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Recommends The following stuff is all recommended by the Frog. This will be updated fairly often, as I like stuff. The categories thus far: Music, Food, Video Games The Smashing Pumpkins, The Aeroplane Flies High box set As virtually anyone who knows me knows, the Smashing Pumpkins are my favorite band of all time. Yeah, they ended on a down note - 1998's Adore came out a full year and a half later than any follow-up to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness should have, and 2000's Machina/The Machines of God was too little, too late. But few bands (I'm talking with way more authority than I should, here) have ever had a run as amazing as the Pumpkins did from 1993 to 1996. Siamese Dream came out in 1993, and the next year, the Pumpkins headlined Lollapalooza with the Beastie Boys, and also released their B-sides/rarities collection, Pisces Iscariot. In late 1995, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was released. 1996 was a mixed bag for the Pumpkins - Mellon Collie sold like mad, they won about a billion VMAs for Tonight, Tonight, and they were up for a Grammy for 1979 (for whatever that's worth). On the down side, a fan was killed in a mosh pit in a show in Ireland, and Jimmy Chamberlin and Jonathon Melvoin ODed on heroin in July. Melvoin died, Jimmy got kicked out of the band, and the summer tour was sidelined. (I remember that day well, because Neil, Jeff and I had tickets for that show. My mother woke me up and told me someone in the Pumpkins had died, the show was canceled, and someone from Little Caesar's had called asking me to pick up their shift. Since I wasn't going to the concert, my mother figured I'd be happy to do that, and had told them sure. This was at a particularly bleak time in the course of my life, so my mother's logic was pretty awful there, but whatever. I lived, and eventually saw the Pumpkins twice during collitch - once right after the Mellon Collie tour resumed, and once on the Machina tour, right before they announced it was the end.) Besides the ups and downs for the Pumpkins in 1996, there was also their primary reason for existing, music. Their shows in '96, pre- and post-Jimmy, were top-notch (if you're interested, boots from the Mellon Collie tour are a worth tracking down either in a record shop or online - the January 30/31 shows in San Diego's Soma are particularly good). They released Tonight, Tonight, Zero, and Thirty-three as singles, and Muzzle as a radio-only single. Better than that, they released the Aeroplane Flies High box set, the point of this very lengthy recommend. The Aeroplane Flies High was a collection of the five CD singles off of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The Pumpkins had already shown their propensity for rockin' B-sides with Pisces Iscariot, and with an album as huge and as indulgent as Mellon Collie was, there were bound to be more B-sides. Over the five discs of Aeroplane, you were treated to 33 songs (no doubt there's symbolism there, since the last single was the song Thirty-three, but I'm not about to look into it), five of which were the A-sides, leaving you 28 songs (the same amount as were on the two discs of Mellon Collie. These 28 songs were actually some of the best of the Pumpkins' career, and were definitely the last, great gasp of the Pumpkins' glory days. The next year, driven to experimentation by Jimmy's expulsion from the band, their only output was contributions to the Lost Highway and Batman and Robin soundtracks (Eye and the End is the Beginning of the End). Both of those songs were crap electronica, and irreperably damaged the Pumpkins' creative drive, all the way until their breakup in 2000. Over the five discs of the Aeroplane Flies High, the Pumpkins basically gave you a guided tour of their abilities as musicians. There were hard songs (Zero, Marquis in Spade, God, Mouth of Babes), heartbreakingly forlorn songs (Blank, Ugly, ...said sadly), spacey songs (Set the Ray to Jerry, Transformer), James songs (Believe, The Boy), covers (the last five songs on the Bullet CD), hopeful songs (The Boy, Tonight, Tonight and the covers of Destination Unknown and Dreaming, which for me capture a wonderful feeling of eagerness to see what this world has, and to never be complacent with what you've seen, to always force more out of life, to know that this life, as flawed as it is, is perfect, perfect, perfect), soft-to-loud songs (Bullet with Butterfly Wings, the Aeroplane Flies High [Turns Left, Looks Right]), weird little songs like My Blue Heaven, an acoustic reworking of one of their biggest hits (Tonite Reprise - actually recorded after the Knicks eliminated the Bulls from the playoffs during Jordan's first retirement from the game), songs that were oxymoronic (The Last Song, which was track two of six on the Thirty-three disc), love songs (Medellia of the Gray Skies, Thirty-three - I've always thought of Thirty-three as a love song to friends), and then the amazing Pastichio Medley, a hodgepodge of never-finished songs that didn't even make it to B-side status but sound amazing, all the same. 2.0's always amazed when I tell her that my favorite Pumpkins