The kissamorph death happens when you try to survive the moisture-extracting robot (the ED-209 lookalike) the "right" way: by running away. When you're close to getting back to the escape pods, the egg hatches and kills you. Another hint: you don't have to type "take a deep breath" when diving in the swamp, but instead just type "hold breath"
When I played this as a kid I was stumped when I got to the asteroid. The acid pit trap was my stumbling block. I replayed the game a few times thinking I might have missed something that would stop the trap from activating. Then one night I had a dream about it where I used the plunger to stick to the wall. I woke up at 2 AM on a school night and snuck to the livingroom to try it. Success!
Yo! Regarding the Slash/Sludge Vohaul clusterfuck... Even if you talk to Scott Murphy in person about this, which I have, it is very hard to get a clean grasp of what the real deal. But from what I can recall: Sludge and Slash are two different people. Slash is NOT the scientist on the Arcada; that's just a random scientist guy. Sludge and Slash are actually brothers. They worked on the Star Generator together but fell out because Sludge wanted to use it as a weapon while his brother wanted to use it for peaceful purposes. Sludge and Slash are both humanoid-looking, but Sludge looks the way he does because, when he was exiled from Xenon for being a warmongering little twat, he couldn't find any test subjects for his many horrible experiments, so he just tested them on himself. Now, most of this can be backed up by what's already in the games, and what can't can at least be accepted as "yeah, I suppose that makes sense." Shit only gets really weird when you start asking Scott about why Sludge and Roger are so much at each others' throats. It's not just that Roger keeps tripping up Sludge's plans for galactic domination. No, it's because... well, you probably guessed it. Roger was supposed to be revealed to be the third brother in the Vohaul family. Yup. That never made it into any of the games, though, so I can't tell you the specifics of how that would have worked out. But one of the reasons for Sludge and Roger's mutual hatred is that Roger was a genetic experiment and, to keep him alive and healthy, his parents (or the scientists that made him; I forget) harvested tissue and even organs from his two brothers. Slash was okay with this because, you know, brother dearest - but Sludge resented his ass for it. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Also (I'm just adding comments as I watch through the video)... Root Monster gauntlet on Slow/Normal speed? You are hereby invited to participate in the annual Space Quest Olympics where we do this thing on "Fastest" speed! 😁
@@NoirReservoir Came down to say this. The stairs in Sierra games become a piece of cake when you unlock the magic diagonal keys. You just zoom right up.
Excellent video! I played this on a Mac SE in the late 80s/early 90s and was astonished at its scope...before giving up in frustration after being shot by guards repeatedly.
Fun Fact: If you type CHEAT at any point in the game the game sends you to a special ending and gives 255 out of 250 points. It is the only way to get this score.
When I added the marker section, I realised it was missing something important. And then I realised: It needed the squeaks. Thanks for watching, my friend!
Great job explaining the design of Space Quest 2 - and how dead man walking was an expectation, not an accident in those days! Funny enough, I just saw a Space Quest Historian video about the Alien "kissing" you and how there is in fact a timer for it to kill you. You should check it out to get closure on that aspect of the game.
I've checked it out, and that's actually really cool to know! I honestly love how both of us decided to cover the same 40 year old game within the same 24 hours too. The odds of that happening are hilarious!
Well done getting through the (IMO) most difficult and unforgiving edition of Space Quest. Back when games had to fill weeks/months of your time these types of devious "puzzles" didn't feel so bad, and the sense of accomplishment when you actually discovered something new was immense. These days though, I only have an hour or two to play before I need to sleep and start my day over again, so I reach for walkthroughs to avoid the soft locks quicker than I care to admit ;) I hope you continue on with the series; I love SQ1 and 2 dearly, but it only gets better from here. 👍
Trying to beat this back in the day without having the Internet there to help must've been the leading cause of rage-based aneurysms for a while. Great work as always Noir!
Regarding the stairs, these Sierra games were written when the IBM PC/XT keyboard was around. They didn't have a set of arrow keys. Instead you'd turn off Num Lock and use the numeric keypad. Home, Page Up, Page Down and End let you move diagonally. Subscribed for the next episode in the series!
Thank you for letting me know! Hopefully it'll help me navigate those bad boys in the future! Thank you for the support, and I hope you enjoy the next video when it comes out!
