Rodney King's Quest - Let's Dunk on Police Quest: Open Season

[Timrod]

“There were a lot of people at the company that were horribly, horribly unhappy… that Ken and management would capitalize on someone as controversial and dark as Daryl Gates. And Police Quest 4 got [a] different name inside the company. We started calling it Rodney King’s Quest.” - Josh Mandel, former Director of Product Design, Sierra.

Police Quest: Open Season (aka Police Quest 4) is the final game in the Police Quest franchise, developed and published by Sierra and released in November of 1993. It is, as a whole, probably one of the worst games ever developed - a unique kind of bad that I don’t think could ever exist again due to the emergence of social media and online games journalism.

I’d like to start by reading the back of the CD case, because it has more lies and omissions per square inch than almost any other piece of marketing material I have ever seen.

Someone’s on a killing spree, and it’s up to you to solve a string of seemingly random murders.

“Created by the nation’s most experienced cop. Retired Police Chief Daryl Gates’ highly acclaimed police drama Police Quest (R): Open Season lets you taste firsthand the life of a cop in America’s toughest city.”

Open Season was a game made to sell on controversy, and to say that Daryl Gates “retired” from the Los Angeles Police Department, where he had been Chief of Police since 1978, is… a bit of an understatement. Daryl Gates “retired” in June of 1992 because the City of Los Angeles was about to pass a ballot measure that would have forced him out of office after several years of near-constant scandals - the biggest of which was the LA Riots of 1992 in which 63 people died and nearly 3,400 were injured.

That’s not the only lie, either. The second one is that Daryl Gates had almost nothing to do with this game. It was mostly written by Tammy Dargan, a producer whose primary experience before being hired to work on this game was as a producer on America’s Most Wanted, which as we all know is a hallmark of excellence in writing (it isn’t). Daryl Gates was basically there for name recognition and the controversy using it was going to stir up.

Let’s keep going, shall we?

“Track a criminal through the streets of L.A. and pray you find him before he finds you. Special CD features include exciting arcade sequences, a professional cast speaking over 10,000 lines of dialogue, and a “Making of Police Quest: Open Season” video.”

First, the “arcade” sequences suck, as we’ll see later. They weren’t even good for 1993. That’s not really the salient point here, however.

Lie number three is actually that there are other videos on the disc that aren’t just the “Making Of” video. You see, Sierra also recorded a series of video interviews with Daryl Gates… in which he calls for making alcohol illegal again and rails against the legalization of pot, where he insists the police did nothing wrong in responding to the 1992 riots, and tries to wallpaper over the beating of Rodney King, which occurred on his watch.

“[That was] one incident that did not demand the kind of attention that it got.” - Daryl F. Gates, on the beating of Rodney King.

On top of all this, though, Open Season is a really shitty point and click. I’m going to give this game a thorough dunking on. Expect a very deep dive: I’ve done a lot of research in my four attempts at starting an LP of this game, and I want to get this done before more of them go offline.

[Timrod]

Update 1: A Little Cocaine, as a Treat

: Welcome to Open Season. There’s an intro video that doesn’t really do much that I’m going to skip. This is the first screen you get after starting a new game.

: Our first order of business is to turn the game to Text mode - unfortunately, you can’t have both the voices and the subtitles on at the same time.

: I also turn the volume down because the background music on this screen sounds like a worse rendition of the Mansion Basement theme from Resident Evil: Director’s Cut.

: With that done, the first thing we want to do in terms of actual gameplay is open our inventory. We currently have nine items. I’ll give you the description for each.

: It’s your wallet.

: It’s your Beretta 92F.

: Daryl Gates had what I’d describe as a fetish for guns and violence. In the Vice article about this game, they mention an LA Times article in which he suggested allowing the police to shoot drug users.

: In fact, one thing you’ll learn pretty quickly about Daryl Gates is that his solution to almost everything was either “shoot it” or “beat it to death”.

: Loaded and ready for action.

: Spare change.

: These are your car, office, and home keys.

: Department issued handcuffs.

: Your department issued memorandum book and pencil.

: This is your Parker Center identification card.

: I skipped the badge on purpose - the first action we do in the game is examine it, which is a source of points.

: We can see that our character (whose name is John Carey) has badge number 612, which we’ll need later.

: You see the two guys - the one by the phone pole being questioned by a cop, and the other one standing in front of the fence? This is the game’s first possible point of failure.

: They will stay there for something like a minute and then leave the area unless we show them the badge. I believe this leads to a dead man walking scenario if you don’t talk to them.

: “Hello, I’m Detective Carey, LAPD. Would you mind answering a question or two?”

: I’ll be using a picture of Daryl Gates for the protagonist’s lines. In this case, this is talking to the guy by the phone pole.

: I will also be using Tammy Dargan’s photo for all civilian dialog. I’m doing this because I don’t believe a single person of color worked on this game, and because I want you to see who’s really saying this racist bullshit.

: “No shirr… I mean, yes shirr, I’ll answer ya…”

: “What is your name, sir?”

: “Jack. Two Jack.”

: I should mention that the voiceacting for this part sounds… very off. I’m pretty sure it’s because the voiceactors were (correctly) phoning this shit in for a paycheck.

: I am also transcribing all lines of dialog, ESPECIALLY those of Black characters, exactly as they are written in the game’s subtitles.

: "Sir, did you see any unusual activity, or unfamiliar cars in the neighborhood?’

: “I hear, hear shots… fast, like, pop, pop, pop, pop.”

: “What time might you have heard these shots, sir?”

: “I’ wuz… it, pop, pop, pop, pop… I just hear them shots, I wuz scare’.”

: “Any other information you could give me, sir?”

: “Pop, pop, pop. I kno’ dis sound, it killin’ the chil’ren.”

: I’d like to pause for a minute and continue my last thought. Daryl Gates, as I mentioned before, was a virulent racist. The fact that the Black characters in this game sounds so off-putting is almost indicative of his worldview - Daryl Gates really seemed to think that people of color were some kind of alternate species instead of, you know, people.

“It seems to me that… we may be finding that in some blacks when it [a police chokehold] is applied, the veins or the arteries do not open as fast as they do on normal people.” - Daryl Gates, on why he believed Black people were more likely to die from choke holds.

: We can then use the notebook on both men, which gives us a few points. Let’s show the badge to the other man now, the one by the fence.

: “Hello, I’m Detective Carey, LAPD. Would you mind answering a question or two?”

: “Wha’ever, man. I’ jest hangin’.”

: “Let’s start with your name. What is it and do you live in the neighborhood, or are you just visiting?”

: Has any real person ever talked like this?

: “Well, Raymond, if this is your neighborhood, then you must know what goes on around here. What happened here tonight? You see anything unusual? Maybe a different car, or some folks from another neighborhood?”

: “Ain’t seen nor heard nothin’. Jest out fo’ some fresh LA air.”

: You can probably imagine why people wouldn’t want to talk to the LAPD, but in case you can’t, I have a story about what happened when people did.

: In August of 1988, some homeowners near 39th and Dalton streets in LA called the LAPD about a gang that had taken over their street and was using it as a hotspot for drug deals. The LAPD determined that the drug dealers were based out of four apartment buildings nearby.

: In response, the police got a warrant, and then went against their own protocol by sending a team of 88 officers and exactly one sergeant to execute a drug raid. [Source: Christopher Commission Report, pp. 38-39]. The small army of cops tore the buildings apart, while doing shit like spraying graffiti and arresting and/or beating the residents there - when the LAPD later sent investigators to survey the damage, the investigators documented 127 different instances of vandalism done entirely by the cops.

: To no one’s surprise, the raid was totally ineffective. None of the drug dealers they were after lived in those apartments, and no one was ever charged with a crime. The raid cost the city $4 million in property damage claims and legal settlements with the residents who had been falsely arrested and/or beaten. The raid also left 22 people homeless.

: Our next action is to use the notebook on the wall here to “record the symbol”, which appears to be an incredibly bad MS Paint job.

: Next, we need to use the keys on the trunk of the car.

: This reveals Carey’s homicide kit (the box) and shotgun. That seems like a really dumb place to store a shotgun, especially one that is presumably loaded - if it were to go off, it’s going to blast you right in the kidneys.

: I know people will say that modern guns are specifically designed not to go off just from being jolted or bumped, but do you really want to take that chance?

: We grab the homicide kit even though we all know if this was Daryl Gates responding to a crime scene he’d be cradling that shotgun and waiting to shoot someone with it.

: A good game would have made it so that the homicide kit is one item, and you simply use it any time you’d need it. This game makes us open it up to reveal a second inventory full of shit.

: The worst part is that there are screens where you need an item in the kit, and if you don’t already have it selected you have to back out, go into the kit, pick out the item, and then go back to the screen you were on.

: The baggies hold evidence found at crime scenes.

: You know, evidence. Like all that cocaine in the evidence lockup.

: 24 inch prybar… very handy.

: I saw this and immediately went “I bet real homicide kits do not have a prybar in them” and I was absolutely right - I found a couple of companies that sell (extremely overpriced) evidence kits to the police, and not a single one had a prybar in it.

: I mean, unless this is meant to be a homicide kit in the sense that it’s a kit you’d bring to commit a homicide, in which case I suppose that would make sense. I imagine Daryl Gates would probably have one of those.

: The jar is used to collect samples when SID is not called for.

: SID stands for Special Investigation Division, and is simply a fancy name for the people who do evidence collection at crime scenes.

: Rubber gloves used against infection or decontamination.

: Department issued 9 volt anodized aluminum flashlight.

: Chalk, made in the USA.

: The putty knife is made in the USA.

: Now that we’ve seen all of our items, we can finally deal with the dead body we’ve walked straight past at least twice without even looking at.

: It looks less like homicide to me and more like he was posing for the cover of a romance novel and fell asleep partway through.

: Our next action is going to be taking the chalk out of the homicide kit and using it twice, once on the cigarette and a second time on the body.

: Additionally, we need to use the notebook on the body and on the cigarette.

: Finally, we need to open the dumpster. I should probably put a gore warning here, but honestly it’s a bad photoshop job.

: I, uh… I don’t know what this crime scene is supposed to tell us.

: Clearly the kid was doing the “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance and then… I guess his neck ran into a really bad photoshop job?

: We use the notebook on the corpse, but nothing else.

: Next, we need to talk specifically to this guy. Now, here’s the problem with this. Let’s say instead of talking to this specific guy, you talk to the person standing next to the dumpster.

: If you do that, the scene ends immediately and you’re pushed on to the next one without getting an item, which I believe is a dead man walking scenario - not because it’s meant to be, but because this game is a bug-ridden mess.

: “Officer Woodbury, I’m taking over as lead investigator.”

: “Yes sir, Detective Carey. I have my crime scene log for you.”

: “Were you first on the scene?”

: “Yes sir. Officer Allen and I were on patrol, he was driving. As we passed the alley, I looked to my right. I saw the body. We radioed it in, stopped, set up the perimeter.”

: “I didn’t know it was Hickman until we got up to the body. I can tell you, sir, I was shocked. He was the last person I expected to see. He was a fine officer.”

: What the hell kind of writing is this? You just gave him a written report that probably has all this shit in it! Why is he even asking?

: There is some alternate dialogue if you talk to Woodbury before you open the dumpster that happens once you open it.

: “Detective Carey, have you found something?”

: “Officer Woodbury, when we’re finished here, I want the neighborhood canvassed to see if anyone’s missing a child, but has not yet reported it.”

: We can talk to Chester now in order to finish this area.

: This brings up a good 30-second long sequence of Chester taking photos of the crime scene. I should mention that the character sprites are photos of actors compressed to hell and back.

: There’s another sequence of a couple of guys coming from the bottom of the screen to bag the body up that takes an additional 10 or 15 seconds.

: We’re now at Parker Center, which used to be the headquarters for the LAPD until they moved out in 2009. LA’s city government tried to re-purpose it a few times, but ultimately demolished it in 2019.

: Of course, what that leaves out is that it was nearly burned to the ground in the 1992 riots.

"From past experience with riotous behavior I doubted anything substantial would happen until much later, or possibly the next day. Like the police, it takes rioters time to gear up, too." - Daryl Gates, as recounted in Official Negligence by former Washington Post journalist Lou Cannon, page 300.