album is Mellon Collie and not Siamese. But 2.0's a few years older than me - when Siamese came out, I was only a freshman in high school. My parents hated rock music and more or less kept me from really getting into it until I got my license and could finally escape the house, in the summer of '94. Jeff got me into the Pumpkins almost immediately, but Siamese was already a piece of history - it was out there and everyone owned it. Mellon Collie, when Mellon Collie came out, it was mine. It was the first album I ever bought the day it came out, and I listened to that CD every day for months. Siamese may be the better CD - Today, Soma, Mayonaise, Rocket, Hummer, Disarm, Quiet, Cherub Rock, all of those are in easy contention for Best Pumpkins Song - but Mellon Collie was mine. It was diverse, the songs were all over the board, and I loved that. I loved how my favorite song off the disc changed almost every listen. Bullet, Here is No Why, Muzzle, Jellybelly, Porcelina, Beautiful, Tales of a Scorched Earth, Lily, By Starlight, Bodies, Thirty-three, We Only Come Out at Night, Stumbleine, they all spent time in the top slot. Mellon Collie was definitely my favorite Pumpkins' album. But right now as I'm writing this, I miss the day that Aeroplane Flies High came out, because the Pumpkins were still gods then. They were a man down, but still at the top of their game, anything was possible, and the Last Song didn't have a chance of being the last song. Queen of Sheba, New York City On 10th Ave in between 45th and 46th Streets, this is an Ethiopian place Lauren first took me to back in August of 2002, when she was house-sitting up in the Bronx. The Nakamura Family Culinary Instinct is infallible. I cannot recommend this place highly enough. Two people can easily split the $8.50 butitcha (chick peas, some really spicy red stuff that I don't really know what it is, and some steamed greens of some sort) and come away full. I usually feel bad for doing that, since that doesn't result in much tip for your waitress, but, hell, it's on the menu. The meat dishes are also exquisite, although I usually give them a skip for the butitcha. If you've never had Ethiopian food, the deal is that it comes on a big platter, which is covered with a few pieces of injera. Injera is this floppy, spongy bread that by itself isn't that flavorful. What you do is rip off a piece a injera, and use it to pick up whatever the main dish is. It's so friggin' good. I took my parents here one time when they were visiting. Dad, being Dad, struck up a conversation with one of the waitresses. Dad: "Where are you from?" My father, much like just about everyone not from Ethiopia, does not know any Ethiopian cities. So when she told him, he really didn't have anywhere else to go with the conversation. The waitresses are all super nice, though. So, Queen of Sheba—highly recommended. Just expect everyone to make jokes like, "I didn't know the Ethiopians had food," or "Shouldn't you not take their food from them, they're starving," when you tell them what you had for dinner. Greenfield's, Notre Dame Starting my junior year at school, they changed the meal plan from a standard (and required, if you live on-campus) 20-meal-a-week plan to a 14-meal-a-week-plan with $200 worth of "Flex Points" to blow in the minimart in the student center or the other places on campus to get food (a few delis in the classroom buildings, a Burger King that they opened, the minimart, the new cafe in the back of South Dining Hall, etc.). Keeping in mind that the meal plan on campus worked out to be something like seven or eight bucks a meal, the 14-meal plan was a tremendous rip-off. But, keeping in mind that collitch kids hardly ever eat breakfast, just about everyone I know changed to the Flex Plan. This had two results: 1) My BK intake went through the roof. 2) It opened the possibility of going to Greenfield's, once we finally found out about it. Greenfield's was a cafe built into the Hesburgh Center for International Studies, a building whose primary function I an still not sure of. It was away from the dorms and other classroom buildings, and was across the street from the Morris Inn, where the University would put up visiting professors, lecturers, dignitaries, whatever. A good deal of them would take lunch at Greenfield's. As a result, the food at Greenfield's was much better than the food anywhere on campus, and was still pretty cheap. I'm fairly certain the Administration never meant for students to find out about Greenfield's, but Tim, I think, had a friend who somehow landed a job there, and that's how we heard about it. Luckily, the Hesburgh Center was pretty close to Alumni, so our natural inertness gave way to hunger, and we because probably the first students in years to go there. I, being always classy, was no doubt wearing track pants, Tevas, and the filthy hat that serves as the Museum icon. I'm amazed I'm ever allowed anywhere. The menu seems to have been greatly expanded since I gravitated in 2000, but some of my old favorites are still there. The black bean enchilada was the best thing I ever ate on campus. It kind of made you want to cry. With a side of hot chips, ooh la la. I don't