Huge thanks go to Admiral__Jay, The Space Quest Historian, sluicebox, RetroTKS, and TerranRich for their help with this video. 03:00 It is actually possible to enter the sewer without dying, though you have to be quick about it. I wanted to show an example of the fast events without spoiling things that happen later in the run. 03:48 The game font literally does not have any symbols other than these five. 03:53 The developers could have made each symbol equally likely. Instead, they did something more complicated. (All ranges mentioned are inclusive.) 1) Pick a random number between 0 and 2. 2) Pick a random number between 3 and 4. 3) Pick a random number between the two numbers generated from steps 1 and 2. That final number determines the symbol. Thanks go to sluicebox for explaining this to me. 05:27 Grim Dark End has the following to say: "That's MORE than a 'shaver' there, that's a joke based on one of the worst epilators ever made (from the late 80's)... it basically uses a rotating spring to rip hairs out... quickly usually?... It's kind of like a very slow version of hot-wax hair removal. And it's EXTREMELY painful the first few times its used. That version was even more terrifying because it had a horrible tendency to pinch and rip skin. Modern ones use a rotating sort of 'tweezer' system that is a LOT less likely to grab skin, and tends to remove hairs quickly enough to not hurt nearly as much as the primitive versions." 09:20 In addition to the game cycles being as fast as your CPU, Sierra made another change in SCI1.1. The speed slider now controls just your character instead of changing the speed of the entire game. So, counterintuitively, what you need to do in Skate-o-Rama is to turn the speed slider UP so that you have a fighting chance of evading the sequel police. Still, if your computer was too fast, this might not have been enough to solve the problem. 10:58 The first instance I can find of this skip online is from the TAS by c-square from 2011 tasvideos.org/3317S
@@matthewrease2376 The game refers to its various time periods as “sequels.” The idea is that when Roger travels through time, he actually travels around the Space Quest series. The post-apocalyptic era is Space Quest XII, for instance. This is why the time cops are call “sequel police” as well.
@@matthewrease2376 No, I did mean "this sequel" as in, Space Quest XII. The joke in the game is that you're traveling through time as measured in Space Quest sequels instead of years.
I must have been five years old and this game was on the family PC for some reason. It was completely impossible and I remember being terrified when I died. Never got out of the first couple of screens. Now I know it was literally impossible because it was the CD version! I never could figure out the name of the game until just now. Very cool, many very ancient memories coming back. Thanks for making the video
I don't blame you being terrified, the first area has the guy with the headpiece that stares at you and screams to attract a droid, it was pretty freakish.
My first memory of SQIV was at a similar age, but roughly contemporary with the game's release. They had a demo setup at CompUSA with all the latest big titles, probably 10 computers or so - this was shown alongside Monkey Island 1 and Prince of Persia. And so all I knew of this game for the next ten years or so was the beginning section with that jarring combination of the apocalypse and the Energizer bunny. All those years later I started playing with abandonware and ran into speed bugs - I don't think with this game, but I was stuck on Willy Beamish's Chef Childish scene for a few years before I realized what it was by extrapolating from other games. It might actually have been following a walkthrough for SQIV that clued me in to speed bugs affecting the timed events in other adventure games.
@@JH-pe3ro It's such a jarring beginner section! I can remember spending a few hours here and there over the years trying to figure out what game it was, googling things like "top ten scariest adventure games of the 90s" XD I stumbled on this game once or twice during the search, like oh this main character looks right, but oh it's a comedy game?? Oh he's in a mall working at the burger joint? Nah can't be this one!
That's MORE than a 'shaver' there, that's a joke based on one of the worst epilators ever made (from the late 80's)... it basically uses a rotating spring to rip hairs out... quickly usually?... It's kind of like a very slow version of hot-wax hair removal. And it's EXTREMELY painful the first few times its used. That version was even more terrifying because it had a horrible tendency to pinch and rip skin. Modern ones use a rotating sort of 'tweezer' system that is a LOT less likely to grab skin, and tends to remove hairs quickly enough to not hurt nearly as much as the primitive versions. And yes, the reason I know this is because I use one. After the first several times, it basically stops hurting. The other great thing is you only need to do it every month or two :D
Hah, that's really fun to learn, I'm familiar with the modern style of epilators but the specific reference the game was making was always lost on me! Still not exactly a fun device today though tbh.
