I was lucky enough to get a Diablo III beta invite. Maybe it was because I have played every Blizzard game since WarCraft II, and have every game available on my Battle.net account. Or maybe it was just because they give them to everyone. I don’t know. Was I excited to get it? Sure. The chance to try out a game before it comes out, why not? Did I care that much? No, not really. To be honest I never thought Diablo III was that big of a deal. There are a lot of dungeon crawlers out there, it’s just that most people ignore them because they don’t have the name Diablo attached to them. Let me go over my history with the Diablo franchise, and then I will discuss the beta.

When Diablo came out in 1996 I was excited. I mean, I had played WarCraft II and there was a preview video for Diablo on the WarCraft II disc (a preview that basically had nothing to do with the game, there were other interesting previews on that disc as well). And I also saw advertisements in PC Gamer Magazine for it, my favorite advertisement being one with the tag, Run like Hell, Diablo is loose. I still remember playing the demo of the first Diablo game. It was shamelessly addicting. The demo let you explore two levels of the cathedral, and walk about Tristram. Since that time I’ve always had a fond memory of the people of Tristram. With a special fondness for the tavern owner, Ogden. I mean I just love when he says that some of the townsfolk may yet survive and yet, there he is, staying in that forsaken town. A truly brave man if I ever knew one. And of course, my favorite part of the game, is near the very end when Cain says, My true name is Deckard... Cain the Elder. And I was like, Big freakin’ deal. So you’re named after the main character of Blade Runner, what does that have to do with the fate of Tristram and Diablo? I mean seriously, his name is Deckard. So what? The humor I found in that aside, I loved Diablo.

A few years later Diablo II came out. I was 16 at the time, and I went to the store to buy it, and the guy at the register wouldn’t sell it to me because it was an M rated game, and I didn’t turn 17 for another three months. Yeah, I hate that guy. So I went home empty-handed, got my brother to go with me to the store, and grabbed a copy of the game. Well, it so happened that the guy that wouldn’t sell it to me only moments before was gone and the person at the register didn’t even seem to know that the store had a policy on not selling M rated games to people under 17, and so I didn’t even need my brother after all.

Naturally Diablo II blew my mind. One of the things I was most excited about was the fact that armor actually made a difference in what your character looked like (in Diablo your character only had three appearances based on armor), even your head looked different depending on if you had a helmet on or not. Of course it had other great features such as the fact that you could run, and move in more than eight directions. A lot of other things were really cool about Diablo II such as the lighting, and the outdoor environments and so forth.

In the end, I actually had a really bad experience with Diablo II. I played as a Paladin, and that was a big mistake. He isn’t very fun to play as, he’s weak, I must have died a thousand times when I got to Baal. And it is very difficult to deal with ranged monsters as a Paladin. I actually gave Diablo II a negative review on Amazon. I later replayed the game as a Sorceress, and it was a lot more fun that time around.

What really interested me about Diablo though, was the lore. I have always loved tales of demons invading from Hell. I was first introduced to this theme in the game Doom and since then I have always been fascinated by the topic. Angels are equally interesting to me. I suppose, really, it’s a cheesy plotline, but it works in games. I mean, Diablo used the term, The Sin War. How freaking cool does that sound? Very freaking cool. I probably read the Diablo manual more than I played the game. There was this drawing of a rogue in it, and she looked so freaking hot... but I digress. The lore goes deep, and is very interesting. In-game much of the lore is spoken by that guy that did the voice of some of the Protoss in StarCraft and he sounds all reverent and intense, very awesome. I can still quote a lot of the manual, or as it is properly called the Librarius Ex Horadrim, Seven is the number of of the powers of Hell, and Seven is the number of the Great Evils. That sentence in particular is my favorite. Those familiar with Christian number symbolism know that seven is actually the number of perfection, and here Blizzard was, saying we don’t need to stick with any kind of traditional symbolism, we can create our own lore. After all, their main bad guy was Diablo, not Satan. I even had a friend that was convinced the game was pure evil because of the imagery of pentagrams. I told that friend he was an idiot. The game wasn’t pure evil it was pure fun.

So, now comes Diablo III and what do I have to say about it? Not much really. Before I even played the beta I had heard some PC Gamer editors say that the beta was little more than a demo to get people excited about the game. I can certainly say I agree that it’s a demo. As for getting people excited about the game, I don’t know. I’m really not that excited about the game based on the beta.