know when the hell I'll next be on campus and eating somewhere other than a tailgater, but when that day comes, I shall be dining at Greenfield's. Pommes Frites, New York City It was Tree's first semester of law school, and his assimilation to New York City was going slowly. He had no TV and lived in Columbia's International House with a bunch of foreignors who thought football meant futbol. As such, he had to travel nine hours by subway from the Upper West Side to my old place in Queens for someone to watch the Irish with. Work was piling up, the people at law school were annoying him, Tree needed something to break his way. Upon his first taste of double-fried Belgian fries dipped in mango mayo, Tree does say unto me, "This is by far my favorite thing in New York City." Beautiful in its poetic simplicity, Tree. Trattoria Kick-Ass, Rome, Italy No link to this one, because 1) I don't know its actual name (Il Frustraro comes to mind, but I can't be sure), and 2) it's been closed for several years now. Trattoria Kick-Ass was my favorite restaurant in Rome, located in a back alley near Largo Argentina. It was nearly impossible to find—the only storefront in an unnamed alley, irregular hours, only a table with a red-checkered tablecloth placed out front to signify that the door was unlocked—and was run by an old dude and his wife, with maybe their grandson or somebody helping with the water and tablewaiting. I'm pretty sure Bay and Fred found the place the weekend Tree, Walter and I went to Cinque Terre. I don't remember much of the speech Bay gave us, but the phrase "a softball-sized carafe of wine" definitely came into play. Sure enough, when we finally got there, the wine carafe was round and huge (I think larger than a softball, but whatever). An order of bruschetta, penne al salmone and vino, and I was one happy brutto americano. Many times, it was our table of maybe three or four guys—Tree and I went a ton, Bay and Fred came a lot, Walter a few times, Juice once, because the owner seemed to disapprove, and Luke probably a few times, but not with me usually—and one other table of Italians. The place was authentic, and I really enjoyed that. The guy kept screwing up our wine order—half-carafes, carafes of white instead of red, you name it—but it was perfect every time, regardless. Hell, he was probably trying to tell us that red white didn't go with the meal we had ordered. Our last time there as a group, he came out with shots of grappa for us. As awful as grappa is, he meant it as a compliment. Sadly, the last last time I was there, the place was overrun with the girls from the program. Too many Americans. Someone had blabbed the location of our back-alley trattoria. I hope the dude can forgive us. Bw-3s, South Bend, Indiana Wings, Etc., probably had better wings—meatier, and the legendary Wall of Flame—but Beedub's was the wingery of choice for us during our collitch tenure. My typical order was six teriyaki, six hot. The guys would fight to try and not have to sit across from me, as my table manners at the time were horrendous. At one point senior year, I was eating the wings by putting the entire wing in my mouth and eventually spitting out the stripped-clean bone. I have no idea how I have ever attracted a woman, being possessed of that skill. My five favorite Bw-3s stories are as follow, in no particular order:
CJ's, South Bend, Indiana Football season is around the corner as I'm writing this, so please forgive the amount of Notre Dame-area eateries. CJ's first entered our consciousness as the freshman bar that you could basically get into with a note from your mommy. I never actually went to CJ's for the purpose of getting loaded. Often on Friday nights, we would go and get the delectable massive burgers that CJ's served with rudeness unmatched anywhere outside of the Bronx. They could be rude—they knew that they had the best burger in town. The wait for tables proved it. Among the things that made CJ's CJ's was the free popcorn you could munch on while waiting for your burger. For some reason, I was always designated Popcorn Bitch. I honestly don't know if there was a single time I ate at CJ's that I didn't always get stuck refilling the popcorn. Alissa, for some reason, came to CJ's with us one time, when still a devout vegetarian. There is nothing without meat on the menu. She had to order a cheese sandwich. It was a bun with two Kraft singles on it. It made me sad. My buddy Pentzien was the youngest of us—he turned 21 in kind-of late November of our senior year. This sucked, because Pentzien looked 21 from the moment I met him freshman year. Unfortunately, he was in Navy ROTC, and was one of the more recognizable faces in the organization. If one of his superiors saw him in a bar before he was 21, he would be in a shitload of trouble. So in October of our senior year, we were at CJ's, and Pentzien noticed his Captain a few tables away. This meant no beer for Jon. Jon's solution was to do shots—they came in little disposable plastic shotglasses at CJ's, so there was no evidence once he got the one-second drink out of the way. "Bullfrog," Jon said, "tell me something that will get me really fucked up." I don't know why I