Space Quest 3: The Pirates of Pestulon (by Jubal)

[Jubal]

Space Quest 3: The Pirates of Pestulon

Game Type: Abandonware
Genre: Adventure

Link: http://www.spacequest.net/archives/sq3/

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So, Space Quest three - the last one of the series to be done in classic text-parser style. It's by far the most meta of the original trilogy - the plot literally involves rescuing the game's creators from the evil software baron who runs the ScumSoft corporation.

The first thing people might note about the above is that it has the healthiest ratings of the three I've reviewed - and it deserves them, with better gameplay than the first or second installments and keeping the immersion score high. The graphics are also improved in this game, and a music soundtrack is provided too which manages to be considerably less annoying than some more modern examples of the genre.

I'll start with my criticisms, however. Firstly, the Monolith Burger restaurant is vexing and, it turns out, actually wholly unnecessary to complete the game. If you buy a meal there and then play the Astro Chicken arcade game (reminiscent of the two horrible grinding SQ1 minigames, albeit a bit less bad) you get a message hinting at the point of the quest. But you don't need to do that, and honestly it's pretty straightforward working out what you need to do as long as you pay attention to what's going on on Ortega and Phleebut (the other two major planets). Making it worth my while would've been nice. Secondly, some of the cutscenes are annoyingly long - the one before the dukem minigame I had to sit through every time I died in the game and had to refresh, which was really annoying, and the one at the end could also have been shortened a bit. There were a few points where there were very non-intuitive things to do (finding the stairs down the crater and finding the button for the retractable bridges, both of which were hidden/invisible in the game are), but these were decreased from SQ2.

On the other hand, the good. The main two reasons I've given Pirates the best gameplay score are the improved minigames and decreased linearity. On the first point, the robot duelling and spaceship fighting are the two best minigames of the series, relying on some measure of intuition and skill far more than the ones in SQ1 or SQ2. The near-compulsory maze game (in the ScumSoft accountancy dept) is also vastly more fun than the two of SQ2, and is kinda funny, unlike crawling around in dark tunnels for hours or having exceptionally fiddly keywork that you then have to do in reverse. The decreased linearity is the other nice thing. Whilst you do have to do things in a certain order to some extent (if you don't complete Phleebut you just die on Ortega) there's more choice, more different/varied ways of solving problems, and that's a really nice thing to have. The Space Quest "aliens in a bar" type atmosphere is nicely maintained, with the burger bar, a souvenir shop, and of course lots of monsters that randomly kill you if you walk in the wrong direction.

All in all I very highly recommend this game - a very good addition to the series and with some of its better moments in terms of gameplay.