The Stack

The story in the second half of FF6 is all about finishing things, tying up loose ends from the first half. And it’s funny, because a lot of those loose ends are things that I don’t remember until I see them tied up. There was even one major loose end — the Terra vs Phunbaba ¹A bad transliteration: it should be Humbaba, the demon from the epic of Gilgamesh (and in some later editions, it is). Mistakes like this happen a lot in the translations of the Final Fantasy series, due to their predilection for throwing in random elements from diverse mythologies that the translators aren’t necessarily familiar with. arc — from the early part of the second half that I didn’t remember. Things I don’t remember are things that I can’t pursue as goals. But that hardly matters, because implicit goals are provided by the game’s very structure: you visit every dot on the map, talk to every NPC, and explore every dungeon, and in the process, you wind up completing the story.

But there’s one other set of major goals the game has provided for me: finding and slaying the great dragons. There are eight of them. I know this because the first time I killed one, I got a message telling me I had killed 1 of 8 dragons. Re-exploring the parts that Celes passed through alone a year ago, I find there’s an NPC who explains how the dragons were released by the cataclysms or something — I don’t remember the details, but there’s some kind of reward for killing them all — probably some magicite yielding Bahamut, the dragon-king summonable from previous games.

I’ve racked up 5 dragons already without really trying, because they tend to show up in places where you’d go anyway: slightly off the main trunk of a dungeon, for example. One of them was even squatting in the opera house. Unlike random encounters, you can see the great dragons as you wander the area: they show up as single-map-tile sprites just like heroes and NPCs, and they look misleadingly cute in that form, like geckos with little wings. So you know when you’ve found them.

Nonetheless, I’ve pretty much run out of places to look, and I’m still short three. I suppose I should recheck the places that I visited with only Celes and Sabin. I would have been avoiding optional boss fights at that point, so I might have passed a dragon by. And after that? I’ll just have to recheck everyplace else. This is basically the stage of the game where it all comes down to grinding: I’m preparing to assault Kefka’s tower, but I need to be stronger before I can make a serious attempt at it. The dragon hunt at least turns the final grind into something purposeful. It gives you something to do other than just wander back and forth and wait to be attacked.

Final Fantasy VI really is the pinnacle of its form, but that shouldn’t be surprising, considering that it’s also the last of its form. The next game in the series shifted to blobby low-polygon-count 3D, and, while that style has its charm, it required different techniques than the rest of the series up to that point. There’s a real craft to storytelling via tiny pixelated sprites, and it was pretty well-developed by now. The human figures have a large library of emote animations for use in dialogues and cutscenes, some of them quite expressive despite differing from the neutral expression by only a few pixels — although others involve running back and forth or leaping in the air several times the character’s height. Everything I said about the theatrical gestures in Police Quest 4 applies even moreso here.

Cutscenes are the obvious place to show off sprite animations, but there’s even more impressive work in the combat. The most noticeable part of this is in the special moves, such as when Cyan swoops into the midst of the enemies, with a comet-trail of desaturated afterimages behind him. The movement there doesn’t doesn’t look at all natural, but then, neither do fireworks. Personally, though, I’m more impressed with the subtler touches, like the alteration in posture to indicate each character’s state. Someone who’s been ordered to cast a spell, for example, will bow their head and make muttering motions until it’s their turn to act. This actually provides useful feedback about what’s going on, whereas the flashier attack animations are just a matter of showing off. The one disappointing thing is that the monsters aren’t animated in combat at all. Certain monsters — mainly bosses — have a fully-animated sprite representation that’s used in the main movement-and-exploration mode, but during combat, all monsters use larger portraits that just stand still. Presumably it would have been prohibitively space-consuming to include animations for every monster type in the game within the constraints of the SNES — even using still images, most of the monsters are palette swaps of other monsters. I suppose the shift to 3D in the next game helped there: suddenly animations were relatively lightweight, consisting of differences in vectors instead of a full copy of the bitmap for every frame.

Today’s indie game developers are in love with minimalistic pixel art, partly because it’s the aesthetic of least effort. But that’s certainly not the case here: the artists put in loads of effort and want you to know it. To the extent that it goes all “less is more”, it’s a product of systemic constraints. Considered purely in terms of style, the closest recent game is probably Braid, which similarly tries to be as evocative as it can with a super-deformed sprite with a limited number of cels. But even Braid was deliberately retro, and there was nothing retro about FF6 at the time of its release.

