Our last Sam & Max (well, our only Sam & Max until recently) was Sam & Max Hit The Road, which if you can crank your memory banks all the creaky way back to 1993, was a DOS adventure game based on characters created by Steve Purcell. Why it never got a legitimate sequel (Sam & Max Freelance Police was announced by LucasArts in 2003, then unceremoniously sacked) is another one of history’s cruel mysteries, especially when you consider how allergic the original romp was to anything but wacky hilarity.
Hats (panamas, fedoras) off, then, to Telltale Games, for having the audacity, aptitude, and sufficiently unbalanced brainpans to give us a much overdue taste of this lovably goofy dog-and-rabbit detective duo. The catch? It’s only available in three (soon to be six) loosely linked nibbles. That’s because the new and improved Sam & Max--call them “The Episodes”--are less like “adventures” than punchy puzzler spurts to the tune of $8.95 a pop and 3-4 hours a piece if you’re leisurely about it. That’s maybe a buck or two north of “the price is right,” but then again, consider what a movie costs, or that most films work twice as hard to be half as funny, and as long as you’re not in-hate with the old style adventure genre, it’s hard not to call these a deal.
Flash in the Pan
For the uninitiated, Sam and Max are each the unlikely halves of an oddball private investigation team. Sam (a dog) wears a suit and hat, calmly intones oblique lines like “Great gouts of steaming magma on a beeline for the orphanage!” and tends to be the voice of reason--or as reasonable as you’re going to get in a game with animals that talk like Adam West reciting passages from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Max (a lagomorph--that’s really a word, we swear) is a “hyperkinetic rabbity thing” who’s fond of violence, dislikes big words and anecdotes, and balances Sam’s laid back yin with bursts of zany over-caffeinated yang.
Now put those two in the midst of a few hilariously screwy, increasingly interesting plot points involving former child stars, talk show hosts, and a “Toy Mafia” at the Ted E. Bear Mafia-Free Playland and Casino. Slap together a bunch of plush 3D backgrounds, populate them with informational hotspots and inventory items (a tear gas grenade launcher, an anti-hypnosis helmet, a meatball sandwich...), toss in a few throwaway action sequences (drive a car and shoot stuff) then record a whole bunch of irrelevant, nonsensical, frequently genius bits of dialogue and the last 13 years without a Sam & Max game nearly melt away.
What’s That You Said?
Nearly, with just one caveat. Nostalgia’s well and good, and adventure games in general stick to pretty safe conventions (talk, point-and-click explore, solve puzzles). But one thing that’s guaranteed to annoy is a poorly conceived dialogue tree, which is pretty much all of them since the genre was invented.
Remember wading through “nested” sentences to bleed all the info out of this or that perp? It’s back! Ever get lost digging into (or back out of) a conversation tree in hopes of finding that one key phrase necessary to trip a switch and send you on your way? You will here! Years of Microsoft Project and Mindmapper and a bazillion other sequencing tools floating around, and we’re still playing a game within a game that’s like Concentration with sentences. And no, you don’t get color coding to let you know whether you already covered the subtext under question-whatever.
Okay, it’s not really that big a deal, and yes, I am using an otherwise snappy assemblage of one-line gut-busters to grandstand a bit, and I know most of you just as soon blink past the little stuff. But seriously, it’s worth considering the next time you’re fighting an untagged menu of options, wondering like someone going in circles why you’re getting the same responses over and over as you try to arbitrarily find the one little stinker that’s sequestered away somewhere.
Love Letter
All told, Sam & Max fans have plenty to celebrate with three top notch (albeit brief) episodes. The key here is timing, and at roughly two months separating installments, Telltale Games seems to be hitting the sweet spot Half Life 2 fumbled with its ridiculous 12 month hiatus between Episode One and Two. Sure, a few of you may balk at this “sacrilegious” abbreviation of your favorite old school franchise, but you’ll be missing the point: this may just be how adventure gaming survives. Let’s hope so. Where else will we find characters that blurt stuff like “Sweet alligator dentures soaking in formaldehyde!”
Article by: Matt Peckham
Video produced by: Paul Bonanno
