Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

Sam & Max: Episode 203 – Night of the Raving Dead is set to release in just a few days, but I’m going to take you back a bit to Sam & Max: Season 1.  As anyone who has read this board can tell you, I’m a big fan of the original penned by Steve Purcell.  Since LucasArts has abandoned the idea of a sequel to 1993’s  Sam & Max: Hit the Road, TellTale games snapped up the Intellectual Property license and ran with it to create one of the first and best examples of episodic gaming to date.  For those who don’t want to tackle this adventure game one episode at a time, you’ll be happy to know that you can now pick up the entire first season in one package. 

Gaming Trend named Sam & Max the Funniest Title of 2007,  so it only seemed proper to put a little justification behind that in one run instead of relying on several months of sustained nostalgia.  Does the anthropomorphic dog / lagomorph hyperkinetic rabbity thing duo have what it takes to deliver a coherent (or at least as coherent as necessary to follow it) product packaged as a full season?  It was time to replay Sam & Max: Season 1.

Some of the best looking titles in 2007 used the Unreal Engine 3 technology as a backbone, requiring an array of hardware beyond the norm to run at maximum detail.  Telltale Games turned internally to select their engine using a modified version of the same engine they use for their C.S.I. games and their other episodic title, Bone.  The result is a game that is visually similar to the original Sam & Max title, but updated in a very significant way – it’s fully 3D. 

The colors in the game are bright and vibrant with a comic flair that borders on being Cel shaded.  The texture work is similarly superb, with great attention paid to Sam & Max.  Sam's suit has a visual texture and shows creases and bunching where you'd expect it.  Similarly, the environments are well textured. Sam & Max's office has a plaster covered drywall look with tire tracks (best not to know how those got there) and random illustrations from Max. In short, they've worked to give the game the look of a title that is normal mapped, bump mapped, and all that other graphic technobabble, but without the hit on your hardware.  Although there are a few low resolution moments in the game that do tend to stick out, they are few and far between. As a result, this title will run on a fairly low-end system.  The game supports up to 1600x1200, widescreen modes, and also supports a windowed mode if you are into that kind of thing.  If you have a system that has been built in the last 4 years, you can run Sam & Max with max detail enabled. It just goes to show, a game doesn't have to use the latest and greatest graphic engine to look great.  Let’s take a closer look at the system requirements:

Required
OS: Windows XP
Processor: 800MHz (if using a video card with hardware T & L); 1.5GHz (if using a video card without hardware T & L)
RAM: 256MB
Video card: 32MB 3D-accelerated video card
Hard drive space: 230MB available
 
Recommended
OS: Windows XP
Processor: 1.5 ghz
RAM: 512MB
Video card: 32MB 3D-accelerated video card
Hard drive space: 230MB available

Obviously my Quad Core Q6600 with 2GB of RAM and an 8800GTX ran it just fine, but more impressive than this, my 5 year old Laptop did the trick just fine as well.   Not to worry – if you have a PC, this game will handle it.

As you play through the game you’ll visit a lot of odd locations (the White House, a TV station, etc.) throughout the city and beyond (the moon?!), giving Telltale the chance to re-use the same graphic assets.  You’ll end up visiting your office, Bosco’s Inconvenience Store, and Sybil’s Psychology office several times throughout the game, but between each ‘episode’ you’ll note small changes.   When you start the game Sybil’s office looks fairly normal (for a Psychologist / Fortune Teller / Book Publisher / Tattoo artist anyway), but when she decides to add flame wallpaper you’ll probably notice.  While it is technically a re-skin of the existing building, it actually turns into a bit of an Easter Egg hunt as you try to spot what has changed since you last visited.   All of that said, playing through the game in only a few sittings does tend to underscore that you really are visiting the same locations over and over again – something you likely wouldn’t notice if you were playing it with a month of time in between episodes.

Jazz comes in exactly two flavors – really fantastic and ear-puncturing terrible.  Jared Emerson-Johnson put together a quirky jazz score that thankfully falls into the former category more than the latter.  Matching the quirky situations and look of the game, the music is a blend of jazz and muzak that dances in the background without ever really jumping out and running over the ambient sounds or voice work.  The best part is that there is so much music here you won’t likely hear it repeat for hours.  Not often do you hear a soundtrack match gameplay so well.

