SBCG4AP: Episode 2

I've got a lot of love for Telltale Games, but I'm getting a little frustrated with their Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People series.

I mean, I'm having buckets of fun with the things. These are good games. You should buy them. It's just that they should be better.

Episode 2 (entitled "Strongbadia the Free") is out for PC and Wiiware. Actually it's been out for a few weeks. And while it's often funny and usually fun, it's full of little things about which, dammit, Telltale should know better.

First up is that, like the first game, there are a bunch of lists and collections to complete during play. Completing these side-goals increases your "rank", although doesn't do much else. That's all right - finishing a list is its own reward. Unfortunately, maxing out your collections involves doing certain things at the right point in the game. The game goes into an "extended play" mode once the story's over but that's not much use as you can't regain items you've used up, or revisit earlier states of the game. Starting a new game resets your collection, and besides, maxing out the lists isn't so inherently entertaining as to justify an entire second play-through.

The game also has the feel of being poorly planned. There are regular setups for quite extended puzzle sequences that look as if they were cut down for time and budget reasons. One area requires you to demonstrate your "dance skills and style", but upon solving the "style" challenge the dance skills are never really tested, despite there being the option to ask characters for dance tips. Another sequence, which involves Strong Sad drinking some dubious water, definitely feels like a puzzle was cut out.

The story revolves around the King of Town introducing an email tax, and the various inhabitants of Free Country USA subsequently rebelling by forming their own kingdoms. However, what one would expect to be the most dramatic and hilarious scenes are missing entirely; the rebellion happens off camera, as does Strong Bad's climactic assault on the King of Town's castle. It again feels like the developers simply ran out of time and money (which they probably did).

Lastly, there's no consistency in the "click for flavour text" area. Some items you can keep clicking on for more information (and occasionally plot progression) while others yield the same result every time. The game should have consistently implemented a "two results for every item" policy, so that once you've clicked on something twice you don't need to do it again. It's really irritating to be punished for experimentation with repeated dialogue.

Anyway, despite these gripes, SBCG4AP is still pretty fun. Hopefully Telltale will keep ironing out these problems as the series progresses. Fingers crossed.

Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People: Episode One

I find these days on my Wii I'm spending more time with downloadable content than I am with games that come in a box.

Case in point is Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, which is available through the WiiWare service. It's by Telltale Games, the people who delivered the recent Sam & Max games, and it's more or less up to their usual standard.

The game's based on the Homestar Runner website, and it's pitched at people who are already well familiar with Strong Bad and his wacky crew. If you don't know the difference between Homestar and Homsar, or understand how Strong Bad can type with boxing gloves on his hands, then most of what's going on here will go straight over your head.

For Strong Bad fans, though, the game's a treat. Like the Sam & Max titles it's a classic point and click puzzle-solving outing, but it makes pretty good use of the property it's based on. All the cast have their original voice acting (i.e. The Brothers Chaps plus Missy whatserface). Locations you can visit include the House of Strong, Bubs' Concession Stand, and the King of Town's Castle. You can spend some time with classic Videlectrix 8-bit gaming, in this case Snake Boxer 5, and you can even design your own Teen Girl Squad comic, which is probably the most awesome minigame in the history of minigames.

One of the traditional problems with point-n-clicks is that while they can be a lot of fun, they rarely offer replay value. Strong Bad's Cool Game etc goes some way to addressing that by including both a number of achievement-style trophies, and an "extended play" mode that lets you keep exploring after the credits roll. Unfortunately there's not much guidance on how to achieve the trophies and the extended play option seems to be a little buggy so you'll probably end up consulting an FAQ to get the most out of the game.

This is, obviously, just the first episode out of several that Telltale plan to release. If it's anything like the Sam & Max games, they'll almost certainly improve over time as Telltale get comfortable with the license, so I have high hopes for future titles.

I played this game on the Wii, but it's also available for the PC. The game works well with the Wiimote but it does take up a sizeable chunk of your hard drive. It'll be interesting as future episodes come out because I don't think the Wii has enough on-board memory to store a whole season at the same time. The sooner Nintendo patch the system to let you boot from an SD card, the better.

Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People

Those talented people at Telltale Games have apparently decided that frolicking in the small bathtubs of cash that their Sam & Max games have made them is not enough, and they need to give the community a little something back. That "something" is a new game, and you'll need to pay money for it.

The game in question is Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People ("but you can play too!"), and it seems to be a point-n-clicky sort of thing which will be delivered in "five adventure-packed action-sodes", starting June 2008. If the trailer's any indication (and the FAQ says it is), it looks like it'll feature writing and voicework by the Homestar Runner crew.

I'm told there's PC versions coming, but what's interesting is that the main delivery platform for the game is going to be Wiiware - the episodes will be 100% downloadable through your Nintendo Wii, and playable with the Wiimote. That's five kinds of awesome.

Sam & Max Coming To The Wii

I've spent so much time pimping the new Sam & Max games at friends recently that I just don't have the mental energy left to develop an extended pimp-themed analogy. In short, they're rather good.

So all you sad sods who can't be bothered to download the damn things for your PC will be happy to hear that it's coming to the Nintendo Wii. Which is a console so ideally suited to puzzle-based point and click antics that it's a shame so few of the blighters have surfaced for it to date.

