[Melanie68]

Nap, they had a short piece on the SciFi channel last night (between programs) about Halo3 and they mentioned the playtesting you brought up in your original post.

With Sam & Max, they only playtest those once (that I know of) with an outside audience. Granted, I've been to quite a few of them, but I don't think playing previous episodes has biased me enough to not be useful. If you read my S&M preview, I described one puzzle that Brendan watched me do as I was having trouble with it, to actually see how he could improve it. At the end, he would talk with everyone who had finished and go through the game to see if we saw the clues, were we thrown off by dialogue, how long did it take us to solve the puzzle, did we use the new hint system, etc.

I do wish more developers would do it. It would certainly pick up any weird, illogical, or poorly clued puzzles before the game got released.