YMMV / Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

• Awesome Music: For the day, even AdLib or MT-32/General MIDI synthesizers sounded totally awesome (the days of the Internal PC Speaker weren't that far!). The one hour of soundtrack provided total immersion, making this easily one of the best games of its era.
• Complete Monster: Sludge Vohaul is far more sinister than previously. After seemingly being killed by Roger Wilco, Vohaul downloaded his brain patterns onto a disk; in the far future, scientists on the planet Xenon find the disk and upload it to the supercomputer that controls Xenon. Vohaul takes over the computer and uses the planet's weapons to obliterate most of the planet's population. Vohaul also takes some people of Xenon and transforms them into his cyborg slaves, using them as spies to find those who survived. Vohaul uses time travel to send his minions to kill Wilco in the present. When Wilco confronts Vohaul, he reveals he downloaded his mind into Wilco's future son, Roger Jr., and intends to force Wilco to kill his son or be killed by his son.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The narrator played by Gary Owens in the CD-Rom version of the game is one of the most fondly remembered parts of the game for his absolutely hilarious performance. No wonder he was brought back for Space Quest 6 (the fifth game didn't have a talkie version).
• Fanfic Fuel: What are the four sequels we don’t see (Space Quest 7, 8, 9, and 11) like?
• Heartwarming Moments: When Roger and Roger Jr. have a chat at the end of the game, and when Roger Jr. thanks him for all he's done, saying how much Xenon owes him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The description of King's Quest XXXXVIII involves "Old Man Graham" and his family getting kicked out of the Daventry Condo Association. Fast-forward twenty-four years later, and we do get to see an aged King Graham, but obviously not in a condo.
  • The narrator describes Monolith Burger as "the only fast food chain to survive the infamous Food Wars". Two years later, Demolition Man had a similar line in which Taco Bell was described as the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars.
• Long Song, Short Scene: A variant. Roger gets interrupted by the Sequel Police just as he's recounting his adventures in Space Quest III, but the audio file for his speech turns out to run for a lot longer if the player pauses the game.
• Moment of Awesome: Several.
  • Roger saving the Latex Babes from the sea slug in Space Quest X.
  • Roger (and you, by proxy) successfully dodging the Sequel Police in the Skate-O-Rama.
  • Roger wrestling with Vohaul to save his son, and shoving him in the Brain Uploading beam.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Right at the beginning of the game you have a chance of encountering a ragged cyborg wandering the streets. Should you get too close, you're treated to a Gross-Up Close-Up of the poor guy's face before he lets out a blood-curdling shriek that alerts the nearby Droid-O-Death, which then shoots you. The whole sequence scarred more than a few kids back in the day.
  • Also the slime in the sewers, which would suck up Roger only for him to briefly come out half-dissolved with part of his skin melted off.
• No Export for You: Actually averted and inverted. There is a very rare Japanese release of the EGA version for PC-98 (that works in ScummVM), playable in either English or Japanese.
• That One Level: The Skate-O-Rama scene where you have to escape the sequel police. Maneuvering is not only difficult, you also have to avoid getting shot! It doesn't help that the SP's movement and reaction times are based on your CPU's clock speed with re-releases tending to have no adjustment made based on how much faster computers have gotten.
• Underused Game Mechanic: This game has two icons in the interface, one to taste things and one to smell, but they're never used for anything important. Because of that, most players never bothered with them and missed whatever humor they were included to provide.

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