My dad and I played through this game a long time ago, before the Internet. I cannot explain the frustration with some of these puzzles. Eventually you get there, but usually because you’ve exhausted every other possibility. The thing that stuck us the most was actually the ‘rub berries on self’ because… that just didn’t compute.
When you first enter that screen you can see the tiny red friendly alien rub berries on its body before it goes in the water (at this point you have seen it pick the berries as well)
Having not seen Alien before playing S2Q, that kiss wrecked my save file. The tunnels leading to the escape pod were the furthest I could reach. However long you waited just had a bathroom break or to and that's as long as it'll take to create a deathsave.
Thank you for saying, friend! I might not be the biggest of channels, but I'm always happy to bring entertainment to lovely folk such as yourself! Hope you stick around for future videos!
I love this pixel graphic style. It looks better to me than some of the later games in the Sierra library. But I spose that's just the nostalgia tugging at my heartsleeves. I was more a LucasArts fan, but the old Sierra games hold a lot of memories too.
Those stairs are nefarious. As a seasoned Questeer, I can advice you to use the numerical keyboard which allows you to move diagonally (marvel at that!) which is the perfect for almost all stairs in all of the AGI and SCI games from Sierra.
My friend, you've likely just saved me hours of torment from falling off those stairs. Thank you. 💕 I hope to do you proud next time I cover a Sierra game!
Sierra games weren't always about tormenting the player. But eventually it definitely seems like someone at Sierra realized how hard the puzzles are and how easy it was to 'soft lock' their games... and they started to lean into it on purpose. SQ2 is a game where this is definitely the case.
?????? * Looks at 90% of modern games. * * Menu. * * Save game at the top. * ?????? 70% of OLD games: Yeah, Imma make the only save a button combo at the title menu I won't tell you about, nothing at all, you just start all over, OR, I'm gonna make it an interactable object within the game, and it will be hundreds of ingame feet away from you at all times within a labyrinth upon labyrinths within other labyrinths. Nothing is stopping me from making it a button press away either. I just like to mentally harm you. (In fact that first one is the first Mario game. Yes. They save your data on the last level you were doing. And you can go back to it after losing all lives. They never tell you this.) The other 30%: Your password is VNFBXGWMRJDKWH39WY4JW92UTNE9273B5OF3H5VX8H4BR9G73BR9VY3BR9C7RBR8VNFBXGWMRJDKWH39WY4JW92UE93BROSNRIDKWBEPGENDIDLWBD7FKBEHCOGNEBSOXUCJRVSOCUENFHD9CHENDICHDBDOCBEMSOVUEBRVSP9CNR and one % symbol. Now write it down and type it out with a blistering D-pad.
@@JeremyFinch42 * Looks at modern games with consolitis: checkpoints, savepoints, no persistence, respawn everywhere, even when you save, the precise state is non preserved, but most things just reset. * looks at old PC games: you can save everywhere and when you restore everything is exaclty as you left.
I loved Sierra games as a kid and there was nothing like the rush of figuring one of them out, but I downloaded guides from BBSes as soon as I got a modem. I'd give it the old middle school try, but eventually gave up. Though the logic in this game wasn't _quite_ as bad as some of the others.
That robot is unlikely to be based on ED-209. Robocop came out 7-17-87, and SQ2 came out 11-14-87. After finishing the game development they had to test it on 6 computers. Then they had to manually copy the game disks, and in the case of the DOS version on two floppy disk types. This was before floppy duplicators were automated, but they could write to two disks at a time (search for the ALF Quick Copy). After that they had to box up the disks and paperwork by hand, and then apply the sticker marking which computer type it is for. Lastly they shrink wrapped the boxes for shipping to dealers. It likely took two or three minutes per boxed copy. That would take one person with a single duplicator about 8 weeks to make 10,000 copies. It is likely that there were multiple copiers and employees to speed up the process, but there were also far more than 10,000 copies needed for Christmas 1987. The time it would take for adding the robot to the game makes it unlikely to be based on such a then recent film.
Have you played the fan made remake? It's really, REALLY good! There's also fan remakes of Kings Quest 1, 2 and 3, and Quest for Glory 2. The amount of dedication they put into doing excellent VGA remakes of classic games for free is just amazing. Kings Quest 2 is quite a treat as it has a lot more added to it.