The original dialogue was, "this is Epiwhip 357, the most powerful hand hair remover in the Universe and it's capable of shaving your legs clean off." Makes sense :D
Another great video, keep it up! A couple things not noted in the video: - the long code you're supposed to input, 6965847669, is ASCII for "EATLE". I suspect it was intended to be "EATME" but they got it slightly wrong... - the way Admiral__Jay avoids the droids in the supercomputer is not the only one, or even the quickest; it's also possible to go left to lure the droid out, head back into the corridor with the lasers, and return as the droid's heading out of the screen. This is slightly harder to execute, but I think it would save time. (Edit: the SQ4 TAS handles the droid in an even faster way, by switching screens at the exact same time the droid does. This is far more difficult in RTA than either of the other strategies, but not impossible.)
11:10 Another interesting glitch I noticed in SQIV is when Roger is in the arcade room. When the time cops arrive walk down by the garbage can in the center bottom of screen get as close to it as possible. Wait for the cop to walk around the arcade, right when the cop walks up to Roger and begins to speak click the garbage can using the hand icon which triggers the audio to play. The cop will fire his gun, but to my surprise he will freeze allowing you to walk around and jump into the time vehicle. Quick and easy. No running around the arcade avoiding getting shot. I have tested this many times on various OS as I have played this game at least once a year for the past.... 30+ years. Enjoy! Still waiting for Space Ventures!......... I am in my 40's now..... would really like to play it before I die!
10:02 I actually had NO idea about the speed clock thing. I played all the Space Quest games back in the day and simply thought SQ4 was impossible. I never came close to finishing it.
Yeah, rewriting that internal timer on the CD version. SQ4 isn’t the only one where that screwed things over. In Leisure Suit Larry 3, certain moments (the dancing scene in the cabaret, exercising) take more time to finished based on the speed of your computer. On a 386, it took 28 reps on each machine to finish exercising, and the cabaret scene took about two minutes. On a 486, that is 42 reps each and a 5-minute cabaret scene. I don’t even KNOW how long it takes to do the exercises on a modern i7. On a pentium 2, The cabaret scene never ends! And you have to finish that part to get to the exercise. Thank goodness for modern virtual machine programs.
The leg shaving thing was a reference to a specific popular device back then which I cannot for the life of me remember the name of. It was insanely terrible. Every woman that used it had hairs literally ripped out of her legs, tons of little infected hairs left in place, it was just a nightmare torture device. Obviously, that product died off ages ago so the pop culture reference is very.. very lost to time.
I remember that CPU speed problem also happening when I tried to play the original Commandos game a few years ago and everything moved so incredibly fast it was pretty much unplayable. I'm pretty sure that using the Compatibility mode solved it, but it was hilarious discovering that quirk nonetheless.
Okay, Now I am angry, every time I approached the sequel polices ship I got shot. Now that I know it was because I had a 486 SX and a CDROM, I am so retrospectively and pointlessly outraged. I never got into the undercarriage.
this video might require a do-over, since the WR is now much much faster than the route presented in this video. still very entertaining to watch though!
I remember a time in the late 90s, when this was an issue even for games that just came out, since by that point, the hardware power of typical windows 95 computers could vary a lot.
Remember kids, Roger Wilco isn't a criminal for crossdressing. He's a criminal for committing credit card fraud. Know the difference! It could save you from the Skate-o-Rama.
Just go play Ms. Astro Chicken if bad guy with bad gun want to shoot you. He'll think you're cool and leave you alone. Learn that playing video games saves lives...yours!
The only one he actually gets caught for is mail fraud. He gets two androids sent after him (in SQ3 and SQ5) trying to collect on the postage he didn't include in SQ2.
It may not reward you but sometimes people just like seeing how good they can get at mini-games like that. People have invented high-score challenges for both Astro Chicken and the burger-making game.
For all that a lot of it has not aged well at all, I do fondly remember a lot of this as a kid. "Casually glancing at the status bar, you realize you're in Space Quest XII." Some really great lines in there.
When Sierra ruled the world of adventure gaming. I remember playing this when I was 12, getting farther into the game but thinking "Was I supposed to do that?" Parts of this game had me laughing hysterically. The best was how you could ask for a job at the fast food restaurant in the mall while dressed as a woman, and after being denied for being female Roger will be shocked and call him a sexist pig.
Yeah, that whole business with the laptop always seemed like it was poorly-implemented, considering you could just trial-and-error your way past the sentry droids. I've never been sure why they had such an extensive puzzle, with components strewn across basically the entire game, but then made it semi-optional. That's such a strange design choice.
Another design choice I was frustrated with is the first time you get in the timepod. Your first instinct is to start pushing buttons, but doing so clears the display. If you don't write down the timecode, you can't finish the game, and there's no feedback to tell you that you did anything wrong.
