So, I've gotten to the point where I have the picture of the Bains brothers, I've gone to the house it pictures, knocked on the door, but every time I try to go to the court house I get the generic "you have no reason to get off here" message. The only thing I can think of is that I am encountering a bug since I didn't end up stopping anyone on day 1 (since at that point I wasn't following a walkthrough) so I never got the court case. I really don't want to replay the entire game from the beginning just to get past a bug, so any ideas on how to force it to let me get to the court? I'm playing on an actual DOS machine with the speed patch from the Sierra help pages.

Nope, you're stuck. You've found the single worst dead end in all of adventure gaming, at least that I'm aware of.

That's not even the only buggy dead end in the game. Police Quest 3 has quite a few design flaws, a rarity for a Jane Jensen game.

Yeah, I kinda figured. Just ended up downloading a save which was good because I found out I also didn't trigger having to talk to one of the officers early on day 1. This is why I like the kinda free-roam of the King's Quest series. You can go back to pretty much anywhere so there is less of a chance of just missing something at the beginning that you can't go back to the way Police Quest and Space Quest do.

Actually, the King's Quest games have lots and lots of dead ends. None of them are as bad as this one though.

Encountered the same bug today. Yea. Where did you get your savegame?

I beleive I just got it from The Sierra Help Pages:

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Misc/SaveGames.html

That website is an excelent resource in general for Sierra's old games for figuring out how to get past common bugs. Often links to unofficial patches that fix them, but unfortunately this bug doesn't seem to be covered by the patches it links to for PQ3. In case you're interested, the page for PQ3 bugs is here:

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Games/PoliceQuest/PQ3Help.html

(I realise that kinda sounded like an advertisement for the site, but I just wanted to let you know about it in case you didn't because installing the fan patches before playing Sierra games has greatly improved my playing experience of these classic games. Have a great day!)

I'm running into the same issue.

What triggers this? Is there to avoid this?

Okay so not everybody playing is a techie, how do you install the saves once they've been downloaded? Where do you put them?

Put them in the directory where the game is installed.

Failing to pull over the slow driver at the beginning of the game.

When you pull him over and give him a ticket, he will protest it in court. That's when the courthouse gets unlocked. If you never pull him over, the courthouse will never be unlocked and you will be stuck at the end when you need to go there.

For the life of me--I cannot park the damn car at corners office and get out on day 6. I have not played this game since I was about 14 years old. I'm 44 now and it's really annoying I can't progress any further, unless I can get into the corners office. I have finished this game, way back years ago is it the GOG version or what. I am tempted to get this otherwise and see what happens. I think I do remember something about the office being not exactly where it's marked. I've seen youtube videos of this though and they did it without a problem

I'm 45 years old and I was thinking about playing this game for the first time since '93, and this thread has made me not want to.

I also remember an irritating bug in this game where one of the days would repeat itself perpetually, like groundhog day. Shudder.

One thing: I'm surprised to hear Police Quest 3 called a Jane Jensen game. I thought she had very little to do with designing any Police Quest game. (I do recall reading on these forums once that credited designer Jim Walls left Sierra for some reason in middle of making Police Quest 3. However, the claim there was that PQ3's main designer was Mark Crowe of Space Quest fame, not Jane.)

For what I read about the Sierra history, games at the time had a kind of "main" dev and then a team of people who collaborated, but it was never too clear how much input each one had (it was almost an open office). And for what I have played in PQ3 there is a lot of the pulpy prose from Jane Jensen but a design that could not really be totally closed probably because it was kind of rushed (there is a huge variety of background quality in the game).