Are the PCs saying they look both ways when they cross the road? No?

Time to have them be hit with a car to teach them road safety!

USA 1997

Sierra Road by Paul J Rush

Source: Flickr/Paul J Rush

Source “Police Quest” by Lax18 (1995) [COPS.ZZT] - “Title screen” Play This World Online ---- Discover More Information About This World on the Museum of ZZT

The Art of Point-And-click Adventure Games

Available now with tracked global shipping: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/the-art-of-point-click-adventure-games

A stunning, 500-page coffee table book; a lovingly produced homage to the adventure games of yesteryear.

#bitmapbooks #book #retrogaming #retrogames #gaming #art #reading #foryou #pointandclick #policequest

Rogue Squadron 3D.

Copaganda adventures

I have no particular love for the police. In fact, I frequently make jokes about cops and doughnuts. Working for several years as a breaking news journalist didn’t help me change this point of view, since I watched way more videos classified under the term “officer-involved shooting” than anyone should be subjected to. In general, I think policing - at least in the United States - is a field rife with problems, and I usually steer clear of video games that glorify law enforcement or the military. 

That said, I have a high tolerance for classic point ‘n click games, and Sierra’s Police Quest franchise has long been a blind spot for me. I finally decided to fix this by playing through the first four Police Quest games (plus the remake of Police Quest 1) in release order, and what I found was a very odd franchise. The Police Quest games walk an unexpected line between hardcore procedurals - where you need to follow rules religiously or risk losing your badge - and wacky cop wish fulfillment, with plots and characters that feel like they were whipped up by an officer with a penchant for writing fanfiction about himself while eating Munchkins during his lunch break. I have no idea if this was the method by which Jim Walls developed the first three games in the series, but I like to think that it was. 

Walls, a retired California patrol officer who was recruited by Sierra’s president Ken Williams to spearhead the Police Quest franchise, is an interesting fella. He experienced his fair share of action as a cop, and the Police Quest manuals point out that he was involved in a highway shootout that left him with recurring PTSD. But rather than explore the mental health trauma that officers experience during their careers (an important topic, honestly), Walls’ first game, 1987′s Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, focuses on a heroic patrol officer named Sonny Bonds. Sonny is your ideal cop who rises through the ranks, becomes a detective and takes down a burgeoning drug empire while getting smooches from his high school girlfriend-turned-sex worker Marie, who really wants him to rescue her from her life as a scarlet lady by being a cool blue stud. All in all, it’s a plot that screams “this was probably written by a conservative dude in Regan’s America.”

Police Quest 1 is infamous these days for punishing players who don’t follow correct police procedure. If you fail to do a walkaround inspection of your car the first time you take it out of the station, you get into an accident and die. If you don’t handcuff a suspect from the right angle, you die. If you type “remove clothes” at any point in the game, you promptly strip naked and die...presumably from embarrassment. These examples hint at the bizarre dichotomy that exists within the game, which pressures you into doing things “by the book” but also contains a strange undercurrent of silliness, including endless amounts of potty humor. (There are multiple descriptions of what happens when you lead Sonny Bonds to any bathroom. One of my favorites: “Panic fills your heart as you watch the nasty fluid nearly breach the rim, before it slowly subsides.”) I can only assume that this contrast exists because Al Lowe, Sierra’s resident funny guy who also designed the Leisure Suit Larry games, worked on Police Quest 1 behind the scenes.

Police Quest 2: The Vengeance doesn’t have quite the same polarities, but it’s still a goofy game. Sonny Bonds is now a hot-shot detective with a useless partner named Keith Robinson (who spends every second chain smoking and will call you a commie if you tell him to cut the cigs), and the pair are on a mission to recapture Jesse Bains, the drug lord from the first game. Honestly, Police Quest 2 is probably the best entry in the franchise, mostly because it leans hard into “’80s buddy cop movie” territory. The Roland-MT intro music is absolutely badass synth, and Sonny’s investigations veer into the realm of ridiculous spy movie shit, with a scuba diving section and a sewer crawl. He does the sort of stuff that would normally require a whole team of agents, and this is especially noticeable during a bonkers scene where a group of random Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a plane and Sonny’s expected to exit his seat, shoot ‘em dead and unwire a bomb they’ve stuck in the toilet. If you can look past the terrible portrayal of Arabs and accept that you’re playing through Jim Walls’ fanfic, Police Quest 2 is actually good - and hilariously, it’s the only entry in the series that got localized into Japanese, with everyone getting the full anime do-over package of big eyes and outrageous hair. Honestly, I’d love to watch a Police Quest 2 anime in the style of City Hunter. 