11:30 If you're curious, I had this game as a kid, and was able to figure out the alien was rubbing the berries on itself. But the animation was slower on old PCs, so it was probably more readable that way. Anyway, I never liked this one that much. One of my least-faves in the series. The puzzles are too obscure, and I just didn't think it was that funny.
When I was in 3rd grade buddy got this game when it came out. First time I ever saw a computer. We played it constantly and made my NES look lame. Haha
Hold on there, Mr. Reservoir, have you forgotten Alterra's "Non-Essential Systems Maintenance Chief," Ryley Robinson of "Subnautica"? This game, like vintage Sierra games, didn't have an Auto Save. If you forgot to save the game before going into hand-to-hand combat with the Reaper Leviathan, you were screwed! There were so many ways to die in "Subnautica" as well, from forgetting to breathe to getting roasted alive by the lava-ball-spitting Sea Dragon.;)
I know the way people viewed game difficulty was different back when this came out. But it's hard for me to imagine how this was ever enjoyable to play for anyone. Every puzzle seems to boil down to, "the game kills you for arbitrary reasons, then forces you to replay a tedious previous section of the game." Also, being forced to guess very specific parser commands in some places to progress... that's not even a puzzle. That's just bad programming. Famously, Sierra had no formal QA process for their games. And in this case, it really really shows.
It's a puzzle because you have to think through it. You're not just moving widgets around until it clicks into place. You're trying to extrapolate real world logic from in-game confines. It's designed more. Intuitively for abstract thinking and with a sense make people take longer since there wasn't much there
@@larkohiyaI’ll use an example in Kings Quest 5, you somehow have to know to throw a custard pie at a Yeti to advance. How are you supposed to know that? Also it’s possible to use the pie before and screw yourself.
The trick is it rewards exploration. You look at everything and take everything on your first trip through. Replaying sections is punishment for not being observant. Kings quest 5 is extra mean, letting someone use an item for the wrong thing is the truly cruelest thing an adventure game can do. Having the puzzles be nonsense doesnt help. But neither applies to space quest 2, above.
Do you plan on covering Larry 2? That one is far worse than this one, more than half the game is on hidden time limits with far too many walking dead cases
I'd love to! I actually started playing it a few months back and I honestly did get a bit frustrated so I took a break. Last I remember, I was in an airport. I'll take a look into finishing it one day though!
@NoirReservoir warning, the last action in the game requires a VERY specific command to work, expect to just look it up because every reasonable way to phrase that action will fail and destroy a key item
The kissamorph death happens when you try to survive the moisture-extracting robot (the ED-209 lookalike) the "right" way: by running away. When you're close to getting back to the escape pods, the egg hatches and kills you.
Another hint: you don't have to type "take a deep breath" when diving in the swamp, but instead just type "hold breath"
that is so obnoxiously specific and yet perfectly logical.
When I played this as a kid I was stumped when I got to the asteroid. The acid pit trap was my stumbling block. I replayed the game a few times thinking I might have missed something that would stop the trap from activating.
Then one night I had a dream about it where I used the plunger to stick to the wall. I woke up at 2 AM on a school night and snuck to the livingroom to try it. Success!
Yo! Regarding the Slash/Sludge Vohaul clusterfuck... Even if you talk to Scott Murphy in person about this, which I have, it is very hard to get a clean grasp of what the real deal. But from what I can recall: Sludge and Slash are two different people. Slash is NOT the scientist on the Arcada; that's just a random scientist guy. Sludge and Slash are actually brothers. They worked on the Star Generator together but fell out because Sludge wanted to use it as a weapon while his brother wanted to use it for peaceful purposes. Sludge and Slash are both humanoid-looking, but Sludge looks the way he does because, when he was exiled from Xenon for being a warmongering little twat, he couldn't find any test subjects for his many horrible experiments, so he just tested them on himself.
