『 Sam & Max Hit the Road - Again 』

Sam & Max game finally got the long awaited sequel. It's no news to people who haven't yet lost their interest in point and click adventure games, but it's news in here, so either read on, or go away [please, do read on, or you'll hurt my feelings].

As you may, or may not know, Lucas Arts are a bunch of old farts and nowdays their sole interest is to publish more and more titles based in the ever so exciting Star Wars universe. Which sucks ass.

The good old days of publishing excellent adventure games are long since gone, and forgotten. By Lucas Arts that is. They were going to publish a sequel to Full Throttle [in both 2000, and 2003], they didn't. They were going to release another Sam & Max game, they didn't. Not to mention no Monkey Island 5, unless someone pays Lucas off. Instead they released a massive flood of Star Wars games, since the big "G" Lucas himself owns the rights and doesn't have to spend his precious dollars, of which he has so few, on worthless peasants souch as Steve Purcell or Tim Schafer.

Sequel to Sam & Max game was originally announced in the August of 2002, but was later cancelled, most likely due to being a non Star Wars game.

Alot of time and effort was put into the new Sam & Max projest, so a number of pissed Lucas Arts employees decided to leave the Lucas' Star Wars heaven and start their own company. That's how Telltale Games was born. Company formed in the middle of year 2004, and finally published first Sam & Max episode in 2006.

It seems like episodic content delivery is getting more popular by the minute. At least this time we don't have to take Valve's crap and spend hours validating installations through Steam. Thank God for that [depending on your religious beliefs, insert a proper god name instead of previously mentioned God].

Three episodes were released thus far. I've already tried the demo versions of the first two and I have to say I was both pleasantly surprised, and somewhat dissapointed at the same time. If that's even possible.

First of all, the demo versions DO NOT support any kind of save feature, which means you either play them, or you don't. I guess a good thing is, they're pretty short. Or extremly short, in case of the first episode demo.

The game's peculiar humour stayed intact, and that's the main aspect of the game I was worried about. Another one was the 3D graphics, which seem to work very well after all. The weirdest thing in the new game wasn't the updated looks though. It was the voices. I played through the original "Hit the Road" game at least 30 times and over 20 of them was the "talkie" version. I'm not sure why original voice actors couldn't make it this time around, but both Sam and Max sound different. A minor detail maybe, and you can call me weird, but I somehow feel as if someone else was trying to mimic the original voices and can't get comfortable with the new dubbing.

But even before I managed to boot the first demo, smething else showed its tiny little head. And it manifested itself through the following message [click to enlarge]:



Yep. The main game executable is protected by Armadillo, which doesn't like system debuggers, memory dumpers, disassemblers and other tools that may help you unpack the program. This caused a minor delay, but after I disabled the debugger, I was ready to play.



As you can see, the game offers you an upgrade to a full version at an incredibly low price of $8.95. This will buy you a download of course. No CD / DVD release is planned untill more episodes come out. I'll wait for my disc version, thank you. But if you just can't wait, you are but two clicks away from the activation menu. After you cough up $8.95, the episode is yours to enjoy.



The new Sam & Max looks are sharp, and so is the humor. I won't go into detail and spoil it for you but as a one Sam & Max fan to another, I highly recommend the episodes. This type of game is a rarity in the year 2007 and you should grab it immediately, as it will probably be the only decent point and click game you will play this year. On top of that, it's really good, so you won't need any other titles to satisfy yout pointing and clicking needs. Just grab the episodes as they come out, or wait for the disc version.