Yes, Space Quest was fun overall but dying was not. I think it was LucasArts who started to make adventure games where you can't die.

My perhaps rose-tinted memory is that the deaths were pretty comic in Space Quest.

Some of the best parts of the SQ4 talkie are the sarcastic narrated death screens. And SQ5 has neat animations.

The manual tells you to "save early, save often" for a reason.

My subconscious has just dredged up the memory "you take a good long whiff of the acid, and .. whoah, talk about clean sinuses!". That might have been from the later remastered SQ I even?

Sounds like Space Quest 4. That one had a Nose/Smell and Mouth/Taste icon.

The narrator (Gary Owens) was also amazing in the CD version.

I enjoyed the death sequences too.

I was sure to have plenty of savegames before I tried anything, of course.

You can die in Monkey Island. Twice.

One is a Sierra Spoof complete with a Sierra death dialog. That one lets you continue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6F55am-rOY

The other has to do with the fact that Guybrush can hold his breath for 10 Minutes. And only ten minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah5o3aAeZso

If I remember correctly that is the only real game over in any later Lucasfilm/LucasArts adventure game.

EDIT: I just remembered the jumping puzzle in Indy3 where you died all the time when jumping on the wrong tile. Or the Knight Statue that axed either Indy or his father. Or you got shot when you punched Hitler... You could also die in Manic Mansion and Zak McKracken.

Lucasfilm games killed you quite a lot. LucasArts stopped doing that.

> 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".

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.

> 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.

It wasn't obvious that you had to _administer field sobriety test_??

> Whenever I discovered LucasArts (DOTT I think was first), Legend of Kryndaria, Discworld, etc, it was such a breath of fresh air.

Discworld MUD or some other game? The MUD is still alive and well!

They probably mean Discworld (1995)/Discworld II/Discworld Noir, which are all point-and-clicks.

You're probably right. I did not know about them, will have to check them out. Thanks!

They are great. 1 & 2 might have aged less well than Noir.

Some puzzles are quite nonsensical, true to adventure game standards of the day. Sierra gamers found it too easy, people new to the genre too hard.

Eric Idle as Rincewind is amazing though.

Ahhh, the hint line.. I would have been sent to boarding school if there was money left after that phone bill.

LMAO I have no idea how much money it cost but I do remember my parents yelling at me for it. I'm pretty sure they charged by the minute. I wonder how many 8 year olds like me called them and how they talked about that in the break room. Super funny to think about as an adult.