Archive for the ‘Games’ Category

Sam is a six-foot dog in a baggy suit sporting a trombone-sized .44 hand-cannon. Max is three feet of pure unleashed id with a saw blade grin and the impulsive nature of the average piranha. Together they patrol the sticky streets of a fantastical New York City, righting wrongs, pummeling perps, and ridding the urban landscape of the shifty legions of “self-propelled gutter trash” that litter their streets. Sam & Max is Telltale’s longest running episodic game series to date.

The new season Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse is the biggest, strangest and most epic to date. As the saga begins, an otherworldy power for controlling matter and space calls to the strongest and strangest who might wield it – intergalactic warlords and eldritch gods, under-dwellers and scholars of the arcane.

Gaming’s greatest dog and rabbit sleuths Sam & Max seek the power’s ancient secrets, as Max gains shape shifting, teleportation, mind reading and future vision abilities for battling these foes. The saga plays out in a surreal 5 month-long symphony of mayhem that gets deeper and more twisted with each episode.

Sam and Max got their start in comics in 1987, courtesy of creator Steve Purcell. They have appeared in a number of formats over the years: videogames, an award-winning animated series, an Eisner-winning web comic, and the Eisner-nominated comic anthology Surfin’ the Highway.

My husband is huge fan of the Sam and Max games so he willing volunteered to review this game on my behalf! Here are his thoughts…

I love Sam and Max. I played the original game. I watched the TV cartoon until some villainous scum-sucking practicing malfeasance canceled it. I danced with elation and ecstatic joy when I heard a new game was coming. I cried bitter tears of sorrow when I got canceled. I proposed to marry TellTale Games when the picked up the broken pieces and started releasing Sam and Max games in seasons. (the restraining order is still in effect.) When my wife (whose blog I’m invading) bought me seasons one and two of the Sam and Max games, I kissed her for so long she passed out and I had to look up CPR on Google.

And now there is a third season. Needless to say I was happy to see it. When I got to play it for free as a reviewer, I made TellTale a quilt, but apparently that is also not allowed with the restraining order, so it got returned in the mail. Anyways, instead of reading about all my problems, you want to know about the game, don’t you?

One of the first things I noticed when I started The Penal Zone (Episode one of The Devil’s Playhouse aka Sam and Max Season 3) was the staples of all Sam and Max games was present: Zany humor, threats of gratuitous and comical violence, and my two favorite heroes, Sam and Max (well, that last one is pretty obvious, but I wanted to be thorough.)

The things I noticed that were different were all good things. The graphics seemed to be a bit nicer (on the same ancient computer I’ve been using for years) than the previous two seasons. Also the user interface is nicely upgraded and is very nice.*

*I actually said the user interface was ‘double rainbow’ but Erin edited that out

One of the new UI features are the ability to walk around freely with the keyboard. I found walking around in seasons 1 and 2 a bit cumbersome and limiting, but all that is gone now. You can still move by clicking, and now you can hold the mouse button down. All ways work nicely. The inventory system is upgraded as well. Now when you look at it, you get the options to pick it up (to combine with something else,) examine it, or use it. This allows for more options and easier control of the items, also better than the previous two seasons.

The conversation system is much better now, too. Instead of simply a vertical list of things to talk about, you get a circular menu with the options. Like many games of this type, you can follow the same topic several times. What would normally happen would be you’d keep clicking that topic, then when you’d heard all of them, you’d click a final time, to hear a repeat part of the conversation. Now when you’ve heard the final part, it’s grayed out, so you know you’ve heard it all. You can still listen again if you want, but you wont waste time hearing stuff twice on accident.

Brand new to this season is Max Mode, where you get to do all kinds of insane things, like turn Max into a plant, or teleport using memorized phone numbers (Max keeps track, so you don’t have too.) This adds a fun element to the game, and more chance for mayhem.

There is also a narrator who appears in scenes that remind me of the G Man in the Half-Life games. I’m not sure if this in intentional, but there were a couple other events that seemed to be homages to other games, probably favorites of the developers. I could be wrong, but even so, they made me smile

This game is great for anyone who likes solving brain bending puzzles, witty dialogue that will make you laugh so hard you soil your shoes, and for anyone who loves my favorite type of game: The adventure game. I thought it was a dying breed, but TellTale (among others) have made it live again.

If you’ve never played a Sam and Max game, I say start from the beginning (way in the beginning if you can find the original.) You’ll get the whole storyline that way. Even though season 3 has several improvement over season’s 1 and 2, it’s no reason to skip them. However, if for some reason you like to read the middles of books and start a movie halfway through, you will probably enjoy the game anyways. There’s plenty of reference to past adventures though, so be ready to wish you’d started from the beginning. However, you can get all three seasons for half the price, and you get a whole heck of a lot of game for the money. If the amount of game you got were a TV dinner and you ate the whole thing, you could burp enough gas to fill a hole in the ozone layers (if you have any clue what I’m talking about, you get 10 points.)

Buy it: You can learn more about this game at  http://www.telltalegames.com/samandmax/thedevilsplayhouse and the game can be purchased straight from the Tell Tale Games site for either MAC, PC, and a number of other gaming platforms like the iPad, PS3, and more for just 34.95 for all three episodes!