: Let me establish a timeline here. At 3:00 PM on April 29, 1992, the judge overseeing the trial of the four LAPD officers who were caught on tape beating Rodney King while he was on the ground reads the “not guilty on all charges” verdict.

: By 5:00, shit is getting bad. There are reports coming in over the LAPD’s radio about riots, and people being attacked by mobs. There is a growing crowd outside Parker Center calling to burn it down and fighting the police, who were vastly underprepared… due to Daryl Gates, of course.

In fact, Gates made no attempt to justify the decision. He told me that attending the fundraiser was “a dumb thing to do” and acknowledged as much in the afterword to the paperback edition of his memoirs. - Lou Cannon, Official Negligence, Page 301.

: According to Lou Cannon, Daryl Gates spent around 3 hours shut in his office in Parker Center, and then at 6:30 made the brave move… of getting into his car and driving several miles away. But wait, it gets even better.

: The reason he left? To attend a fundraiser - specifically, a fundraiser dedicated to defeating City Charter Amendment F - which would have forced him out of office if it passed.

: I’m going to use the SIU director from Persona 5 for this guy, because I can.

: “As you know, you’ve been assigned the lead investigator on this case and I’m going to be turning to you for answers.”

: It’s always a sign of good writing when a character states something, and then two minutes later another character re-states the exact same thing that both the audience and the character are already aware of, especially when it’s prefaced by an “As you know”.

: Tammy Dargan makes Katsura Hashino and post-nutjob Satomi Tadashi look competent by comparison.

: “I’m going to ask you to put aside your personal feelings, deal with the investigation in a professional manner. If you don’t think you’re up to it, I want to know now.”

: Also always a good sign for your career when this guy, who you’ve presumably worked under for years, doesn’t seem to trust you enough that he doesn’t need to remind you of this shit.

: “Neither you, nor the public, nor the department can withstand not knowing the truth. I want you to comb that neighborhood. I want every rock turned over and every person interviewed. Remember, Hickman was not the only fatality tonight. The family of that boy is grieving also.”

: This is probably more of a thought than Daryl Gates ever gave to an actual non-white person. At the risk of this LP turning into nothing but stories about him, there was one in the Vice article involving two LAPD officers shooting a Black woman shortly after Gates took over as the police chief. They then handcuffed her as she lay on the ground dying.

: His response? The officers were the real victims, because they had to shoot someone. That woman’s name was Eulia Love, and she was murdered by the police in front of her kids.

: “Yes, sir.”

: “For your information, the boy has been identified as one Bobby Washington. As for Hickman, I think there is something you should know. Maybe you already do, but here it is straight. Hickman’s lieutenant, Jim Varaz, informed me that Hickman was having trouble with stress. Trouble at home.”

: “Varaz told me that Hickman had been in a fragile mind-set, that working undercover was getting to him. You know, the violence of the streets can get to anyone. I’m not knocking Hickman. I just want you to know how the department viewed his current capacity.”

: The way this guy talks sounds robotic as fuck. Like, I’m imagining this guy’s voice as Peter Weller doing the Robocop voice, only with less emotion somehow. I might have to do a playthrough with the voiceacting on so I can see what this actually sounds like.

: “OK, Carey, you know what you need to do. Go out there and do it. Find who killed Hickman, find who killed the Washington youth. Any questions?”

: “No, Lieutenant.”

: “All right then, get to work. And ah, Carey, when you see Katherine, please extend my deepest sympathies.”

: I have no idea if this is a real shot of Parker Center, or if it’s a set. If this is what it really looked like, I can see why people would want to burn it down - and also why they probably weren’t successful. This building looks like it’s easily 80% asbestos by volume.

: I feel like this is a bit toned-down from how actual cops working in the LAPD would have spoken, which probably would have involved a lot more swearing and also dropping the n-word every sentence.

: Normally, I’m not going to bother showing off every action for every character or object, but you have to see what this guy’s name is.

: Given that the guy on the other side of Carey looks like a clone of this guy, I think we can safely say ACAB - all cops are bottoms.

: I like to think the nametag is there because John Carey is a complete idiot who can’t find his desk without a map.

: I looked it up, and Form 3.14.00 is in fact the form for a “Follow-Up Investigation”. I was kind of hoping to find a PDF of one so I could fill it out myself as a gimmick, but didn’t have any luck.

: We then need to use the notebook with the 3.14.00 form (the one on the right).

: We can then click up here to find a memo from Lieutenant Block - that was the dipshit we were just talking to, the one who is probably a robot.

: What’s annoying about this is that we have several different inventory items that are all pieces of paper, and thus have a very similar icon.

: Next up is examining this drawer, which has a photo we need to look at.

: This is kind of confusing, so let me explain. The top part, “Gunner”, is Carey’s password to log in to the department’s computer. The bottom part is a phone number. Let’s see where that goes.

: I’m going to need to explain CRASH, because it’s yet another of Daryl Gates’s pet projects. CRASH stands for “Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums”, and on paper was the LAPD’s anti-gang unit. There was a CRASH unit in every police station in LA when this game was made.

: In reality, CRASH was basically a gang run by the cops and was dissolved in March 2000 after a series of embarrassing scandals. PBS did a very good series on this in the early 00s, most of which is still online.

: The best story from that is about the CRASH cop who had been stealing cocaine from the evidence lockup for years, replacing it with Bisquick, and then selling the cocaine on the streets. He didn’t get caught until he took six pounds at once.

: By the way, that drug raid I mentioned before? The one that cost LA $4 million in legal settlements? That was a CRASH operation.

: There are a bunch of references to CRASH in the games made in the early 2000s - Saints Row 3 had the STAG unit that is based on them, Dead to Rights (Hi, Slowbeef!) had the GAC unit, and I believe the villains in GTA San Andreas were outright part of a CRASH unit.

: “Hello, this is Detective Carey, over at Major Crimes, Homicide. Is Lieutenant Varaz there?”

: Why would he need to specify he’s from “major crimes”? Wouldn’t just “homicide” be enough? I mean, it’s not like this is The Silver Case where the Heinous Crimes Unit is a hit squad.

: We get points for doing this, and in an earlier version of the game, there was a bug where every time you dialed the CRASH unit, you’d get 3 points added to your score.

: I imagine a cop who did nothing all day except bug CRASH on the phone would technically be the best cop because not only are they not doing anything productive, they’re also stopping CRASH from raiding the evidence locker for cocaine.

: I mean, why did you think the homicide kit had all those plastic bags in it? It’s for sneaking a little cocaine, as a treat.

: We then need to give All Cops are Bottoms the 3.14.00 form we filled out and the crime scene report we got in the alley. This is followed up by me grabbing a second 3.14 form off-screen because we’re going to need it later.

: Now it’s time to use the computer.

: The server’s name is a reference to Sonny Bonds, the protagonist of the first three Police Quest games. He briefly shows up as an instructor in one of the SWAT games.

: Those games were mostly about grooming a sex worker into becoming Sonny’s wife, which… yeah, not great. There’s a part in Police Quest 3 where she’s in the hospital and you have to adjust her medication because obviously a cop would know better than any doctor how medicine works.

: We have to go into the Gang Information section. I did try going into the thing on hate crimes and typing Rodney King’s name in hoping I’d get personally chided by Daryl Gates.

: I see the cops are committing crimes against punctuation in addition to stealing cocaine from the evidence locker, robbing banks, and shooting each other.

: The game takes five screens to fit in a paragraph of text one sentence at a time, so I’ll quotebox it.

Rude Boys Get Bail
This symbol is found on buildings near to where the gang has committed a crime.

RBGB is a violent South Central gang led by Ragtopp Spiff. It is believed that Spiff is an alias as no social security number exists under his name.

: This is the second lamest gangster name I’ve ever heard.

Gang activity centers around gun trafficking. This includes both imported and stolen goods. The gang has claimed responsibility for many violent and torturous deaths. This gang should be approached with caution. It is believed that this gang has international connections. Various members of the gang are suspected of being involved in several unsolved murders and disappearances that have taken place over the past few years.

: …Hold on a second. Why would they need to “import” guns? This is the United States in 1993, guns are easier to get than a mortgage and the assault weapons ban won’t pass for another year.

: We’re pretty much done with this update - the only thing left to do is go to the gun range and I’ll handle that next update. However, there’s another gang entry here that is… pretty racist, honestly.

Snub’s
Symbol found on stores after they have been a victim of a robbery.

This is an all girl hispanic gang. Very violent. The name is derived from the snub-nosed handguns all the girls carry. To enter and stay in the gang a girl must rob at gun point a retail business. Many of these girls are unwed mothers and receive public assistance. Targeted area: Echo Park.

: First off, holy fuck could this be any more racist and misogynist? Second, I’d like to point out that this is not based on any of the actual gangs that were in Echo Park at the time. You know why?

: Well, here’s a list of a few of them. One of them (the Diamond Street Locos) had a side business protecting the LGBT community in Echo Park in the 80s.

: Sure, there were fights and murders, but for the most part, there’s no Ronald Reagan “super-killers” wandering the streets with guns and blasting people like it’s Grand Theft Auto.

: Next time, we’ll do the shooting range. I’m pretty sure there will be another Daryl Gates story almost immediately.

[Timrod]

Update 2: Yo, I Be Fly Today

: Now that we’re done dicking around in the office, we can head out of the building and into even more of Daryl Gates’s bullshit wonderland.

: Here’s another shit game design thing. This screen makes it seem like there’s two different exits… only both go to the same place, rendering this entire screen pointless.

: If you go down the left-side exit from the last screen, you instead wind up on the other side closer to the buttons, so technically going left is speedrun tech.

: I’d like to point out that while this game does have a page on Speedrun.com, no one has ever submitted a run of it. I hope no one ever does.

: We have to call the elevator for some more confusing bullshit. We want to go down to the lobby - I didn’t even bother trying the other options and I’m not sure half of them actually go anywhere.

: We can optionally use Carey’s change on the vending machine to get a candy bar. This doesn’t do anything and isn’t worth points.

: Any kid who grew up in the 90s will recognize that logo instantly. DARE (short for Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was another Daryl Gates program.

: DARE was a school-based program dedicated to promoting abstinence-only education about drug use. It usually involved a cop coming to the school to tell kids about how so much as looking at pot would kill you.

: I had to do DARE when I was in school, and I remember even then that everything they were saying seemed really suspect - one of their key lines of bullshit involved pot being a “gateway drug” that inevitably turned anyone who so much as touched it into a heroin or coke addict.

: Spoiler alert: I have in fact touched pot (never smoked it, but had a college roommate who did and got the shit everywhere) and have not morphed into a coke addict.

: This is the message you get for touching the poster, and… pfft. DARE was not only completely ineffective, it was also a GIGANTIC waste of money.

: See, what you have to keep in mind is that DARE revolved around cops - cops who were billing their time doing the DARE program as overtime. One paper from 2001 estimated the cost of police overtime alone at somewhere between $537 million and $635 million per year, and PBS estimated the total cost per year at nearly $600 million in 1998.

: What’s especially infuriating is that DARE still exists as far as I know, even though it has been documented by study after study to be totally ineffective. If we assume that the cost of the program remained constant from 1993 until today, that’s $18.6 billion (probably more than that) in police overtime alone.

: Daryl Gates died in 2010, so that means he’s managed to waste some $8 billion from beyond the grave.

: Oh no, it’s Daryl Gates’s worst enemy: THE NEWS MEDIA.

: This scene makes no sense if you know anything about Parker Center. Carey wouldn’t leave the building through the front door. Those cars you see in the background? That’s the visitor parking lot.

: The people who worked at Parker Center used an underground parking garage which was attached to the main building.

: “Heading up the Hickman investigation is veteran homicide detective John Carey. Carey is best known for solving the murder of Lane Blair, the stunning actress who featured in many of the action-adventure Straight Shots movies.”

: “Detective Carey has been unavailable for comment and all requests for a formal statement from the department have been denied. However, we have been told by an unofficial source that the department is looking at this as a gang killing.”

