The Stack

So, I did a sweep of my records, updating everything with its release date as reported by mobygames. ¹Except Wizardry III, which I’m already committed to treating like it was released in 1986. The year listed with mobygames search results generally seems to be the date of the earliest release on any platform, so quite a few items on the Stack have been shifted back on that basis alone. But there were also quite a few outright errors in my listings, both forward and backward. There was never any good reason to list Dust as 1997, for example: even the specific edition I have isn’t a 1997 release. (Its readme gives instructions for installing it under Windows 98, which really should have made me realize this sooner.)

This done, I had two adventure games listed for 1997: Tex Murphy: Overseer, the last of a series that really epitomizes the 90’s FMV genre, and Egypt 1156 B.C.: Tomb of the Pharaoh, one of Dreamcatcher Interactive’s numerous ancient-civilization-themed pixel-hunts. I chose the former.

Overseer is unusual in that it shipped on CD-ROM and DVD together. The original packaging contained a double-width jewel case containing four CDs, and a single-width case containing a single DVD (and a fifth CD). I still haven’t removed the shrink-wrap from the double-width case, as the DVD version is just the obvious way to go here, both for the superior video quality and for simply not needing to swap discs during play. Unfortunately, it also depends on the same the lost technology as Tender Loving Care did: the MPEG2 decoder card, or at least a software driver capable of acting like one. Fortunately, unlike TLC, the Tex Murphy games have a fanbase. There are websites and message boards, some with fresh activity now that the CD version of the game is available on GOG. There were links to patches and DVD drivers, and after some looking, I eventually found ones that weren’t broken. The Overseer intro movie, if nothing else, has successfully played on my system.

But in the process of looking, I found claims that Overseer was released in 1998. Checking mobygames again, I saw that, although the search results list it as 1997, the detailed game description says March 1998. So I don’t know what’s up with that. They’re at least consistent about Egypt, so let’s try that tonight.

1997 continues to elude me. I installed Dust and played it a bit — sometimes it crashes to desktop with an error immediately on launch, but once you’re in, it seems to be stable. Then, for reasons I’ve already forgotten, I checked its mobygames listing. It turns out to have actually been written in 1995. I had two more adventure games listed in my spreadsheet for 1997, and they both turned out to be from 1996. Probably at some point in the past I accidentally told Google Docs to “sort column B” instead of “sort sheet by column B”, or something along those lines. I’m going to have to scan for more errors more thoroughly at some point, but I’ve already found a genuine 1997 adventure game that was mislabeled for a different year. We’ll find out tonight if it runs.

Meanwhile, I did in fact play a couple of hours of Dust, so I suppose I should write about it. Dust is a first-person adventure set in a small frontier town called Diamondback in 1882 (as the first NPC you meet clumsily points out). Its full title is Dust: A Tale of the Wired West, although the “wired” part doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the content; rather, it’s shorthand for “It’s 1995 and we just found out that you can tell stories on computers!” The art is primitive in a way that almost looks naïvist. The sound is gratingly low-quality, and compounds the irritation of talking to characters with annoying manners of speech, which happens amazingly often — much of the dialogue is unnaturally full of colorful westernisms. It’s the sort of writing that probably reads better on the page than spoken aloud, but not by much.

In fact, sometimes the dialogue seems to go out of its way to annoy the player. At one point early on, there’s a dialogue containing a pause of a few seconds, after which the person you’re talking to says “Well, what are you waiting for? Go!” The player’s likeliest reaction to the pause is frustration that, even though nothing is happening, the game hasn’t yet given back control. To then scold the player for being on the receiving end of this mistreatment smacks of bullying, like knocking someone to the ground and then saying “Why are you lying down? Get up!”

Dialogue mode is where most of the game seems to be played. When you talk to a person, they stop being a stiff CGI model and turn into a photograph of a face, which animates in a stop-frame sort of way: it’s not quite FMV, but it clearly has FMV ambitions. Perhaps because it falls so far short, the technology here feels somehow more rustic than retro, as if this were the sort of crude computer game that the grizzled cowpokes and prospectors of Diamondback put together for their own amusement after seeing a kinetoscope in a penny arcade. Still, even the worst of the animation here works a lot better than the complete lack of animation that a lot of adventure games have during conversations. (I’m thinking in particular of The Longest Journey, which was extremely dialogue-heavy but didn’t seem to realize it.)