was the go-to on this one, but I told him 151 was probably the strongest thing they had back there. Pentzien did something like five shots of 151 in the course of the meal. Good times, great oldies. Sadly, none of us ever tried the Golden Domer, something I view as a real lack in our education. Although a six-pound burger sold by some place in Pennsylvania was recently brought to my attention, so I guess the Golden Domer is just kind of sad, now. Frank's Red Hots/K's Bar and Grill, South Bend, Indiana The last eatery from the Bend, unless I decide to add Bruno's at a later date. In case I don't, I'll do a quick recap right now—Bruno's South was this really good pizzeria that had a $5 buffet night. It took like 20 minutes to drive there, but the food was so fragging good it makes me cry. Bruno's North had the same food, but was delivery only. They put so much cheese on the pizza, it was astounding. Anyway, Frank's is called K's now, although I still tend to call it Frank's, as I am bent on confusing everyone. When Dan, Scotty and Eric moved to Turtle Creek senior year, Frank's was right on the other side of their fence. To make matters better, there was a gap in the fence, meaning it was about a twenty-second walk. The burgers are good (not CJ's good, but good), and the people there are really friendly. Ever since gravitation, Frank's is where we always gather right after the football games. We're inevitably not all sitting near each other, so Frank's is our reuniting place and dinner stop before passing out for a few hours before going out again. They have a ton of TVs, so we can keep watching football and see recaps of us kicking ass. Or, more often as of late, getting murdered by some second-tier Big 10 team. Bleh. New Green Bo, Chinatown, New York City New Green Bo is my favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Another Nakamura find, I think my first time here was when Jeff was in town once, but I can't be sure. Lauren and I used to go a lot, and we took Tree there the weekend he visited to check out Columbia. God, that was two and a half years ago already. Wow. I took Richard, Register and Sickmiller here after my 24th birthday party a few years back, too. Richard said it was the best Chinese food he'd ever had, although we had really abused ourselves that weekend and any old food was a Godsend by that point. The must-haves on the menu are the scallion pancake, the soup dumplings, and the crackling shrimp soup (I think that's what it's called, anyway). I like to get a sesame chicken or beef for the main course, but that's just me. Trust me on the scallion pancake, it is an absolute can't-miss. Try and order two. Just try. It's really easy to over order at this place, too. But don't worry if you do, it's cheap and they have doggie bags. Joya, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Joya is my lady's favorite Thai place in her old neighborhood. Our second date was there—I had to go to Brooklyn because I had blown her off when our second date was supposed to be. Long story, and it's all Tree's fault. Anyway, Joya is awesome. The pad thai is something like eight bucks, and it's a huge plate. I had the salmon special once, and it was pretty damned good, too. They had a great outdoor area in the summertime, and the bar makes a fucking mean martini. Only problem is that it's really popular, so crowds are a problem. Crif Dogs, New York City I've only been once, with Carrie and Lauren, but, man, those were some good dogs. I got the chihuahua. A hot dog wrapped in bacon, with sour cream and avocado on it? Holy shit! $2 PBRs never hurt, either. I think their Pac-Man machine is only a quarter, too. Careful poking around their site—the For Sale section is evidently there with the intent to make you stab your eyes out. Better Burger, New York City A little pricey, but organic, and oh-so yummy. If you feel like healthy eatin' of a little more upscale nature, Better Burger is next door to, and associated with, Josie's. Any place that shares its name with my favorite Blink-182 song can't possibly be bad, and it's not. Vatan, New York City The descriptions are getting shorter, but don't let this one's placement at the bottom throw you off. Vatan is amazing. It's this vegetarian all-you-can-eat Indian place that simply rocks my world. I think dinner is $23, so it's pricier than most this list, but this isn't the sort of place you can hit every week, anyway. Upon arriving at Vatan, you will be seated by a matronly Indian woman in colorful tradition garb, and she will explain Vatan to you. All you have to do is order a drink if you wish, and tell them how spicy you want your food. They bring you an appetizer course with samosas, fried peppers, chick peas or something, a yogurt-covered rice thing, potato balls, and other yummy stuff. The main course is kind of a blur to me, since I'm usually half-comatose by the time it gets there. You can ask for refills of anything, and last time, I ate almost a whole second helping of the appetizer course. This resulted in me passing out cold at eleven on a Friday night, my belly full and seams bursting. The release of a new Leisure Suit Larry game made me realize that Sierra is actually