Unfortunately, anything resembling anime went out the window with Police Quest 3: The Kindred, a game that veered back towards the realism department. It's the first project in the series to utilize what was at the time Sierra’s brand new engine upgrade - their SCI1 interpreter - and it’s got 256 colors, rotoscoped animations, digitized closeups of actual people for speech boxes, and music composed by Jan Hammer, the guy who did the Miami Vice soundtrack. (You should watch this video of him jamming out to the Miami Vice theme, it’s pretty funny.) Unfortunately, Jim Walls left Sierra before Police Quest 3 was finished, and it shows. What begins as a fairly promising setup where Sonny’s now-wife Marie gets injured by cultists devolves into a nothing burger which...just kinda ends. The last act of the game feels like it’s building to a showdown with the cultists and Sonny’s new partner, a corrupt cop named Pat Morales, but everything concludes in a brief scene where the cult leader just gives up with nary a word. Pat tries to shoot Sonny but gets shot by vice instead. Marie wakes up, announces that Sonny’s gonna be a dad and everything is over in three minutes. Not that the other two Police Quests had fantastic finales, but this one really feels hollow, and despite all his quirks, it probably would’ve been better if Jim Walls had stuck around. (Walls would go on to work for Tsunami Media to produce Blue Force, a game I haven’t played but certainly seems like “Police Quest with the serial numbers filed off.” He also tried to Kickstart a Police Quest successor called Precinct in 2013, but never met his funding goal.) 

After Police Quest 3, Sierra developed a remake of Police Quest 1 using the SCI1 interpreter. It’s a very solid effort, and while not the game in the series I personally liked the most (Police Quest 2 still takes that trophy), it’s probably the most playable by modern standards. Everything has been upgraded to look more in line with Police Quest 3, but while that game suffered from a half-baked story, the Police Quest 1 remake has the original’s framework to fall back on. And the writing is greatly improved. Sonny Bonds’ characterization is way better - he makes banter with his colleagues, groans about how the public cusses him out as a dirty pig and seems to grapple with toxic masculinity on the police force. The game doesn’t do anything really meaningful with his thoughts, but it’s still cool. Marie also gets elevated from a tropey hooker into a conflicted woman who’s more fleshed out, which is good to see.

Following the remake, Sierra was in need of a new direction for Police Quest. Ken Williams wanted a big fish to headline the franchise and stir up sales, and of all the people in the world, he decided to go with Daryl F. Gates, former LAPD chief during the Rodney King riots. Gates was an edgy pick even by Ken’s standards, and it’s worth reading this Vice article from a few years back, or this highly-detailed Digital Antiquarian post detailing how the man who presided over one of the LAPD’s worst moments somehow became a creative consultant on a computer game series.

Even if we ignore Gates’ background, Police Quest: Open Season - commonly referred to as Police Quest 4 - is not a great game. Sonny Bonds was always a little boring, but now he’s been replaced by an utterly forgettable LAPD detective named John Carey. Carey’s mission to stop a serial killer is portrayed via digitized actors and low-res photos of LA that have not aged well and make the entire game look like pixelated mud. The plot is also fiercely out of step with the current era, feeling like a mixture of tastelessness and serial killer kitsch. While Jim Walls’ Police Quests definitely had their fair share of casual racism, the portrayals of people of color in Police Quest 4 are on another level. The Black characters are largely gangbangers, drunks or rappers who spout bad dialogue, and there’s an Asian convenience store owner literally named “Kim Chee.” The game’s vaguely homophobic and transphobic as well, going out of its way to stereotype a male sex worker and show him attempting to steal the tires off Carey’s car. The killer, meanwhile, dresses in women’s clothing and is depicted as aberrant for doing so. His motivations for killing are not explained - rather, the fact that he wears a red dress is all the characterization he needs for his murder sprees, at least according to the minds behind this game. While all of the Police Quests could be classified as copaganda, Police Quest 4 is the only one that explicitly feels harmful. 

There were other entries in the franchise developed in the wake of Police Quest: Open Season, but I didn’t feel like playing them since they veer wildly away from the adventure genre. Gates stuck around to oversee Police Quest: SWAT, an FMV game glorifying the special tactics teams that he elevated during his time as LAPD chief, and he was also there for Police Quest: SWAT 2, a real-time tactics game. Then Gates exited the scene and “SWAT” replaced “Police Quest” as the main title of the series, which gradually morphed into first-person shooters that were about as far of a cry as you could possibly imagine from Sonny Bond’s early adventures. (Sonny did cameo as a SWAT leader in SWAT 4, so at least the original boy in blue did well for himself as he got on in years.)