On the other hand, the game’s biggest reach beyond sprites is something I regard as its biggest failure: the character portraits. In my posts about FF5, I described the concept art created by Yoshitaka Amano, and how little it resembled the stuff in the game. FF6 puts a closer approximation to the concept art in the party stats screens, fitting in greater detail by showing just the head. There’s just something off about these portraits. Some of the faces are just ugly in a way that their sprites are not: Gau looks misshapen, Setzer has scars that you can’t normally see. But even the pretty ones look very wrong to me. I don’t think this is the famous “uncanny valley” effect — even the portraits are too far from human for that. It’s more like Scott McCloud’s famous observation that it’s easier to identify with simplified and cartoony characters than with highly-detailed ones. So anyway, here’s a case where I think it would have been better for the art to be more minimalist than it is, and therefore for the artists to choose minimalism rather than do as much as allowed by the medium (and the budget, and the deadlines).

I’m kind of wondering now what FF7 would have been like if the series had stayed 2D. Would it be a better or a worse game? It was astounding at the time, but today, I tend to think that the primitive 3D of the day has weathered worse than well-crafted 2D of the same era. A remake of FF7 in the style of FF6 seems like such an obvious fan project that I’d be a little surprised if it doesn’t turn out that someone is already working on one. But a quick google only yields rumors and arguments about Square going the other direction, doing a HD remake for the PS3. I guess we all at least agree that FF7 in its current form falls short of ideal.

I’ve finally reassembled the whole team. Actually, I’ve done more than that: I’ve picked up a couple of extras. In fact, I have more characters now than are mentioned in the manual. Mog the dancing moogle, who showed up only briefly in the first half, is briefly described there, to document the basics of his dancing abilities (which hardly need documentation, really — it’s not as if they made a DDR-like minigame or anything out of it, intriguing though it would be to try to combine such a thing with ATB combat). His yeti friend is another matter. The presence of a yeti doesn’t come as a complete surprise, because I recall hearing the miners of Narshe talk about it back at the very beginning of the game, and I remember wasting some time hunting for it. But that it joins my party? That was unexpected.

I suppose the reason it’s not mentioned in the docs is that, unlike Mog, there’s no special interface associated with it. In fact, the distinguishing feature of the yeti is absence of interface. You can’t give the yeti equipment, or teach it spells, or even give it orders during combat: it is, in effect, always berzerk and naked. It’s like the Barbarian class from previous games taken to its logical extreme. This makes it the simplest of all the characters to play, and therefore the least interesting. I doubt I’ll be using it much, unless I have an urgent need for more melee power, which it’s got in spades.

But I really don’t think that’s going to happen. Maybe it would have been useful to have a yeti around when I made my assault on the treasure cave where I picked up Locke, but I tackled that cave and the yeti’s lair in the wrong order. Once you have an airship, the game doesn’t much try to force you to do things in a particular order, but there’s definitely an optimal sequence. There are soft walls, and, because of a misunderstanding on my part, I forced my way through some of them prematurely. The result was a nice bit of power-leveling, but now that I go back to the places where I should have gone first, I’m finding them tediously easy. But that’s a risk in any CRPG with an open environment — I remember having a similar experience in Planescape: Torment, for example. Anyway, I think I’m past the point where mere brute muscle is an asset. Everything I meet is either much less powerful than my party, in which case I don’t need the yeti, or a boss, and best handled with judicious use of spells or special powers that the yeti doesn’t have.

And ultimately, this isn’t a yeti’s world. It’s far too genteel. I’ve seen the game described as steampunk, but that’s not quite right: it’s a century or two early for that, fantasy-classical or even fantasy-baroque, with major set-pieces built around things like an opera house and a private art collection. Even after the apocalypse, the men tend to wear long dress coats and tie their hair back with ribbons. A hairy, slope-browed man-beast is somewhat out-of-place, lumbering through the elegant and tastefully-appointed mansions here. But then, of all the playable characters, the only one who’s fully at home in this environment is Edgar. Everyone else is a misfit or outcast of some kind, and several of them have animalistic qualities: a feral child, a girl who transforms into a beast, a moogle. Once again, the yeti is just an exaggeration of something that was already present.

