Classic time: "Police Quest II: The Vengeance" playthrough

New game!

I've started my replay of Police Quest II: The Vengeance, and I'm 1 hour into it!

It's been a year since officer Sonny Bonds helped take down a notorious drug trafficker and murderer known as The Death Angel. The city of Lytton has returned to its old days of relative peace and quiet. Sonny remains at the job steadfastly, coming in every morning to take on the bad guys, chatting with his colleagues, and keeping his target practice scores up to snuff.

Let me try to aim for that headshot...

One of those mornings, however, the station is in an uproar when the news comes that Jessie Bains, The Death Angel, has escaped from jail. Sonny and his colleague Keith jump into their car to investigate. During this first hour of my playthrough I learned that Bains is holding a jailer hostage and that he took the poor man's car; that he then switched cars at a local mall parking lot; that he got rid of the jailer at Cotton Cove Park; and that he vamoosed to the airport.

Too bad you can't drive yourself in this game...

Police Quest II isn't a point 'n click adventure game but instead uses the text parser the early Sierra games were famous for. If you haven't played a text parser game (in a while), it takes some getting used to (again). You can't simply click and look at something you see; you need to describe the hotspot and hope it fits the programmers' descriptions, like you would in a text adventure (without graphics). My strategy is to first look around in a new environment. Normally you then get a list of all points of interest. Then you can look at those in detail and thus find items or information. Though often the game relies on general knowledge. To give a simple example: the game starts with Sonny sitting in his car in the police station's parking lot. Looking around will only tell you he's in that car, it won't give a description of the interior. So you have to realize the car has a glove box, and that there might be something important in there...

Ooh, a witness!

Walking around can be a bit clunky, especially when you have to maneuver around obstacles. At one point I had to restore my game because I had wandered into a phone booth (do young gamers today still know what that is, a phone booth?), but my partner Keith was following me and effectively blocking the way when I wanted to get back out, and the silly git just didn't move out of the way.

Something seriously spooked that jogger...

It's a pretty fast-paced game. At the start I was wandering around the police station for a while because I didn't have anything to do, just basically waiting for that call to come in about the escape. Then the ball gets rolling at quite the brisk pace. You drive from one location to another, getting call after call through dispatch whenever you try to return to the station thinking you've finished. Then you encounter what I guess could be called an action sequence at the park, where it's very possible to die in more ways than one.

This creepy scene is basically a pixel hunt...

These old Sierra games work with a point system, awarding you when you've done something right. Doing the necessary actions to "win" the game amounts to a huge percentage of the total points, but there are also hidden achievements, so to speak, which don't really matter in the big picture or the further course of the game but awards you those final points you might otherwise be missing in the end. I'm never playing to get a perfect score, anyway, just going through the general story...

A free space so close to the entrance? No way!

I left the game after one hour of playing and being stuck at the airport. I discovered Bains got rid of the gun he took off the jailer, then bought a ticket, but I don't know where to and I'm having some trouble handling the text parser to ask the right questions, it seems. At least I can't get anyone to tell me what ticket he bought exactly, so I'm not really sure what it is I'm missing, or what I have to do next. But so far I feel like this game is more worthy of the subtitle In Pursuit of the Death Angel than the first game was. I feel like I'm always going to be two steps behind this guy for a long time...