still in business, something that I was completely unaware of. Sierra On-line was the game company that made a huge chunk of my favorite computer games from back in the day. I figure I'll start writing little reviews/reminisces of the old Sierra games, starting with what I oftentimes think is my favorite computer game of all time. I got my first computer back in eighth grade, for Christmas of 1991. It was a Hewlett-Packard 386, and I'm pretty sure the 486 came out about two months later, sonofabitch. Still, it didn't get totally obsolete until I tried restyling the config.sys files so that I could play Ultima Underworld or somesuch game by Origin. All of Origins games needed this bizarre XMS memory, and almost everyone I know busted their computers trying to get those effing games to run. Anyway, in January of '92, I was fishing around the bargain bin in Babbage's in Crossgates Mall, and found a ten-dollar copy of the Colonel's Bequest. It was a murder mystery. I was on a big Agatha Christie kick in eighth and ninth grade, so I bought it. I remember my 'rents and I ate at Pizza Hut on the way home, too. No idea why I have that memory. Anyway, The Colonel's Bequest is set up somewhat like a play. Certain game events trigger a grandfather clock to appear and chime off fifteen minutes. Every hour that passes represents a new act. The game takes place on a bayou island near New Orleans. Your character is Laura Bow, a journalism student at Tulane, who is accompanying her flapper friend Lillian for a weekend at her uncle's. Her uncle is Colonel Henri Dijon, a miserly old coot who lost the use of his legs in the Spanish American War, and who announces during the opening credits that he is going to divide his fortune evenly to his family and several confidantes upon his death. He actually says 'Should any of you die before I do, the treasure will be divided amongst the survivors.' Not surprisingly, the first body shows up about an hour later. Besides Laura, Lil and Henri, the characters in the game are Ethel, Lillian's mother and Henri's sister. Provided that Laura asks Ethel about every character in the game right off the bat, she's a wealth of information. After that, she is soused the whole rest of the game. Gertie is Henri's other sister. Gertie's two kids are Gloria Swanson (a platinum blonde actress-type) and Rudy (a Rhett Butler-looking smoothtalker). Henri's lawyer is Clarence Sparrow (old Sierra games were nothing if not full of puns), and his doctor is Wilbur C. Fields. The mansion is kept up by Celie, the cook whose family has lived on the island since they were slaves there, Jeeves, the butler, and Fifi, the sexy French maid. Despite the fact that all the characters are easily described in a few words, they're actually all fleshed out awfully well, too. There are love triangles, sour business deals, old family scores, jealously, all sorts of issues between these people. The mansion and surrounding island is almost as important and lively of a character as any of the people in the game, too. The mansion has several secret passages, and Laura can spy on people from these passages by looking through the cut-out eyes of pictures. This is how much of the story is observed. There is a secret attic, a secret basement, dangerous areas of the swamp, a chapel, and all sorts of other stuff to explore. Through the course of the game, almost everyone winds up dead. There are people pushed from windows, bludgeoned, strangled, poisoned, shot, and stabbed. To make matters worse, Laura is the only one to every find the bodies, and as soon as she turns her back on them, the bodies disappear. So everyone thinks she's a liar, until it becomes impossible not to notice that people are disappearing left and right. The Colonel's Bequest is an ancient EGA game, but the graphics look more charming to me than dated. Between the graphics and the writing, the game does a wonderful job at building an air of suspense. Not the Silent Hill type of suspense, where you're sure something's going to jump out and rip your face off and eat your entrails or something, but when Clarence starts freaking out at about midnight about where everyone is, you can't help feel but the mansion is shrinking around you, and there is precious little space to hide from the murderer. When the game is finally beaten - there are three different endings that I've ever found - you are given a score from 'Barely Conscious' to 'Super-sleuth' depending on how many plot points and items you stumbled across in the course of the game. Hints are given for those who rank closer to the Barely Conscious side of things (as I did when I first beat the game lo these many years past). The Colonel's Bequest rocked. It's still on my computer to this day. It spawned a sequel, which I may write about, but the second game didn't capture the feel of a British cozy as well as this one did. If anyone's read Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (also known as ...And Then There Were None), The Colonel's Bequest is basically like playing that novel. I'm fairly certain the game's not available anywhere these days, but if anyone's really interested in giving it a whirl, lemme know, and I'll see if I