Troels Pleimert

Ah, okay - thanks! So we have now established that Space Quest does, in fact, take place in a parallel universe to our own. That does lend credence to the theory that Earnon could be the Milky Way and Xenon the Earth of this parallel universe. Okay, mind officially blown.

:D I wish I had known about that site a lot earlier. Man! Next thing you'll be tellinf me is that Scott and Mark are making a new game! Haha lol.

What Suejak said.

Damn it! I have, shamefully, never read the SQ3 manual. Never owned a boxed copy of that game. I had no idea. Does someone have a scan of that thing? Sierra Chest Rudy, perhaps?

Now that's an interesting idea. I always assumed Black Hole Bertha transported the Mallard thousands of light years to our galaxy, and possibly through time as well. I hadn't considered the idea that it might have transported Roger and the Guys to an alternate universe. Can black holes even do that? Will someone get professor Hawking on the phone?

Wha-- where? Who? How? What year is it?

And, as Akril pointed out in one of my podcast episodes, the fish DOES actually have inventory descriptions -- they were recorded and are in the resource file on the CD. They just weren't implemented in the game.

All I know is I miss the color cycling logo.

I'm not sure that's exactly what happened. I think they were told about it, but they were busy doing SQ4 and not able to be directly involved in the remake. Scott tells the story that they were asked to make comments, but when they did, they were told, "Yeah, we can't change that. Anything else?"

1 - 1987-1993 2 - Going corporate. It was probably inevitable in the business climate of the day, but ... yeah, hindsight. 3 - The Two Guys had punk spirit and went their own way. So them. :) 4 - There's no way of knowing. They're clearly in this to try and capitalize on the growing indie game market. Whether this will translate to credibility remains to be seen. I think it might turn into what Fox Searchlight is to the 20th Century Fox movie corporation.

For me, what makes BS1 good is the incredibly snarky humor, first and foremost. It's something the series sadly lost as the sequels piled on. If you want my advice, stick with George's incredibly languid walking pace and see if the mystery doesn't grab you. If it hasn't by the time you hit Spain, you can probably give it a miss, then.

I've been playing The Journey Down (chapters 1 and 2) for the most part. Last weekend, I played the freeware game Mudlarks, which was a pretty fun little ghost story. Lost of dry British humor, too. I also played through two of the three retro fan games I talked about on the last podcast episode -- Replicated and Decision of the Elders -- with great apologies to Vonster D Monster, whose Lost Chapter game completely and utterly crapped out on me. Turns out there's a patch for the error I encountered, and I was too dumb to notice it right there on the friggin' website.

"Gladdens" belongs in the dictionary right next to "embiggens."

Okay, I buy that. But what about this "Earth" stuff?

You and Fronzel should start a fan club. ;) But, to unnecessarily clarify: I wasn't suggesting EGA to spite those that like and/or prefer VGA. I suggested it because we're doing a speedrun and I would think it was important that we were all playing the same version. Leveling the playing field and all that.

Judge it however you want. I judge it the same way as I would judge someone who went in and re-recorded Sgt. Pepper's without consulting The Beatles first.

I can't answer an "either/or" question with yes or no. What the hell? But, if I could, I'm going to have to go with EGA. Sure, the music in VGA rocks, and Josh Mandel wrote some killer new material for the click events, but having heard how betrayed Mark and especially Scott felt about the VGA version left quite a sour taste about it for me.

Oh boy, this is going to be fun. Everyone have their copy of SQ1 handy? Should we make a pact right now that we're going EGA on this?

No way! And you'd spend it with us? That's ... that's ... I may weep openly.

So, what weekend's good for you guys? ;) Seriously. Joe from the Upper Memory Block podcast facetiously suggested a Space Quest I speedrun competition, and I said it could make for a fun Hangout. (And PCJ chimed in, "Shortest hangout ever.") But I thought, could be fun to start up SQ1, run through it as fast as we could, and then spend the rest of the time catching up and chatting with Joe. I'm sure we have plenty of talk about, now that it's been some time since the last hangout. A kind of reunion of sorts. :) We were thinking the first weekend in October (ideally Saturday the 4th). At the same time as usual -- 8pm Denmarkian time -- or these times for everyone else: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Space+Quest+Superfan+Hangout%3A+The+Reunion&iso=20141004T20&p1=69&ah=4 Who's game?

Don't get me wrong, I love the fan games. Pretty much all of them. I hear 4.5 is kind of odd, but I haven't played it, so I wouldn't know. Anyway, that's not the point. But we were getting a little sidetracked in one of the other topics over at StarCon Academy, the one about what time period SQ takes place in, when I started talking about a little odd thing I noticed in SQ-1: Decision of the Elders. So I thought this could be a fun time to ask about some of the things in the fan games that made me go "huh?", and if we can somehow concoct a good reason/explanation for it being there. The thing in DotE was that someone in the game mentions that the game takes place on "Earth." Uh, does that mean Julia and Jerry went all the way to the Milky Way system and visited Earth to see if it was a suitable spot to hold their wedding? That's quite a long way to travel! The other thing was in Space Quest 0: Replicated when Roger visits Andromeda. Andromeda the planet. Now, I'm not good with astronomy and such, but I thought Andromeda was a galaxy, not a planet? Feel free to add more -- and believe me, this is in no way meant to take any of the fun out of playing the fan games. This is, really, just playful nitpicking. The two games I've just mentioned are great fun to play and I'm glad I finally got around to it. If you haven't, you should, too.

Doubtful -- Roger's home planet is numerously times given as Xenon, first in the original SQ1 manual. Also, everyone else on Xenon looks humanoid. Also-also, if Space Quest takes place concurrently with our time (let's just say that for argument's sake), that would mean Roger somehow fell through a wormhole in the early 80's at the least. How'd he manage that? I don't think we've ever been given a list of planets in the Earnon system -- in fact, we had a bit of fun trying to find out if Kerona is even in the Earnon system, or somewhere else entirely. But it'd be a pretty big coincidence if one of them was named Earth. And, just to be pedantic, our planet's name isn't even Earth. At least not if we insist on calling our planets by Latin names. ;) I think it was during the chat with the professor dude. Or perhaps it was in the note Julia left you. At any rate, it's definitely in there and I was not hopped up on cheap over-the-counter smack when I saw it, or at least I don't recall being so.

There ya go. What Andrew said.

http://guysfromandromeda.tumblr.com/post/97978675743/nice-bit-of-fan-art-of-the-monolith-burger-clerk :)

Well, time is very loosely defined in Space Quest, owing in great part to that phrase "indeterminate amount of time" in the opening of SQ3. Roger floating for an "indeterminate amount of time" really screwed up the timeline in all sorts of ways, and the unexplained time between SQ4 and SQ5 didn't help much, either. We know for a fact that Space Quest doesn't take place anywhere near our own galaxy. So, technically, Roger's really not even human. The only time he's ever visited our galaxy was when he went through Black Hole Bertha at the end of SQ3, and, thanks to the magic scifi trope that wormholes have become, that means he could've gone through time as well as space. So we really have no way of knowing. Actually, that whole business about Roger not being human made me wonder, when playing Boston McShew's "Decision of the Elders" ... what's up with the story being described as taking place "on Earth"? What's Jerry Wilco even doing there? Okay, I know this is fan fiction, sure, but ... okay, better not think too much about this.