(re: re: Love for Police Quest)
I never loved the PQ series really madly, except of course for the superb PQ4, but I did like the first two a lot, and enjoyed parts of the third one.
PQ1 was okay, like a typical made-for-TV cop thriller, and the cliches were not too numerous in it yet. The SCI version was of course incomparably better but the original AGI had its charm, too.
PQ2, in spite of more cliches, was perhaps even better, with a good and often plausible plot, some suspense, and good puzzles. (And the driving was gone! 🙂
PQ3 was awful, badly designed, bugged, with its horrible driving parts, and a ridiculous cliched ripoff of a “story”, with plot holes bigger than the Grand Canyon. (How many more “lost” Bains brothers/uncles/grandpas would we see trying to kill Sonny Bonds if Jim Walls continued on to PQ4?)
Blue Force was actually very good, even if if had its big share of cliches, again. Nice, unjustly forgotten game. I wouldn’t mind seeing a sequel.
But the outstanding one is of course PQ4, one of the best adventures ever made, tough, gripping, dark, gritty, realistic… made me feel like an actual investigator 🙂 – especially since the game required me to really act like one. No more cheap humor, no cartoony graphics, and a detective I could identify with instead of the hillbilly cop from the first three. 😛 A dark, deep, suspenseful, involving plot, and a conclusion that scared wimps used to the comic book realities of the first three games… A wonderful game, probably the last truly great point-n-click, 2D adventure made in the 1990s. Only one thing was wrong with it from my point of view – that it was too short. 🙂 When a story is good and involving, I don’t want it to end… 🙂
Too bad chief Gates and Tammy Dargan didn’t make another police adventure together… I’d love to be John Carey again… or maybe go back in time and work on a case with Bob Hickman in a prequel. 🙂