Sam and Max - Culture Shock / Situation: Comedy
Thirteen years and change later, Sam and Max hit the road again.
Posted January 14, 2007
"You know, we did put the kibosh on that whole terrorist operation, so..."
"How 'bout some free stuff?"
"Is that why you did this? For free stuff? Was this...all a part of the plot?!?"
"Yes, a labyrinthine scheme in which we paid off a former child star to deliver videos to your store just so that we could knock him out via your own security system and claim an undeserved reward."
"So you admit it!"
"Conspiracy humor may be lost on this crowd."
Before there were 3-D graphic cards...before anyone knew what a real-time strategy game was...back when 'Sims' brought to mind cities and not mumbling little people with diamonds over 'em...there was the mighty adventure game. One of the genre's most widely adored hits was 1993's Sam and Max Hit the Road, a 2-D adventure anchored around Steve Purcell's comic creations. Nearly a decade after it dove headfirst into stores, LucasArts teased fans with the promise of an eventually-cancelled sequel, but...hey! A bunch of LucasArts alums formed Telltale Games, jabbing an adrenaline-filled needle squarely into the heart of a mostly-dead genre. Along with refining a bunch of the usual adventure game conventions, Telltale has also given the business model a kick in the keister; instead of banging out one long epic, Telltale is releasing their Sam and Max adventure in six monthly installments. The first two -- Culture Shock and Situation: Comedy -- are now available for download through Telltale's website as well as gaming subscription service Gametap, and fans of the Freelance Police should find 'em well worth a look.
There aren't any twenty minute long cinematics or awkward exposition -- all you need to know is that Sam is the witty, well-dressed canine straightman, Max is a nekkid, deranged, bear-trap-jawed rabbit, and they're Freelance Police. The first episode, Culture Shock, weaves the tragic tale of failed child actor Brady Culture. After his blink-and-you-missed-it TV show was yanked off the air in the '70s, Culture languished in obscurity until deciding to hypnotize his childhood competition, forcing a trio of pint-sized singers called The Soda Poppers to distribute the ocular exercise mantra of Eye-Bo to the world at large. Sam and Max have to figure out how to de-program the Poppers (violently, as luck would have it) and convince the shrink across the street to certify Sam as nuts enough to enter Culture's compound. Culture Shock is completely self-contained, and if for whatever reason you opt not to give the other five episodes of the 'season' a gander, you're treated to a beginning, middle, and end. The Soda Poppers turn up again in Situation: Comedy, as Sam and Max are dispatched to rescue a (literally) captive audience from the clutches of a talk show maven gone mad. Since Myra Stump requires celebrities to at least be on the C-list before deigning to chat with them in front of her studio audience, Sam and Max have to snag a recording contract, pop up in a network sitcom, and splash their mugs across the front of the tabloids.
Even adventure gamers who left the genre behind fourteen years ago should be able to leap right into these first couple of episodes. The core gameplay hasn't changed much since the original Sam and Max Hit the Road, but one very appreciated change is that you no longer have to specify an action. In the old LucasArts game, if you wanted to do something like grab money from a mousehole, you'd have to select the 'pick up' icon and then click on the hole, making simple actions much more cumbersome than they really should've been. Telltale's games cut out the middleman: picking up a lampshade, warbling karaoke-style on TV, and gabbing with a tattoist-turned-psychoanalyst are all performed the same way and with just a single click of the mouse. A quick trawl of the screen highlights every object you can interact with, and if you need to use an item in your inventory or want to fork something over to the price-gouging inventor-slash-convenience store owner next door, it's just a matter of clicking and dragging. It's ridiculously intuitive, and even if you've never given the adventure genre a whirl before, no tutorials or manuals are necessary.
"The other day, I was beating up a man at a parking meter and shouting 'Die! Why wont you die?', and then Sam said, 'You crack me up, little buddy.'"
"Your point?"
"I crack Sam up!"
Both episodes are lean and economical. The adventures aren't padded out with shameless filler, there are only one or two steps to solving most of the puzzles, and backtracking is kept to a bare minimum. That last point is even more remarkable considering that each episode takes place in just a handful of locations, and the designers at Telltale have been courteous enough to keep the majority of Situation: Comedy set at a large TV studio instead of lazily recycling the locales from Culture Shock.
There's been plenty of grousing about the difficulty of these first couple of episodes. Seasoned adventure gamers have scoffed at 'em as being far too easy, but personally, I thought the puzzles were exactly where they needed to be. That adventure game trial-and-error syndrome of combining every object in your inventory with everyone and everything on-screen is tossed aside. You can trot down that path if you want, but spend some time exploring every room and pay attention during cut scenes and snippets of dialogue, and you'll spot most of the clues you need. The puzzles are reasonably logical in their own twisted way, but they're still clever and extremely funny, and that's more valuable currency than sheer difficulty. My favorites include duping a fledgling psychoanalyst into certifying Sam as nuts, courtesy of an ink blot test, free association, and dream analysis, and the Freelance Police ad-libbing their way through a paint-by-numbers sitcom with a half-hidden cow and a near-sighted chicken. The designers at Telltale were also nice enough to not make these episodes completely linear. The meat of each game has a few major puzzles you can solve in pretty much any order you want, so if you get stuck on one of 'em, you can often give something else a shot until you figure it out.
