Finished Police Quest this evening. Really enjoyed that! Can't believe I'd been too intimidated to play it for more than 30 years; the "police procedure" stuff wasn't as much of a big deal as I'd made it out to be in my mind. In fact, I suspect it was primarily in there as a means of copy protection, in the same way that King's Quest III required you to exhaustively type out steps in a recipe when casting spells.
As an adventure game, it was actually rather straightforward; rather than having obtuse "adventure game puzzles", everything made perfect sense, and if you do find yourself confused on procedure at any point, there are plenty of opportunities for the game to remind you of what you should do. Even when you encounter the typical Sierra frequent death scenes, they provide sufficient clues to help you avoid further mistakes; in many ways, it's actually one of the friendliest Sierra games I think I've ever played.
I was playing the VGA remake, by the way; I am curious to give the EGA version a go sometime and see if it has the same level of charm, wit and characterisation of the VGA version, but I suspect the parser-driven interface may make some of the procedural elements a little trickier. I understand the driving sequences in the EGA original kind of suck, too.
Anyway, I'm definitely going to explore the other games in the series. I remember reading a review of the Atari ST version of Police Quest II back in the day and thinking it looked thoroughly intriguing, so I'm looking forward to giving that a shot; I suspect it will be a bit of an adjustment to go back to a parser-driven interface, but it does at least make use of the later-era "nice" EGA graphics rather than the weird double-width pixels Sierra games used in the early days.
It's strange what happened to Police Quest in the long term. After three games with a coherent, ongoing narrative, the fourth game completely ditched everything it had built up in favour of a realistic LA setting — and from there it ceased to be an adventure game altogether, gradually turning into a strategy game and then a tactical shooter. Original series creative lead (and ex-cop) Jim Walls has supposedly attempted to create a "spiritual successor" on a few occasions, but we're yet to see this realised.
Anyway. I'm definitely intrigued by what I've played so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing if the fourth one feels like it has any connection whatsoever to the first three — I suspect not. For now, though, I definitely don't regret my time with the VGA remake of the first one!
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