Sam & Max - Season 1
I was a huge fan of the original Sam & Max Hit the Road game back in 1993. It had great voice acting (a game with full digital audio speech instead of text was real high tech stuff for the time), twisted humour and equally twisted puzzles. It’s been a long time. Graphic adventure games have died a death over the years since. Besides the occasional Broken Sword game once every few years, it has been a pretty barren period for the genre. A much anticipated new Sam & Max game from LucasArts was canned during this time too.
Late last year Telltale Games released the first of six episodes of “season 1″ of a new Sam & Max game. This seems to have been the first good and successful attempt at affordable, episodic gaming. Fair play to them - you can buy each episode for US $8.95, or the whole lot for $34.95. They’ll even discount the price of any episode you already purchased if you want to upgrade to the full six-pack. The sixth episode was released last week. I just finished playing through the first episode last night, and it was high quality stuff. Sam & Max’s world successfully made the transition to 3D, which I can’t say for a lot of other giants of the 2D era, such as Worms. The voice acting is still great, although not done by the same people as in the original game. The only annoyance I have with the game is the fact that it does not support widescreen resolutions at all. I had to configure my graphics card to just display it with borders on the side to avoid stretching the picture.
Its an excellent game. If you like adventure games, go buy it. Now. Its cheap. It comes to less than 30 euros for the full six episodes after you add US sales tax and convert the currency. They also give you the option of receiving the game on DVD for the cost of shipping — which from the US is likely to not be all that cheap.