@@OneShortEye Yeah, that one definitely feels like a playtesting fail. By the 90s, even Sierra had abandoned that level of "let the player screw themselves five minutes into the game" asshole puzzle design. Although I believe that was partially fixed in the CD-ROM version, which (iirc) has a pre-set code for SQXII rather than randomizing it. So you could still accidentally blank it out... but at least you could restart the game, grab the code, then load your old save rather than having to play through everything again.
If you use the PocketPal a second time in the Super Computer, you get a message from Sludge Vohaul that it's your son he's kidnapped. It was even fully voiced in the disk version!
@@OneShortEye That's why my dad taught me to save constantly throughout the game and to leave save games spread evenly throughout the whole game. That way when you get to one of these puzzles, you can go back to that spot pretty quickly.
Another brilliant video OneShortEye. It’s always a treat to see some of my favorite games from my childhood get a new look and make it that much more interesting. To be part of this one was a privilege. Again, great work, and keep it up.
omg ... I was a victim on the CD rom glitches when I was a very young man. I thought I was doing something wrong and just gave up ! Was confused when I picked it up again years later and it was so easy. Great to have the answers now :D
I love your style of showing what the scenes could/should look like so seamlessly. Having usually never played these old games it always bugs me not knowing what exactly was skipped in some of these other speed run breakdowns.
Great video! As a note, the problem with the Skate-o-Rama felt really familiar. I remember playing SQ6 and being completely stuck on the first part of the game, unable to continue, not even with walkthroughs. Then, years later I found out that the problem was that I was playing on a Pentium 233 Mhz, which meant that the internal clock of the computer was way faster than the intended 486, so a particular event played so fast, it was impossible to do. What a weird, specific problem.
"What happens next is kind of hard to explain. Or maybe not ‘hard,’ I just... don't want to explain it." What, you don't think sexist jokes considered funny thirty years ago are funny now? What a shock!
Sooooo.... you're actually telling me that the evil skate-o-rama ZAP ZAP YOURE DEAD that caused me to almost fucking break my computer back in the day is actually unbeatable on a DX4 100MHz that I had when I first played the game... FUCK MY FUCKIN LIFE...
The game code running way too fast was a common problem back in the day. Properly written games that used the screen timing to sync worked fine with super fast clock speeds, but ones that went for maximum speed without syncing became unplayable (without special tools). One of my favorite games from back then was called "The Incredible Machine", where you had to construct a machine with given parts to accomplish a particular goal like "Put the ball through the hoop". But if you had a fast machine the game would run so fast that you couldn't see where your machine failed, making it unplayable. Here's what that game looked like: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-dl1LvFDgCio.htmlsi=OVY0MWXoT7ia8mO5
If you look at the KQ XLIII icon, the narration is: "Probably represents some tertiary function of the super computer brain. Certainly nothing important." There's also a joke about the increasing size of King's Quest games. Before you do anything, the "Memory Free" states "Memory Free: 2,451 Kbytes." But if you flush KQXLIII, it reads, "Memory Free: 841,912,226 GBytes"
Wow, this answered a 31 year old painful memory of never getting passed Skate O Rama. Earlier today I tried to play this again on Steam but it's so unfair and ridiculously difficult I gave up after ten minutes stuck in XII and watched this instead.
Oh, I love your videos. I never got to play any of these games, but I've always found them fascinating. But more than that, your videos always calm me for some reason. I have major anxiety issues, so I play this channel's videos in the background when I'm feeling stressed. Maybe that wasn't your intention, but I want to thank you all the same. I hope you'll keep making more!
I'm sorry to hear about your anxiety, but I'm touched that the videos help. I'm always working on something, so there will definitely be more in the future. Keep taking care of yourself; you deserve it.
I certainly hope so! And I understand the frustration with the gameplay. To a young kid in the late 80s-early 90s, if you wanted anything with a story, games like this were really all that we had. So we learned to live with it.
I think this might be the only floppy disk game I've ever watched someone speedrun Love the channel, by the way. Found you from the King's Quest video.
Glad you enjoyed it! I learned a lot too in researching this. Big thanks go to sluicebox for explaining the copy protection and the integer overflow. Dude is a wealth of knowledge.
Despite being born in 2003 this video brought back some weird nostalgia, I watched Dilandau3000's lets plays of the classic adventure games religiously as a kid and now I love these old, janky as hell, games.
He had a laid-back style that was easy to watch and also explained all the weird quirks and annoyances in these games quite well. A great narration style for sure!
Every time someone mentions Space Quest, I check the Kickstarter page for the spiritual successor. Currently around 9 years overdue for many many different reasons. 9 years is also the amount of time between the first SQ and the sixth one.