: No TV reporter is going to report on a murder by standing outside the police department. They might get some B-roll there, but they’re not going to report from outside the police department. They’re going to report from outside the crime scene, preferably from inside if the cops are gone.

: The reason is obvious: the cops aren’t going to answer shit if you have a camera with you. Hell, I had to call a police department recently to get a report on a car crash (for work) and they were stonewalling me on shit that is supposed to be a matter of public record.

: You also would not see a reporter saying “an unofficial source”. There are essentially two levels of anonymous sources in journalism. The first is called “background” and sounds like this:

: “An officer in the LAPD with knowledge of the investigation told KTLA that officers in the Rampart station frequently stole cocaine and other drugs from the evidence locker.”

: The second is essentially full anonymity and sounds like this:

: “A source with knowledge of the investigation told KTLA that Daryl Gates had at one point attempted to freebase the cocaine in the evidence locker, only to wind up with a very dry pancake.”

: There is a third level, which is going fully off the record, but that’s technically not a source because you can’t use or attribute that information.

: Finally, you wouldn’t see the LAPD “refuse to issue a formal statement”. Their PR person is going to tell you that they don’t comment on ongoing investigations. This will happen 100% of the time, and that’s what you report. The only reason people call is to see if the PR person fucks up and leaks something.

: “Detective Carey, would you care to make a statement concerning the murder of Officer Hickman?”

: “No comment.”

: The reporter will block us if we try to move past her, which is again not something a journalist would actually do, because again - they all know the cops aren’t going to say shit.

: To progress, we have to push the reporter out of the way - which is the way Daryl Gates would handle this situation (he’d probably also punch her) and is also the wrong way to handle it.

: After leaving Parker Center, we get the world map. Our list of possible destinations includes Hickman’s house (in Area 11), the Morgue (in Area 3) and the alley from the start of the game (Area 12), but we want to go to the police academy. It’s time for the gun range.

: Let me explain what a “bonus shoot” is. Bonus shooting is a thing the LAPD actually does where you’re given 30 rounds to shoot targets and get a pay bump depending on your score.

: I wish my desk job offered something like that only with golf, because I am Happy Gilmore level dangerous with a driver in my hand.

: The first thing we need to do is pick up Form 13.5.1, which as far as I can tell is not a real LAPD form.

: Carey fills it out automatically, which… what was the purpose of making me do this? There’s no challenge here, other than clicking around until you find the form - I think the guy behind the desk will tell you to fill one out if you haven’t.

: In return, he gives us a box of 9mm ammo. Let’s just take that…

: This may or may not be entirely bullshit, I can’t really tell. I could not find a single source anywhere about cops having to pay for ammo except for two circumstances: if they’re using their own gun, or if they’re using a gun that isn’t the standard department carry (some departments, for instance, offer the option to carry a .45 instead of a 9mm but you have to pay for the .45 ammo).

: It may be, however, that we have to pay because we’re not here for the qualification (which we have to come back for later, regrettably).

: He also gives us some ear protection, which we can’t put on immediately for some reason.

: Welcome to the uh… “exciting” “arcade” sequences.

: You go through four “phases” of targets at different distances. The goal is to hit them as many times as possible, which seems… kinda counterproductive.

: The goal is to aim for the white dot in the middle, but I’m gamer-pilled and forced to go for headshots.

: I get a little over 310 points, which would be enough to be a “marksman” and get $4 a day in extra pay. The City of Los Angeles can feel free to get in touch with me to pay me my $4 stipend.

: For extra “realism”, you occasionally have to reload your gun in the inventory by clicking the box of bullets on it, because that’s how a gun works. You just kinda dump a box of bullets on your gun and it reloads. That’s just science.

: Our next destination is the morgue, which has a lot of optional dialog in it. In fact, we only need to go in here for two things and there is a screen that is entirely skippable.

: By the way, I checked, and the address on that isn’t current - the Coroner is actually at 1102 North Mission Road.

: Quick shout-out to this kid, who I imagine is in some kind of necromancy club. That kid knows how to summon a skeleton. I can just tell by looking at him.

: What IS at 1104 North Mission Road is the County Medical Examiner, which is in a different building. Here it is, for reference:

: If I was writing this, the receptionist would be desperately trying to pretend she didn’t notice Carey, the way the people at Sierra did when Daryl Gates was around.

: “Hello, Sherry. I’d like to see Deputy Nobles. Is he available?”

: Boy, I sure do love pointless busy work in games.

: "How can you tell when someone’s been choked to death instead of by accidental ligature strangulation?’

: “I don’t know.”

: “By occluded blood vessels and thyroid fracture!”

: This feels like a Harvester cutscene. I feel like Steve from Harvester was more of a protagonist than Carey is.

: What we’re here for is… you see those little brown bumps on top of the counter behind the coroner?

: These are the envelopes containing the belongings of the two people who died in the alley at the start of the game, and are in fact the only reason we need to be here.

: The one for Hickman is identical but has a “BH” on the envelope.

: What I’ll do now is summarize the optional dialogue. There’s a bunch of questions we can ask and the coroner will just go “I dunno”.

: “Sam, have you completed Hickman’s autopsy? What are your preliminary findings?”

: “The autopsy is complete. Beyond the surface evidence, I found a ruptured gastrointestinal tract. Fluids were sampled and I’m having toxicology tests run, including all known poisons.”

: I’m not a coroner, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how autopsies work.

: “Sam, will you go over the physical marks on the body?”

: “Yes. There are the two injection marks in the upper left arm, the burn marks to the face and upper torso, the epoxied eyes, the missing index finger, and then there are restraint marks.”

: “The restraint marks appear where you would most expect to find them, on the ankles and the wrists. At these points I found fiberous [sic] material. All very consistent with what you would expect to find at a torture scene.”

: “Sam, do you have a preliminary back on the toxicology tests?”

: “Not yet, John, but I believe we’ll find that Hickman died of poison, as opposed to say, a heart attack. If Hickman was killed by poison, it could have been a slow and painful, and quite obviously, tortuous [sic] death.”

: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Now we can go and ask about “the youth”.

: “Sam, what can you tell me about the youth?”

: They think you’re an asshole and are glad you’re dead.

: “Exactly what would you like to know, John?”

: “The boy’s identification? Confirmed, and by whom?”

: Who the fuck talks like this?

: “The Lucky Mini Mart owner confirmed the body as Bobby Washington, a local neighborhood boy.”

: Real creative naming we’ve got going on here, these two dead Bobs.

: “Has the boy’s family been notified?”

: “Yes, and as I am sure you can imagine, the mother is near hysterics. Her name is Bernadette Washington and she lives just around the corner from the alley. The poor woman is so upset she can’t yet bring herself to come down and claim the body or the few small trinkets we found on the boy.”

: “Sam, do you have a preliminary on the boy’s cause of death?”

: “I counted seventeen points of entry, John. The boy was mowed down, execution style. Cause of death, gang violence, if you want a personal opinion. Professional opinion, the youth was killed by gunshot wounds to the head and body.”

: That… isn’t what “execution style” means. Granted, the term is almost meaningless because reporters overuse the fuck out of it (this was something they told me even back in college) but it’s usually used to describe a single shot to the head from point blank range.

: Our next destination is back at the start of the game, in another move that really doesn’t make any sense. The game is never really good at indicating where the exits are, but there’s an exit at the top of the screen (where Carey came from at the start of the game) that we couldn’t take before.

: Apparently the police simply forgot to check this wall that has been riddled with bullet holes. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me given how generally incompetent the LAPD is.

: And now we get to do more busy work. We have to use the putty knife from the homicide kit to dig out all sixteen of the bullets from this wall.

: But wait! That’s not all! We also get to do the tedious bullshit task of clicking each hole again to put the bullet in a bag.

: See, a good game would have had it so simply using the putty knife on the wall automatically removes all the bullets and bags them, but this is not a good game.

: We can exit through what is… apparently a wooden prop wall set up in the middle of LA. Gotta love that DARE billboard in the background - LA’s taxpayer dollars at work (or rather, not at work).

: We have to show the badge and use the notebook on these two guys, who don’t really have much to say. I’ll show you some of it. The other person talking is the guy in front wearing what looks like the Takoroka Windcrusher from Splatoon 2.

: “I’d like to ask you fellas a couple of questions.”

: “You be da Man, ask away.”

: “Last night there was a double murder… a police officer and a neighborhood boy, Bobby Washington. Do you know anything that might help us solve what happened to them?”

: That last sentence sounds like it was badly translated from a different language, only it wasn’t.

: “I be knowin’ nothin’. Dat copper, wha’ he be doin’ down here anyway?”

: “Did you know Bobby Washington?”

: I had no idea who the fuck they were talking about, so I searched the name and came up with about 20 different Wikipedia pages. They’re talking about this guy, who was a pitcher for the Dodgers.

: “You a big baseball fan? I see you’ve got a baseball.”

: “Yo baby… I like all dem sports… dis here ball, I find it… find it in da field. What’s lost is now mine.”

: “If you can think of anything that might help us, why don’t you give me a call down at Parker Center. Just ask for Robbery Homicide, Detective Carey. You never know when I might be able to repay the favor.”

… What. What the fuck is this writing?

: Has… has anyone ever said the phrase “I be fly today”? Is that a phrase human lips have ever uttered? Who the fuck at Sierra looked at this and went “This is okay. We can release this.”?

: That’s a disingenuous question, because it was Ken Williams. I do want to mention that at one point, years ago when I was doing research for this LP, I found a source that I have not been able to find again that talked about this game’s development.

: There was a story involving Daryl Gates being in an elevator with Tammy Dargan and some other people, and she’s running some stuff past him and he looks at it and goes “That’s… kind of racist, isn’t it?”

: I wonder if this was what he was talking about.

: Oh look, it’s the two guys from last night. We have to talk to Raymond Jones III again - for reference, he’s the guy in the blue shirt.

: “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

: “Yeah, OK… sure. Ya got som’ spare change a fellow could have?”

: We have to use the change on him three times. This doesn’t get us anything, but if we try to use the change a fourth time…

: Fuck you, Daryl! Fuck you too, Tammy Dargan! Holy FUCK this pisses me off.

: I work right near a major road that connects three towns. There are little “islands” in the middle of the road that divide it, and those islands are a hotspot for panhandlers.

: I personally saw the cops arrest one of them and throw all his stuff in a garbage can a few weeks before I started this LP.

: The cops also had a car parked nearby that had a sign reading something like “DO NOT GIVE PANHANDLERS MONEY, THEY SPEND IT ON DRUGS”.

: Shortly thereafter, as a personal fuck you to Daryl Gates, I took the lane that put me closest to the panhandlers and gave this guy who reminded me of Frank $50. I then went to the grocery store, picked up some stuff, and came back past the same spot.

: Was the panhandler doing drugs? Fuck no he wasn’t! He was eating dinner outside a Popeyes right across the way. I wanted to give him the rest of the cash in my wallet but couldn’t get to where he was from that road.

: And if he had been buying wine? Let him! He deserves it! Fuck, I’d have gone and gotten him a bottle of the good stuff if he asked.

: We now have to go into the convenience store for some more racist bullshit.

: “Everybody know who you are. You big cop, bring big trouble.”

: The TV plays a highly compressed shot of Carey pushing the reporter.

: “Not too smart, big policeman. You push girl on TV.”

: “I… it wasn’t like that, she…”

: “Yeah, yeah, you save for others. I see TV. I see you in neighborhood. You not come but for dead cop.”

: Now, in a good game, Carey would be forced to come to terms with the fact that he really is only here for a dead cop and it might be a moment for character growth. This is not a good game.

: “Can you tell me your name, and what your position is here?”

: Let’s just set the casual racism aside for a moment (fuck you, Tammy Dargan!) and focus on something worse - that being the person this character is a reference to.

: The clerk is a reference to Soon Ja Du, who owned a number of convenience stores with her husand in LA in the early 1990s. One of those stores was Empire Liquors, which was located in the middle of a hotspot for gang activity.

: According to Lou Cannon, Empire Liquors had been robbed at least 30 times prior to 1991, including an armed robbery by the Crips in December of 1990 while her son had been behind the counter.