First of all, it was not nearly as graphically pleasing as I expected. One huge thing that seems to be lacking is the dynamic lighting that Diablo II had. One of my fond memories of the second game was running through the corridors of some underground catacomb, and watching the shadows dance around as I ran past pillars. Diablo III is lacking any such ambiance. It felt stale and lame. The ground looks like a flat texture. They should have done some kind of bump-mapping to make it look more interesting and 3D, they didn’t. The technology exists, and computers can certainly handle it, but Diablo III falls short. Overall the graphics look very flat. I wasn’t impressed.

To be honest that alone really turned me off to the game, and the graphics are the first thing you see. But I have argued that graphics aren’t everything. What really matters is if the game is fun or not.

I mentioned that I had a bad experience in Diablo II with the Paladin, so the last thing I wanted was to fight hand to hand again. So I picked the Wizard. That was a terrible experience. My character was weak, my spells were stupid. I didn’t have any fun. I gave up pretty quickly. I tried again as a Monk. This time I did have a good experience. It was quite fun to play as the Monk, and based on my experience so far this is probably what I’ll play as my first time going through the game. The Barbarian was equally fun. The Witch Doctor and Demon Hunter were alright, but not as fun as the Monk and Barbarian. From what Blizzard says, and from what the few that have played with higher level characters have said, the Wizard is much more powerful at higher levels, so I won’t discount it immediately, but as for immediate gratification, no such luck with that class.

My early thoughts are, that if the exact same game came out without the Diablo or Blizzard name attached to it, people wouldn’t be that excited about it. Torchlight was more fun than the Diablo III Beta by far. Will I bet getting Diablo III? Of course. Will I play through it? Yeah. Do I really think that people are overly excited for something that they could find more fun in another Diablo-style-game-but-doesn’t-have-the-Diablo-name-so-they’ll-never-even-try-it? Yes. The fact is that Diablo III will have one thing to offer that similar games don’t: Your friends will be playing it. So you won’t even have to try to convince them to get some game they never heard of that you know is cool, but they don’t. Keep in mind, it was the beta I played, so who knows how things will play out in the actual game. And I do know that being that there are so many Blizzard fan-boys out there, I will be criticized for having anything negative to say at all.

I received news today that the Xbox Kinect has sold over ten million units, and that the Guiness Book of World Records as named it The Fastest Selling Consumer Electronics Device. As a core gamer I have little choice but to address this, because this could be a step backwards in the future of video games. Devices like the Kinect (and the Wii as an entire system) are not things that I like to see in the gaming industry. These devices take gaming away from the roots that have attracted me since the 80s, immersion.

What? you may ask. Isn’t using more of your body more involved than using only your hands? My answer to that question is no, absolutely not. Let me explain. For me, games are about escaping reality. They are about living in another universe. They are about being part of a world that I could never be part of. Games are an emotional experience. They are about the mind, and quite frankly, being reminded that my own body has limitations is not something I want to think about while playing a game.

I have had friends say that the ultimate video game would be the holodeck introduced in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A virtual reality simulator that involved all the five senses. A game like that would put the player in a seemingly real physical world, and they could interact with the world like is was reality. That sounds like a great game, right? Wrong. Think about it. You already have reality. Say you were running around a level in a holodeck game. You would actually have to physically run in order to play the game. If you’ve ever played a first person shooter, you know that all you do is run. Walking in a game is a joke, it is much too slow. Running in a holodeck would be a lot more effort than pushing a single button or moving a joystick a little. You would start panting, and the immersion would be lost when your body started complaining to your brain. And have you ever actually held a real rifle? They aren’t exactly light weight. How can you have fun like that? I’m even saying this as someone who is physically fit. I could probably run for a mile or two before getting tired, but the last thing I’d want to do is run up and down stairs, kick doors in with my feet, and jump over two foot high obstacles. That’s not immersion, that’s exercise. I’m not saying exercise is bad, some gamers probably need it, but not while playing games. (I’m not the first to say this, but let me be clear, the phrase Wii Fit is an oxymoron.)

Devices like the Kinect are a gimmick. Sure they may be fun, and they will attract buyers that aren’t really interested in hard core game play, but they could have a negative impact on the future of games. If games start requiring too much exercise and not enough involvement, people will play games less and less. Let me give an example. I own the Rock Band game. I’ll admit, it was fun to start with, and it’s a great party game, but it isn’t the type of game that I can sit down and play for hours on end. I can sit down with a mouse and keyboard and play a hard core RPG like Fallout: New Vegas for hours, and I don’t need to physically move my body to feel like I’m really in the Nevada wasteland. I get tired playing a game like that because I stayed up late, not because I was physically running around.