This brings us to the final question - are the first four Police Quests worth checking out, in spite of their tonal issues? In my opinion, you can skip Police Quest: Open Season, unless you're fascinated by the career of Daryl F. Gates and want to see how something with his name on it managed to be twenty different degrees of insensitive. The entries starring Sonny Bonds, in contrast, might be of interest to old school adventure fans, as well as those who want to see the progenitor of modern law enforcement and special tactics games. Compared to stuff like Rainbow Six: Siege, Police Quest is certainly quaint - and while the series never managed to completely change my attitude toward cops, I will say that there were moments that made me appreciate the regulations that police officers are supposed to abide by. Let me specifically note the fact that if you make Sonny wantonly shoot any suspect in Police Quest 1, you’ll instantly lose and be reprimanded for not following procedure. Considering that we live in a world where police brutality raged up a shitstorm of massive proportions in 2020, it’s pretty heartening to see that in a computer game from 1987.

Cruisin’ with alternate universe Sonny & Keith

A Personal List of Video Games That Might Be Deemed as Obsolete If Not Inferior Compared to Its "Modernized" Follow-Ups:

Wolfenstein 3D < Return to Castle Wolfenstein and The New Order+The Old Blood; also, the likes of the entirety of Doom

Warcraft: Orcs and Humans < II: Tides of Darkness+Beyond the Dark Portal and III: Reign of Chaos+The Frozen Throne

Star Wars: X-Wing < TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance

Age of Empires < Age of Empires II and Age of Mythology

System Shock < System Shock 2; also, its own Enhanced Edition (with maybe the upcoming Remake)

Hitman: Codename 47 < Hitman 2: Silent Assassin onwards

Titanfall < Titanfall 2 (and even Apex Legends)

Star Control < Star Control II/The Ur-Quan Masters

Outpost < Outpost 2: Divided Destiny

The Marathon Trilogy < their Aleph One releases; also, the Halo games arguably up to Reach

Medieval: Total War and Shogun: Total War < Medieval II: Total War+Kingdoms and Total War: Shogun 2; also, Rome: Total War and Total War: Rome II

The entire Police Quest series up to SWAT 2 < S.W.A.T. 3: Close Quarters Battle and 4+The Stetchkov Syndicate

Silent Hunter I and II < III and 4: Wolves of the Pacific+The U-Boat Missions

Shadowrun Returns < Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut and Hong Kong: Extended Edition

Zone of the Enders < The 2nd Runner

Meat Boy < Super Meat Boy

Saints Row < Saints Row 2 onwards

Just Cause < Just Cause 2

Hexagon < Super Hexagon

Dune II < its Command and Conquer spiritual successors.

(In the meantime, in case there are readers interested in this, feel free to comment on games that fit the criteria that I haven't put on the list either because of tag limitations, not ever playing them, or not remembering them.)

Police investigation – park and forest

Pixel art for today based on videogame Police Quest 2 for system MS DOS. It is a quest and adventure. It is rather popular game for first half of 90s. It is a time of quests from Sierra. It is Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest.

And this is my pixel art. Here we have a scene in style of videogame Police Quest. It is made in graphic style of first half of 90s. Several colors. Not so many as today. But also interesting.

This is only a drawing. And some ideas about videogame. What kind of game can it be. I suggest to make a investigation also. In quests, it is very complicated, it is about search items, talk with people.  So it is like this, but more simple. And some little element of action. You are also a policeman, and you are making some investigation.  And a little of shooting for you also. And at first – you are walking here and there, looking at things, collecting items. Items – gives you understanding about what is going on. A little talking – and you have a clear picture. So you have find bandits. And it is start a shooting.

So task is done. And with such sequence all the gameplay. Mainly –like a quest. So very retro one. Small amount of items. Few characters. And several this kind of tasks to solve.

Mainly, all the actions will take place in several places. Several scenes of the city, police station. And main zone – forest, park. Big forest and park. It will have a lake, forest, grass. Bright sun. Good weather. And you are walking the locations. Talking with characters, trying to get what is going on. And searching the items, which can help you understand the situation.

Game will be with a patterns of Police Quest. But a little another way, my way. Sometimes with a jokes. Sometimes like a parody, sometimes just another way. So it can be my own clone. So, at start you search for a lost dog in a park, or something simple. Very fast for solve. Than it goes investigation of something more complex. And with elements of action and shooting. So investigation process in consist of simple things and shooting. So, for example, everything is connected with car thief. At the park. And the game goes on. About a car case, walking the park, about gunplay. So it is right now a picture and fantasy for it.

Police Quest Collection

i need to post more stuff

UK 1991

I get hating certain political systems and trying to abolish totalitarian regimes but at the same time many of them are so interwoven with our history and society they have become tropes and when I consume media with a setting where the monarchy is absolute and revered then I am playing my part and sucking that princeling off

Source “Police Quest” by Lax18 (1995) [COPS.ZZT] - “Don's Death Room” Play This World Online ---- Discover More Information About This World on the Museum of ZZT