: On March 16, 1991, Soon Ja Du shot and killed an unarmed Black girl by the name of Latasha Harlins with a single shot to the back of her head. The entire thing was caught on video.

: Soon Ja had accused her of stealing a carton of orange juice, which was completely false - eyewitnesses to the murder saw Latasha Harlins with money in her hand going to the counter to pay for it.

: There was a physical altercation. Soon Ja picked a fight and lost, and then proceeded to pull out a gun from behind the counter and shot Latasha Harlins as she was trying to run away.

: Soon Ja Du was arrested, tried… and sentenced to 5 years probation and a $500 fine for a shooting that was caught on video and where the prosecution had multiple eyewitnesses. It also became pretty clear that this was a hate crime - again, from Lou Cannon:

"Soon Ja Du acknowledged her fear and dislike of African Americans. She confided to a white probation officer that blacks were lazy and used welfare money to buy liquor instead of feeding their children." - Lou Cannon, Official Negligence, page 112

: Let’s look around the store, because the descriptions of some of the shit sound like a cross between a robot that has never seen LA before and Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.

: We need to take an apple from the bowl.

: Of course they’d be Red “Delicious”, the worst apple in existence. I imagine Daryl Gates refused to eat any other kind.

: I’m willing to bet there was no way Daryl Gates didn’t drink.

: We also need to get a tube of superglue from the rack to Carey’s right.

: And of course, we need to pay for it. Wouldn’t want the owner to shoot Carey in the back of the head… actually wait, yes I do.

: Next time, we’ll meet Bobby Washington’s mother. We’ll also do another pointless gun range segment (not shown) and meet some more racist caricatures.

[Timrod]

Update 3: Ballistics for Dipshits

: Welcome back to Police Quest: Open Season, where it’s time for glitchy plot flags and an even glitchier action sequence. This screen is one screen to the east of where we started the game.

: If we try talking to the girl, she runs away and we have to reload the screen. Daryl Gates had such a way with kids… no, really, he did. Did you know he once called for his own son to be killed?

: Daryl Gates has a son named Lowell Scott Gates, who was arrested several times for drug possession from the late 70s to as recently as 2004.

: In September of 1990, Gates appeared before Congress and told them that drug users “ought to be shot”. By this point, he knew his son was a drug addict.

: He then tried to backpedal and said that only “casual users” should be shot and that his son should be exempt because his son was a long-time addict and “had already shot himself”. (Note: Lowell Gates did not actually shoot himself).

"He must have been smoking some pretty bad stuff." - LA City Council Member Zev Yaroslavsky, on Daryl Gates’s proposal to shoot drug users.

: We first need to use the badge on her. Why this wouldn’t make her run away faster than if you don’t show her the badge, I have no idea.

: We then have to give her the apple we got from the store, because… honestly, I don’t know. My guess is that Daryl Gates probably thought eating fruit stops people from joining gangs.

: Giving the apple to the girl causes Bernadette Washington to show up on her front steps. LaSondra is the girl we just passed by - she has dialog, but it’s mostly her telling us her name.

: We need to show Bernadette Carey’s badge, and then give her the envelope.

: “I’m Detective Carey, LAPD, Homicide. May I have a moment of your time?”

: “Yes, Detective, what is it?”

: “Mrs. Washington, these are the items found on Bobby’s person the night he was killed. I’m so sorry, ma’am.”

: “Thank you…”

: We then need to reload the screen to talk to Bernadette.

: “Mrs. Washington, I have reason to believe that a young man by the name of Ragtopp Spiff might be involved with your son’s murder. Does his name sound familiar?”

: I like to think this is a different Raymond Jones from the one we met. It’s his evil cousin, Raymond Jones the Twice Removed.

: The rest of her dialog is about 10 textboxes of shit we already know, so I’ll skip it. There is one more thing we can do here, but for some reason I could not get it to trigger without going to our next destination first.

: Our next destination is Hickman’s house, which… what the fuck is this architecture? It looks like it has a tumor.

: You know, I wasn’t sure if this was a real photo they had compressed or not, and… yeah, this kinda looks like a real photo. I sure hope someone put this house out of its misery since then.

: Nothing creepy about that.

: “Hi, Valerie. How are you doing?”

: This part feels like it was supposed to be different at an earlier stage of development. We have to sit here for a good 20 seconds or so without being able to do anything.

: My guess is that originally, you were supposed to sneak into the hall closet before Hickman’s wife comes downstairs. By the way, can you see where that is? I sure as hell couldn’t. If you follow a straight line from Carey’s eyes, it’s that little sliver of a slightly different shade of white sticking out of the left side of the doorway.

: I can’t capture it properly because of DOSBox, but there’s this really weird speed issue that makes Hickman’s wife poke her head out from the doorway and then teleport into the sitting position.

: “Hi, John, thanks for coming over.”

: “How are you, Katherine?”

: “I don’t know… I can’t believe this has happened. It’s like a nightmare. I keep hoping I’ll wake up and Bob will be alive.”

: “Thank you, John… is his wedding band included?”

: “I didn’t open it, Katherine. I don’t know.”

: The evidence guy probably sold it to buy coke.

: “John, this was Bob’s Kevlar vest. I’d like you to have it… maybe it will keep you safe.”

: I looked this up because it sounded ridiculous that an LAPD detective wouldn’t have body armor issued to them, but wasn’t able to find any legit sources on it.

: Also, I’m pretty sure body armor is bigger than that.

: “Thank you, Katherine.”

: “I suppose so, John… I, I just can’t believe this is happening. I don’t know what to do…”

: “Katherine, Bob’s gun was not found at the scene. Is it here? Do you know if he had it with him the night he went out?”

: Holy fuck, how dumb is Carey? Yeah, I’m sure Hickman went out in full uniform, took his holster and left his gun home.

: “His gun isn’t here. I already looked. Bob’s captain already asked about it.”

: “Katherine, the department is aware of the fact that Bob was taking sedatives to combat work-related stress. Do you think that Bob could have been abusing those medications?”

: “John, how could you say that about Bob! I’m sorry… I, I can’t talk about this right now…”

: “Valerie, do you understand what’s happened?”

: “You know, Val, you always have your Uncle John if you need anything, right? Valerie, can you remember anything that happened the night your dad went out and didn’t come home?”

: Has anyone else noticed that every time anyone speaks in this game, they always call out by name who they’re speaking to? That’s because Ken Williams thinks you’re a moron.

"Our players don’t read the New York Times." - Ken Williams

: “Was your dad bringing a lot of work home, Val?”

: This unlocks our ability to finally search the closet.

: It’s a good thing those are prescription, or else Carey would have to give Valerie a juice cleanse. Just this absolute dipshit of a detective chasing a little girl and screaming “YOU HAVE TO EAT ALL THE APPLES”.

: For some reason, getting the bulletproof vest makes LaSondra move to this screen, where we can now question her.

: “Do you wanna know a secret? I seen a real pretty lady in the alley. I seen her when my brother was dead.”

: We need to ask her all three of these questions, so I’ll go from the top.

: “What was this lady doing, LaSondra?”

: “She was smoking.”

: “LaSondra, what did this lady look like?”

: “She was pretty. And she had pretty clothes!”

: “What was she wearing, LaSondra?”

: “A pretty red dress.”

: I have to wonder if the whole “saying the person’s name every line” thing was some intern fucking up when transcribing the script because Sierra’s usual person refused to work on this game.

: After using the notebook on LaSondra, we’re all done and can go back to Parker Center.

: We have to use Carey’s ID card on him to enter the building, which I again remind you would not happen this way because Parker Center had an underground parking garage.

: The real reason you’d probably need the ID card is for a door access control system where you swipe your card to get in.

: One riveting elevator ride later and we’re in the basement to do even more pointless busy work.

: We need to use two items here, the glue and the pills from Hickman’s coat. You can use them in either order.

: “Chester, I’d like you to take a look at this and see if you can match it to the glue found in Hickman’s eyes. I purchased it in the neighborhood where Hickman was found… I know it’s a long shot.”

: I’m just gonna go ahead and say this is total bullshit and there’s no way the police can do this. 90% of forensics is total jangly key man bullshit.

: In fact, I’ve got a story about this because of course I do. When I was a kid, all of my science teachers would talk about Dr. Henry Lee, who at the time was a big shot in the world of forensics.

: Dr. Lee lives in (and has lived in, for a long time) Connecticut, and was a major point of pride for the state. The forensic science program at the University of New Haven is named after him, and I’m kind of surprised it still is.

: I found a copy of his CV from around 2010, and you can see that he quite literally wrote the book (or rather, over a dozen books) on modern forensic science. NBC 30 in Connecticut recently did an entire video series on him that appears (from what I’ve seen) to be quite good.

: Now, you might ask why NBC 30 would do a massive investigative piece on Dr. Lee… and that’s because in 2023, a federal judge found that he fabricated evidence in a murder trial from 1985 and sent two people to prison for 30 years for a crime they had nothing to do with.

: His entire career is now rightfully being questioned, and I would not be surprised if half the shit he did was entirely made up.

: Carey gets the rest back, presumably to huff for a quick high if the evidence locker runs out of cocaine.

: “Chester, I found these at Hickman’s. Apparently he was taking them regularly. Could he have overdosed on these things?”

: “Detective, these are Valium, five milligrams. Hickman weighed, what would you say, 170 pounds? Hickman would have had to take what’s left in this bottle and coupled it with something else to have killed himself. No, these didn’t have anything to do with his death.”

: I looked this up and it seems to be generally correct, but I couldn’t find any hard evidence to support it.

: We can also try to give Chester the bullets, except… she won’t take them.

: By the way, ballistics? Just as bullshit as the rest of forensics. Just wait until we get to the ballistics guy, which requires us to go to the fourth floor.

: “I’d like a ballistics test run on them.”

: “I don’t know which test, like, I don’t have another set of bullets to compare them to or a gun or anything. Just uh, run the ballistics test. You know the one. The one that proves a gang did it.”

: This, however, is not NEARLY as dumb as it gets.

: We now have to select what we want Ballistics Officer Dipshit to do with the bullets. None of this makes any goddamn sense!

: I mean, you’ve got the fact that a supposedly “trained” ballistics tech wouldn’t know what to do with bullets, plus the fact that there’s no real fail state here. These are fucking bullets! They’re not going to evaporate if they’re put in a freezer!

: When we return to Carey’s desk, the phone is ringing.

: “Yo baby, s’up? It be Emmo. You be wantin’ a piece of da action? I got the news fo’ ya… I known som’ straight up talk. Yo, baby, yo… hear me talkin’?”

: What.

: “Yes, Emmo, I’m here. Are you telling me you have information concerning last night’s murders?”

: “Straight up baby! I be waiting by the field, if you be interest’d…”

: We now get to leave Parker Center. They put a shitty filter over the daytime image of it to make it “night” because that’s how much of a shit Ken Williams gave.

: This is the point at which you want to save the game, because the next part is the first real death possibility in the game, other than I think trying to walk out of the convenience store without paying.

: We arrive, and there’s Emmo…

: And he’s dead. We’re now on a timer to do several actions in order. The first is to use the “move” action on the car.

: We’re now in cover behind the car, but if we don’t immediately put on the body armor, we die.

: Now, I’d like you to imagine for a moment that you’re in Carey’s position. You’re being shot at by two guys standing behind a prop wall like it’s Hogan’s Alley on the NES, and are behind cover.

: You have, on your person, a presumably loaded Beretta along with an entire spare magazine for it. What do you do?

: That’s right, you inch along to the back of the car to grab the shotgun in the trunk. If you don’t have the vest on, you die right here.

: For some reason, the guys behind the wall are just letting Carey casually sift through his pockets for his keys, unlock and open his trunk, and unlock the shotgun.

: Fortunately, there’s no timer on this screen, because it is a bitch and a half to get out of. I had to spam clicks until it let me out.

: At this point, you have to do an “arcade” sequence where you try to hit the guys with the shotgun. There is no hit indicator, and in fact no indication at all that you’ve done anything.

: While I get that’s realistic, it’s horrible game design. Further, you’re on a timer again AND you have a limited number of shotgun rounds.

: “So what’s it gonna be, Carey? You gonna act like a pro or a spoiled brat? Have I made a mistake in assignin’ you as lead investigator on this case?”