The voice actors of Sam & Max: Hit the Road, Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson, were unavailable to reprise their roles as the Freelance Police.  In 1997, Harvey Atkin and Robert Tinkler voiced the duo in the cartoon adaptation.  For whatever reason, none of these four voice actors were available, and new voice actors had to be used for this title - a change that could easily bury the game. 

Hiring David Nowlin and Andrew Chaikin to handle the voices of Sam & Max, respectively, Telltale games sought to recreate the unique chemistry of the original game. Having now played through all of the first season, I am proud to say that the team actually got better at becoming Sam & Max as I reached the latter episodes.  Practice makes perfect it seems.

Throughout the six episodes you’ll meet several characters and interact with them frequently.  Bosco, Jimmy "Two-Teeth",  Sybil Pandemik, Abe Lincoln, and the rest of the characters turn in solid performances, acting as a catalyst or a foil for their bizarre interactions with the crime fighting duo.  Amazingly, the writers behind the game manage to find new comedic ground to tread while still managing to keep the feel of the game fairly consistent.  Granted, the storyline gets more insane as you move into the latter chapters, but I have to admit I was laughing the whole way through.  There is nothing quite like having Abe Lincoln threaten you with “I’m going to slap you silly, you little punk!”  Democracy at its finest.

I’d like to mention one more thing about sound before moving on – I’ll tip my hat to the developers for adding separate controls for music, voice, and sound effects.  This simple thing means that players can turn the effect sounds down and crank the voice work up for maximum enjoyment. 

Let me describe the controls for a point and click adventure game – first you point your cursor at things, then you click on them.  If you can handle this you can handle the controls in Sam & Max: Season 1.  If that is beyond you I have serious questions how you managed not to get killed in traffic up to this point in your life.  Refined in their other titles, Telltale uses an intuitive 3D control scheme.  Want to talk to somebody?  Click on them.  Want to interact with an object?  Click on it. Want to use an object?  Tip over your box, click the item you want, and then click on the object you want to manipulate.  Simple and effective.

The controls for conversations are as simple as the movement and interaction controls. When you click on someone who will talk to you a speech menu is displayed.  You select the phrase that you'd like to say, and then click it.  You can sometimes choose between something Max has to say versus what Sam has to say by simply clicking on their picture and then selecting their phrase.  A good bit of the insanity in this game is the wacky dialog, so going through multiple speech trees is a given.  Should you get tired of hearing the same dialog leading up to your choice, simply right click and the game skips to the next line.  Again, simple!

Each of the chapters in the game has Sam & Max racing towards some ridiculous destination which means another trip behind the wheel of the DeSoto.  The driving sequences are essentially auto-pilot minigames where you can blast the tail lights off of other cars, heckle other drivers, and essentially become the very definition of ‘moving violation.’  My only complaint with these sections is that the controls feel somewhat ‘floaty’ and the aiming reticule has a bit of input lag. 

In short, the control scheme of Sam & Max harkens back to a simpler time.  Point and click without a complicated interface cluttering up the scene was the watchword of the adventure genre, and Telltale Games has seen fit to remind us why it was such a good idea.  

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?  If you like adventure games, go buy this one.  Even if it isn’t necessarily your cup of tea, it does send the message that there are those of us out here who want to click on things and not necessarily blow them up.  Nobody knows this more than Telltale’s Senior Designer Dave Grossman.  You may know him from Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, and Monkey Island 2 – arguably three of the best adventure games ever made.  Toss in the influence and occasional assistance of the original creator Steve Purcell and the already-proven team at Telltale and you can see why I have such high hopes for this title. 

The game kicks off just as Sam & Max: Hit the Road did, with the duo hanging out in their office.  Normally they'd be looking for a call from the Chief, but it seems their phone has been nabbed by the rat that lives in the hole next to Max's desk.  The rat, named Jimmy Two-Teeth, demands Swiss cheese in exchange for the return of the phone. Thankfully Max has stockpiled a closet full of cheese, but unfortunately it isn't Swiss.  How do you make it Swiss cheese?  Pull out Max's gun and blow holes in it!  Jimmy Two-Teeth, being the rat that he is, decides to up the ante a little bit and decides to hold on to your phone. Initiating a dialog puzzle, you threaten the rat with bodily harm until the phone is once again yours.  It is these simple nonsensical good dog/bad rabbity-thing interactions that make the game everything that you'd hope it could be. 