One nice thing about the companion-hunt in the FF6‘s second half: you find people in a different order than the first time around. This forces you to spend some quality time with the ones you acquired late and never really saw the point of. So I’m rethinking some of what I said before.

I said before that the time needed to charge up Cyan’s special “sword technique” attacks made them less than worthwhile in the time-sensitive ATB system. This might have been the case earlier in the game, when attacks were resolved relatively quickly. But the more powerful attacks — both yours and the monsters’ — tend to have longer and more elaborate animations associated with them. The extreme end of this is of course the summon animations, but simple high-level spells take multiple seconds to execute, and when there are a lot of them flying around, you can wind up with your entire party queued up, waiting to carry out the orders you’ve already given them. This is the time to start Cyan charging up a special attack. This isn’t always practical, but that’s a good thing. It gives you a reason to not just automatically use the special attack all the time.

With Setzer, I complained about the slot-machine-like interface for his special moves: it asks you to stop three wheels with precise timing to get three matching symbols. I didn’t use it much before, because I found myself incapable of timing it right. But now, I’m certain that it didn’t really matter. I heard tell of some other game with an interface of this sort that only pretended to rely on the player’s timing: the outcome was really predetermined. And now that I’m aware that this sort of thing goes on, I’ve been paying closer attention to Setzer, and I’m quite certain that he’s cheating as well. I’m putting absolutley no effort into getting the timing right, and I’m still getting matches far more often than you’d expect from chance — in fact, if the first wheel stops at a picture of a gemstone, I always get three gemstones. No exceptions. I hadn’t noticed this in my earlier sorties, but Setzer is significantly higher level now, so perhaps he’s just better at it. It all makes me wonder how prevalent this kind of fakery is. Are there any games that use this kind of interface and don’t cheat the player determination? What’s the psychological effect on all the Japanese children growing up immersed in this? Are they developing an unjustified sense of confidence in their abilities? I suppose that’s part of the RPG experience anyway — the sense of personal improvement that’s really just a matter of the computer gradually making things easier for you. But at least it’s more honest about it most of the time. At any rate, now that I know that Setzer’s special attacks aren’t really dependent on my reflexes, I’m much more willing to use them. It means he’s the game’s specialist in powerful but randomized and unreliable effects, like FF5‘s Geomancer. I kind of liked the Geomancer.

Little Relm’s special power is that she can “sketch” monsters to use their own attacks, randomly-selected, against them. In most cases, this isn’t a very useful ability: the monsters are so much weaker than the party, and often immune to the same kind of elemental damage that they use against you. But I’ve come to realize that she’s got an even better power: her wardrobe. She can wear tiny but powerful outfits that no one else can. (Although I’ve discovered that her grandfather Strago can fit into the moogle suit too, which is a little creepy.) Okay, so that’s not unique to Relm. There are a bunch of character-specific items — mostly weapons — and most equipment can be used by only a few characters. But Relm starts off with an item that’s very powerful, and which only she can use: the “Safty Ring” [sic] left to her by her mother. I don’t think I fully appreciated this before, because it has no effect on her stats and the in-game description is ambiguous. What is does is, it gives her a near-total immunity to direct-damage spells. That is a very big deal. In the second half, there’s a tower populated entirely by spellcasting Kefka-worshippers (and one dragon). I’ve made several attempts at ascending it, and still haven’t reached the top. But I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I have without that ring.

Well, except that an item identical to the ring but useable by anyone can be found in the tower’s lower reaches. I really should have figured this out back when it made more of a difference.

My merry band has picked up three more: Relm (tyke with magic paintbrush), Cyan (dour samurai), and Gau (wild boy), in that order. This means I’m once again over the limit on how many can be in the party at a time, and have to choose who to take with me. Obviously the last one to join up always gets a spot, just because I want to try them out and see if I want to keep them around more permanently — my memories of everyone’s relative usefulness are not necessarily reliable, and new abilities come with higher levels or better equipment I’m picking up. (For the wretched inhabitants of a destroyed world, the weapons and armor dealers have really managed to advance the state of the art. But I suppose this could be the result of necessity, as the world turns harsher and the monsters tougher. Or it could be a result of magic returning to the world, or of buried artifacts unearthed by the cataclysm. Or, y’know, it could be a RPG.)