: “No sir, I…”

: “I’ll have you know, I’ve had dozens of calls this morning on you shovin’ that reporter yesterday! Everybody in town, from the Chief to the Mayor to outraged Joe Citizen, saw you push her.”

: Mayors are another thing Daryl Gates probably shouldn’t talk about, especially given the history the LAPD had with the mayor of LA. For most of Daryl Gates’s career, that was Tom Bradley.

: Before we get into that though, I want to talk about Gates’s predecessor, William H. Parker (for whom Parker Center was named). When Tom Bradley ran for mayor in 1969, Parker rallied the police and fire unions against him, and as a result, Tom Bradley lost.

: Now, you might think that’s entirely because Tom Bradley was Black and Parker was just as much of a racist as Daryl Gates… except that’s not the entire reason. It was also because Tom Bradley would have been harder to blackmail than the guy who won, a career politician named Sam Yorty who at the time was a Republican but had flip-flopped between both parties and was generally weak.

: And yes, I mean blackmail. I’d like to quote from Raphael Sonenshein’s book Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles.

"He did threaten Sam Yorty. One day Parker sent a message over with a package. And they showed that to Yorty and told him he wanted him to shut up and stop criticizing the chief and laid out all these bits of information that they had gathered on him. And we never again heard Yorty criticize Chief Parker. It was well known around City Hall. From that day forward, the day he threw that package on that desk, that was it and it shut him up." - Former LA Mayor Tom Bradley on a meeting between Yorty and Parker shortly after Yorty won the 1969 election, as recounted by Raphael Sonenshein in Politics in Black and White, Page 68

: It is fucking crazy to me that this shit was real. It’s crazy that Open Season ever existed. I mean, I can believe it, but still. This whole thing fees like some kind of alt-history fever dream.

: Tom Bradley finally won in 1973 (that picture up above is him being sworn in by Earl Warren, who would later investigate the LAPD) and immediately had enough of the LAPD’s bullshit.

: He cut the LAPD’s budget, which had skyrocketed to over 23% of the total budget for the City of Los Angeles, down to 17% - where it had been before Sam Yorty was mayor - [Source: Politics in Black and White, pp. 158-160] and re-arranging the formulas used by the police to force them to patrol areas (particularly those where people of color lived) that they had refused to patrol under Yorty.

: He also was the driving force behind Proposition F - that’s the one that would have forced Daryl Gates out of office - as well as the Christopher and Warren commissions that looked into the LAPD after the beating of Rodney King.

: “Lieutenant, it wasn’t…”

: “Besides you appearin’ uncooperative, you were downright politically incorrect! You shove one more reporter an’ the department’s gonna get slapped with a civil suit! Shovin’ anybody else, and I’m gonna give you the boot myself!”

: I’d like to point out just how unrealistic this is using examples from the Christopher Commission report. The report found that there were 44 LAPD officers with an inordinate amount of complaints of excessive force compared to the rest of the department.

[Source: Christopher Commission Report, Page 37]

: The thing is, you see that list? None of those cops were fired! Not one of them! If you were a cop in 1990s LA, Daryl Gates was going to protect you no matter what.

: “Lieutenant, I’d like to explain…”

: “Then there’s the small issue of last night’s events, Carey. Would you mind telling me what you were doing in the middle of a CRASH sting operation?”

: “Sir, I received a telephone call from a possible informant. I set up a meeting, I walked into an ambush…”

: “So it would seem, Carey, so it would seem. However, your tete-a-tete cost the department thousands of dollars and months of work! CRASH has been undercover for months on that operation! They were a fly’s hair away from bustin’ a gun runnin’ ring wide open!”

: Could this dialog be any more cliche? Also, given CRASH’s track record, merely wasting “thousands” of dollars is probably less damage than they would’ve caused had the operation gone off.

: Hell, CRASH is still killing people and wasting money over a decade after the original unit was disbanded. I’ll talk about that in a bonus update.

: “With your help, the only catch they made was that local punk, Spiff. Luckily for you, your informant, what’s his name, Emmo? What kind of name is that?.. has turned into a little songbird!”

: I’m picturing Carey looking at this guy, dead-eyed, and going “Wait, they can actually shapeshift? I thought that was just a rumor.”

: “Emmo’s sittin’ pretty in the hospital singin’ how Spiff’s the one who killed the Washington boy. Emmo contends Spiff wanted the boy to deliver guns to gang members and he wouldn’t do it.”

: More cop movie cliches. I would think that even the dumbest criminal alive wouldn’t hand a 6-year-old a gun and expect it to get anywhere near its intended destination.

: “SID is running ballstics on Spiff’s gun to see if they match the slugs taken from the dead boy. And speaking of SID, they’ve run ballistics on your firearms and they’re ready to be picked up.”

: They… ran ballistics… on Carey’s guns? What exactly would you be expecting to find there? I mean, that makes sense if you’re investigating the Rampart scandal and need to prove the CRASH unit shot the guy they said they absolutely did not shoot, but it doesn’t make any sense here.

: What really doesn’t make sense is why they’d even bother to ballistics check Carey’s fully loaded pistol and full spare magazine (keep in mind that the LAPD knows how many bullets it issues to its officers, so they’d know if any were missing) when the bodies would be full of shotgun pellets.

: “The Police Commission is gonna want to know where an’ into whom your bullets went last night. These tests are vital. Check with Chester before you head out.”

: This is Tammy Dargan making a dishonest argument. Does anyone really believe that in a situation where a cop is being shot at, unprovoked, by two guys with rifles and kills both of them that they’re not going to look at it, go “Yeah, this is pretty clearly justified” and rubber stamp it? I mean, there were even witnesses.

: Now granted, they’d probably do the same thing for a cop pulling out their gun and shooting someone at random, but that’s not really the point.

: “Thank you, Lieutenant. Sir, it would appear to me that if Spiff is found to be connected to the Washington boy’s murder, might not he also be connected to Bob’s…”

: “It doesn’t work that way, Carey. While you were out being a cowboy, another body showed. The MO is similar, very similar. Again, it’s one of our own. His name is Rene Garcia. Worked out of Hollenbeck.”

: I work on this LP in bursts, so as I’m writing this, I haven’t actually recorded the next part yet - but how much do you want to bet Yo Money is a blatant stand-in for NWA?

: “Anyways, Garcia was found by this Money man’s bodyguard. He was walkin’ a lady that’d been there for a party to her car. It was about 4:00 AM.”

: This dialog is also unrealistic because Daryl Gates would have probably used the n-word two or three times by now. Hard R, of course.

: “I want you to get over there and see what’s going on. And remember Carey, no cowboy tricks… just try and be nice, OK?”

: “God damn broads! Hey, Junior, that was quite a shoot-out last night. Heard all about it. You’re god damn lucky one of those punks didn’t blow your head off!”

: “I want ya to listen up, Junior. Playing cowboy only takes ya so far in this damn job. If ya wanna make it as long as I have, you’re gonna have to curb your appetite for action. Do ya hear me, Junior? You’re just goddam lucky you weren’t killed!”

: What we run into here is another case of bad game design. Remember how in the first update, we had to fill in one of those 3.14.0 forms and hand it to All Cops Are Bottoms?

: We have to do that again - only if you try to access Carey’s desk at this point, you get locked out of handing it in because Bottoms is “on the phone”.

: This is why we had to pick up a spare at the start of the game. I did check to see if Bottoms ever gets off the phone, and the answer is no - he’s just on the phone all day.

: Now we have to go down to the basement again to get Carey’s gun.

: “Thanks, Chester. I appreciate it.”

: “You know, Detective, Nobles and I are heading over to the Short Stop tonight for a beer. Would you care to join us?”

: I linked it in the opening post for the LP, but in case you didn’t notice it - Daryl Gates himself did a series of interview videos with Sierra that were included on the game disc. In one of them, he calls for bringing back Prohibition.

: “Are you asking me out on a date, Chester?”

: “Not in your wildest dreams, Detective.”

: There are some questions we can ask Chester, but none of them are really important so I’ll skip them.

: We then need to do the shooting range again - it is exactly the same as last time.

: Next up is Yo Money’s house. The first thing we need to do here is use the notebook on the chalk outline, and… wait a second, how the hell did they get a chalk outline like that on grass?

: Usually, sports fields use a spreader thing that uses liquid chalk - but there’s no way they could get an outline like that with one of those.

: We then need to walk up to the door. Can you tell what the object is we’re looking for on this screen?

: That’s right, it’s the bush in the bottom-right corner that has no distinguishing features to tell you “Hey, there’s an item here”.

: We now need to knock on the door. Due to a bug, we have to do things out of order.

: If we show the bodyguard our badge, he’ll shuffle us into the house, at which point we can’t talk to him again because this is a well-programmed game with no flaws whatsoever.

: Instead, we need to show him the shoe we just found.

: “So ya got a shoe. What about it?”

: “I found it in the flower bed, by the crime scene. Have you seen it before?”

: “Ya implyin’ its [sic] mine or somethin’?”

: “I’m merely asking if you’ve seen this shoe before.”

: “Well, ya put it that way, no. I ain’t seen it before… 'less of course it was on some babe’s foot.”

: “Babe’s foot? Could you clarify that for me… what babe?”

: Carey is probably enough of a dipshit that he assumes the bodyguard is talking about a baby.

: “Shi’ man… there’s so many comin’ and goin’ all day and all night… who knows their names…”

: “Do you have any idea what kind of field day the press is having with this? Do you have any idea what this is doing to record sales? A dead cop on our lawn! What the hell are you doing about it?”

: Yeah, I’m sure this is something an actual rapper would say as opposed to putting the chalk outline on their next album cover and doing a diss track on the LAPD.

: “I think you people planted that dead cop on our lawn! He probably knew something he shouldn’t, and what better way to diffuse attention than to dump him on the lawn of a ‘controversial rapper’!”

: Yes, they put “controversial rapper” in quotes like that. Let’s be real here, this is entirely about NWA.

: The cops hated NWA so much that they’d openly refuse to provide security at their concerts… which is kind of baffling when you realize that Eazy E was cozying up to their political party.

: I get that Eazy’s been dead for years and the Republicans weren’t quite the same in 1993 as they were today, but god dammit Eazy! Fuck! The GOP might as well stand for “Good Old Police”!

: “This is such bullshit! I want that yellow tape off our lawn immediately! I want the persons responsible for this to own up! If this screws sales on Money’s record, I swear, I’ll make sure some butt is kicked!”

: We have to show the shoe to Yo Money and to his… girlfriend? wife?

: “Lots a booty comin’ and goin’ around here…”

: I’m using Kaneshiro for Yo Money because I think it fits.

: “Could you clarify yourself, Money?”

: “Ladies, babes, booty… strippers. Say, man, women. We got lots of women comin’ in and outta here…”

: I refuse to believe Carey has ever had a woman visit his home. In fact, I don’t think we ever see where he lives, so my firm belief is that he sleeps under his desk in Parker Center.

: Question marks. What are those.

: “What are you saying? I’m some kind of cheap cow?! Where do you get off?!”

: “No, no, I didn’t mean to insult you. I found this in close proximity to where the body was found…”

: “Well, it’s not mine! I wouldn’t wear such a cheap piece of trash! If you’re going to insult me, you better leave now!”

: A better writer would realize that they just repeated the same exchange twice, and that we didn’t even really need this because we already have a pretty good idea of what the girlfriend is like.

: “Knock this crap off… quit calling us! Oh yeah? …Bullshit! Quit calling, do you understand?”

: “I’m Detective John Carey, LAPD, Homicide.”

: “Yo… 'sup?”

: “Money, that phone call…”

: “It’s under control. Jus’ some unfinished business, that’s all, man…”

: “This is personal business. We don’t need your intervention.”

: We get three questions, but in the interest of saving time, I’ll only ask the relevant one.

: “Money, your reputation is controversial. Do you know of anyone who would want to harm your reputation further?”

: “Shit man… everybody’s got enemies. Ain’t no different with me.”

: “Well, have you recently experienced any problems, through the mail, telephone calls…?”

: I mean, it’s at least realistic that a Black guy, no matter how rich, wouldn’t want to call the cops even for something like this.