Culture Shock is a good bit longer than Situation: Comedy. I didn't exactly keep a stopwatch next to me while I was playing, but I'd guess the first episode took me around three and a half hours to finish, and that includes a look at pretty much everything and following just about every possible chain of dialogue. I was paying closer attention to the time while tearing through Situation: Comedy, and it clocked in just under two hours. For a serialized game, this all seems pretty reasonable. I like sprawling adventure games teeming with overcomplicated puzzles and scores of subplots as much as the next guy, but sometimes it's nice to just pop in a breezy, funny game and zip through it in a couple of hours. Especially since I always play adventure games at least twice, the $8.95 sticker price for each individual episode is reasonable, and the $34.95 price tag for the season set of all six episodes seems about right assuming the length of each installment doesn't continue to dip from month to month. There are enough Easter eggs lurking in the background to make 'em worth a second or third look, and the gameplay seems to change a bit too. My second time through Culture Shock, one of the symptoms for the diagnosis of Artificial Personality Disorder was completely different and required a different plan of attack, for instance.
These Sam and Max games are geared towards downloading, with each of the first two around 70 megs a pop. Eight quadrillion polygonal models and ultra-high resolution textures? No, not so much, but the look of the game is a perfect fit for these characters, taking the cartoony look of the LucasArts game and giving it a 3-D spit-'n-polish. The voice acting is also a reasonably close match, and the music is in that same infectiously upbeat, jazzy vein.
The system requirements are pretty modest too. If you have a video card with hardware texture and lighting, Windows XP, an 800MHz processor, a couple hundred megs of hard drive space, 256 megs of RAM, and a 32MB 3-D accelerated card are all you'll need. If your video card doesn't have T&L on-board, bump up the processor requirement to 1.5GHz. Chances are if you've bought a computer in the past 3 or 4 years, you ought to be covered.
So, yeah. Longtime fans may need a bit of time to adjust to the simpler episodic approach, a change of pace from the massive inventories, convoluted puzzles, and globetrotting of many adventure games. Sam and Max Hit the Road is one of my all-time favorite PC games, and Culture Shock and Situation: Comedy are worthy follow-ups. Highly Recommended.
"How 'bout some free stuff?"
"Is that why you did this? For free stuff? Was this...all a part of the plot?!?"
"Yes, a labyrinthine scheme in which we paid off a former child star to deliver videos to your store just so that we could knock him out via your own security system and claim an undeserved reward."
"So you admit it!"
"Conspiracy humor may be lost on this crowd."
Before there were 3-D graphic cards...before anyone knew what a real-time strategy game was...back when 'Sims' brought to mind cities and not mumbling little people with diamonds over 'em...there was the mighty adventure game. One of the genre's most widely adored hits was 1993's Sam and Max Hit the Road, a 2-D adventure anchored around Steve Purcell's comic creations. Nearly a decade after it dove headfirst into stores, LucasArts teased fans with the promise of an eventually-cancelled sequel, but...hey! A bunch of LucasArts alums formed Telltale Games, jabbing an adrenaline-filled needle squarely into the heart of a mostly-dead genre. Along with refining a bunch of the usual adventure game conventions, Telltale has also given the business model a kick in the keister; instead of banging out one long epic, Telltale is releasing their Sam and Max adventure in six monthly installments. The first two -- Culture Shock and Situation: Comedy -- are now available for download through Telltale's website as well as gaming subscription service Gametap, and fans of the Freelance Police should find 'em well worth a look.
There aren't any twenty minute long cinematics or awkward exposition -- all you need to know is that Sam is the witty, well-dressed canine straightman, Max is a nekkid, deranged, bear-trap-jawed rabbit, and they're Freelance Police. The first episode, Culture Shock, weaves the tragic tale of failed child actor Brady Culture. After his blink-and-you-missed-it TV show was yanked off the air in the '70s, Culture languished in obscurity until deciding to hypnotize his childhood competition, forcing a trio of pint-sized singers called The Soda Poppers to distribute the ocular exercise mantra of Eye-Bo to the world at large. Sam and Max have to figure out how to de-program the Poppers (violently, as luck would have it) and convince the shrink across the street to certify Sam as nuts enough to enter Culture's compound. Culture Shock is completely self-contained, and if for whatever reason you opt not to give the other five episodes of the 'season' a gander, you're treated to a beginning, middle, and end. The Soda Poppers turn up again in Situation: Comedy, as Sam and Max are dispatched to rescue a (literally) captive audience from the clutches of a talk show maven gone mad. Since Myra Stump requires celebrities to at least be on the C-list before deigning to chat with them in front of her studio audience, Sam and Max have to snag a recording contract, pop up in a network sitcom, and splash their mugs across the front of the tabloids.
