4 ms·

> I loved SQ but it frustrated me so much. As a kid I could NOT get anywhere with it without one of those hint books with the red garbled text or calling the Si

by the_af 2y ago

> I loved SQ but it frustrated me so much. As a kid I could NOT get anywhere with it without one of those hint books with the red garbled text or calling the Sierra Hint Line (on my parents bill...). Interesting! When I played SQ II, it was a pirated copy and I had no hint book. Also, no access to the Sierra Hint Line from my country. And no Internet websites to google the answer, either. So I beat them all by myself. All of those games were pirated, and the hardest was SQ 4 which would randomly crash to desktop, and I wasn't sure if this was supposed to happen, or some badly cracked copy-protection thing, and to this day I still don't know. Spanish is my native language, so the inspiration to try things like this was pretty cool: "mooom, how do you say "rub" in English? I think I'm supposed to rub these berries on the dude!" > I forgot how slow you walk.. ugh. Oh, yes. Those early adventures didn't let you teleport to the next screen either, you had to very slowly walk all the way. I used to use savegames for fast teleporting: "ok, this didn't work, I want to go back to that other screen but it's so far, let's restore my savegame".

jandrese 2y ago
Space Quest 4 was one of the only times in my childhood that I found a legit error in a game. There is one part in the space mall with the ice rink where you can go into an arcade. You get a quest to do something, but if you then try to click on one of the arcade cabinets it will cause the game to throw an error. I remember it because I actually called Sierra to tell them about it. The person on the other end even fired up the game and verified it, then told me vaguely that the solution to the puzzle was something else. I'm guessing the tech support weren't allowed to give hints because they had a paid tip line.
- the_af 2y ago
  > You get a quest to do something, but if you then try to click on one of the arcade cabinets it will cause the game to throw an error. Wait, I'm pretty sure that's the crash to desktop I'm remembering! It was definitely in the arcade. I tried randomly clicking to avoid the Time Police (or whatever those androids were called) and the game would error out. I was never sure if it was an error or copy-protection. I remember winning the game, but don't remember what I did to bypass this (remember: no access to any hint line). So it was an actual bug, and not copy-protection after all? Wow.

by the_af 2y ago

jandrese 2y ago

Space Quest 4 was one of the only times in my childhood that I found a legit error in a game. There is one part in the space mall with the ice rink where you can go into an arcade. You get a quest to do something, but if you then try to click on one of the arcade cabinets it will cause the game to throw an error. I remember it because I actually called Sierra to tell them about it. The person on the other end even fired up the game and verified it, then told me vaguely that the solution to the puzzle was something else. I'm guessing the tech support weren't allowed to give hints because they had a paid tip line.

the_af 2y ago
> You get a quest to do something, but if you then try to click on one of the arcade cabinets it will cause the game to throw an error. Wait, I'm pretty sure that's the crash to desktop I'm remembering! It was definitely in the arcade. I tried randomly clicking to avoid the Time Police (or whatever those androids were called) and the game would error out. I was never sure if it was an error or copy-protection. I remember winning the game, but don't remember what I did to bypass this (remember: no access to any hint line). So it was an actual bug, and not copy-protection after all? Wow.