: “What can you tell me about Dennis Walker?”

: “He’s a racist asshole. For awhile, he was drivin’ by hollering shit at my house… I got a restraining order. I still get shit in the mail… ends up in the trash.”

: Huh, a racist asshole? I wonder who that sounds like…

: Anyway, we now have to wait for the phone to ring again. I believe it will ring a second time, and then will not ring again.

: While Yo Money and his girlfriend are distracted, we need to grab his girlfriend’s cigarette from the ashtray. Yes, this is entirely because she’s a woman in a red dress who smokes.

: This gets us thrown out of the house. There is no way to get the cigarette (at least as far as I know) without getting thrown out.

: Next time, we’ll try and arrest Dennis Walker. By the way, here’s a bonus video of the shootout sequence so you can see how fucking janky it is.

[Timrod]

Bonus Update: Police Quest SWAT

: I was going to do a bonus update on how many people Daryl Gates has killed after his death, except then I realized there’s something else I need to touch on first that we won’t see in Open Season.

: A few days after this thread went up, I saw a post on 4chan’s /v/ board asking why Open Season was the last Police Quest game. Technically, it isn’t. There were two more. In this update, we’ll take a look at the fifth game, Police Quest: SWAT (also known as SWAT 1)

: SWAT 1 released in 1995, meaning that it’s likely Sierra went straight from working on Open Season (which released November 1993) to this. As you can see, Daryl Gates’s name is still on it.

: The reason his name is on it (apart from the “cred” it lends) is that SWAT was a Daryl Gates program. There are cops who will insist that someone else came up with the idea, but Daryl Gates was unquestionably the first one to implement it.

: He started the SWAT division after a massive riot in 1965 - I’ll go into this some other time - that started with a DUI arrest and ended with snipers on rooftops shooting at the police, because that’s the kind of thing you can expect when Daryl Gates is involved.

: Anyway, SWAT 1 is a GIGANTIC piece of shit. It’s Sierra’s equivalent to Virtual Hydlide, in that they had no experience developing the kind of game they wanted to make, didn’t have the engine for it, and as a result it turned out about as well as you’d expect.

: The manual has something like three pages dedicated to calibrating a rifle scope, but very few on actually playing the game.

: The game starts by uh… having a voice read you a version of SWAT’s mission statement. The people who made this game clearly didn’t agree with that last part and went past mediocrity to being shit.

: They then ask you to sign it in the bottom. The default name is “SWAT Pup”, which sounds to me like a gay furry with a police fetish.

: Next up is a very poorly acted cutscene of two guys explaining what you’re supposed to do. There are no subtitles, so I couldn’t simply screenshot my way through it.

: Instead, I did a recording of it, so you can click here to watch. The acting is… questionable at best. My favorite part is the Warhammer 40k Soulstorm moment where the guy in the fatigues goes “We have tactical assaulters, negotiators… and assaulters. You will be an assaulter.”

: By the way, one thing I didn’t record is if you try to skip the cutscene (which is almost 4 minutes long), the game does a Mr. Resetti lecture at you.

: Just like SWAT in real life, the game is a fucking mess of confusing menus. The top button is the “ADVANCE THE PLOT” button, the rest is all kinda bullshit.

: Of course, I didn’t understand that at first, so I instead hit the map button thinking I needed to go to the police academy. Nice re-used shot from Open Season there.

: Doing that gets us an encyclopedia of SWAT gear, with voiceovers for each item. It is the most pointless goddamn bullshit. This should have been relegated to the manual.

: I was kind of hoping they’d let me select gear for the firing range so I could do what I would do in real life and pick the battering ram.

: Instead, we have to hit the “ADVANCE THE PLOT” button, which causes our character to run to the range. I think this is the same range they used for Open Season, just a different part of it.

: I’m going to tell you outright that this is as far as I got in the game, because it is a fucking boring mess. Let me tell you exactly what happens.

: Step one is using the magazine on the MP5 to load it. Then you switch it to single shot, and wait. The game will randomly tell you what to shoot. You go through each drill three times.

: By the way, you also have to compulsively reload between “drills”.

: This takes me over 10 minutes to complete. I’m pretty sure that if you don’t meet the “par” time, you get to re-do the entire thing again.

: After far too many “drills”, the game tells you to put the MP5’s safety on and put it back in the inventory. Surely we’re done, right?

: Nope! Instead, we’re forced to do the exact same drills… with a pistol. There’s one drill where they tell you to “put two controlled shots into center mass, no double-tap” and I have no idea what the fuck the difference there is.

: I spend another 10 minutes on this and then hope I can click the “advance the plot” button… except you can’t, that just forces you TO DO ALL THE FUCKING DRILLS OVER AGAIN.

: But wait, it gets worse. I looked up a guide on how to make progress, and the answer is that progress in this game is completely random.

: What happens is that after each set of drills, you have a chance to unlock “Combat Training”… which is several more hours OF THE EXACT SAME BULLSHIT.

: That’s about as far as I care to go into Police Quest: SWAT… so I guess I’ll call that an update.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Just a heads up, this update will contain several slurs and Nazi imagery.

: Now that we’re done with Yo Money, we have to go through the rigamarole of putting the ID card on so we can go back to Parker Center to do paperwork. Hooray.

: You would think that Carey could simply, I dunno, use one 3.14 form for all of this shit since it’s all linked to the same investigation, or do them all at the same time at the end of the day.

: The real reason we came back here is to run Dennis Walker’s name through the crime computer.

: The California Youth Authority was, surprisingly, not a Daryl Gates program. It closed in 2023 and was California’s prison system for offenders under 21.

: Now we can go to the local Nazi den.

: We need to show him the badge - if we don’t, he uses a couple of slurs I won’t bother showing here.

: “I’m Detective Carey, LAPD. Are you Dennis Walker?”

: “Yeah.”

: “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

: “Yeah, c’mon in.”

: This whole situation makes no sense. Why is this guy willingly inviting a cop (who doesn’t have a warrant) into his apartment?

: We can’t talk to him because the music is too loud, so we have to turn it down first.

: I love that it takes Carey so long to switch the radio off that this guy is in another zip code by the time he turns around.

: Then out of nowhere comes a lady with a knife, which we have to immediately use Carey’s gun on to not die. Now, I want to ask you something - how many of you sincerely believe that a cop in Daryl Gates’s LAPD would not have mag-dumped the pistol by now?

: Because this is a well-designed game, we have to take three steps here. The first is to go into the inventory and use the gun on her. We then need to talk to her twice.

: I don’t get why you wouldn’t go for “drop the knife” first. I’m sure a cop would go “Well because then she might have another weapon” but if she has another weapon, why isn’t she using it?

: The second time we talk to her, she drops the knife (which mysteriously disappears) and lets us handcuff her.

: I could barely read the subtitle on this one even when I was recording it, so I’ll transcribe this whole thing.

: “Whew… that girlfriend of Walker’s is something else! Tough for being so petite!”

: “Hell junior, all women are bears… god damn grizzly’s [sic]! But if ya thought that li’l tomato was tough, wait till ya meet Garcia’s mamacita! Now that’s one tough bitch!”

: “She’s in giving the Lieutenant an ear full right now… poor son of a bitch!”

: “I am Rosa Garcia. Are you the detective investigating my son’s death?”

: “Yes, I’m Detective John Carey. Let me extend my sincere sympathy for your loss, Mrs. Garcia. I didn’t know Rene personally, but I…”

: “Well, I knew my son, Detective and he was a good boy! He lived at home with me, helped me with my errands, attended church!”

: “I have been told by your Lieutenant and the Coroner that Rene’s poor body was found exposed! I want the person responsible for doing this to my son caught and punished!”

: Are we sure he didn’t die in a sex accident?

: “Yes, Mrs. Garcia, I understand.”

: “Do you understand, Detective? Do you have a son?”

: I covered this last update, but yes and also Daryl Gates called for his death.

: “Well, no…”

: “Well, then you do not understand. Rene helped take care of me. I have heart trouble, I cannot do heavy lifting. Rene cleaned the house, did the laundry, cooked our meals. Maybe, he once in a while would go to a movie, but he didn’t date any of those fast talking, modern-type women.”

: What the fuck is this shit? This sounds like bad TV writing, and… oh wait, it is. Nevermind.

: “He was waiting for a good girl, he was saving himself, and for what? For some pervert to strip him, murder him! Find who did this to my son!”

: She leaves, and we can fill out yet another 3.14 form. I think this is the only place you can learn the name of Walker’s girlfriend.

: To progress, we need to pick up a memo from Carey’s desk stating that we missed Hickman’s funeral.

: “Katherine, I wasn’t informed about the time. I wanted to be there.”

: “I understand, John. I know how busy you are. I heard about the shooting you were involved in… when I realized you weren’t there today, at first I thought maybe you’d been hurt… but then the Chief told me you were fine. I was worried.”

: “Thanks for your concern, Katherine, but you don’t need to worry about me. I should’ve called or…”

: It’s kind of amazing that Tammy Dargan had the werewithal to put filler scenes in a game that is really only a couple of hours long if you know what you’re doing.

: I mean, it’s really not, because Tammy Dargan is an incompetent fuckwad of a TV writer. I am thoroughly convinced there is no such thing as a good TV writer.

: “Oh, no… I know how you guys work, it’s your life, I understand. I… I was wondering how the investigation was going. Nobody would really tell me very much today… I guess they didn’t want to upset me.”

: Stop fucking repeating yourself! Fuck! Shut the fuck up! This scene isn’t even that long and I’m already getting pissed off.

: “Well, there’s good news. Bob’s name has been cleared of any wrongdoing or involvement with the Washington boy’s death. Bob’s gun was retrieved and ballistics testing cleared it as the murder weapon. However, new evidence suggests that Bob’s death is unrelated to the alley incident.”

: WE ALREADY KNOW THIS, YOU ABSOLUTE SHITFUCK OF A WRITER! You know what this is? This is The Room, only even The Room is better than this trash.

: My headcanon about this, and this makes the game make so much more sense, is that Carey is like the guy from Memento and has no ability to form memories.

: This would explain so much - why he always has to address everyone by name constantly - he has to do it because otherwise he’d forget.

: “Oh, John, that’s horrible… really horrible.”

: “Katherine, I know this is a rough time for you, but I need to ask you to think back to the night of the murder. Can you think of anything out of the ordinary happening that night.”

: You know, this would be a good time for a Daryl Gates story. There’s a part in Official Negligence where Lou Cannon talks about how Daryl Gates was chosen to be the LAPD chief, and I imagine it’s a lot like how Tammy Dargan got the writing position for this game: by default.

“Gates, who was assistant chief under Davis, placed second on the civil service examination behind an outside candidate, but moved up to first place when credited for his twenty-nine years of service with the department. Under the arcane rules by which the commission was then bound, the outsider was eliminated.” - Lou Cannon, Official Negligence, pp. 91-92

: It’s kind of telling that he didn’t get promoted after William Parker retired, given that he was apparently Parker’s favorite. But wait, there’s a better quote in here:

“Gates had no intention of kowtowing to a part-time civilian commission that had selected him only because it liked the other candidates even less.”

: The other candidates included Robert Vernon (who would go on to be Deputy Chief under Gates and would later go on to blame Tom Bradley for the 1992 riots like the complete dipshit he was) and Charles Reese, who I could find almost no information on other than his obituary from 2004.

: “Bob and I had an argument… he went out, John. I don’t know where he went, or if he saw anyone. Thing is, he didn’t take our car. I don’t think anyone picked him up. I mean, we started arguing and the whole thing just blew up. He was gone before I really had a chance to understand what happened.”

: “Can you tell me what you argued about?”

: “We fought over his drinking. He… everything was manageable until he started taking sedatives to calm down from work. The combination made him mean… he’d yell at Valerie, me… for no reason. That’s how he left when he went out that night. He’d been drinking and taking pills.”

: I’d be surprised if he had the capacity to even walk after that, given what mixing sedatives and booze usually does.

: Katherine fucks off for the rest of eternity and we can move on with our lives to the next bit of racist bullshit.