PC Gaming (*sigh*)

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened: I was absolutely looking forward to playing a game based on the concept of Sherlock Holmes vs Cthulhu. Unfortunately the sound is buggy (choppy and occasionally cutting out altogether) and the interface is annoying so this one's going back on the shelf.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: If the latest pirate-themed MMOG had had a free trial, or even a download-purchase option, I would have ended up playing it and probably subscribing. It didn't, so I haven't. Seriously, who in this day and age launches a MMOG without a try-before-you-buy option?

Sam & Max Season Two: is awesome. Way better than Season One, which was pretty darn good. It's no longer just a good imitation of the old LucasArts classics - it's way better. You should be playing this. And, once again, you don't have to futz around with all that GameTap rubbish to buy - it's a regular normal-style online store.

Sam & Max - Season One

It’s widely held that the last great point-and-click adventure was Grim Fandango, the final game to be produced by LucasArts using their famous SCUMM engine. Oh, sure, there were some more Monkey Island games of varying degrees of quality, and it took the Myst franchise a bit longer to die than it probably should have, and occasionally you’d see some backwoods European developer getting up to mouse-driven malarkey in the bargain bin, but really Grim Fandango was unarguably the arbitrarily designated nail in the coffin.

When LucasArts stopped making original games and went back to lame franchise cash-ins, and when the Tim Schaeffers and Ron Gilberts of the world had moved on to greener and ultimately less profitable pastures, the fans of the genre were left to make their own way in the world, much like the surviving members of a doomsday cult following the mass suicide of all their friends. Some moved on to “mainstream gaming”, some left the hobby entirely, and others banded together like junkies in a crack den to mainline obscure Russian detective games and slurringly reminisce over the good old days while cockroaches crawled unnoticed over their babies.

It’s with that pleasant image in mind that Telltale Games enters our story. They exploded onto the gaming scene with the devastating force of a poorly-made Christmas cracker, promising all and sundry that they were going to bring back the golden age with a mix of episodic PC gaming, oddball humour, and a development team that were maybe possibly related to friends of the people who lived with the cousins of the people who made the LucasArts classics.

That was a fine ambition, one not to be instantly sneered at, and it was met with some anticipation and wary optimism by the gaming public. A slow drumroll began in the collective subconscious, building in power, momentum and intensity over the months, which finally culminated in Bone: Out from Boneville, an adaptation of Jeff Smith’s comic masterpiece which completely failed to capture the spirit of either “comic” or “masterpiece”. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, very, very bad. Very, very, very bad.

So when Telltale announced that it had obtained the licence to Sam & Max and was going to make a game of it, most people interpreted “make a game of” to mean “dig up and have sex with the corpse of”. I know I did.

And that’s basically what they did. But where it became surprising was that the corpse wasn’t exactly struggling, if you know what I mean. It turned out Telltale was one fine romancer of corpses. When their first episodic Sam & Max instalment hit the streets, not only did it not smell of the grave and shamble insistently in the general direction of our brains, but it was actually injected with the life and mayhem that we expect – nay, demand – from our Freelance Police-related antics.

Over the following months, Telltale did six of these things, which they loosely referred to as Sam & Max: Season One, and you can now buy all of those episodes together on one disc as what amounts to a single full-length point and click odyssey. I’m happy to tell you it’s well worth buying.

Sam & Max, for those who don’t know, are a pair of unlicensed crimestoppers created by Steve Purcell. Sam’s a dog in a suit and fedora, and Max is a naked white rabbity-thing with a lust for mayhem. They fight crime! They’re tasked with protecting the values, decency, and collected kitsch of America from the rabid forces of unreason by using a combination of suave dialogue, improbable physics, and extreme violence.

Over the course of the six episodes contained in Season One, you’ll lock horns with embittered child stars, cheat at poker, elect Max as President, set the disembodied stone head of Abraham Lincoln up on a date, and destroy the internet, among many other unlikely acts of mayhem. The jokes are fresh and delivered in the instantly recognisable verbose style of Sam & Max, the set-ups are inherently amusing, and the puzzles generally combine just the right amount of logical cause-and-effect with ridiculously exaggerated off-the-wall consequences.

The first few episodes, it must be said, are a little slow, and the puzzles are so easy as to put small children to sleep. In addition, the first four episodes re-use a lot of the same dialogue and art assets to the point of frustration, presumably to reduce Telltale’s development costs. But both the quality and quantity picks up sharply in the back end of the season, and as a result hilarity quickly ensues.

As far as I’m concerned Telltale are so far the only developers to have really wrapped their heads around episodic gaming in a successful fashion. They’re bringing out new games very regularly, at reasonable prices, and delivering exactly the sort of results that gamers expect at that pricepoint. Upon finishing Sam & Max Season One I immediately went looking for the first episode of Season Two, and am pleased to find that they’re following up their initial success with games that are bigger, better, and more fun – and you don’t even need to stuff around with all that Gametap snake oil they were trying to sell you before.

Ultimately Sam & Max Season One shows very clearly the fingerprints of a developer finding its feet in a new marketplace with a non-standard delivery model, but if you’re one of the dispossessed generation deprived of their point-and-click satisfaction lo these long years then you’ll be absolutely tickled pink by how accurately Telltale has hit the target in this effort, and you’re likely going to come out eager for lots, lots more.

Sam & Max & Suchlike

[Computer Gaming]

Now that I've seen a review (thanks, Gamespot) I'm quite happy to say that I would like to play Telltale's new Sam & Max game. I am prepared to pay reasonable sums of money to make this dream come true. However, I would rather gargle rusty nails that sign up to GameTap.

Is anyone aware of any options available to me?