As the adventure unfolds, you find that a conspiracy is unfolding involving former child stars called "The Sodapoppers" being masterminded by Brady Cultures.  Your job is to figure out the particulars of the conspiracy, how to disrupt it, and how you'll track down the mastermind behind it.  All is not quite as it seems though – Brady Cultures is hardly the criminal mastermind type, so someone else must be behind all of the farcical shenanigans. 

The second episode of the game is called Situation Comedy.  Sam & Max must gain entry to a nearby television studio for investigative purposes (and mayhem, of course), but the show producer Myra Stump (an obvious parody of Oprah Winfrey) won’t let them in until they can pass an audition whereby the recreate the last scenes from the classic movie Old Yeller.  Obviously it can’t be that simple so an entire subplot involving rats and cans of shaving cream ensues.  It turns out that the pair are pretty convincing actors and they end up being cast in the sitcom “Midtown Cowboys” which sounds like what would happen if you smashed the script to City Slickers and Three’s Company together.  Crazy parodies of other shows parade themselves into the storyline as Sam & Max try to gain access to Myra’s television show.  Eventually they score a bit of celebrity for themselves and end up as guests on the talk show.  I won’t ruin the outcome but it involves the Toy Mafia.  Yea…

The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball puts Sam & Max up against the Toy Mafia as they try to unravel the delicate underpinnings of the underworld influence within the Ted E. Bear Mafia-Free Playland and Casino.  Not nuts enough for you?  From there you move into Abe Lincoln Must Die as the investigation leads all the way to the White House.  With shades of Manchurian Candidate out of the series culminates in the two best episodes yet – Reality 2.0 and Bright Side of the Moon.  These last two episodes deal with more geek cliché subjects than you can shake a lagomorph at and round out the first season for the series. 

There are plenty of hilarious moments throughout the game.  One that stuck out for me was in the very first episode where Sam quipped how he remembered a particularly gruesome that occurred on 03/03/04 – the same date that LucasArts killed the previous title.  Ink blots, assassination attempts, negotiating with the rodents that hold your phone (and shaving cream) hostage,  and other random craziness are just the tip of the iceberg. 

The very thing that makes Sam & Max work is the same thing that hurts it.  The storylines were designed to be compact and episodic with only tenuous connection to the next one.  While this means that the objects you pick up for puzzles are always used within that episode, playing through the episodes in one sitting makes them feel a bit disjointed.  It isn’t anything jarring, but it is best if you just think of them as episodes of your favorite sitcom – don’t expect a perfectly stitched storyline. 

About once a year I break out the original Sam & Max: Hit the Road and fire it up.  From the opening lines where Max asks “Shall I confront, subdue, and pummel the suspected perpetrator Sam?” I’m absolutely hooked all the way through to the end.  Sam & Max: Season 1 certainly comes close to approximating that experience, even if a few episodes (e.g. Situation: Comedy) aren’t as brilliant as the final two episodes.  All told you’ll burn through this title in about 15 hours, many of which you’ll be quoting to the chagrin of the non-gaming people around you.
 
Also included in the package is a set of DVD commentary tracks.  I’ve not watched all of them yet, but there are certainly several hours of inside information at the very least.  If that isn’t enough, there are seven wallpapers with options from 800x600 to 1920x1200 in size, as well as 18 songs from the game.  I can see this game being pulled out and played once a year next to Hit the Road once you’ve beaten it.  Telltale games has proven that episodic gaming can work, and getting the chance to collect them all on one disc makes it convenient.  While the storylines don’t line up with each other perfectly, I’m off to dive into Season 2 for review – while you wait, I think we can all agree that Max would make a great President. (http://www.maxforpresident.org/)  Vote now, vote often.

Gaming Trend Score

87

1. Graphics: 85
2. Audio: 90
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 85
5. Value/Replay: 90
6. OVERALL:87