: Cool grammatical error there. Anyway, I was wrong about one thing. Yo Money isn’t meant to be anyone from NWA. He’s meant to be Ice T, which is really funny when you realize that these days, Ice T is known far more for playing a cop on Law and Order.

: In 1992 though, Ice T was part of what was basically a metal band called Body Count. Their most memorable song was “Cop Killer”, which released in 1992. It was written before the riots, but after the beating of Rodney King - and was done partially in response to the Rodney King beating.

: The police… were not big fans of Ice T. Note that they call it a rap song despite it very clearly not being a rap song - this was because they wanted to lump it into the same category as NWA.

: This is, as you can see, totally unrealistic given that the real news media at the time were questioning whether the song would cause people to want to actually kill a cop. The news media was definitely not on NWA or Body Count’s side.

: This screen is a goddamn pixel hunt. You see that little black bowl in the middle of the table, between the three beer glasses?

: We need to use that so that Carey can awkwardly shove some pretzels in his pocket. There’s no way in hell those aren’t going to be dust by the time he leaves.

: There’s a lot of pointless dialog here I’m going to skip, but there is one line…

: The Rampart scandal hadn’t happened yet when this game released, but boy was this a bad choice.

: Carey’s boss then just… kinda shows up at the bar and tells him to stop drinking, which is a perfectly normal thing that has actually happened (it’s not).

: I checked, and this is in fact a photo of LA’s City Hall. After this game released, the city named a room in it for Tom Bradley.

: What we’re seeing is the city council chamber. I have to wonder what the LA city council’s reaction to Sierra wanting to film here was, especially given that Daryl Gates’s name was on it.

: “The Mayor and the Council want to ask you a few questions. Get up there, and remember, do not divulge anything that could harm the case.”

: This would never happen anywhere in the US, but especially not in LA where the cops are part of a very powerful union. Carey wouldn’t be going up there without a union rep and probably an attorney present.

: The mayor (center, next to the flag) looks to be Tom Bradley, who had left office in early 1993.

: “Miss Bilden, I was briefed about the homicide just this morning as I entered this council meeting. I have not yet been able to confirm or refute its relationship to my current investigation.”

: “Mr. Mayor, the police department has always had to deal with the threat of violence. Tragically, someone has now moved from thought to deed. However, I do not believe there is a threat against the city as a whole or that a random selection process is occurring.”

: “It is my belief that the Los Angeles Police Department is living up to the oath ‘To protect and to serve’.”

: Now for the absolute fucking dumbest part. Let’s say you don’t have the game’s speed cranked all the way down before you leave the bar. You see that guy directly to Carey’s right, with the… I think those are supposed to be suspenders…?

: Yeah, that’s Dennis Walker, and on the game’s highest speed setting you don’t have the time to react to him. By the way, the game defaults to the highest speed setting every time you load the game.

: On a slower setting, we have time to pull out the gun and do the same exact thing we did to Walker’s girlfriend not even minutes ago. Compelling gameplay, this is not.

: “What a morning I’ve had. First the Mayor and the City Council, and then Walker. Geez, the feds are talking to Walker right now. Apparently he’s a real special case.”

: Not pictured: filling out another 3.14 form.

: We have to do something in this room. Can you guess what it is?

: That’s right, we have to search the ashtray for a pack of matches that are not visible or in any way indicated as existing on the screen. Quality Sierra game design.

: Also not pictured: me doing the gun range again. The only difference is that we fill out a different form, and don’t have to pay for the bullets.

: Like an idiot, I forget to talk to Bottoms before we leave Parker Center, because we need him to tell us where to go.

: “What have you got in the way of updates, Hal?”

: “You’re damn lucky ya got me as a partner, Junior. I got friends everywhere! I was the first one my buddies over at Hollenbeck called. Seems they got the patrol car. Garcia’s patrol car. Seems the damn thing was found abandoned at Hollywood and Vine!”

: “Hollywood and Vine? That wasn’t Garcia’s patrol area, was it?”

: “Hell no it ain’t, Junior! Seems our good son ain’t so good! Either that, or hell, Junior, he was good at somethin’! Damn good.”

: Time for some more pointless bullshit.

: I did a search on the address. It’s still an impound lot, but it’s now a private one.

: We have to use the badge to get in, which causes Carey to do a very awkward-looking crouch.

: “Ah, Beavis? I was told to tell you that Butthead sent me.”

: “Ha! Ho, ha ha, ho! Hey buddy, what do you want?”

: “I’m looking for a patrol car that was brought in from the Hollywood and Vine area. It had been abandoned.”

: You’re… you’re looking right at the patrol car. How many cop cars do you think are going to be in a police impound lot?

: “Well, come on in, buddy!”

: The thing in the middle of the car is a “Mobile Digital Terminal”. I found a pic of an actual one on some guy’s blog. They were essentially really fancy radios.

: I wish they still made desks like these. I would absolutely get one. This is the “Emergency Command Control Communications System” that the MDTs linked to.

: Here’s the stupid part. We have to come back here later to get the license plate number of the car - even though there’s no real reason we couldn’t do that now.

: We’ll tackle those next time.

[Fefnir]

How desperate for padding do you need to be before you think adding paperwork to your game is a passable idea?

[Timrod]

Bonus Update 2: Rodney's King Quest

: I wanted to do a bonus update on Rodney King, and I think the best way to do that is by doing this game.

: Police Quest 3 released in October 1991, and I’m pretty sure the intro of the game was re-done after the Rodney King beating. I’ll point out when.

: Police Quest 3 was written by former California Highway Patrol officer Jim Walls, who (as far as I know) was merely a mediocre writer and also kinda creepy if the plot of the first two games is anything to go by.

: The first three games take place in the fictional town of Lytton, California, and all have the same protagonist - Sonny Bonds, whose name gets mentioned as the server in Open Season.

: The door on the left leads to Sonny’s office, which is our first destination.

: Note the part about “during the issuing of a citation”, because that’s exactly how Rodney King started. Two California Highway Patrol officers spotted his Hyundai supposedly going “in excess of 100 MPH” (a claim the Christopher Commission disputed) and tried to pull him over for speeding.

: The CHP cops pulled Rodney King off the highway and into LA, at which point the LAPD took over jurisdiction. According to the Christopher Commission report, there were 21 officers present when four LAPD cops dragged him out of his car and started beating him.

: Our next destination is the briefing room, which is a bit annoying to get to. If you try to click the open door with the “move” verb, Sonny will instead go all the way back to the screen with his office door on it, so we instead need to “use” the doorway.

: This is the briefing room. We first need to talk to Morales - she’s the one sitting in the middle.

: Those portraits are uh… they’re something alright. Sonny looks like he had some kind of forest creature crawl onto his head and die there.

: Speaking of complaints, the Christopher Commission had something to say about that.

"Whether there even would have been a Los Angeles Police Department investigation without the video is doubtful, since the efforts of King’s brother, Paul, to file a complaint were frustrated and the report of the involved officers was falsified. Even if there had been an investigation, our case-by-case review of the handling of over 700 complaints indicates that without the Holliday videotape, the complaint might have been adjudged to be “not sustained” because the officer’s version conflicted with the account by King and his two passengers. - Christopher Commission Report, Page ii (Intro Section)

: In reality, we all know they’d just cover up the complaint… because that’s exactly what they did.

: The “Holliday” in that quote is George Holliday, who lived in a building that overlooked the spot where the cops finally stopped Rodney King and where the subsequent beating took place. He happened to have a camcorder on him, and that’s the only reason anyone knows what actually happened that night.

: To progress, we need to use the clipboard on the side of the podium.

: “Good afternoon, people! I will be filling in for Sergeant Jaco while he’s on vacation.”

: “Have a safe shift and think about making right-hand approaches on your car stops.”

: “I have a complaint here alleging that you were verbally abusive to one of the violators you stopped. The complaint states that you yelled, screamed, and used profanity.”

: You’re leaving out the part where four LAPD officers surrounded Rodney King, at least one of them shouting the n-word, and then hit him over 50 times with “power strokes” from a baton. It was sheer luck that Rodney King survived that night.

“Finally, after 56 baton blows and six kicks, five or six officers swarmed in and placed King in both handcuffs and cordcuffs restraining his arms and legs.” - Christopher Commission Report, Page 7.

: One of the justifications used by the officers involved in the beating was that Rodney King had “lunged” at them, possibly as the result of him being on PCP. There was… just one problem with that theory.

Blood and urine samples taken from King five hours after his arrest showed that his blood-alcohol level was 0.075%, indicating that at the time of his arrest, he was over the level (0.08%) at which one can be presumed intoxicated under California law. The tests also showed traces of marijuana (26 ng/ml) but no indication of PCP or any other illegal drug. - Christopher Commission Report, Page 8.

: Also, this quote from Official Negligence, because holy fuck the way the cops describe Rodney King makes him sound like Brock Lesnar or some shit:

“Officer Theodore Briseno… recalled King’s iron strength and the ease with which King threw him from his back when he tried to bring his arms together to handcuff him.” - Lou Cannon, Official Negligence, Page 20.

: “Alright. Why don’t YOU tell ME what happened?”

: The officers who beat Rodney King up clearly didn’t think so, as documented in Official Negligence.

“This is great! They got it on tape! Now we’ll have a live, in-the-field film to show police recruits. It can be a real-life example of how to use escalating force properly.” - Sergeant Stacey Koon, who was the ranking officer at the scene of Rodney King’s arrest (and later served two and a half years in federal prison for it) as recounted in Official Negligence, page 20.

: “Did you raise your voice and use profanity with the man or not?”

: I get what Jim Walls is trying to do here. He’s trying to make a statement about the Rodney King case… but he’s just not doing it very well.

: The Christopher Commission report came out a good four or five months before this game did, and it proved pretty conclusively that the LAPD was not going to fix itself, especially not with Daryl Gates at the helm.

: “Okay, Morales, that’s it for now. Get back on duty and see if you can keep the ‘civil’ in civil servant.”

: You might think this is bullshit paperwork like in Open Season, but it’s actually got a purpose. If you answer anything but “Sustained”, Morales comes back later and kills you.

: Sonny automatically puts the report on his boss’s desk. If this was Open Season, I can guarantee you that we’d have to do it manually.

: We now need to get a “computer access card”. I have no idea what the hell this would be, especially this early into the 1990s.

: We now need to take the elevator to the third floor. Unlike Open Season, Lytton’s police department doesn’t have any bullshit floors. The elevator is also significantly faster than the one in Parker Center because this game doesn’t waste our time (as much).

: By the way, while we’re on the topic of complaints against the police, the Christopher Commission points out in their report what it took for the LAPD to take Rodney King’s brother seriously - namely, it took George Holliday mailing the tape he took to KTLA (a local TV station) and to CNN.

: Holy fuck, what’s wrong with your head? This guy looks like someone took a balloon, inflated it, and then printed somebody’s face on it.

: I’ll skip all his dialog (it’s unimportant, he’s the typical 90s IT dipshit making dumb computer jokes that would have fallen flat even in 1991) and just say he gives us the card.

: Remember when I said this game doesn’t waste our time, the way Open Season did? I lied. We have to wait here for a random amount of time until we get a call.

: After George Holliday mailed the tape to the media, it immediately became international news… which Lou Cannon figures is probably part of the reason why the cops got off scot-free in state court. Let me explain.

: When KTLA first aired the tape, they cut it down from 81 seconds to 68. If you watch the unedited version, you can tell why - it’s because it’s a blurry mess at the start. This is because George Holliday wasn’t a professional cameraman (he was a plumber), he was using consumer-grade equipment from 1991 (which sucked) and it took him some time to get the camera steady.

: The KTLA version was the one that circulated to CNN, and thus to all of the other stations that ran it. The “problem” is that during the initial 13 seconds of blurred garbage, you can supposedly see Rodney King “charging” the police. I’ve watched those 13 seconds multiple times, and I call bullshit on that. You can’t see shit and it’s certainly not safe to make that determination.

: This, of course, posed a problem in court. The attorneys for the cops insisted that the tape was edited on purpose to make their clients look bad, and I believe that was also the stance Daryl Gates took. This is why he did that whole interview with Sierra that I linked in the opening post.

: We’ll go a bit further, until you see the reason I will never LP this game.