can find the discs for it anywhere. Even the stupid copy-protection is cool - you have to identify people's thumbprints using this red-cellophane magnifying glass. Ah, just writing about it, I long for a gray, rainy day and my laptop. There's a murdered about, and I've got to find him! Space Quest 3: Roger Wilco and the Pirates of Pestulon, Sierra Continuing my bizarre series on old Sierra games, I'm going to tackle what was actually the first of the "3-D Adventure Games" that I played. That's what Sierra called their games back in the day - even the early early EGA King's Quest 1 was considered 3-D. It took me a while to realize that, by 3-D, they didn't mean that the images popped out of the screen and appeared 3-D (when I was playing these games, those Magic Eye books were tremendously popular, and I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be a similar concept). No, no, instead, Sierra meant that, on-screen, your little guy walked around and behind stuff. For instance, Space Quest 3 starts on this garbage scow (apparently kicking off right from the conclusion of Space Quest 2, which I later played and found out had the least rewarding ending in the history of video games, worse even than getting a misspelled congratulations at the end of beating Ikari Warriors). So, because it is 3-D, Roger can walk behind garbage. That's taking some frigging license with the term 3-D. The premise behind the Space Quest games was that Roger Wilco was an intergalactic janitor, thrust into the adventuring life when the Sarians attacked the ship he worked on and butchered the crew while Roger was asleep in the broom closet. That was the Sarian Encounter, which I'll review sometime. The second game involved the revenge of the mastermind of the Sarian encounter, Sludge Vohaul. The second game was not good. I may mention it briefly at some point. In fact, I'll mention it now. It's got a funny sequence involving the Planet of the Apes, and the concept is that Vohaul is sending an army of cloned insurance salesmen to destroy Roger's home planet, Xenon. Roger foils this through a series of inventory puzzles, blows up the asteroid base of Vohaul, and puts himself into suspended animation in the escape pod. Seriously, the game ends with him in suspended animation. The Bartleys got their computer the same time we did, and I think Mr. B bought it from somebody at the Baptist Church who overhauled computers. So their machine came with a few programs already loaded on it, one of which was Space Quest 3. Neil (best friend at the time) and I spent hours trying to get Roger out of that friggin' garbage scow, to positively no end result. As it turns out, we never bothered to look at the one object we absolutely needed. We had everything else figured out, just we needed to pick up the warp engine with the hook from the railcar above the conveyer belt near the garbage hopper, and to drop the engine in the Alluminum Mallard, past the tunnel with the rats who beat you. Our utter futility to find this warp engine led to us getting killed in every conceivable way, which was half the fun of Space Quest 3. On the garbage scow alone, you can get beaten and eaten by rats, fall from any number of heights, get a hole blown in your head by a robot, and, my favorite, fall into a garbage hopper. That results in a white censor box popping up while blood flies everywhere, and then a Game Over screen showing a package of USDA-approved meat. Now that's comedy. Anyway, once you finally get off the garbage scow, Space Quest 3 picks up. You're chased to Phleebhut but a terminator, you have to go to the lava planet of Ortega (never been sure if that was a riff on the taco-sauce company or not), and to the galaxy's most rockin' fast food franchise, the Monolith Burger. Where, if you buy the Big Belcher Combo, you vomit before leaving. Again, that is comedy. In the end, the goal of Space Quest 3 is the existentialist task of rescuing the Two Guys From Andromeda - the working aliases of Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, the game's designers and my God I can't believe I didn't have to look that up - from Elmo Pug, the slave-driving CEO of Scumsoft and head of the Pirates of Pestulon. But what difference does it make what the end goal was? The fact was that the game had colorful graphics, hilarious text, and music by the dude from Supertramp. Which I don't think is much of a selling point, but, trust me, the music is really, really good. If, along the way, you rescue your creators from blocks of lime Jell-O (my favorite sort), then that's all gravy. Space Quest 3 is short - I think I've beaten the whole thing in under 50 minutes - but it's better to take your time and enjoy yourself. The Two Guys From Andromeda were pretty funny, and this game was the height of their collaboration. Space Quest 4 moved into darker territory, half of it taking place in a post-apocalyptic Xenon, and by Space Quest 5, Scott Murphy had moved on and the games lost direction. As with the Colonel's Bequest, I have no idea where you can find a copy of this thing today, but if you feel like, give me a holler and we'll work something out.
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