Space Quest VI: The Spinal Frontier

This game is part of the Space Quest series.

Plot Synopsis
Having defeated the diabolical pukeoid mutants in Space Quest V, Captain Roger Wilco triumphantly returns to StarCon headquarters - only to be court marshalled due to breaking StarCon regulations while saving the galaxy. He's busted down to Second Class Janitor and assigned to the SCS DeepShip 86 (a parody of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), commanded by Commander Kielbasa.

The game's subtitle comes from the final portion, in which Roger has to undergo miniaturization and enter the body of a shipmate and romantic interest. (This segment also provided the game's original subtitle, Where in Corpsman Santiago is Roger Wilco?, which was not used due to legal threats from the makers of the Carmen Sandiego products.)

SQ VI was released in 1995 and ran on the last version of the SCI engine, SCI32. This allowed it to use Super VGA graphics with 256 colors at 640x480 resolution. Unlike other SCI games, it didn't have the interface in a pull down bar at the top of the screen, but instead used a "verb bar" window along the bottom of the screen, similar to LucasArts' SCUMM engine. The graphics style was also more cartoonish than in previous games. Gary Owens served as narrator once again.

Josh Mandel designed the majority of Space Quest VI but had to leave the project shortly before completion. Sierra asked Scott Murphy to complete the game, and then (reportedly against Murphy's wishes) promoted SQ VI as if the former "Guy from Andromeda" was solely responsible for it. As an additional result of this change in designers, some puzzles were shoddily implemented due to lack of communication.