Sam & Max: Situation: Comedy

[miffy495]

So: Just finished it. Very enjoyable. Actually laughed out loud (or "lolled," as the kids say...) more times with this one that Culture Shock. Although overall I think I found Culture Shock a bit more fulfilling. Maybe it was just that it'd been so long since I'd played an adventure when I played CS, dunno. Still, awesome work. TellTale really seems to have a good handle on how episodic stuff should work. I am pleased.

Only one bit gave me any trouble.

I kept on trying to take the ketchup to the studio rather than take the cake to the ketchup. Whups.

Still, there's nothing inherently wrong with an easy adventure game. The pacing for a comedy game is definitely helped when there's constant progression.

Complaints? I'm still a bit irked by the fact that I can't tweak the resolution. Widescreen support is also something I'm still looking for. Jake, you do interface stuff, right? What gives? Or are we talking something outside of your jurusdiction?

[brkl]

You can't tweak the resolution? The game does support multiple resolutions, although it'd be nice if it supported my LCD's native 1280x1024 (as opposed to 1280x960).

What irks me is that they still haven't fixed the bad compression for the voices. Every 's' sounds wrong

The rest seems to be great. Only played a few minutes. Oh, and this time I had absolutely no problems downloading and getting to play the game, that's a big plus.

[miffy495]

Hmm... it occurs to me that I didn't really try. There was just never an obvious options menu. Although something did pop up after the credits. I guess that's the problem with going through the entire game in one sitting.

[David]

What irks me is that they still haven't fixed the bad compression for the voices.

Because it's not broken? I really, really, really don't hear what you guys (meaning the several of you who have posted about the compression) are talking about when it comes to the "bad" sound quality.

If it must be addressed yet again, though, I would say that fitting a whole game into a 70MB download and paying like 6 bucks per episode (assuming we all ordered the whole season), and then having the game company faithfully adhere to a release schedule, which is so rare in the industry, is well worth the trade-off of some missing sound quality. But I don't hear any problems, so I guess I'm getting a better deal

[Jake]

Theres a very good chance that when all six episodes are done and Telltale can actually spend time maintaining a bunch of patches and addons (instead of, you know, releasing the games), there will likely be higher quality voice files available, either on the season CD or as a downloadable add-on or both.

But also I agree with Met.

And I did the UI design but I don't control what resolutions the game runs at. Widescreen isn't supported right now because our camera system -not to mention all the shot compositions both in cutscenes and during gameplay - are all based around 4:3 aspect ratio. Its obviously totally doable to support widescreen if we wanted/needed to, but it would be a lot of work to suddenly start doing in the middle of full production, when the current already tight schedule doesnt allow for anyone dealing with two aspect ratios for every shot. So yeah, for right now anything outside of 4:3 aspect ratio (including 1280x1024, which is slightly taller than 4:3) is out.

[miffy495]

Yeah, I figured as much. The widescreen thing was kind of a wishfull shot in the dark that I never expected to happen until at least this season is finished. As for the audio quality, I don't have any problems with it. I've heard the complaints, but don't really see the issue. It's not the best, but it sounds perfectly fine to me.

[Karimi]

Twenty minutes in so far. Much funnier , and I think I've fallen in love with this new dialogue system, I was a bit unsure last episode but I like how it keeps the dialogue fresh and suprising. It took less than a minute to download, fantastic. I'm sort of disappointed that its another tv related episode but hopefully the story will pick up.

[Jayel]

having recently purchased a widescreen monitor, I'm outraged!

Other than that, I love it. Is it my imagination, or are some of the lines from the first episode re-recorded?

[Udvarnoky]

Yeah it sounds like all the lines that carry over from Culture Shock were re-recorded.

[miffy495]

Twenty minutes in so far. Much funnier , and I think I've fallen in love with this new dialogue system, I was a bit unsure last episode but I like how it keeps the dialogue fresh and suprising. It took less than a minute to download, fantastic. I'm sort of disappointed that its another tv related episode but hopefully the story will pick up.

I would also like to applaud the download time. I went to grab a glass of water after it started downloading, and on my return approximately 1 minute later it'd already finished. Considering it'd just released, that's damned impressive. I figured that the servers would be swamped and I'd have plenty of time to do things before playing. Not so, and I'm very happy for it.

(and Karimi, I'm pretty sure the TV & Hypnosis themes will carry on through the season until the climax. Unless I'm horribly turned around about the whole thing, the season's greater arc is based around it)

[brkl]

I wouldn't mind little 32 pixel bars on the top and bottom of the screen, that would work. Otherwise my monitor stretches the picture to a 5:4 aspect ratio.

And the sound problem does exist. I don't know if you have bum ears or bum speakers, but I've clearly heard the faults over four games, two different computers, a new Creative X-fi soundcard and several different headphones and speakers. It's such a shame to have a thing like this mar what is otherwise a great experience. Anyway, if better quality voice files eventually get released, I'll applaud you for it.

Oh, and Miffy, there's a small gray gear on the top left of the screen. Use that to get to the options, save menu and such.

[Tanukitsune]

I think one of the problems with this game is that Sam & Max are just mischievious instead of... well, violent!

It's not fun if noboy gets hurt!

I liked the references to Bone (Barrelhaven tavern prop) and I do believe the Red Dye nº2 is a reference to Monkey Island?

