I can imagine. Luckily for me, at the time of playing all these games the 5.25" floppies had become so worthless people would actually throw handfuls of those away, still in pretty good condition, no bad sectors and capable of countless rewrites. That's exactly how i got all of mine, i didn't buy a single one, and even if i really wanted to i still couldn't have, cause i hadn't even seen any of those for sale except for 3.5", of course. So, in the end by just getting it from different people my entire supply of 5.25" disks would amount to 100 i think, and i would often carry them and 3.5" ones around just to transfer something from CDs at other people's, friends', etc, cause CD-ROM was another challenge i wasn't quite ready for

Well, I played it from floppy… and even the price of floppy disks was frightening enough to think twice before sacrificing one just to store save games

Heh, i can't say i played the game exactly at the time of its release, so i have to give up here. I had a 20mb hdd (ST-225 to be precise), and could make as many savegames as needed. I can only envy those lucky few who played and KNEW what computer games are like back in those days

It's been too long since I've played Police Quest, so I can't point out any specific cases. However, I encounter such issues all the time in adventure games.

Second, "just restore" may be easy these days, but keep in mind that back when the game was new, saving and restoring implied formatting a dedicated floppy disk and swapping back and forth for the data to be written/read. Quite annoying.

Somehow i can't relate to your experience, and Police Quest is pretty easy as it is in my opinion. I may have got stuck in it 1 or 2 times, one of which was the safety procedure (walk around the car etc) and another i can no longer recall, but i would always figure it out somehow. By the way, how else do you lose objects unless giving them away which typically brings up the sierra's all-time sarcastic dialogue box "Hey thanks! But you'll never get it back!"? I never had an issue like that, to be honest, and most adventure games including Sierra's are so made that you can't really do anything terminally wrong and somehow get away with it, unless it's plain obvious you have lost. I don't recall that at all.

Just that it isn't always that easy, is it? If you forgot to do something way back, didn't pick something up or lost an important object, you've been in a dead end for hours or days without knowing it – and even if you were willing to retread all those steps from there (assuming you even know where you took that "wrong" step), you may not even have a save game from that long ago!

Ah, my very first adventure, played it on XT-compatible in CGA-composite mode. Looked ugly as hell, but it was repayed amply with interest. Like you i was making some baby steps in english with this game, but i was a bit older than you, around 14-15 i think. But this:



...honestly, i still don't get why people are so fixated on it. Save & Restore, and you're good to go. Besides, isn't it fun to find out exactly how things may turn out unless you follow the correct path?

Feel free to share anything about Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (1987) here!