Love your videos. With the code for the door at the end I wondered if there was possibly a better number that would work. There are 106290 possible candidate codes that are smaller than the true code but would have an integer overflow that would register to 6965847669. It would be great if a code was something like 1111111. This might be easier than 26229 (Which is already not complicated). Sadly 26229 has 3 unique numbers in it and there are no codes with 2 or 1 unique number. The only benefit of a code like 4417141 is that all the numbers are on the same side of the keypad. With that said, it is two characters longer and would likely just lead to more errors and isn't worth the 0.02-0.1 second time save (If it even would save time). Here are the list of all candidate codes with 3 unique numbers between 26229 and 6965847669. [1] 4417141 5990005 14444149 21128821 33711733 58877557 71001717 73033333 93349493 98985589 [11] 99116661 99903093 113993333 171337333 183133813 212166261 266626677 322332277 337733237 377775733 [21] 389899893 433743477 449799797 475555445 479749749 557475445 558458485 633366133 666199669 676226677 [31] 711616117 744777333 752772725 777479797 797795957 798778997 813131381 855008885 881288821 933193333 [41] 959997557 961111669 988898933 995255925 999777909 1011050101 1100310133 1227712117 1413441141 1551656565 [51] 1991009909 2111727221 2119919221 2128111221 2292999797 2525521525 2998298229 3100010101 3133171317 3188811381 [61] 3313133173 3333449333 3339937397 3365365365 3373033077 3377030773 3434374773 3595593333 3636553333 3799737973 [71] 4044777077 4400440949 4433143413 4444481141 4471744117 4966999669 5111113333 5112555125 5522155125 5554595445 [81] 5558855285 5568685685 5595555445 5859599989 6161196661 6166111861 6226929269 6336636533 6599566965 6600550005 [91] 6626633333 6756656757 6922266229
Hehe not "shave"! Epiladys (?) basically had a spring wrapped into a loop like you see (I think that was pretty accurate); the spring rotated and ripped your hair out. They were horrific.
A copy of this came with the Creative CDROM drive we had with our IBM when I was a kid. Suffice to say I never got past the initial time warp scene and was so frustrated I didnt touch it again until decades later
Is your objective to make people play this point and click games? Because if it is, you are doing a great job lmao. I hope a deal comes soon to GOG so I can buy this sierra games
Not really! I make these videos because grew up with these games and love speedrunning, and I love the stories that come out of that. If it makes people want to play the games and they enjoy them, that's just a bonus.
I think I've paid for at least 2 different space quest collections in the last 20 years when I got the itch. Most recently, although still some time ago, I purchased the collection on steam. It comes with a frontend that fixes all the processor speed issues. SQ2 was my first, bought it when it came out at an office depot. Played 5 next. They're still my favorites.
@@jkhmr8283 If I had to guess, I imagine that Steam has bundled with games with ScummVM, which has a ton of bug fixes for all sorts of games. I only played a little bit of SQ2 before giving up when I was kid, but I have played SQ5 and really enjoyed it.
@@OneShortEye the first collection I bought I remember needing dos box and a program to actually slow down my processor lol. I'm almost certain the stream version is scumm virtual machine but you'd never know. It installs with the games and when you click the icon you get a splash screen with a space quest graphic and buttons for each one, plus your choice of space quest 3 in ega or cga :)
It's a real pantload at times perhaps but the CD version is still superior to the 💾 version to me for 1 reason. The voices. I just couldn't imagine a playthrough of Space Quest IV without Gary Owens berating you after every death or hearing all of the character dialogue. Those CD'S really made the difference.
I must have had a pretty slow computer back in the day because I had the CD but never had the issues mentioned in the video. And yes Gary Owens was the best.
If I'm understanding the Skate-O-Rama CD bug properly, basically, the progress in technology and computer speeds made triggering events go ludicrous and made it impossibly hard to complete. Sort of like how the AI in the Microscope Puzzle from The 7th guess became practically all-powerful because computers have become so much better at computing, which meant emulators had to make the processor speed run slower to make it manageable.
That's basically it. The floppy version has no issues with speed. After that came out, Sierra upgraded its engine to SCI 1.1, which is what the CD version runs on. I'm going to quote and adapt an explanation sluicebox gave me: There are two changes that happen to the way time works in SCI1.1: 1. Speed slider now controls YOU instead of the entire world 2. Game cycles are now unthrottled (run as fast as your computer will process them) SQ4's problem is that it was written against the earlier rules, then all the underlying system components that had to be rewritten for the new speed model got swapped in, but the game wasn't reprogrammed to adjust to these. Issue #1 is a problem in some places. But for skate-o-rama, the bigger problem is that it's programmed for your speed being in sync with the world's speed. Now your speed is controlled by a speed slider, but the sequel police delays don't know that! So the solution to skate-o-rama is to turn UP the speed slider so that you go as fast as you can, because all the delays are fixed values that are no longer relative to your speed. But your average gamer had no way of knowing this.