Disclaimer: I received Sam and Max The Devil’s Playhouse game to review as a member of the Game Review Network. This review is 100% my opinion and has not been edited or reviewed by anyone. I was not compensated in any other way for this product review.

What the heck is going in Scoggins, Minnesota? When White House inquiries to the Scoggins Eraser Co. are answered only with curious puzzles, the U.S. Department of Puzzle Research’s Nelson Tethers is sent on the case.

The strange case of Scoggins plunges Tethers into a mystery that will challenge every ounce of his expertise, and possibly his very wits too. He must overcome brainteasers at every turn, including mazes, logic puzzles and riddles, and he soon realizes that these – along with the clinically pre-occupied townspeople, secret societies, and mysterious sounds from the forest – are intimately connected to the core conundrum. And what’s with the gnomes?

My husband is big into puzzle games so he willing volunteered to review this game on my behalf! Here are his thoughts on Puzzle Agent…

The following are known issues that will be fixed in the release build:

• Occasional minor graphics glitches
• Minor animation glitches
• Some sound effects missing
• Some typos / spelling errors

PC System Requirements:

Operating system: Windows XP / Vista
Processor: 2.0 GHz + (3 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent rec.)
Memory: 512MB (1GB rec.) Sound: DirectX 8.1 sound device
Video: 64MB DirectX 8.1-compliant video card (128MB rec.)
DirectX: Version 9.0c or better

Buy it: You can learn more about this game at  http://www.telltalegames.com/puzzleagent and the game can be purchased straight from the Tell Tale Games site for either MAC or PC for just 9.95.

Disclaimer: I received this review as a member of the Game Review Network. This review is 100% my opinion and has not been edited or reviewed by anyone. I was not compensated in any other way for this product review.

Personal Thoughts by my husband Justin Lowmaster…

When I first heard about Boom Blox Bash Party, I was very excited. I’m a big fan of the original Boom Blox game. We bought the original the day before my daughter was born and played it for hours and hours that day. It helped us relax.

Boom Blox Bash Party has all the same things that made Boom Blox great, and so much more. The main game play modes all revolve around blocks of some sort. In some levels you must carefully deconstruct towers (ala Jenga), while in others you win by throwing balls to knock down towers. Bash Party adds stacks of new modes and ways to interact with the blocks. New modes include paint levels where you color blocks to match them, space levels where the goal is to explode blocks outside an area floating in the void, and undersea levels where you have to toss blocks up to the surface without letting them touch the ground. New interaction ‘toys’ as they are called include a cannon you light and aim, a slingshot where you grab blocks (or the block animals) and fling them, and a new kind of ball, the Virus Ball.

In Bash Party there are also a few new block types aside from the standard bomb blocks (explode when hit) and chemical blocks (explode when two or more of these touch). The new blocks include Book Bux which add in-game money to your total (more on this later), Change Blox which morph from one block type to another, and the new Virus Blox. Virus infect other surrounding blox when exploded or when they are hit a Virus Ball (or touch another virus block). Infected blocks can spread like zombies in a crowded city under the right conditions. Activated virus blocks go poof and chaos ensues as whatever they were supporting collapses (like modern society when zombies run around biting people).

The Boom Bux allow you to unlock various items in the level building mode as well as unlocking levels. One of my complaints in Boom Blox was if you couldn’t beat a level, you were stuck (in that area at least) until you managed to get past it somehow. This happened and until a friend visited and we managed to beat a certain level. Before that, whole sections were unplayed. With Boom Bux you can unlock the next level in any given section after the currently unlocked level. No longer will you spend hours cursing at the skeletons attacking the kitties that you just can’t quite defeat. You can skip that level and move on, and take on the challenging level later.

The multiplayer levels are just as solid as the single player ones, but you get to have fun with your friends. Knock down each others towers, remove blocks hoping that the tower stays up just a little longer and crashes down on the next player, or work together to get a gold medal on all types of levels. Whether single player or multi-player, there are a lot of levels shipped with this game.

Now, the most important part of any game is: Is it fun? Just like Boom Blox, Bash Party is hours and hours of fun that anyone can enjoy. In fact, Bach Party, with the addition of connecting to Nintendo Wi-Fi, can provide a nearly unlimited number of levels. Played all the levels that came with the game? Just click the button and choose from the highest rated, newest, or random levels other players have created. Once you finish that level, you are given a chance to rate the level. This lets the best levels rise up, while still giving the new ones a chance to see the light of day.

I think Boom Blox Bash Party is a fantastic game for anyone. It’s easy to grasp the controls and concepts of the levels and I’ve never played any Boom Blox game with a single person who has said they disliked the game (and yes, everyone I played with had the ability to speak). There’s no need to play Boom Blox before playing Bash Party, but they are both great games. If you get one, get Bash Party because of the new features, but you’ll get the benefit of lots more levels if you get both.

Boom Blox Bash Party retails for 29.99 and is rated E for everyone.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of Boom Blox Bash Party for review from Electronic Arts . This review is 100% my opinion and has not been edited or reviewed by anyone. I was not compensated in any other way for this product review.