I’m not a complete cynic. I actually think that gimmicky devices are a good way to get converts into the gaming world. Maybe they’ll start out with a silly game like Carnival Games: Monkey See, Monkey Do and graduate to something serious like Mass Effect 2... Just maybe... Who am I kidding, if publishers forget about us hard core gamers, we could be in some serious trouble.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was looking forward to StarCraft II, and that wasn’t a lie. It is a rare occastion that I buy a game when it first comes out. I figure wait a few months, or even a year, and save quite a bit. Well, I waited over a decade for this game, and in my experience Blizzard games don’t diminish in value very rapidly (the original StarCraft is still $20.00). Everyone waited a long time. I figured why wait any longer, and I bought it. This review will mostly be focused on the single player campaign, but I will provide some comments on the multi-player as well. In short, I will say that the game did not disappoint, but it was not without flaw. It would be a disservice to say that just because Blizzard (as reputable as they are) made this game, it’s automatically good.

To get one disappointment out of the way I want to comment on the opening movie. About two years ago a short trailer was released, in which a marine is suited up in power armor, and, appearing that he’s about to go out into battle, says, Hell, it’s about time. Clearly his remark was a joke on how long fans have waited for this game. This turned out to be the opening video to the actual game. I’m saying this in shock, not in glee. This video seemed more or less like a joke, a piece of humor to get a laugh out of the fans, and they used it for the game. When I first fired up the game, I was wondering why they were reshowing me the trailer I’d already seen. I wanted to see some kind of intense battle being carried out on a foreign world. No such luck. This was nothing like the salvage vessel being destroyed in the original game. It was cool, sure, but it wasn’t that exciting, and it certainly wasn’t the Apocalypse Now-like trench warfare seen in the opening movie of Brood War. Throughout the game, we do learn who the man in the opening video is, and the movie does apply to the story, but I expected more.

The game manages the single player campaign much differently than Blizzard has done before. Rather than going through menus to get to mission briefings, or having the story play out in RTS mode, you play out the role of the main character, Jim Raynor. The game begins with Raynor hanging out in a bar on the planet Mar Sara. The story is played out in animated sequences rather than the traditional pre-rendered video of past Blizzard games. This was a good choice on Blizzard’s part. If you watch the old StarCraft videos, as cool as they still are, they are low resolution. For StarCraft II, the story videos are going to scale to whatever resolution you play the game at, so the game’s animated sequences are likely to hold up in the future. There are a few pre-rendered videos, which may not hold up so well in the future, but they do look really cool right now.

As I was saying, the game begins with Jim Raynor on the planet Mar Sara, where you have the option to click on various objects to get Raynor’s thoughts on them. After the first mission, you’ll get your first chance to talk to another character, Tychus Findlay. Throughout the game while you are in between missions, you’ll have the opportunity to talk to various other characters. When you click on them, they’ll give you their thoughts on upcoming and previous missions. You can do other things as well, such as watch news reports, play an arcade game, and other more important things, such as upgrading your equipment and hiring mercenaries.

Interestingly enough, when a friend of mine first described WarCraft II to me, I was imagining something akin to the in-between-mission mode of StarCraft II. My friend told me that in WarCraft II you could click on characters, and they’d say funny things. Never having played an RTS, I imagined an adventure game type scene, with a fixed set, and characters to talk to by clicking on.

This mission briefing system is very interesting. You’ll spend most of your time aboard Raynor’s command ship, the Hyperion. On the bridge, you can access the star map, which usually has two or three missions for you to choose from. You can also visit the engineering bay for upgrades, the cantina for relaxation, and the science lab for various research upgrades and missions.

Upgrades are bought by earning cash or research points during missions. There are three main flavors of upgrades, the unit and building upgrades, research upgrades, and mercenaries.

Unit and building upgrades are just that, upgrades for your units and buildings. By spending some money you can have marines start with more health, make it so bunkers can hold more units, cause various units to deal more damage, and so forth.

Research upgrades are often more helpful. You’ll be developing research in both Protoss and Zerg technology. For every five research points that you earn in these categories, you get to choose between one of two different research options, each has its benefits, but you only get one of them for the duration of your campaign. One such option allows you to build vespene gas refineries that do not require SCVs to gather the gas. There are other helpful (and sometimes not very helpful) research options as well.

