Adventure Forums - Sam and Max Ep102: Situation Comedy

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SAM & MAX EP102: Situation Comedy Review

Okay! I just finished playing episode two of this series (which im really starting to love now after this second one, and I must say that its a remarkable improvement on the first story. I'll mainly just have a quick word about the storyline and puzzles because i'm giving the same marks for the other sections, considering its basically part of the same game! Don't worry, no visual spoiler! I Used Spoiler text.

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Storyline: This storyline starts where the last left off and builds upon the first story, and not too far into the game you also meet some familiar characters from the first episode including the two nearby store owners who both play roles in the storyline. It starts to make a bit more sense why we saw what we saw at the end of the first episode (for those that played the first one). Sam and Max get another phone call and this time its from the local TV studio who have been taken hostage by an Oprah/Ellen wannabe, but mainly Oprah... Upon arriving at the studio you soon learn that you cannot just bust straight into the set where this is happening (and its an adventure game so why should you?) so Sam and Max must complete a series of trials (the 3 trials...but not to become a pirate) in order to qualify to become guests on the show. I actually didn't realise at first exactly what was going on and i completed the first of the trials (see the picture directly above) before even finding Myra (the Oprah/Ellen American talk show host Stereotype). Whilst attempting the first trial i realised that a majority of this game would be played from almost a Nth person perspective. You're actually viewing Sam & Max through a TV set from home BUT still controlling them to complete puzzles. The game drops in and out of the TV mode as you go along and when in TV mode you could actually almost be fooled into thinking its a real show. Infact one of my housemates stood behind me watching a section of it and asked what show i was watching (probably thinking it was some humerous new U.S cartoon comedy since he's a big fan of those ones with that Seth fellow in them) A much better story line then the previous one but I still tend to think that these short adventure games are lacking in the ability to create in depth characters due to how short they are. The game designers use mainly conversations between Sam, Max and the N.P.C's to create a bit of character, instead of having more cut scenes, which it could probably do with. The cut scenes you do see are hilarious and many of them had me laughing out loud. This is so much better then the first game but still, I struggled to be completely sucked in by the storyline as I have been by some other adventures in the past. Also Max still continues to have "not much" of a role in the game apart from comedy relief (which Sam does fine at himself also) and the usual ability to give Sam hints.

SCORE 7.5/10

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Puzzles: My favorite of the puzzles this time had to be involving Sam & Max's hilarious office Rodent, who has joined (or formed maybe) a street gang!! I was completely thrown off at first believing I had to do something completely different than I was in order to stop the gang. (see invis spoiler text below)

Spoiler:
Theres a "one way" street sign at the corner of the street and when you shoot it with Sam's pistol it spins around pointing the opposite way and you hear a car crash. Since the rodent gang were hooning up and down the street in their little hot rod i thought i had to time the shooting properly and cause them to crash. How wrong I was (bring on the next action sequence instead).

None of the puzzles at all appear to be irrelevant or pointless. Each puzzle has a logical and purposeful reason and you don't (once again) have to use any inventory items with other inventory items (thank god....i'm remembering monkey island 3 here...with a *shudder*). The puzzles are usually quite funny and more than a few of them had me chuckling to myself as it suddenly dawned on me what I had to do. More than a few times i was mislead by very clever dead-end puzzles. These were things you could do which make you think you're on the right track when in fact you aren't. Usually you just have to sit back and scratch your chin for a bit, or go make a coffee and think about it. Due to the puzzles being fairly simple and more location based then some other games, they'll eventually come to you. If they don't, then playing around until you get it right is usually the key, and its usually pretty funny at the same time because theres a lot of content you might not see unless you simply sit there and mess around (like the poker table joke, for those that played this already). One particularly simple puzzle had me stuck for ages.

Spoiler:
Finding the tomatoes to put into/onto the cake because Sam was asking questions about cherry tomatoes and if that was a joke I didn't get it (which it probably was) and i was completely thrown off. I thought it was something to do with mixing the correct herbs and spices (from teh rack) but obviously they had no particular use in the game....another misleading and fiendishly clever trick.

Once again.... there is a serious lack of using Max. They've got two wonderful characters but one of them is more of an N.P.C and there for comedy relief. I enjoyed the puzzles in this one much more than the first episode, they were indeed a GREAT deal of fun! Thus the high score.

SCORE: 9.5/10

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So as not to ramble on with the same comments as my last review (click here: http://www.adventuregamers.com/forum...ad.php?t=24983) I'll just list the scores and then the total below. Basically to summarize it you can tell by the scores that I enjoyed the graphics, animation, sound and the way that the game as a professional product is marketed and presented to the buyer, including setup and installation.

Graphics 8/10, Sound 9/10, Controls 9/10, Presentation 10/10 (i will say again however that the price of these games is remarkably cheap for the product you're getting! Although the whole price for a season adds up to around the price a retail game might be, its very economic to be able to buy them by the episode; whenever you feel like another episode)

Total Score: 88%

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