another company and everyone was fired in the event known as "Chainsaw Monday".

[@holisticreviews]

Great game. Thanks for this!