13:24 MAN I love when games let you use your Numpad when there is one in game, it's a no-brainer. Deus Ex spoiled me with this feature because everytime there is a keypad in a game, I instinctively reach for the numpad. Sadly it's extremely rare for games to implement this.
6:17 Damn, wish I'd played this game as a kid! Might've figured some stuff out a LOT sooner! 7:36 _NOOOOOO!!!_ Worst game ever made, 0/10, throw every copy in a landfill.
The CD-ROM Skate-o-rama sequence is virtually impossible on my 486DX33 system that originally shipped from the factory in May 1992 - half a year before the CD-ROM version shipped. It’s almost like they didn’t do any testing on 486s at all.
i first learned about SpaceQuestIV (and soon after the REST of SpaceQuest and other Sierra titles like King'sQuest) from GameGrumps/SteamTrain...and lets just say Danny and Ross are nowhere near 'speedrunner' levels, but their playthrough was still enjoyable nonetheless xD
a lot of the humour has aged really badly. was especially interested in the 'cross dressing' sequence with the sacks shop- neither surprised nor pleased to see the droid call him a sicko
It's a shame because the game doesn't handle it as poorly as you'd think for a game of that era. If it wasn't for that particular line, it would be pretty painless. Also, like other Sierra titles, can't escape some good ol' Boomer humor "women only want to go shopping, amirite?".
If only so many of these LucasArts point and click games didn't have nonsense puzzles, fast timed events, and pixel hunting. I recently completed Sam and Max: Hit the Road. I loved it, and now want to play more point and click adventure games. I already know I need to prepare for a nightmare and strict adherence to a guide if I want to. I only needed to use a guide occasionally with Sam and Max. Great video, I enjoy Speedruns of games that are so different to what we have now.
I loved this game as a kid. I remember being stuck in an arcade for months and couldn't progress, these games were incredibly hard before the internet. Eventually I triggered the right event somehow and moved on. It took me about a year of playing it off and on but I completed it.
my 486 had a turbo button I could turn off slowing it down to a 386, but I dont remember getting past the burger job... I think ill give it another try. nice explanations.
I wonder how many people really hat a pc or similiar stuff at the time here in germany none of my frinds had any pcs. Just my cousin had a pc. First time i remmeber nearly anyone having a pc was around 2003 when i was around 12 years old and later on 2004-06 the first people had internet.
This feels SO validating! I was crushed i couldnt figure out how to beat the CD version on my brand new computer 🤦♀️im glad i never called the 1900 hint line at $1 / minute!
My friend's family had a couple of Macintoshes way back in 1990 and they let us buy this game for it. Having an Atari 2600, NES and C64 only I'd never actually seen a game that looked this good and it was my intro to adventure games. I was totally hooked but no matter what I tried I couldn't figure out the "most annoying part". My buddy and I spent hours trying to figure out what to do and we never did. Luckily I got a copy later on in highschool when I bought my first PC, a blazing fast Pentium 60 with 8mb of ram. I got past it but had no idea how until years later when game FAQs became a thing.
Ahh, Space Quest, I remember playing the first one back in 1986.... I own all of them, on floppy disc, them and Kings Quest, Hero's Quest (Quest for Glory, they had to change the name for copyright reasons), Police Quest.... I loved all of those games from Sierra.
computers: getting faster sierra devs: oh, lets get rid of that pesky timer and let the speed depend on how fast the computer is There is a reason nobody (except for EA when making NFS) puts any kind of important timer on how fast the game is rendered and uses independent timers instead
Note: The reason walkthroughs and solutions tell you to go back and get the connector for the pocketpal, is because they're usually focused on getting the highest score for the game. Effectively a 100% completion. As opposed to what's on display here, an any% run. You get points in Sierra games for doing things, getting things, etc. An example in Space Quest 5, there's a test at the start of the game. I believe you can just memorize the answers, which is quicker, but the game awards points for cheating by looking at another student's test paper, because that's in line with what the character Roger Wilco would do, but only for looking at the correct student's test paper, because that's progressing the game. In SQ4, getting the pocketpal, catching the bunny and taking out its battery to use in the pocketpal, buying the terminal adapter and using the terminal to check droid locations, they all give you points.