Now, most of this can be backed up by what's already in the games, and what can't can at least be accepted as "yeah, I suppose that makes sense." Shit only gets really weird when you start asking Scott about why Sludge and Roger are so much at each others' throats. It's not just that Roger keeps tripping up Sludge's plans for galactic domination. No, it's because... well, you probably guessed it. Roger was supposed to be revealed to be the third brother in the Vohaul family. Yup. That never made it into any of the games, though, so I can't tell you the specifics of how that would have worked out. But one of the reasons for Sludge and Roger's mutual hatred is that Roger was a genetic experiment and, to keep him alive and healthy, his parents (or the scientists that made him; I forget) harvested tissue and even organs from his two brothers. Slash was okay with this because, you know, brother dearest - but Sludge resented his ass for it.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Also (I'm just adding comments as I watch through the video)... Root Monster gauntlet on Slow/Normal speed? You are hereby invited to participate in the annual Space Quest Olympics where we do this thing on "Fastest" speed! 😁
Oh wow, I had no idea! Thank you for sharing!
You can move diagonally in Sierra games with the home, end, page up, page down keys or turning off the num lock and using the numpad keys.
You have just saved me hours of anguish in future Sierra Games, thank you. 🙏
@@NoirReservoir Came down to say this. The stairs in Sierra games become a piece of cake when you unlock the magic diagonal keys. You just zoom right up.
Excellent video! I played this on a Mac SE in the late 80s/early 90s and was astonished at its scope...before giving up in frustration after being shot by guards repeatedly.
Fun Fact: If you type CHEAT at any point in the game the game sends you to a special ending and gives 255 out of 250 points. It is the only way to get this score.
The tiny squeak effect on the Sharpies earned you a sub. Excellent work with the ancient adventures, homeslice!
When I added the marker section, I realised it was missing something important.
And then I realised:
It needed the squeaks.
Thanks for watching, my friend!
Great job explaining the design of Space Quest 2 - and how dead man walking was an expectation, not an accident in those days! Funny enough, I just saw a Space Quest Historian video about the Alien "kissing" you and how there is in fact a timer for it to kill you. You should check it out to get closure on that aspect of the game.
I've checked it out, and that's actually really cool to know!
I honestly love how both of us decided to cover the same 40 year old game within the same 24 hours too. The odds of that happening are hilarious!
I always got stuck on the asteroid as a kid. Such memories, thank you for taking me back
I'm glad you enjoyed, thank you for watching! Hope you stick around for when I cover Pirates of Pestulon!
That "FREE" whistle ends up causing a lot of trouble for roger in games to come.
IT LITERALLY SAID IT WAS FREE. CALL OFF THE BOUNTY HUNTERS
@@NoirReservoir THE GIPPAZOID NOVELTY CO. TAKES VENDING MACHINE FRAUD VERY SERIOUSLY.
Thanks for all the videos on your channels, just discovered it today and was binging though all Sierras ;)
Thanks for watching! Hopefully get some more Sierra content your way soon!
Well done getting through the (IMO) most difficult and unforgiving edition of Space Quest. Back when games had to fill weeks/months of your time these types of devious "puzzles" didn't feel so bad, and the sense of accomplishment when you actually discovered something new was immense. These days though, I only have an hour or two to play before I need to sleep and start my day over again, so I reach for walkthroughs to avoid the soft locks quicker than I care to admit ;)
I hope you continue on with the series; I love SQ1 and 2 dearly, but it only gets better from here. 👍
Trying to beat this back in the day without having the Internet there to help must've been the leading cause of rage-based aneurysms for a while.
Great work as always Noir!
Thanks for watching!
And it must have been good money to work the Hint Phonelines with difficult games such as this!
My parents spend so much money on the 1-900 hint line that they just started buying the hint book whenever they bought a new game
Regarding the stairs, these Sierra games were written when the IBM PC/XT keyboard was around. They didn't have a set of arrow keys. Instead you'd turn off Num Lock and use the numeric keypad. Home, Page Up, Page Down and End let you move diagonally. Subscribed for the next episode in the series!
Thank you for letting me know! Hopefully it'll help me navigate those bad boys in the future!
Thank you for the support, and I hope you enjoy the next video when it comes out!
The hospitality of SQII..
What ever you do or don't, it results as trip to hospital.
My dad and I played through this game a long time ago, before the Internet. I cannot explain the frustration with some of these puzzles. Eventually you get there, but usually because you’ve exhausted every other possibility. The thing that stuck us the most was actually the ‘rub berries on self’ because… that just didn’t compute.
When you first enter that screen you can see the tiny red friendly alien rub berries on its body before it goes in the water (at this point you have seen it pick the berries as well)
I enjoy watching full retrospectives on old adventure games cuz I never finished any of them decades ago. Glad I found your channel today. We subbed.