For all that, the game is oddly ahead of its time. While the rest of the adventure-gaming world was scrambling to imitate Myst, the designers of Dust, oblivious to context, put together a sandboxish interactive environment with multiple viable approaches to your problems. For example, one of your chief initial limitations is lack of money. You can work around this to some extent by giving people items that they want in lieu of cash, or even just being nice to them, or you can try to pick up the money you need by gambling, and even have the opportunity to cheat at poker.

With the emphasis on dialogue and the alternate approaches, it plays a lot more like an RPG than an adventure. That’s why I shelved it the first time around. When I pulled it out of the bargain bin, I had been expecting a Myst clone.

My success in getting the shooting gallery to work is only spottily repeatable, and I still have yet to get the chase to terminate correctly. Even if I managed to get that to randomly work after repeated failures, I’d be wondering throughout the rest of the game if I was missing crucial events through the same bug. So Blade‘s a bust. It’s time for Dust.

Moving on, then. I’m already a week behind schedule, and I want to make some time to finish up the last few games, so lets go for something short. Adventure games usually qualify. It’s hard to pad things out when every interaction is a special case.

Unfortunately, we seem to have entered the danger zone, where the games are too old to run without problems on a modern system, but not old enough that I can easily get around the problem with a robust and stable emulator. The first game that I pulled out of the Stack for this week, an ill-regarded exercise in wackiness titled Armed & Delirious, consistently crashed to the desktop during the intro cutscene, with a popup reading “Unexpected Error”. No tweaking of the compatibility settings helped. Online searches turned up no patches and no record of anyone else ever having solved this problem, and precious few mentions of anyone even encountering it. Such is the doom of ill-regarded games.

After giving that up, I switched to plan B: Blade Runner, a point-and-click adventure loosely based on the movie of the same name. Blade Runner: The Game doesn’t tell the same story as the movie — or, for that matter, as the novel it was based on (again loosely) — but instead puts you in the shoes of a different cop/murderer hunting for a different set of synthetic humans. It’s more or less a sci-fi police procedural, and I’ll probably be comparing it to my recent experiences with Police Quest if I keep on playing. I have to say, it’s a pretty slick package, if low-fi and over-antialiased by today’s standards. I’m particularly impressed by how smoothly the FMV scene transitions are integrated into the action (something probably helped by the fact that I copied all four CDs to my hard drive).

Operation of the game seemed trouble-free at first, but then I hit a wall, ran out of ways to progress. The last thing I did to advance the story was chase a suspect through an abandoned building. The chase ended at a locked door in a room with no other hotspots. Lacking anything better to do, I left, then tried out the shooting gallery back at HQ, only to find that there was nothing to shoot — no targets ever appeared. Growing suspicious, I hit up the net for information. Walkthroughs confirmed that the chase scene was supposed to end with a triggered event: when I reached the locked door, the guy I was chasing was supposed to jump me from behind. I’m hoping that this is the same sort of trigger that was supposed to make the targets in the shooting gallery appear, because I’ve solved that part. An old FAQ suggested that it had problems on fast systems, and that I should use a slow-down program like Turbo to cut the system speed down to somewhere between 30% and 50%. I had to set it to 1% to get the shooting gallery working — and until that happened, I wasn’t even sure that Turbo was having any effect at all.

But I still haven’t completed the chase successfully. Going back to the locked door after having left it once has no effect. I’m probably going to have to do the chase over again — and since my only save is after that point, that means starting over from scratch. If it doesn’t work, I suppose it’s time for plan C. (Or rather, plan D. I don’t have any unfinished adventure games from 1997 beginning with C.)

Grassland
You are in a pleasant grassy meadow. To the north, south, east, northeast, southeast, and southwest is a meadow; to the west and northwest is seething lava.
A red pyramid stands to the north.
A green pyramid stands to the south.
A blue pyramid stands to the east.