To some slight extent, I’m choosing characters for story purposes. Cyan has been writing letters to a woman in one town, so I take him to meet her. Gau’s father is around — I don’t really remember meeting him before, but I must have, or else a lot of the dialogue in this section doesn’t make sense. Anyway, there’s a fairly involved cutscene about reuniting father and son, and its unsatisfactory consequences. I haven’t been to visit the moogle warren yet, but when I do, I’ll have to be sure to bring Relm so she can show off her newly-looted moogle suit. Celes is a constant fixture in my party (and consequently leveling up faster than anyone else) simply because she was the only playable character at the beginning of this half of the game, and therefore it feels like it’s her story. It was her idea to put the old gang back together, so she should be on hand to recruit each member personally.

Notably, even though the choice of characters is the closest thing this game has to FF5‘s Job system, I’m not choosing characters on the basis of their utility in the immediate context, like picking the ones with the skills to overcome the monsters or other obstacles in a particular area. What’s more, I didn’t even really do this back in the first half. I remember putting together some special teams to accompany Gau into the Veldt, but that was a matter of choosing the characters that benefit the most from the context, and that’s not quite the same thing. I mainly remember swapping people out as a way to level everyone up evenly, and to make sure everyone learned all the spells. And I may settle into that pattern again, once I’ve got everyone back. It’s certainly the way to go if you want to experience the game completely, to try out all the special powers and so forth, and it’s kind of necessary because you never know when the game is going to force a character on you. Characters that rejoin your party after an absence seem to get artificially leveled up to match the ones you’ve been leveling up yourself, but ones that you’ve simply kept waiting in the wings get no such handicap. But also, the first half frustrated the natural tendency to identify a core team: the sole initial character there was Terra, and she was simply pulled out of the party early on. Imagine losing Cloud Strife that way, or Heimdall, or Pikachu. It made it clear that this is not simply a hero’s journey, but an ensemble piece. Perhaps I’ve been forgetting this. Perhaps I should remember.

My last session ended at a wall: a confrontation with a trick boss. I haven’t yet got its measure down completely, but it cycles between two forms with different attacks and different weaknesses. I’m going to have to do some probing, then probably go back to the last save point (located conveniently outside its lair) and pick out more specialized equipment.

At this stage of the game, bosses of this sort are the only fights that present any difficulty at all. In particular, Sabin has a move called “Air Blade” that’s basically the “win fight” button, doing at least a thousand points of damage, and usually substantially more, to all enemies. Since it’s one of his moves that requires a hadouken-like rotating sweep of the D-pad, I don’t always execute it successfully, but that just means I endure one round of attacks before I get to try again. The rest of my party is basically just there to absorb damage, and sometimes to reduce the enemy’s ability to dish it out. Most of my characters have learned most of the spells available in the game, but the only ones I really use are the healing spells. Only the bosses force me to exercise my options more fully.

But then, I suppose that abusing Sabin isn’t my only choice. For example, I could probably do just as well through power-spellcasting. I got used to conserving mana in the early parts of the game, but that isn’t really a necessity now: my characters are rolling in the stuff, and pulling in enough cash to maintain a wagonload of mana restorative items. Ordinary melee attacks plus damage-enhancing items is also probably a valid approach; as it is, I’m keeping my characters mainly equipped with stuff to ward off status effects, which makes success in combat more certain, but reduces the variety of the experience. As I once said about Diablo, it’s important to have a strategy, but it doesn’t really matter what it is.

But personally, I find that once I hit on one approach that works, I tend to stick with it until it stops working. This may mean I’m the wrong sort of player for this sort of game, but if so, a lot of other players are in the same category. I remember this being a particular problem in Final Fantasy VIII. Summonables become available extremely early there, and were unusually cheap to cast, and for much of the game were as good a battle-ender as Sabin’s Air Blade. So a lot of players, it seemed, just used a summon in every fight, until they either got tired of watching the summon animations over and over and quit the game, or finally hit a battle where summoning alone didn’t cut it and abruptly had to learn to use the rest of the combat system. FF8 is usually considered one of the weakest of the series, partly (though not entirely) because of this problem. And I can see the same thing happening on a smaller scale here.