[Spaff]

having recently purchased a widescreen monitor, I'm outraged!

Other than that, I love it. Is it my imagination, or are some of the lines from the first episode re-recorded?

haha max hides again!

[Tanukitsune]

haha max hides again!

Whoa! You have to have your screen brightness pretty high to notice him!

[miffy495]

And the sound problem does exist. I don't know if you have bum ears or bum speakers, but I've clearly heard the faults over four games, two different computers, a new Creative X-fi soundcard and several different headphones and speakers. It's such a shame to have a thing like this mar what is otherwise a great experience. Anyway, if better quality voice files eventually get released, I'll applaud you for it.

I'm not saying it's the best quality ever. I can hear the faults too. Thing is, they're not serious enough (for me anyway) to really detract from the experience. It'd be nice if they were higher quality, but for now they get the job done.

Oh, and Miffy, there's a small gray gear on the top left of the screen. Use that to get to the options, save menu and such.

...yeah. I get that now. The fact that there's no menu when you start the game for the first time meant that I didn't bother trying to find an options menu and just started playing. Maybe next playthrough I'll start messing with stuff.

Walter, I think the problem is on your end for that one. I'm a widescreen person as well, and on my monitor there's an option in the settings (like, settings that come up when you mess with the buttons on the monitor, not settings in Windows) to display things in their native format. As such, whenever something 4:3 comes up, my monitor switches over to 4:3 on its own. It didn't do this by default though, so have a look around and see if you can find the option. Good luck.

[Karimi]

Finished it, I think it ended way too soon but it was entertaining. Needed to be twice as long imo.

The bear fit in well at the end but I would have liked if they investigated it more.

[Jake]

The bear fit in well at the end but I would have liked if they investigated it more.

hint:

of course they will investigate the bear some more! maybe you don't fully understand what's going on here?

[miffy495]

Uhhh... you do understand that this is episode based, right? As in "Tune in next episode to see what the deal with that creepy bear thing was! Also, what's causing these TV personalities to flip out and go rogue." Now eagerly awaiting next month's episode, and hoping that Season 2 is already in the planning stages. It's not like some TV network can just up and cancel it.

[Jake]

No need to be too condescending here, man! I was just joking around.

[Karimi]

*Sigh*

Yes I did realize but I would have liked it if they did a bit more in episode. Like "Hm, lets investigate this" END.

[miffy495]

No need to be too condescending here, man! I was just joking around.

Didn't mean to be. I often forget how hard it is to get proper intonation across in text. Sorry 'bout that.

Karimi,

I can kinda see your point. I'm perfectly happy with the cliffhanger the way it is though. Especially given the way that Sam & Max often have no regard for consequences, simply destroying that bear would probably seem like enough for them.

EDIT: Whups. Spoiler tags. Important. remedied.

[Karimi]

Didn't mean to be. I often forget how hard it is to get proper intonation across in text. Sorry 'bout that.

Karimi,

I can kinda see your point. I'm perfectly happy with the cliffhanger the way it is though. Especially given the way that Sam & Max often have no regard for consequences, simply destroying that bear would probably seem like enough for them.

EDIT: Whups. Spoiler tags. Important. remedied.

Yea I know what you mean, I didn't expect them to take it too seriously but I was hoping that would have gotten just a bit more notice. They did notice the pattern but I wish they would have added this to the conversation.

"We should investigate this."

" Yea !"

" Later ?"

"Sure !"

But overall my main criticism was that it was way too short.

[Marek]

People might complain about the length a little too much considering what the series is going for.

Both episodes have enough content to make them self contained and satisfying little stories. It's not like there's things missing, people generally just wish there was more. And there will be, next month.

I really don't care if an episode takes me 2 hours or 2,5 hours to complete. What counts is whether I had enough fun playing it. Telltale could have padded things out a little more, or included more difficult puzzles, but I don't care for that. Right now I can easily complete an episode and not let my gaming diet become oversaturated with Sam & Max (which would make me skip episodes or delay playing them). A one month break between episodes of this size is just perfect.

If there's going to be a Season 2 I think it'd be smart for Telltale to include a Mega Monkey esque difficulty setting to appease the hardcore fans, but I would still play it on easy because I'm really not interested in being stuck in an adventure game anymore.

[manny_c44]

I agree with Marek, the episode lengths are pretty spot on, considering that there are more on the way. If you've ever read the Sam and Max comics they were similarly short and punchy, long involving story arcs have never really been part of the series.

One thing that really does change when you make an adventure game this short, however, is puzzle continuity. Because each game in the series is released a month or two after the next one, you really cannot overlap environments. For the most part this didn't happen in episode 2, the newly introduced environments contained all of the puzzles except for one instance:

Putting the ketchup on the cake? My mind just wasn't able to compute the old Bosco area with the new areas, especially given the dearth of interaction at Sybil's and the office.

Without large interconnecting environments we can basically say goodbye to the complex, interlocking puzzle fields of the old Lucas Arts adventures. Which might be for the better, like Miffy said, it's good to keep a comedy's pacing quick.

I really liked episode 2, and I look forward to the next one...but those sound problems are quite annoying.

[Moosferatu]

Excellent episode. My only complaint is Max's forehead. I hate how it looks like an anvil has fallen on his head every time he raises his brow. Also, I'm hoping for some trippier locations more on par with the original Sam & Max in future episodes.