Mercenaries are a little different. When you buy a mercenary contract, they will be available for hire at the mercenary compounds during the missions. Each mercenary squad is based on one of the standard units, but they are a little tougher, and when you hire them from the mercenary compound you get them instantly, no build time. You do have to wait for a recharge period before you can hire them, and there are other limitations associated with them, but they will prove very useful if you need troops right away.

One cool thing about the upgrades, is that you can replay old missions with all your new technology. Also, as you complete more missions, you get access to more and more units. When you replay missions, you will have access to all the units you’ve earned at that point. This is very helpful for earning the achievements on missions that you may have missed previously.

I want to comment on the graphics as well. The in-between-mission graphics are excellent. They look as good as any shooter, with shadows and everything. Quite impressive. The male characters look a little funny, most are short and stocky, but that isn’t really anything different from the original game. StarCraft is meant to have a cartoonish feel to it.

On the other hand, the RTS mode graphics are a complaint I have. I played the game with the settings on high, and they looked okay, but I they they could look better. Dawn of War II looks better, in my opinion. There’s something about the graphics that feel stale. The buildings have the same basic look to them, there’s variation with race, but each race’s buildings look very similar. This isn’t horrible, but it would have been nice to see a little more color. I do acknowledge that the special effects are excellent, lights flaring, explosions, and shadows, all with audio to match, make the game feel like a battlefield. It is just that the buildings and some of the units feel a little drab.

Now I want to discuss the meat of the game, the missions. Blizzard has done an excellent job of creating unique missions. Unlike the original game, where, with few exceptions, each mission basically involved attacking and destroying an enemy base, each mission in StarCraft II has some kind of gimmick that makes it stand out from the others. For example early in the campaign there is a mission where every few minutes lava rises, so you have to get all your troops, and buildings to high ground (most Terran buildings are mobile). Another mission has a night and day cycle, where you need to retreat to your base and setup defenses at night, but during the day you can go out and cause mayhem. These two, are probably the most notable missions as far as uniqueness goes, but all the missions give you the sense that you are doing something different.

Unfortunately this model of single player game-play does have a flaw. There are no straight-forward destroy the enemy base missions. It would have been nice to see at least one mission like that, but there aren’t any. Some come close, but as I said, there is always some kind of gimmick. Usually the gimmick makes you feel rushed as well, and it would have been nice to see some missions where you could just go at whatever pace you want to.

Still, players are going to get what they expect. Essentially you’ll be using your mouse and keyboard to send troops into battle. Blizzard has reworked the keyboard controls from the original game (though you have the option for the traditional controls, if you so choose) where most commands can be issued without moving the left hand from the standard typing position. For example, in the original game a probe would be built by pressing P, the command is now E, which is not a letter that is in the word Probe, but is a key that doesn’t require you to move your hand across the keyboard. This will take some adjusting for players that expect the command to build various units to be the first letter (or even a letter at all) in the unit’s name, but overall this will lead to more efficient multi-player gaming.

The most important thing about the game, is that it is fun. Missions are fast paced, action packed, and bring a satisfying sense of epic warfare. You can command a lot more units at a time than you ever could before. The game does away with the limitation of selecting only twelve or so units at a time. Now you can select (as far as I could tell) as many units at a time as you want. Then you can send them all to victory (or death if you didn’t select enough units). The single player campaign offers twenty five missions. You’ll spend maybe fifteen hours on your first play-through. You might even want to play again, to get some of those achievements you missed, or you may just want to move onto multi-player, which is a whole other ballpark.

I do want to complain about one thing in the single player campaign, and that is the secret mission. There is one secret mission, and if you miss it, you miss it. That means if you didn’t get access to it before you finish the game, the only way to get access to it, is by replaying the entire game. Unless you happen to have a save-game from early on. I didn’t have such a save-game, so I have to replay the game to get access to this mission. I was upset by this, and other gamers on some of the forums that I read were upset as well. It just isn’t that satisfying to see that you completed 25/26 missions. This feels like an oversight on Blizzard’s part, you should be able to play this mission after completing the campaign. You can’t.