Since people have expressed interest in the IF adaptation of Icebreaker included on the CD, I suppose I should say a few words about it. In a way, it’s similar to the IF adaptation of Doom: when something is about to kill you, you simply type in a command beginning with the word “shoot” and that’s that, with no possibility of missing. Unless, that is, two seekers happen to come on you simultaneously from different directions, which can happen, but isn’t likely as long as you stay in the region where the pyramids and the natural obstacles are. This seems to be a 6×6 region, much smaller than in a normal Icebreaker level, and there are only 14 pyramids to destroy in it. It’s just as well that it doesn’t try to create a full Icebreaker level, if you ask me. The whole thing is basically a curiosity, and is just large enough to make its point.

The most interesting part is also the chief way it differs from the game it’s based on: the point of view. In the original game, you see a broad area around you — not the full playfield, but enough for you to make plans based on where everything is, and to see the Seekers coming. In the text version, all you can see is the square you’re on and the squares adjacent to it. Information about what’s going on elsewhere is conveyed through sound — which, actually, happens to some extent in the original game too: you can always tell when a Seeker offscreen has crushed a green pyramid from the distinctive “kssh”. But in the text game, “offscreen” means almost everywhere, so the noises play a larger role. Apart from that, the fact that you can see only one square around you means that it’s possible to forget where you are relative to other things — in other words, to get lost. Which means that, in grand adventure-game tradition, there’s motivation to draw a map.

The mechanics aren’t completely faithful to the original. You can’t edge between a pair of adjacent pyramids here; any attempt at movement sends you straight at the center of the square in the specified compass direction. You can shoot stuff by specifying a compass direction, but your shots seem to only have a range of one square: shooting at a red pyramid from two squares away does nothing. I have no idea if the pathing algorithm for the Seekers bears any resemblance to that in the original — it’s hard to tell, when you can’t see beyond one square — but I suspect not, because it has to happen on the level of grid-squares here, not on the pixel level. Still, you expect changes when going from one format to another. Icebreaker: The Text Adventure does a reasonably good job of aping the experience of the game it was based on, and that’s all we can really ask of it.

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.

Despite my earlier reluctance, I’ve dipped into the walkthroughs for Police Quest 4 several times now. Not because it has difficult puzzles, but because the things that aren’t puzzles are sometimes difficult — for example, parsing the art. I had a particular problem at first with finding the exits to scenes. The worst case of this was at the scene of the first murder, where you have to walk off an edge that, to me, looks fenced off. Making it worse, you actually can’t leave in that direction the first time you’re at that location, on the night that the body is discovered. It’s only the daytime version of the scene that can be exited. Sometimes the game just arbitrarily declares certain exits to be non-useful, and the only way to tell which is by trying to use them. But by now I’ve got into the habit of trying to exit every scene in every direction, so there’s no good reason for me to get stuck in that way any more.

The pixel-hunting is another matter. Most of the scenes are cluttered with scenery, some few undistinguished bits of which will be crucially clickable. Like a lot of Sierra’s adventures, Police Quest 4 is divided into days, with each day triggering new events and opening up new locations. Days advance in response to plot developments, and plot is gated in arbitrary ways: if you know you need to talk to the victim’s relatives but they aren’t at home, it could be because you haven’t picked up a completely unrelated item in a different part of town. There was one point back in day 1 where I thought I had an actual chain of reasoning that put me on the right path: learning that the dead cop, Hickman, had been undercover as an employee of a nearby diner, I figured I was supposed to snoop around the diner for clues. I couldn’t get in, but there was a prominent employee’s entrance, locked. So I figured Hickman had a key. Where would that be? In his pocket, of course! So I went to the morgue and found a previously-unnoticed envelope containing his personal effects. But all I could do with it was deliver it to his grieving widow, and although that did unlock further events, they weren’t events related to the effects or the diner: instead, it made a potential informant telephone me when I got back to HQ. I still haven’t been inside that diner, and by now it really seems like I never will.

