FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE...
1: Lucasarts releases their latest adventure game, The Curse Of Monkey Island. The game announces that it has arrived to kick ass and take skeletal limbs, and it doesn't need another skeletal limb.
2: Blizzard cancels their own Warcraft Adventure game, reportedly because they didn't think it would be as good as Curse Of Monkey Island. (The story of Thrall's quest for kingship will eventually be told the way it was meant to be, by the intervention of high-level time travelers on the quest for mad lootz.)
3: Lucasarts releases Escape From Monkey Island. It disappoints.
4: Lucasarts cancels Sam & Max 2, so that they can concentrate more time on creating the ultimate Hoth experience.
5: Adventure games flee to Europe, briefly forming a light jazz ensemble with Cindi Lauper.
Cut to now. The company Telltale Games releases Sam And Max: Season One as a series of six 'episodes', released about once a month. Surprisingly, they keep to their schedule.
Reportedly, most of the changes that were made in later episodes were due to customer request. For example, nobody at Telltale Games ever thought that reusing the exact same jokes for the exact same items would ever get old. Also, their reaction to demands for better puzzles was fulfilled by making a joke about how simple most of the puzzles were. Also, a dying child used the Make-A-Wish foundation to insert a "Wardrobe Malfunction" joke into episode four, as one last act of spite against an unfair universe.
Each episode lasts about one hour longer that it ought to, mostly taken up by walking back and forth between Sybil's and Bosco's. There are some good jokes, and some decent (though easy) puzzles. Which is good, because the exceedingly simple game structure means that whenever you get stuck, you have absolutely nothing to do except to stew in your own frustration.
In short: Sam And Max won't hurt you, but it will disappoint. I'm not ready to blame polygons for killing the adventure game yet, but it's mighty tempting. I'll let you know after Season Two rolls out.
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3 comments:
Much like Adventure Games, Cindi Lauper is back in America. To quote one of my friends, "I thought the name Cindi Lauper sounded familiar, so I looked her up on Google..."
We really should have tagged posts with "disappoints" from the beginning. After a long spell of deliberate optimism, it's emerging as a common theme. I submit that instead of "viewed", "read", or "the forsaken", we henceforth preface negative reviews with "disappoints."
Agreed. I am only sorry that events beyond our controll have taken us to this place...
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