Sam and Max Season 2

Just a quick one today.

In case you've missed me talking about my somewhat obsessive love for Sam and Max I just want to draw your attention over to their website:

www.telltalegames.com

The guys are updating pretty much every week with new information, screenshots and videos of the next season of the game so I urge you to go over and look.

Who knows, you may want to take the risk and buy the first season! It really is worth it.

Oh and so you know, I don't get paid for this. These posts are fueled by nothing but my love.

It's A Review, Little Buddy

I completed Sam and Max: Season One a few days ago but I didn’t have time to review it until now. Things are getting busy with family and getting ready for the next year of university so if it takes a day or two for me to post, you know why.

First I have to say, I can’t compare this to the original game. The original game has so many happy memories for me as a kid that to compare the two would automatically bury this game. This game doesn't deserved to be buried, o I am looking at this game as completely separate entity.

The first thing that springs out to you when playing this game is the look. There have been a few 3D Adventure Games but too be honest I’ve found the majority of these games annoying. The graphics are ugly and blocky and the 3D world in turn introduced controls, which were clunky and vastly more complex then they needed to be. Sam and Max is both pretty to look at and easy to navigate. The game takes the adventure game back to using only one button, which is really all you need in this type of game.

The format of the game with it being separated into six different chapters leaves something to be desired. You do get 6 good little stories that create one big arc but at the end of each episode you are left thinking “Oh, is that it?”. They introduce the characters into some marvellous situations like them staring in a number of TV shows or Max becoming President but these only last only a few hours and it’s kind of sad that they didn’t make the most out these great ideas. Of course that just goes to show how well these have been writing that I’m actually sad when we leave these storylines behind. If they had been bad or even mediocre I would have been happy to move on to the next thing.

Another minor complaint I have is that parts of the episodes do become very formulaic. With an introduction of a strong supporting cast, by the second episode you know 3 puzzles you know you have to solve straight of the bat. You know Sybil Pandemik will have a new job that will help you out, you know you need to buy something from Bosco and chances are Jimmy Two Teeth will be up to some crime that will help you move on.

One thing that annoyed me was at times you knew you had a puzzle only because someone was obstructing you. If someone is stood in front of something you have to move him or her. Why? Well… it’s an adventure game and that’s the point. Sadly that’s not enough. This is the problem of a non-linear game where you can branch off to do several tasks at once but I’m sure with careful scripting it could be done.

The voice acting is superb. The actors of Sam and Max aren’t the same from the original game but they manage to sound similar but at the same time add something different to it. Not necessarily better but just as good. I was also impressed to see a different voice actor for every character, instead of taking the much cheaper option of paying one person to do a few voices. This gave every character a very unique voice and helped them come alive.

The characters were also well written and designed. They all had unique chrematistics and funny quirks, which this type of humour game works. While his supporting casts tasks became very formulaic as mentioned above, I still enjoyed them and look forward to seeing them again. There was only one character who annoyed me but seeing as he annoyed Sam and Max just as much, I’ll take it he was designed to be.

The puzzles had various levels of difficulty and were fun to try and figure out. The game suffered from the episodic releases due to items being restricted to only 2 or 3 areas, making the puzzles perhaps not as complex as older, larger games but over all it didn’t bother me to much.

I was happy to see the addition of a hint system in the sixth episode, something I felt the game was missing. I might suggest that a notepad for Sam might be an important feature. As freelance police you’d expect them to take notes, which you can look back on and perhaps pick out key points that may help you to figure a puzzle out. Sometimes you forget a key detail a character said at the start of the game.

While it may seem the episodic format annoyed me I have to say if that means yearly releases and a cheaper price sticker that I’ll take the trade off. The game lasted me a week or so, so perhaps it should have been longer. However at the same time I paid £24 for it, compared to the £40 to £50 I normally pay for games that last not that much longer. I can also expect the second season later this year/early next year instead of years of wait like we had come to expect from the Adventure Game.