It’s been over a year since my last session of FF6. I’ve spent a little while rereading my previous posts to remind myself of what was going on, so here’s a brief recap: Kefka destroyed the world. Characters in the game say as much. He continues to destroy it from time to time, clobbering towns with his destructo-beam for giggles from atop his unassailable mile-high tower, but the indomitable survivors continue to rebuild. Likewise, the player is rebuilding the party. You start with only Celes, who was once an imperial general, but whose main role in the story is that of girl. Before my hiatus, I had found Sabin, martial artist with his own special martial-arts-move interface, and I was stalking someone who looked exactly like Edgar, gadgeteer king, but who claimed not to be him. And by the end of my latest session, I had added Edgar to my party, as well as Setzer, shady gambler with his own airship. That airship was destroyed during the apocalypse, but once he was convinced to rejoin the old gang and topple the tower — something best attempted from the sky — he unveiled a replacement, called the Falcon, just in case you hadn’t caught on about the Han Solo wannabe thing yet.

Now, I hadn’t planned to take so long to get back to this game, but it seems to me that if there’s one spot in the game that’s ideal for an extended break, it’s here at the beginning of the second half. You get the player characters and their abilities introduced afresh, one by one, and until you get the airship, your choices about where to go are constrained, making it less important that you don’t remember what you were doing. My one regret is that I didn’t cut things off soon enough to get the full effect. If I had started this session with Celes still stuck alone on her island, I’d have essentially no immediate context to try to remember. As it is, I started off between a cave and a town, and didn’t remember which one I was headed towards and which I had just left — or, indeed, if I needed to go somewhere else entirely. I wound up wasting some time wandering around in a desert having random encounters. But I suppose I needed that time to refamiliarize myself with the combat mechanics, and, in particular, to relearn Sabin’s special moves (or at least the few worth using).

Still, I have to say that getting back into this game has been a joy, especially in comparison to the other games I’ve been playing lately. It definitely has by far the greatest sense of professionalism of everything I’ve hit so far in this year’s chronological rundown — in contrast to everything else, it doesn’t feel at all rushed or ill-conceived or technology primitive. Was 1994 some kind of turning point for the industry? Perhaps it’s the difference between console and PC games? Or maybe it’s just that I’m playing the 1999 Playstation remake instead of the original SNES version, which definitely has an impact on the UI, if nothing else.

Daryl F. Gates died of cancer on April 16, 2010, three days before I started playing Police Quest 4. He was 83.

One of the biggest differences between games and real life is that games can end in victory. PQ4, as expected, ends in a moment of triumph for player character Detective Carey, his heroism in facing down the serial killer formally recognized in a ceremony where he’s given a medal by Daryl Gates himself, even if that heroism was only necessary because he deliberately put himself in a position of danger without requesting backup, and the end result was killing a man instead of making an arrest. Sonny Bonds is somewhere shaking his head sadly, but that’s the world we’re in by the end. Procedure has failed us. It’s cowboy time. The strange part is that the writers don’t seem to realize that this is what’s happening. Even in the endgame, you can get extra points by taking notes about your discoveries.

Or maybe not. It seems to me that the ending is open to another interpretation — one that would be more plausible if the game credited David Lynch or Hideo Kojima as its celebrity figurehead, but one that’s compelling enough to describe here. This will involve spoiling the ending completely, if anyone cares.

Now, recall that the victims were poisoned. The evidence about how the poison was administered was a little confusing — the autopsy reports mentioned puncture marks, as if the victim had received an injection, but also talked about the gastrointestinal tract being ruptured, which seems more consistent with an orally administered poison. Towards the end, there’s a point where you’re talking to a suspect — one Mitchell Thurman, a Norman Bates actalike who runs a dingy art cinema, apparently all by himself — and, just after you tell him that you’re investigating a murder, he offers you some tea. Taking it seems like a really bad idea, but, as with many really bad ideas, the game doesn’t provide the option of not doing it. He also offers you a free movie screening, and the end result is that you doze off in the empty theater — some images of Thurman in drag against a black background are shown, and it’s not clear if this is the movie you were watching or a dream/hallucination/premonition. Regardless, Thurman wakes you up and tells you to get out of there.