Thinking is futile when cause and effect make no sense. All you can do is go everywhere and try everything and hope that you hit on the things that the author thought of. Or, of course, play from a walkthrough, which may be what Sierra had in mind at this point: why sell a solvable game when you can sell a game and a hint book? If there’s one thing we can truly thank GameFAQs and its ilk for, it’s putting an end to that sort of foolishness.

Most of Sierra’s adventure games used standardized UIs, but the standards went through several iterations. The very earliest Sierra adventure games were illustrated text adventures, where all interaction went through a text parser, and the graphics could be turned off at will. King’s Quest introduced the AGI engine, which added interactivity to the illustrations through an on-screen avatar that you moved around with the arrow keys or a joystick, and this marked the beginning of what we tend to think of at the Sierra-style game today. But it wasn’t until King’s Quest IV, the first game to use the SCI engine, that they added mouse support, and even then, the text parser remained the primary way of entering commands. Only with King’s Quest V did they start making true “point-and-click adventures” — a few years after their chief rival, Lucasarts (then known as Lucasfilm Games). This was basically the final standard Sierra interface, and this is the stage at which Police Quest 4 was made.

Now, the Lucasarts UI at that point was basically a menu for building text commands. You had a menu of verbs at the bottom of the screen, and the nouns were provided by clicking on objects in the scene or in your inventory. Sierra’s approach was different: instead of textual verbs, there were icons. Click on an icon, and it changes the cursor. The icons varied from game to game, but typically included a walking-legs icon for “go to”, an eye for “examine”, and a hand for a general “use/manipulate/pick up”. The last is something that Lucasarts games would split into multiple verbs, allowing the player to specify what they wanted to do more precisely. With the Sierra version, I often don’t know what effect clicking the hand on something is going to produce. Click the hand on a person, and, depending on context, it might be interpreted as an attempt to shake their hand, or to push them aside, or grope them, or tickle them. (In the course of playing PQ4, I’ve encountered all of these.) Lucasarts experimented with their own version of a body-part-oriented action menu in Full Throttle, and it had pretty much the same problem. If it is a problem — there’s something to be said for a game that surprises you, and Coktel’s Goblins series made a virtue of it by making it pretty much the point of the game.

These icons aren’t the only verbs, though. Inventory items are also verbs. That might seem strange if you’re unfamiliar with the kind of UI I’m describing, but what I mean is that they can be assigned to the cursor just like the action icons, effectively creating the verb phrase “Use [object] with…” Now, one big difference between the Sierra point-and-click UI and the Lucasarts one is that Sierra made verbs into modes. Once you assign an action to the cursor, it stays there until you change it. This, combined with the obtuseness of some of the puzzles, yielded the “use every item on every other item” syndrome. If you have an apple in your hand, and you don’t know what it’s for, it’s easy to just go around clicking it on everything until something happens. I really haven’t had a problem with this in PQ4, though, perhaps because the use of objects in this environment tends to be obvious. I have a gun and a badge, but when I get stuck, I’m pretty sure it isn’t because I haven’t applied them to the right inanimate objects.

One other thing about the Sierra UI from King’s Quest V onward: it was designed with full-screen graphics in mind. In KQ5, the icons were hidden until you moved the mouse to where they were located, along the top of the screen. (PQ4 puts its action icons at the bottom.) In KQ5, this had the effect that anything in the top inch or so of any scene had to be purely decorative, because there was no way to click on it: if you moved the mouse cursor there, it would be immediately covered up with action icons. Now, by PQ4, they had come up with a way around this: the icons only appear when you move the cursor all the way to the bottom edge. But at the same time, PQ4 makes such measures unnecessary by not using that part of the screen after all! The scene takes up only part of the screen, making a sort of pseudo-letterboxed effect; at the bottom, when the icons aren’t visible, their place is taken by filler, the words “Police Quest” in big letters on a crude stone-effect background. They might as well leave the interface there all the time — and in fact they give the player that option: you can “lock” the UI in place. But why not just make it that way automatically? It smells of compromise between opposing design goals, or perhaps code reuse with unintended consequences.