Honestly, the worst part of this game was that we are lacking this type of thing in two mediums I love. We should have more adventure games out there. I don’t think every game needs to be more action orientated, and I hope there is a market out there for this game so we can have more. I also think the comic industry is severely lacking a good humour book. Not a knock on Telltale’s online webcomic but I really wish Steve Purcell (Sam and Max’s creator) would spend time getting new material in print or reprint all of his older work. I can’t imagine a publisher like IDW or Image wouldn’t want to publish a new Sam and Max comic.

So overall this game was good. It has a few little problems but the majority of them were fixed by the time the sixth episode hit. I can only think that now they have all player feedback in that season two will be even better. I know I can’t wait. All I have to do now is try and fill my time in between the releases.

For now I have the hope of Sam and Max Surfin’ The Highway coming out, which I’m sure you’ll hear me discuss more in-depth in the future. There are also the other TellTale games out in stores. Sigh… I need more money!

My First Time

There is a question that is asked on comic message boards every few months, that being “How did you get into comics?”. These questions always get me thinking because growing up I had no idea that so much of the stuff I enjoyed as a kid was influenced by the world of comic books. Hell, I had no idea there were actually comic books, my local store only carried crappy UK magazines that were filled with dot-to-dots and crosswords. The only comic books I knew of were the Beano and Dan Dare and they are only a source of nostalgia for parents these days.

When I talk about these influenced products such as television shows, movies, games etc. I don’t mean the obvious ones like Batman, Superman or Spider-Man because as a kid I had no interest in them what so ever. I knew they existed but I didn’t get the appeal.

The obvious early influence to me was the Teenage Mutant Turtles. I had all the videos, all the toys and could sing the theme tune with the best of them. For a while I even wanted to grow up to be a turtle. But I was too young to remember any of this stuff, so I can only go by home movies and embarrassing stories as told by drunken relatives.

What I would list as the comic book that had a biggest impact on me without having read the comic book was Sam and Max. Since I was very small I always had a fascination with computers and there are numerous pictures of me sat on the potty with a game controller in hand. In the early 90’s we got our first PC and my brother and me got hooked on the world of adventure gaming. Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Day of The Tentacle, we’ve played them all. We ran up bills of hundreds of pounds for phoning the game help lines, which we inevitably got in a lot of trouble for.

When 1993 hit we got the best of them all, Sam and Max Hit the Road! It was laugh out loud game that required you to think to complete the game. The two characters that were far beyond my scope of the world and their humour was adult and that has changed my viewing changes forever. Since I was 8 I’ve been watching adult sitcoms and cartoons soon became no existent to me. They were somewhat violent and never talked down to the gamer just because they were a cartoon dog and rabbit. It was so unique to me and I don’t think I’ve ever found a game with characters I’ve fallen in love since.

But the adventure game died out and was replaced. I’m still a fairly big gamer but it was sad to see my favourite genre die out because it wasn’t interesting enough as shoot em’ ups and today’s audience just don’t have the attention span to try and figure out puzzles which can take hours.

Then in 2002 Lucasart’s announced a return to their gaming roots and announced the sequel to the original Sam and Max Game and my heart jumped for joy… then they cancelled it. I, along with many other people campaigned for it’s return but Lucasart’s didn’t listen and instead continued to work on their 6 or 7 Star War’s titles a year quota.

Luckily I was instore for good news again as bunch of former Lucasart’s employees set up their own company called Telltale Games and announced they were bringing Sam and Max back!

It was about this time I found out that it was based on a comic book, a hobby I’d had for a while by this time. Sadly the back issues are out of my price range, although they are re-releasing an old trade soon. I find it so interesting to see stuff that was so important to my childhood were based on a hobby I had no idea existed but now have fallen in love with.

So, why did I bring this up now? I just bought Sam and Max Season One from my local game store. If you don’t see me for a month, you know where I am!

I'll review the game when I've completed it, my 360 is going to take a month to repair so that Superman Returns review might never happen.