Cool video, and nicely focused. It was fun listening to the ways SQ2 wants to hurt the player
Glad you enjoyed! Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoy future reflections 😁
What a treat. I remember playing this game on my grandfather's work computer in 88.
I’m enjoying this, good job making it dude
Having not seen Alien before playing S2Q, that kiss wrecked my save file. The tunnels leading to the escape pod were the furthest I could reach. However long you waited just had a bathroom break or to and that's as long as it'll take to create a deathsave.
Your channel is criminally underrated!
Thank you for saying, friend!
I might not be the biggest of channels, but I'm always happy to bring entertainment to lovely folk such as yourself! Hope you stick around for future videos!
I love this pixel graphic style. It looks better to me than some of the later games in the Sierra library. But I spose that's just the nostalgia tugging at my heartsleeves. I was more a LucasArts fan, but the old Sierra games hold a lot of memories too.
Hi, algorithm brought me here
Me too, but I love me some Space Quest
Me too , I love the old Sierra games from the 80’s
So what
Same! 🎉🎉
@@jacobshelt01 Ever play discworld? It broke 16 year old me 😆
Very good video!! Good job making it!!
Oh the nostalgia... Sierra... remember the CD / FMV awkwardness of phantasmogria 😂
Those stairs are nefarious. As a seasoned Questeer, I can advice you to use the numerical keyboard which allows you to move diagonally (marvel at that!) which is the perfect for almost all stairs in all of the AGI and SCI games from Sierra.
My friend, you've likely just saved me hours of torment from falling off those stairs. Thank you. 💕
I hope to do you proud next time I cover a Sierra game!
Sierra games weren't always about tormenting the player. But eventually it definitely seems like someone at Sierra realized how hard the puzzles are and how easy it was to 'soft lock' their games... and they started to lean into it on purpose. SQ2 is a game where this is definitely the case.
I love when these old games allow you to save everywhere. This is a lost technology.
Never played breath of the wild?
@@everythingpony Yes but, these days, games like Breath of the Wild are kind of an exception.
??????
* Looks at 90% of modern games. *
* Menu. *
* Save game at the top. *
??????
70% of OLD games: Yeah, Imma make the only save a button combo at the title menu I won't tell you about, nothing at all, you just start all over, OR, I'm gonna make it an interactable object within the game, and it will be hundreds of ingame feet away from you at all times within a labyrinth upon labyrinths within other labyrinths. Nothing is stopping me from making it a button press away either. I just like to mentally harm you.
(In fact that first one is the first Mario game. Yes. They save your data on the last level you were doing. And you can go back to it after losing all lives. They never tell you this.)
The other 30%: Your password is VNFBXGWMRJDKWH39WY4JW92UTNE9273B5OF3H5VX8H4BR9G73BR9VY3BR9C7RBR8VNFBXGWMRJDKWH39WY4JW92UE93BROSNRIDKWBEPGENDIDLWBD7FKBEHCOGNEBSOXUCJRVSOCUENFHD9CHENDICHDBDOCBEMSOVUEBRVSP9CNR and one % symbol. Now write it down and type it out with a blistering D-pad.
@@JeremyFinch42 * Looks at modern games with consolitis: checkpoints, savepoints, no persistence, respawn everywhere, even when you save, the precise state is non preserved, but most things just reset.
* looks at old PC games: you can save everywhere and when you restore everything is exaclty as you left.
All of the Space Quest games are brutal! It is almost like the game Groundhog's Day movie premise, but they came out way before the movie!
The universe still needs cleaning.
Tough call, naming another sci-fi janitor. The protagonist from Planetfall didn't have a name.
I loved Sierra games as a kid and there was nothing like the rush of figuring one of them out, but I downloaded guides from BBSes as soon as I got a modem. I'd give it the old middle school try, but eventually gave up. Though the logic in this game wasn't _quite_ as bad as some of the others.
Stairs are much easier if you use the numpad so you can move diagonally. Still a pain, but not as bad as that stupid mountain path in King's Quest 3.
