Posts Tagged ‘Game Review’

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.

Personal Thoughts by Justin Lowmaster…

NERF N-Strike Elite is a rails light-gun shooter by EA Games. It is an decent alternative to the more violent and bloody rail shooters such as Dead Space: Extraction or any of the House of the Dead games. While it isn’t a game I enjoyed a lot, it will do well for certain audiences.

Key Game Features

* The NERF: N-Strike Elite Game – Enjoy a classic rail shooter packed with arcade style shooter action where your path through the game is laid out in advance so you can concentrate on having fun.
* NERF Switch Shot EX-3 Blaster Included – Bundled with the game is the NERF Switch Shot EX-3 Blaster, which is compatible with other games utilizing the Wii Remote, and as a standalone NERF gun with a three NERF projectiles capacity.
* Decoder Lens Attachment – Your blaster includes a detachable decoder lens through which special codes and enemy weaknesses can be seen in-game.
* Multiplayer Support – NERF: N-Strike Elite features 2-player off-line. multiplayer co-op functionality for twice the fun.
* Multiple Available Characters – NERF: N-Strike Elite features access to four different characters, each with their own arsenal of NERF blasters
* Weapons Selection – Weapons available in NERF: N-Strike Elite include 16 different NERF blasters, both real and fictional, each with their own specific strengths and weaknesses.

This games enemies are robots who shoot NERF darts and the weapons the players use are also foam NERF projectiles. I have not played the first game in the series, but I believe that in that game the players are in a training course. In the second game, the robots have gone awry and are in ‘real’ danger.

I myself enjoy games like House of the Dead, so when I started the NERF game, I wondered how it would compare. While I hoped for a similar game that was just geared for a younger audience. I was, sadly, a little disappointed. While at its core, it is like any rails shooter. The camera moves around and you fire at whatever enemies pop up. My biggest complaint is the fact that enemies take many hits so sometimes you just stand there holding the trigger, waiting for a robot to explode, then going to the next one. I’d call it slow-paced. There aren’t enemies popping up all over forcing my to quickly blast them. Some robots show up, I hold down the trigger, and wait. Even on the harder difficulty, the only difference is that you take more damage and the rockets you blast from the sky move faster.

Another issue is that there is very little ‘feel’ to the game. The robots will move somewhat when hit, but there is little to no feedback to know you are hitting one. Obviously they are getting hit with foam darts, not shotgun shells, but still, some reaction would be nice. There isn’t much in the way of impending danger. Your shield is the only ‘health’ meter you have, and when it drop to zero, you simply are asked if you want to return to the previous checkpoint or to the menu. Also, to reload you have to shake the remote. This is awkward and I kept wondering if I’d shake something loose, but I didn’t. Shooting off-screen to reload, like most games like this, would have worked just fine. It auto-reloads when you run out of bullets though.

In game you can shoot canisters that you spend to upgrade your weapons. This makes them stronger, hold more ammo, bigger scopes, the normal things in this type of game. I did not find any bonus modes or options, but they could be there.

The game is short, beatable easily in just a few hours. That’s not too uncommon for any of the rails shooters I’ve played. There are three difficulty modes, but playing on Hard didn’t make it much more a challenge as nothing changed that I noticed besides the amount of damage I took and the speed of one enemy. Basically I just had to replay more often. The levels appear to be the same for every character, you just have a different set of weapons to choose from.

The game comes with an actual NERF gun that you can remove the firing mechanism from and insert the Wii Remote into to play. Attached to the top is the Red Reveal scope. It’s a red bit of transparent plastic that will sometimes reveal a specific target to hit. I believe you could play the game without it, but it is meant to be played with it. For me it was kind of a gimmick and didn’t make the game better. Didn’t make it worse though.

Final Thoughts…

All in all, Nerf N-Strike Elite falls short for me, but if you’d like a rails shooter that isn’t full of zombies and blood spattering everywhere, it is a viable alternative. I could have been better with faster paced game play. I worry the younger audience it is meant for will also tire of the repetitive times when the same few robots show up and you just stand there waiting for them to explode. It’s not a bad game though, just could have been better.

This title is rated Everyone 10+ for fantasy violence and can be purchased at various locations as well as Amazon.com .

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of NERF N-Strike Elite for review from Electronics Arts . This review is 100% our opinion and has not been edited or reviewed by anyone. I was not compensated in any other way for this product review.