As for the story, the game stands alone as a complete story. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It ends on a cliffhanger, but it’s not a bad cliffhanger. The ending is positive. Sure, there is more story to the series, but Wing’s of Liberty doesn’t have many unanswered questions. I don’t know how long the wait will be for the next two games in the series, but I am certainly left with a better feeling in my gut than the end of Brood War, where the Terrans were losing. Wings of Liberty is very much a new chapter of StarCraft. It opens various potential conflicts for the future of the series. It makes it clear that the bad guys may not be who you think the bad guys are. Future games in this series can, and will, go in whatever direction Blizzard wants them to go, and it will be interesting to see what direction they choose. I’ll definitely be looking forward to the next two games.

Let me now move onto multi-player. Going in, I expected it to be difficult. I figured I’d play a few matches to get a feel for it. I played 1v1, my very first game. I wanted to play as Protoss, because I think they’re cool. I played as such, and was brutally murdered. I expected to be. I couldn’t say I was upset, because it was my first time playing.

When you connect to play a multi-player game, the games asks if you’d like to start in the training league. In this league you aren’t ranked, so it doesn’t affect your standing or stats. The game wants you to play fifty matches in this league. Quite frankly, that is more matches than I ever plan on playing, I don’t have that kind of time to spend on one game. When you find a match, the game indicates that it is Searching For Other Players. Later it says, Expanding Search, clearly indicating that it can’t find any other players as bad as you, which means you’re going to be matched up with better players, and probably get killed.

For that reason, on my second game I chose to play 2v2, that way, hopefully, my teammate would be better than me, and I’d at least have a chance of winning. Well I won that game pretty quickly because the players on the other team had a bad connection to the internet, or something, so they dropped, and I won the game by default, before I even started.

On my third game, it was the real deal. I don’t know if my teammate, Psycostele, knew what he was doing or not. I was talking to him over voice chat. He had to type back to me. He didn’t even know the game had voice chat. That made me worried, I thought we might lose. Still, in case he was experienced, I figured I wouldn’t tell him it was my second time playing, that way he wouldn’t bail out on me in frustration. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I heard Void Rays were tough, so I built them. My teammate seemed to like that, so he sent me some of his gas and minerals. I built more Void Rays. I lead the attack on the enemy base, and we dominated. My teammate never even built that many troops. I guess he figured the Void Rays would be enough. I also had quite a few units called Stalkers, which I remembered using during the Protoss portions of the campaign. The match was about fifteen minutes long.

I will tell you this, there was something very satisfying about winning. Sure we were all in the training league, so we were all new, but it still felt good to destroy the enemy bases, especially after my first game where I was brutalized. It was a rush, definitely.

In addition to the base game, players can expect a lot of user maps for the game, with totally different play styles. This is where persistent multi-player gamers will get their value from the game. Blizzard is saying that maps and mods for this game will be better than those developed for WarCraft III. Whether or not that is true is yet to be seen, but the potential is certainly there.

Multi-player is going to require a lot of hours of game-time for players dedicated to the game, but will bring satisfaction to serious players. Single player is a fun experience for those that like the occasional RTS, but don’t really want any kind of hardcore competitive experience. It was a long wait, and the while the game has a few flaws, it will not disappoint. It’s a little pricey for those only wishing to play the single player campaign, but, Hell, it’s about time.

Link: http://www.kings-bounty.com/eng/legend/

King’s Bounty: The Legend is one of those games where at first glance it seems to be on of the funnest games ever made. Essentially it is a real-time overhead RPG with turn-based strategy style combat. The avatar you control doesn’t engage in combat directly, instead he has armies which he leads into battle. It’s actually a very fun combination of game play, and gamers familiar with the Heroes of Might and Magic series will feel right at home.

Basically, you go out into the world, you perform quests, you fight battles, and, hopefully, eventually you’ll get somewhere. The world is beautiful, it has a colorful and cartoonish look, and equally silly, yet fun, characters to interact with. It’s a hard game to put down. The first time you play, you’ll soon realize that eight hours have just passed you by. Sadly, however, you’ll soon discover the major problems with this game.

The problem is that THIS GAME IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT CHEATING. Okay, maybe it’s not impossible, but I personally put almost 22 hours into this game when I finally got to a point where I had to scour the landscape looking for battles that I could actually win. Most of the time I had to fight half a battle, run away, restock my army, then finish the battle. That was the worst. almost as bad as that, was fighting a battle, winning, then having to restock my army anyway. This involved a lot of running back and forth, and it was very tedious.

Finally, I was fed up, I just wanted to finish the game. I looked up the cheat codes, and it turns out that a link to the cheats are posted on the game’s homepage. The website says, During the game you can use different cheat codes, which will make the game easier and gives you the possibility to [win]. They are basically saying you have to cheat to win. The game is too hard. It just isn’t well balanced, and it needed a lot more play-testing.