That robot is unlikely to be based on ED-209. Robocop came out 7-17-87, and SQ2 came out 11-14-87. After finishing the game development they had to test it on 6 computers. Then they had to manually copy the game disks, and in the case of the DOS version on two floppy disk types. This was before floppy duplicators were automated, but they could write to two disks at a time (search for the ALF Quick Copy). After that they had to box up the disks and paperwork by hand, and then apply the sticker marking which computer type it is for. Lastly they shrink wrapped the boxes for shipping to dealers. It likely took two or three minutes per boxed copy. That would take one person with a single duplicator about 8 weeks to make 10,000 copies. It is likely that there were multiple copiers and employees to speed up the process, but there were also far more than 10,000 copies needed for Christmas 1987. The time it would take for adding the robot to the game makes it unlikely to be based on such a then recent film.
Space quest 2 was my most played in the series as it was my fiest as a kid. Its got a lot of obtuse puzzles
T-I-T-S is a reference to the HAL/IBM theory from 2001: Space Odyssey
Have you played the fan made remake? It's really, REALLY good!
There's also fan remakes of Kings Quest 1, 2 and 3, and Quest for Glory 2.
The amount of dedication they put into doing excellent VGA remakes of classic games for free is just amazing. Kings Quest 2 is quite a treat as it has a lot more added to it.
Oh btw, the choose a path isn't 50/50. You just have to follow the "right" path.
One day I will get my revenge...
11:30 If you're curious, I had this game as a kid, and was able to figure out the alien was rubbing the berries on itself. But the animation was slower on old PCs, so it was probably more readable that way. Anyway, I never liked this one that much. One of my least-faves in the series. The puzzles are too obscure, and I just didn't think it was that funny.
I don't understand "jesus"
Cotton eye joe 6:10
When I was in 3rd grade buddy got this game when it came out. First time I ever saw a computer. We played it constantly and made my NES look lame. Haha
Just push enter on the character name screen and get a name assigned to you.
Hold on there, Mr. Reservoir, have you forgotten Alterra's "Non-Essential Systems Maintenance Chief," Ryley Robinson of "Subnautica"? This game, like vintage Sierra games, didn't have an Auto Save. If you forgot to save the game before going into hand-to-hand combat with the Reaper Leviathan, you were screwed! There were so many ways to die in "Subnautica" as well, from forgetting to breathe to getting roasted alive by the lava-ball-spitting Sea Dragon.;)
I know the way people viewed game difficulty was different back when this came out. But it's hard for me to imagine how this was ever enjoyable to play for anyone. Every puzzle seems to boil down to, "the game kills you for arbitrary reasons, then forces you to replay a tedious previous section of the game."
Also, being forced to guess very specific parser commands in some places to progress... that's not even a puzzle. That's just bad programming. Famously, Sierra had no formal QA process for their games. And in this case, it really really shows.
It's a puzzle because you have to think through it. You're not just moving widgets around until it clicks into place. You're trying to extrapolate real world logic from in-game confines. It's designed more. Intuitively for abstract thinking and with a sense make people take longer since there wasn't much there
@@larkohiyaI’ll use an example in Kings Quest 5, you somehow have to know to throw a custard pie at a Yeti to advance. How are you supposed to know that?
Also it’s possible to use the pie before and screw yourself.
The trick is it rewards exploration. You look at everything and take everything on your first trip through.
Replaying sections is punishment for not being observant.
Kings quest 5 is extra mean, letting someone use an item for the wrong thing is the truly cruelest thing an adventure game can do. Having the puzzles be nonsense doesnt help.
But neither applies to space quest 2, above.
@@larkohiyaThat's a really polite way to say that it's intentionally nonsensical in order to make the game longer.
I have no idea how I figured this out as a kid. I must have a cheat book or something.
>Save states.
You didn't finish the game.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Space quest is cool.
I played this in black and white, i can't remember how long it took me to solve this game, but it was on and off for years. Just awful
Do you plan on covering Larry 2? That one is far worse than this one, more than half the game is on hidden time limits with far too many walking dead cases
I'd love to! I actually started playing it a few months back and I honestly did get a bit frustrated so I took a break.
Last I remember, I was in an airport. I'll take a look into finishing it one day though!
@NoirReservoir warning, the last action in the game requires a VERY specific command to work, expect to just look it up because every reasonable way to phrase that action will fail and destroy a key item
Please de ess your audio in future videos
Algorithm shunted me here