Space Quest V: The Next Mutation

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation is a graphic point ‘n click adventure game released for MS-DOS on February 5, 1993. Play Space Quest V: The Next Mutation online!

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation game description

After travelling back and forth through time in the previous game, Roger Wilco is back in the Starfleet Acadamy, serving as both a cadet and a janitor. Cheating his way through the Starfleet Aptitude Test, Roger is finally given the rank of captain, his own ship (a garbage scow) and a mission: to explore strange new worlds (which no man in his right mind would explore), to seek out new life and new civilizations (which grew out of the massive amounts of trash Roger will collect on his way), to boldly go where no man has gone before. Step by step Roger will have to unveil a galaxy-wide biohazardous material dumping scheme, solve the mystery of the disappearance of a fellow Starfleet captain and his ship, and confront an agent of an old nemesis.

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation is an adventure game in the Space Quest series. Like its brethren, it is characterized by humorous writing and situations, as well as plenty of opportunities for the hero to die horribly. The game is entirely mouse-controlled: the player interacts with the world by clicking on locations, people and objects on the screen, cycling between various actions (walking, looking, touching or taking, talking, etc.), by clicking the right mouse button or using the icon bar. The latter also contains icons that allow the player to access Roger’s inventory, quit the game or change the settings.

Commands for smelling and tasting have been removed, but a special icon for giving orders has been added. It can be used on any object or character in the game, but its actual purpose is to issue specific commands to the crew members: Roger’s garbage scow, the Eureka, has a crew over which he presides. The game is plot-driven and contains cutscenes done in a comic book-like style. Plot development is linear, but each planet the protagonist visits usually consists of several screens and contains its own objectives and puzzles. There are also hazardous situations that may occur on the spaceship itself and must be dealt with.

Some missions are:

• Roger is hunted, alone, on a jungle planet by W-D40, a homicidal gynoid (the apparent sister of Arnoid the Annihilator, an Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike from Space Quest III). The gynoid has an invisibility device and a laser very similar to the plasma caster of the Predator. Her ship also resembles a Klingon Bird of Prey. Roger is being pursued for failing to pay for his Labion Terror Beast mating whistle from Space Quest II (a continuity error also found in Space Quest III, as in the second game it is shown on the order form that the whistle is free).
• While visiting a “space bar”, Roger must free his chief engineer Cliffy (a parody of Scotty from the original Star Trek) from the brig, where he ended up after starting a fight triggered when he overheard a rival ship’s crewmember refer to the Eureka as a garbage scow. This parodies the bar fight scene in the famous Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles”—except that in this case, as Roger points out, the Eureka actually is a garbage scow! This is parodied further when Roger, noticing a warning not to immerse his free pack of space monkeys which he got from a “salesbeast” in alcohol, places them in his drink, causing them to multiply indefinitely (although the “space monkeys” are significantly larger than the sea monkeys they are a parody of).
• At one point Roger is in the process of being teleported when a fly buzzes into the beam. The teleporter malfunctions, and Roger ends up in a tiny fly body with a human head. He then must find a way to restore his body, while the fly, in Roger’s body with a fly head, acts rather stupidly (even by Roger Wilco standards) and jumps into garbage piles. This is a parody of science fiction/horror movie The Fly.

Roger’s son from the future saved him at the beginning of SQIV, and later he shows a hologram of Roger’s son’s mother. Roger meets this woman in SQV and must protect her, or else his son would not exist, and thus neither would Roger.

The main plot is to stop a mutagenic disease that is spreading through the galaxy by discovering its source, and fighting everyone that got infected. In the end, the disease infects the crew members of the SCS Goliath, the StarCon flagship, whose toupee-wearing commander, Raems T. Quirk (a rather blatant spoof of Captain James T. Kirk), subsequently attacks the Eureka. In the end, Roger sacrifices his ship to get rid of the plague – and suddenly, if temporarily, becomes the commander of the fleet’s flagship.

Roger is presented in a more positive light than usual. He’s still a bungler and flies a ship that’s falling apart at the seams, but along the adventure he gains the genuine respect of his crew and gets the girl in the end.

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