Shortly afterward, the character of the game changes — it becomes more adventure-game-like, less concerned with talking to people and more concerned with using objects on objects in sometimes unlikely combinations. (It even briefly turns into a Room Escape game, complete with first-person view and right-angle turns by mousing to the edges of the screen. This was a year before the genre-defining Crimson Room and its explosion of imitators, so, as with the proto-Dating Sim in QfG5, Sierra was anticipating things to come.) On returning to the cinema though an unlikely route, you find an unconscious woman in the seat where you fell asleep. She’s shortly taken away by Thurman, who’s wearing the same dress as in the dream sequence, and only swift action on Carey’s part saves her from becoming one more victim. (We know she’s still alive because the award ceremony at the end mentions five victims, and that’s how many have been found up to that point.)

So, what we learn from this is that Thurman’s MO involves sedating people so that they fall asleep watching movies. This is in fact what he did to Carey. So why didn’t he go through with killing him? I suppose we’re supposed to interpret his dress-up act as indicating a split personality, like in Psycho, so the Thurman who tells you to get away genuinely doesn’t want you to die, and fears what will happen when she comes out. But I have another explanation: Nothing that happens after you sit down in that darkened cinema is real. It’s all the hallucinations caused by the poisoned tea. It explains so much, and it gives the game that noir twist that I was craving in my last post. It also provides fuel for speculation. The idea that the killer is a transvestite isn’t entirely the product of Carey’s subconscious — there’s some evidence suggesting it — but the fact that his hallucination puts a woman in the place of his own unconscious body suggests gender issues of some sort. “Carey”, as one NPC points out, sounds like “Carrie”, a female name.

But as fun as it is to pursue this line of thought, I have to ask what Tim Rogers asked about Metal Gear Solid 2: Did the author intend to make the game this way? And I have to admit that I don’t think so, because I don’t think anything about this game came out as intended. Despite crediting Gates as the author, PQ4 credits Tammy Dargan as designer and writer. What that leaves for the author to do, I can’t fathom. I can’t say anything for sure about PQ4‘s development process, but this confusion of responsibility really seems like the sort of thing you’d expect in a rudderless project, where different developers are trying to take it in different directions. And that’s my impression of the game overall. There’s all this infrastructure to support investigation of a sort that just doesn’t happen — the lab reports that never come, the evidence room where you can successfully turn in one piece of evidence in the whole game, the evidence-collection toolkit that’s mainly used in that room-escape sequence at the end. It reminds me of jokes I made about doing a videogame adaptation of the movie Jarhead: it would have the most awesome tutorial ever, where you learn all sorts of devastating combo moves and the like, and then the main game would consist of sitting in a featureless desert without an enemy to fight for twenty hours.

I haven’t said much about the story of Police Quest 4 yet. Let’s rectify that.

The main plot is a hunt for a serial killer. The victims, including two cops, are found at accelerating intervals, naked and mutilated, with signs of poisoning. The specific poison is not identified by autopsy — every time a new victim is found, you get to hear the coroner make excuses for this, asserting that there are thousands of poisons, and tests for only a few of them. And in general, lab results tend to be promised and then forgotten about: “We’re analyzing the fibers found on the body”, you’re told, and that’s the last you hear about it. Obvious suspects crop up, and you find evidence pointing at them, only to have it not pan out, leaving you at square one until a new body shows up. Overall, it has a strong sense of futility, although that’s probably not what the author intended.

Although maybe it is. Some parts of the game seem like cries of frustration — the recurring annoyance with the media, for example, personified by a TV reporter who blames the police for not protecting the public. Similarly, one of the bodies is found on the grounds of a famous rapper’s mansion (the author clearly doesn’t get rap, and the player is expected to not get it too), and the rapper actually accuses the cops of dumping the body there in order to ruin his reputation and hurt his sales. (A strange thing to say, considering the lengths that some rappers have gone to in order to cultivate a criminal reputation.) And of course your boss has harsh words for you every time someone else complains about you doing your job. Everyone has it in for you, even though everything you do is really for their own good. It’s a little like an Ayn Rand novel in that respect, except with a greater sense of social responsibility. If anything in the game is a deliberate expression of Daryl Gates’ conscious worldview, it’s this sense of persecution.