: The locker room is a copy protection puzzle that requires you to get the code from the manual. It’s 776.

: Here’s another fun waste of time. The flashlight has no batteries, and if we try to leave the station without it having batteries, that’s a game over.

: We need to get batteries for the flashlight (top left) and road flares (bottom right) because of course we do. We’re two games removed from having to do a four-point inspection on the police car every time we want to drive it.

: Here’s why I won’t ever LP this game to completion: the driving segments. There’s no map in the game. You have no way of knowing where you are or where your objective is. The speed controls are done entirely with the mouse, and failing to stop for a stop sign is a game over.

: We arrive at Aspen Falls, which is achieved by going all the way south and then east. It wasn’t immediately clear to me what you’re supposed to do here, because usually the signs denote the next turn coming up.

: I wound up passing it, only to figure out that you’re meant to stop there and just get out of the car.

: By the way, note the timestamps. This will be important… actually, I’m never going to get that far and we’ll see why.

: There’s one more thing I want to add about Rodney King before I finish this update off, which is that you’d think after a massive riot, the police would learn something. They didn’t.

: I’ve pointed out before that the Christopher Commission found that there were a number of cops in the LAPD with double-digit numbers of complaints filed against them, and that one of the recommendations of the Commission was to fire them.

: Tell that to Andre Hill, who was killed by a cop in Columbus, Ohio. Adam Coy, the cop who shot him, had a history of complaints against him including at least 10 involving use of force. Most of them were dismissed.

: This puzzle is honestly the dumbest bullshit. The naked guy grabs Sonny’s badge and throws it in the lake.

: He then jumps into the lake, and trying to follow him causes him to drown you, because Sonny is that much of a dipshit.

: Now, a logical solution here might be to read this guy’s driver’s license and try to use that to get him out of the water… but no.

: Instead, we throw his keys into the lake, which causes him to charge Sonny.

: You now have a short window to handcuff him. By the way, if you try to use the “use” verb on him while he’s down…

: Funny that, because that didn’t seem to be the case for the six Memphis, Tennessee cops who killed Tyre Nichols. Tyre Nichols is one of the people Daryl Gates killed years after being put in the ground.

: CNN did a pretty thorough overview of the case, which goes like this: you have six cops who are part of what is, for all intents and purposes, a CRASH unit. They pull Tyre Nichols over for… actually, I don’t even know what they pulled him over for. He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t speeding, he hadn’t committed any offenses at all.

: The CRASH morons immediately start threatening to kill Tyre Nichols, drag him out of his car, and start trying to pepper spray him - spraying themselves twice in the process, because these cops are fucking morons.

: Tyre Nichols does what anyone would do - he runs away. At this point, he’s only a couple of blocks away from his mother’s house… until the cops catch up with him again. This time, they beat him to death.

: The cops tried to cover it up by saying he had “attacked” them (he hadn’t and there was video evidence proving so) and that he had tried to go for their guns (again, a complete lie).

: The trial for the cops involved is still ongoing, but it looks like a lot of the stronger charges against them (murder, for instance) were dropped.

: This is as far as I got while recording, because at this point the game makes you manually drive back to the police station. I’d like to point out that at no point has the game told us where the police station actually is.

: No, for that, we need to consult the map that comes with the game. Surely this will solve all of our…

: Or not. This shows us where the police station is, but not where Aspen Falls is, because Aspen Falls (as far as I can tell, anyway) isn’t even physically on the map. It’s south of the south edge of the map, somewhere in the bottom-right.

: Next time, I’ll finish Open Season. Maybe I’ll look at SWAT 2 as well since I hear that game’s also pretty dogshit.

[Timrod]

Summary

: We’re back to Open Season, and I hope you’re all ready for some pointless fucking busy work!

: It’s time for another long talky part in the morgue that no one gives a fuck about. I forget which dialog icon I used for the coroner, so I made my own.

: “How’s the world of the living, John?”

: Remember when I did an LP of Alf on the Sega Master System? I do, and I wish I didn’t.

: “I don’t know, Sam. I’m surrounded by death.”

: Most of this shit is pointless and not in an entertaining way, so I’ll cut a lot of it out.

: “Sam, I understand another body was found this morning in Griffith Park. What can you tell me about it?”

: “More than you probably want to know, John… more than you want to know.”

: “Let’s start with whether identification has been made, and a general description.”

: “Identification has not been made. The description is as follows: African American female, mid-thirties. Found under a tree in Griffith Park by park police at 10:00 AM. She was clothed, no ID. The body was being guarded by a stray dog.”

: Let’s be real here, these morgue scenes exist for exactly one reason, and that reason is Silence of the Lambs, which released in 1991 and wasn’t a giant cliche yet.

: “Has the autopsy been performed yet?”

: “As soon as she arrived, John. Same MO, the burns, injection marks, the glue. It’s all there. Body fluids and tissue samples have been taken. Both have been sent to SID. Your killer is keeping busy, John. Very busy.”

: I’ll just let the rest go. We can ask him if the victim had both shoes, which seems like the most idiotic question when you consider it’s supposedly been two days since we went to Yo Money’s house.

: I’m pretty sure this is meant to be a reference to Red Dragon, which is the first Hannibal Lecter novel. Red Dragon’s villain is a serial killer called the Tooth Fairy - though that’s because he bites his victims.

: The general creative bankruptcy is one of the things I hate about this game. This doesn’t feel so much like “inspiration” as it does a straight up ripoff.

: “Thus far, your killer has a finger, a full set of toes, a forearm, and a molar. You know what that means, don’t you?”

: “Yes, unfortunately I do, Sam. I’m looking for a serial killer who takes a souvenir of the kill. It means he enjoys the kill itself and wants to relive it through the object. I need to find this person fast, Sam, real fast.”

: Now that we’re done here, let’s go do some busy work.

: It’s really funny to me that Griffith Park (which is a big chunk of LA and borders most of the major Hollywood studios) isn’t even on the map.

: I have no idea where in Griffith Park this would be, given how fucking big Griffith Park is. In any case, it’s time for a really stupid puzzle. We have to get rid of this dog, and for some reason we can’t just call animal control in.

: We have to feed the dog the pretzels from the bar. I would think dogs in LA would make it a policy to bite the fuck out of any LAPD cop who comes near them.

: We need to use the dirt here. I’m surprised the game didn’t make us go hunt down an LAPD form 241.7.3 (Digging Implement Requisition) and hand it in, in triplicate.

: The game gets back at us by making us use the notebook and then the bags from the homicide kit on the bone instead. And now, more busy work followed by… some bad shit.

: First, we have to go back to Parker Center, which means putting the stupid ID card back on, only to have Chester tell us that we brought the bone to the wrong place. Yes, this is a required thing to progress the game.

: I would say that it doesn’t make sense, given that Carey is a homicide detective and should know how this shit works, but this is Daryl Gates’s LAPD. Incompetence is par for the course.

: We then get to go back to the morgue to find out that the coroner is fondling his secretary. On the morgue table. Nothing weird about that at all.

: Now, I know that any real coroner or medical examiner will probably tell you that they sanitize the fuck out of those tables, but I still feel like you’d catch some horrible disease doing that.

: “Screw the dog! And screw the request for tests! I’ve got the City, the press, and my supervisors all over my ass! You’ve got the evidence in your hand, for Christ’s sake! Run the tests! This investigation does not have time for a red tape marathon!”

: You would think he’d just say something like “If you’ve got time to grope your receptionist, you have time to do the fucking test” but this is Tammy Dargan and we can’t expect even baseline competence from her.

: “You’re right, John. I’m sorry… it’s working for the County, we tend to thrive on the bureaucracy. Trust me, John. I will place the tests on the top of my priority list.”

: Our next destination is Hollywood and Vine, where the police car was found.

: The strip club is just to Carey’s right, and that’s where we’re going. The sign for the strip club didn’t look edited in, so I went to see what this area looks like today.

: There is a strip club in that area, and I think it’s the same one, just remodeled several times. If we look at the older images for this spot…

: Yeah, I can kinda see it. The record store turned into the tattoo place, and I think that’s meant to be the theater from the in-game newspaper next door.

: This entire scene makes no sense. It’s still daytime, but there’s a dancer on the pole… dancing for the all of no one who is going to be in a strip club at 10AM on a weekday.

: We have to show this nameless stripper the badge first before she’ll talk to us, which is just… I dunno, kinda weird when you think about it. If you’re someone who really doesn’t want to talk to the police, the cop showing you their badge really isn’t going to make much of a difference.

: “Hello, I’m Detective Carey, LAPD, Homicide. I’m investigating a series of murders,. I was wondering if you’d talk to me?”

: I bet if you look closely, one of those pictures in the background is of Carey with a “WE DON’T TALK TO THIS GUY” underneath it.

: “Umm… so you’re a real cop. Tell me, handsome, is everything you’re packing real?”

: And now it is time for one of the dumbest fucking exchanges of dialog in this game. We have to show the stripper the shoe from Yo Money’s house.

: “I found this shoe in Yo Money’s garden… Money told me he had strippers at his house the morning Officer Garcia’s body was found. Do you know if any of the girls from the Kitty know Money or were at a party at his house this week? Does this shoe look familiar?”

: Does… does Carey think she has some kind of shoe database she can compare it to? A secret stripper crime lab?

: The way he’s offering it to her makes it look like he thinks she doesn’t know what a shoe is.

: “Well, it’s true all us girls know celebrities, and Money does come here. We’ve all been invited to parties one time or another out at his place. As far as this week, I don’t know. I do know it’s not mine. I’m very petite and that would never fit me. Barbie might know though.”

: Here’s what I want to know. Has anyone, at any point, ever said the phrase “I’m very petite” to a person in the same room who can clearly see them? I mean, outside of making a joke.

: What I’m saying is that I think Tammy Dargan might be from the same planet David Cage is.

: “Who’s Barbie, and why might she know?”

: “Barbie runs the place, handsome! Barbie Cann, never heard of her? She’s infamous! She’ll know if any of the girls were at Money’s this week. You ask her.”

: “Where is Barbie? Can I talk to her?”

: “She’s taking a nap right now. She’ll be up later, you could come back.”

: This is another moment that makes no sense. You see that little red thing on the bar, right in front of Carey’s hand? That’s a lighter. She’s… asking him for a light when she has a lighter right there.

: I get that she’s supposed to be flirting, but at the same time, who the fuck would flirt with Carey? He’s got all the charisma of a rock.

: We take the lighter and light her cigarette, and then just kinda keep the lighter because we need it for the dumbest fucking puzzle in the game.

: On the way out of the strip club, a random passerby walks by and smashes Carey’s car mirror, which we pick up. That random passerby is the best character in this game.

: We then, of course, go right back into the strip club because now Barbie has spawned. I imagine she’s got psychic cop senses that woke her up the moment they sensed a cop in the vicinity.

: Barbie also won’t talk to the cops, but we only really need to show her one thing.

: “This shoe was found on Yo Money’s lawn, after the party, and after Officer Gracia’s (sic) body was found. Could it belong to one of your girls?”

: “Darlin’, I don’t think so. It’s large… even too large for me and I am a big woman. I think it would fit you better than it would fit me…”

: I think you might be able to see where the game is going with this, and yep, it’s transphobia.

: Clearly, Carey is going to pick up a record and then there’s a twenty-year timeskip to his dipshit son, Alex.

: At this point, the game breaks and I don’t know why. We can talk to the guy here, he doesn’t have much to say, but the game won’t let me advance the plot for some reason and I don’t know why.

: What’s supposed to happen is that you go back to Parker Center, do more paperwork, and then go back to the coroner. For some reason, the game won’t let me progress.

: I tried re-playing through the entire day, starting from fighting Dennis Walker in City Hall, and had the same thing happen. My conclusion is that there is something profoundly fucking broken in this game’s scripting.

: I then tried going on to GOG’s forums to see if anyone else had run into the same problem. I didn’t find anything specifically related to this bug, but there are a whole lot of other points (almost all involving the morgue) where the game can break like this.

: At this point, I’m going to have to unfortunately invoke the Gabriel Knight 3 rule and end the LP here. I’m not going to put more time into this game. It’s just not worth it.