Space Quest: The Lost Chapter

[Cloudee1]

Alright, I have officially started playing this game. I have looked it over a few times in the past, but have never actually sat down and attempted to beat it. That time is now.

Ship - that was kind of an annoyance, figuring out that I needed to stand in front of the chair to actually use the control panel. Took me a little bit of wandering around to manage it.

hmm... and so ends my current adventure. I don't know whether it is the game or scumm acting up, but when I clicked on the menu bar, I wasn't able to get it to close again so that I could continue playing. Opening and closing SCUMM, I can get easily recreate...

I am definately going to chalk it up to SCUMM, opening the game with DOSBOX, I can't get the issue to reoccur. Continueing on...

Time to draw a map

Nowhere near finished drawing out my map of the planet. I find the layout slightly confusing and I am sure that I am missing some screens yet surrounding the start of the game, but so far a couple of points of interest... items in other words.

   

now back to the mapping

[Cloudee1]

Ouch, that hurts. There is a blown stack error that shows up. There is a patch for the blown stack, however applying it takes away the mouse support. I much prefer the mouse support over strict keyboard.

There appears to be one room transition that triggers this error. Both directions however. What I did to maintain the mouse support was to save right before getting the error and apply the patch. There are only a few rooms on the other side of the error causing transition, so I played those few rooms without the mouse support and once I crossed back over the error line so to say, I recopied the files from the mouse support game into my directory, essentially overwriting the patch and played on, so far there does not really seem to be any ill effect from doing so.

Either way though, this bit of silliness is definitely going to lower my opinion of it's playability when it comes time to give it a rating... That and there is just simply no way anyone could ever make it through this game without looking at a walkthrough.

I have gone ahead and repackaged the zip file containing the game to include a patch.zip folder as well as an undoPatch.zip folder. To apply the patch copy all of the files to the game directory, likewise, when you are ready to have mouse support again, copy the files from the undoPatch folder into the game directory. It's as easy as I could make it.

[Cloudee1]

Holy Crap, are you kidding me with this one...

Not sure this one is even doable. Overkill... literally.

*Edit - Ok, I am a cheater I admit it. I ended up opening up the game and altering this pic resource in order to actually make it playable. Not proud of it, but considering how utterly impossible this maze is, I am not ashamed of it either.

[Collector]

You could play the game in NAGI to keep the mouse support after the stack patch.

[Cloudee1]

And there it is... Finished this one. Granted I HAD to use a walkthrough and change a maze pics priority's in order to do it  I still got to the end.

[Collector]

Cheat!

[Cloudee1]

Yes, yes I am. 

Seriously though, that squid or whatever it was, it took me about an hour to get as far as I am in the screenshot. Not only did I need to get to the other side of the room but I would have also needed to make it back. If it wasn't for cheating, I wouldn't have continued playing the game.

As for the walkthrough, sadly it was a necessary evil. There just weren't enough clues or hints that something needed done or investigated further. Plus, a lot of the rooms were drawn as though the a direction was blocked off even though it wasn't.

Playability is my only complaint. The story was good and most of the dialog had a space questish air. The fact of just how big this game is too, just blows me away at the amount of work that went into it. I have tossed around the idea of incorporating a point and click sci remake of this game into one of my more ambitious projects... that thought has passed now that I see just how big this game is.

[daleks13]

Playability is my only complaint. The story was good and most of the dialog had a space questish air. The fact of just how big this game is too, just blows me away at the amount of work that went into it. I have tossed around the idea of incorporating a point and click sci remake of this game into one of my more ambitious projects... that thought has passed now that I see just how big this game is.

You have my vote for an sci remake.

[Cloudee1]

It will probably never happen, but I have always had the desire to do Space Quest 1-3 as well as the two agi fangames all in one large game. I have played around with redoing space quest 2 already. I have it done to about half of the planet. But like I said, now that I have seen the actual size of The Lost Chapter, I will probably just stick with the big 3... and that is if it ever happens, more than likely it will not.