And yet, when the player character has his “I’m through with this crap” moment, it’s not a reaction to the hate, but to the bureaucracy. Which is strange for a game that so fetishizes paperwork, but I’m assuming that this is simply inherited from the previous Police Quest games, and not part of the author’s message. At one point, you need some DNA evidence analyzed, while the room where you’d normally check in evidence at HQ is closed. And so you have to take it directly to the morgue, where the PC delivers an impassioned speech about how we can’t afford these delays while the killer could strike again at any moment. The game frequently gates stuff by closing other offices arbitrarily, but in this one instance, it seems to be aware of how frustrating this is. ¹You actually have to wait for elevators in the HQ building. At first I thought this made some sense as a way to encourage you to spend most of your time in the field and only come back to HQ when you have something specific to do there, and that may have been the intention, but the unpredictability of where you have to go in order to advance the story interferes with any such planning on the player’s part. At any rate, the only apparent result is a reprimand for not following procedure. As usual, evidence submitted for analysis is never mentioned again.

I half-suspect that I’m missing out on some way of getting information that the game expects me to have — particularly when I’m asked at one point whether the killer is a man or a woman, and have to answer on the basis of no hard evidence. But then, this is a game that generally makes progress contingent on receiving exposition, so I doubt it. More likely there were infodumps cut in order to meet a deadline.

Meanwhile, there are other crimes, including a neo-nazi hate criminal at one point that seems plainly included as a doomed-to-failure attempt to stave off allegations of racism on the part of the author. The initial crime scene had a second body, a kid riddled with bullets in a dumpster, which turned out to be completely unrelated to the serial killings — apparently murder victims are so dense in Los Angeles that good body-dumping spots have to be shared. Back in the original Police Quest, the crime wave threatening the sleepy city of Lytton was ultimately the product of one man, and arresting him meant there was hope that things would go back to normal. There is no such hope here. LA, in this game, is irreparably steeped in violence — another facet of that sense of futility I mentioned.

I haven’t quite reached the end of the game, but I expect that I’ll arrest the serial killer after a dramatic confrontation. Afterwards, the author has a choice: the wish-fulfillment route, with the PC hailed as a hero and even that TV reporter changing her tune, or the darker and more thematic route, where even after saving lives nothing really changes. But I submit that it would be more in line with the game so far if the PC is the next victim. To be tied up like the previous victims would be the ultimate expression of his powerlessness in the messed-up world, and to die without solving the case would be the culmination of the repeated failures to pin it on anyone throughout the game. I doubt that Sierra would have the courage to do this, but it would be very noir, and make me re-evaluate a lot of what I’ve already seen.

Action scenes in adventures are a longstanding Sierra tradition, and one mercifully not widely imitated. The original Police Quest had two basic sorts: driving and shooting. The driving part was a top-down affair similar to the original Grand Theft Auto, except of course that you were expected not to drive recklessly, which pretty much removes the fun. It yielded enough complaints that they left it out of Police Quest 2, but this was a drastic enough change to the character of the game that fans complained again, resulting in it being added back in a modified form in the third game. PQ4 leaves it out, letting you instead navigate Los Angeles through the interface that was already becoming the norm for mystery games in urban settings: a map, with clickable dots at the important locations.

The shooting remains, although most actual shooting is done at stationary targets on a firing range. You’re expected to pass a marksmanship test on the game’s third day, and in fact you can visit the range to practice on preceding days, and get points for each iteration. It’s basically the world’s easiest first-person shooter. You’re rated on speed and accuracy, but when you come right down to it, it’s speed and accuracy of clicking on an image with a mouse.

Good marksmanship doesn’t really help you with the gunplay in the field, which is mostly about pointing your gun at people and then yelling at them, at which point they drop their weapon and surrender. I’ve seen only one fight so far that actually has to be won with bullets rather than handcuffs, and I figure this rarity is one of the game’s more plausible claims to realism. But even these parts are essentially action scenes, in that you have to act quickly or be killed.

Finally, there are a couple of out-and-out literal videogames, playable coin-op machines located in the bar where the cops hang out after hours. There are two, a simple Asteroids clone and a simple driving game. (So they didn’t completely eliminate driving after all!) I haven’t checked the walkthroughs on this, but Sierra has a certain history of awarding points for doing well in embedded games of this sort. They may not be doing it here, though — they weren’t completely consistent about it, and it doesn’t exactly fit in with the sort of thing you generally get extra points for in this game: diligence, following up every lead no matter how remote, following procedure, and filling out paperwork at every opportunity. But if there are any points associated with the embedded videogames, I doubt I’ll be getting them. The driving game in particular seems very hard, and I just don’t care about my score in PQ4 as much as I did in the earlier games.