Even adventure gamers who left the genre behind fourteen years ago should be able to leap right into these first couple of episodes. The core gameplay hasn't changed much since the original Sam and Max Hit the Road, but one very appreciated change is that you no longer have to specify an action. In the old LucasArts game, if you wanted to do something like grab money from a mousehole, you'd have to select the 'pick up' icon and then click on the hole, making simple actions much more cumbersome than they really should've been. Telltale's games cut out the middleman: picking up a lampshade, warbling karaoke-style on TV, and gabbing with a tattoist-turned-psychoanalyst are all performed the same way and with just a single click of the mouse. A quick trawl of the screen highlights every object you can interact with, and if you need to use an item in your inventory or want to fork something over to the price-gouging inventor-slash-convenience store owner next door, it's just a matter of clicking and dragging. It's ridiculously intuitive, and even if you've never given the adventure genre a whirl before, no tutorials or manuals are necessary.
"The other day, I was beating up a man at a parking meter and shouting 'Die! Why wont you die?', and then Sam said, 'You crack me up, little buddy.'"
"Your point?"
"I crack Sam up!"
Both episodes are lean and economical. The adventures aren't padded out with shameless filler, there are only one or two steps to solving most of the puzzles, and backtracking is kept to a bare minimum. That last point is even more remarkable considering that each episode takes place in just a handful of locations, and the designers at Telltale have been courteous enough to keep the majority of Situation: Comedy set at a large TV studio instead of lazily recycling the locales from Culture Shock.
There's been plenty of grousing about the difficulty of these first couple of episodes. Seasoned adventure gamers have scoffed at 'em as being far too easy, but personally, I thought the puzzles were exactly where they needed to be. That adventure game trial-and-error syndrome of combining every object in your inventory with everyone and everything on-screen is tossed aside. You can trot down that path if you want, but spend some time exploring every room and pay attention during cut scenes and snippets of dialogue, and you'll spot most of the clues you need. The puzzles are reasonably logical in their own twisted way, but they're still clever and extremely funny, and that's more valuable currency than sheer difficulty. My favorites include duping a fledgling psychoanalyst into certifying Sam as nuts, courtesy of an ink blot test, free association, and dream analysis, and the Freelance Police ad-libbing their way through a paint-by-numbers sitcom with a half-hidden cow and a near-sighted chicken. The designers at Telltale were also nice enough to not make these episodes completely linear. The meat of each game has a few major puzzles you can solve in pretty much any order you want, so if you get stuck on one of 'em, you can often give something else a shot until you figure it out.
Culture Shock is a good bit longer than Situation: Comedy. I didn't exactly keep a stopwatch next to me while I was playing, but I'd guess the first episode took me around three and a half hours to finish, and that includes a look at pretty much everything and following just about every possible chain of dialogue. I was paying closer attention to the time while tearing through Situation: Comedy, and it clocked in just under two hours. For a serialized game, this all seems pretty reasonable. I like sprawling adventure games teeming with overcomplicated puzzles and scores of subplots as much as the next guy, but sometimes it's nice to just pop in a breezy, funny game and zip through it in a couple of hours. Especially since I always play adventure games at least twice, the $8.95 sticker price for each individual episode is reasonable, and the $34.95 price tag for the season set of all six episodes seems about right assuming the length of each installment doesn't continue to dip from month to month. There are enough Easter eggs lurking in the background to make 'em worth a second or third look, and the gameplay seems to change a bit too. My second time through Culture Shock, one of the symptoms for the diagnosis of Artificial Personality Disorder was completely different and required a different plan of attack, for instance.
These Sam and Max games are geared towards downloading, with each of the first two around 70 megs a pop. Eight quadrillion polygonal models and ultra-high resolution textures? No, not so much, but the look of the game is a perfect fit for these characters, taking the cartoony look of the LucasArts game and giving it a 3-D spit-'n-polish. The voice acting is also a reasonably close match, and the music is in that same infectiously upbeat, jazzy vein.
The system requirements are pretty modest too. If you have a video card with hardware texture and lighting, Windows XP, an 800MHz processor, a couple hundred megs of hard drive space, 256 megs of RAM, and a 32MB 3-D accelerated card are all you'll need. If your video card doesn't have T&L on-board, bump up the processor requirement to 1.5GHz. Chances are if you've bought a computer in the past 3 or 4 years, you ought to be covered.
So, yeah. Longtime fans may need a bit of time to adjust to the simpler episodic approach, a change of pace from the massive inventories, convoluted puzzles, and globetrotting of many adventure games. Sam and Max Hit the Road is one of my all-time favorite PC games, and Culture Shock and Situation: Comedy are worthy follow-ups. Highly Recommended.