I’m sure some will argue that it is possible to win this game, and I acknowledge, that sure, it may be possible. If you want to inch your way through it, and spend over 100 hours in it. Frankly, that is too long. Being that this is, for the most part, an RPG, it is in my opinion that you should be able to play through the main quest, doing only a minimum amount of side quests, and finish this game. You can’t do that. You can’t even come close to doing that. With cheating it took almost another ten hours to finish this game. That was ridiculous.

It’s really not that bad a game, and I’m sorry to say, that as fun and amazing as this game appears at first, I cannot recommend it. It just doesn’t have the polish it needs. It doesn’t have the balance that it needs. I hate relying on cheats to win games, but honestly, without them, I was just going to give up on this game anyway.

Rating: 5/10

Link: http://www.telltalegames.com/samandmax

I had purchased Sam & Max Season One back in 2008 when it was featured as a weekend deal on Steam, though I wasn’t really that interested in playing it then. I was, at the time, a junkie for cheap video games. In fact, I enjoyed buying video games more than I actually liked playing them. I couldn’t help myself, every time I saw a deal on Steam, I bought it, not even caring what it was. All that ended when I purchased the game Mount and Blade, tried it, and realized that I hated it. From then on I was more conservative about the video games that I purchased.

As I was saying, I had six games from the Sam & Max series sitting in my account, and I don’t know that I ever intended to play them. I never played the original Sam & Max game from the 90s, and to be perfectly honest, I really don’t like comedy in video games. I mean, some tongue in cheek humor is okay, but I had heard that Sam & Max was basically laugh out loud comedy. That’s part of the reason I had the games for almost two years before sitting down to play them.

As the title of this post suggests, I found the games to be a breath of fresh air. I actually installed Sam & Max 101: Culture Shock several months ago, with the intent of at least trying it out, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I fired it up. I was laughing out loud right away. There I was, introduced to two absolutely hilarious furry animals. I found Sam to have the dry and self-centered sense of humor that some would think of as ignorance, but the keen observer would recognize as cognizant wit. And then there was Max, I didn’t even know what to make of Max the first time I heard him speak. All I did know was that I couldn’t stop laughing at the wisecracks that he was making. Yes, I was very surprised, and I’m not ashamed of the fact that I was laughing more loudly than I would during any sitcom.

For those that don’t know, these recent Sam & Max games are being developed by Tell Tale Games and released in an episodic manner. That means that instead of developing and releasing one game, the game is produced as a season, the first season has six episodes. The episodes are released monthly, and when you buy a subscription you get each game as it is released. Of course, purchasing past seasons gets you the games right away. Certainly this is an interesting way of publishing games, and quite frankly, it works for Sam & Max.

Sam & Max is an adventure series, so the games mostly focus on plot and puzzle solving. Each episode from season one was about three hours long, more or less depending on how long it takes the player to figure out the various puzzles and challenges. None of the puzzles were ridiculously difficult, but some were more obvious than others. These are not the type of game where you give up, and follow a walk-through to complete. No, they actually make sense, despite the comic world where a dog and a bunny interact with humans, as if there was nothing unusual about it.

I played an episode a day for six days, and I was laughing all the way to the end. Admittedly, it wasn’t quite as funny near the end, and it was starting to feel a bit tedious, but I think that was more because I was playing them all at once, I think a month apart would be a very good spacing to play each episode. It wasn’t all funny, however. I hated the character Bosco almost right away, he was funny the first time that Sam and Max interacted with him, but the character got old fast, and was more annoying than anything by the final episode. But hey, nothing’s perfect.

This is the type of game that you can play with your significant other, one person takes the controls, but both discuss possible solutions to the puzzles.

The narrative of the game had all the nonsense that you might expect in a world with anthropomorphic animals. Half way through Max actually becomes the president of the united states. Each episode is an individual story unto itself, but the whole season cumulates as a persistent world, meaning that the events of previous episodes are often referred to, or even part of, later episodes, with the final episode revealing what was behind all the mayhem previously encountered.

I was pleasantly surprised by this game, and I look forward to playing seasons two and three, and any future seasons. If you like video games and you like to laugh, give it a try. Sam & Max 104: Abe Lincoln Must Die is free, so there is no reason not to try it, you might find yourself in a world of laughter.