Sam and Max: Culture Shock Review

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            Sam and Max Episode One: Culture Shock

Review by ScoutOctober 2006

Sam and Max are back, no older, no wiser, and that’s very good news. It was not good news for several centuries as fans of the first game waited and waited and waited for a reprise. Then it was very good news again as Lucas Arts announced Sam and Max were back in the development pipeline. That party abruptly ended in the spring of 2004 when Lucas Arts cancelled the game. Goodness and light returned to this earthly sphere when the majority of the Lucas Arts Sam and Max development team spun off into their own indie studio, Telltale Games, a company dedicated to reviving the adventure game format and reshaping it for modern times. All-out hysteria and shameless marketing excess broke out when Telltale subsequently announced they had the rights to Sam and Max and would be releasing a graphic adventure game of the storied duo in a serial format. For those of you with the Max-like attention span of a spawned-out steelhead, stop reading, take your Dramamine and get this game. It’s the real thing, an adventure game that makes you smile and giggle like a fool as you play and play and play right through to the ending credits.  There are not a lot of these babies around anymore.

I played the original Sam and Max Hit the Road several years ago and liked it a lot. Steve Purcell is the brains and brawn behind the idea of pairing up a Robitussin-dosed dog in a Sam Spade getup and a laugh-a-minute, lovable, lethal homicidal maniac naked rabbit.  Purcell had the good sense to entrust his creation to the capable hands of Lucas Arts the first time around and has made a singularly wise choice after a very long wait for the follow-up, Sam and Max Episode One: Culture Shock. I don’t know the dirty details of the deal. Plenty of fans no doubt have websites devoted to a second-by-second timeline of how and why events transpired, but I’m here to paint with a broad brush, to write about the game we have, not the various permutations of a game that might have been.  However it happened, it happened. Sam and Max are back.

Sam and Max Episode One: Culture Shock drops the player back into the same world as Hit the Road. These guys haven’t moved to a better neighborhood, they haven’t painted the office lately, and they still like to point and click even if they run around these days on a proprietary 3D engine, dubbed T3 Tool by its creator. It’s not Source, folks. It’s a stage, and you’re firmly entrenched behind the fourth wall. You can’t steer Max beneath the desk and or make him do unspeakable acts with the pet goldfish.  Mostly you can’t make Max do much of anything except when you really, really need to. Max is like the friend who only proves himself at the very last minute. Instead, you play as Sam, the dog with a hat and a soft, blurred-at-the-edges velvet fog of a voice.

Sam may be loveable, but he also has a pretty big gun. You’ll need it every once in a while, so get acquainted with it. Though the characters get equal billing, Sam does most of the heavy lifting and all of the toting. He carries the inventory, a cardboard box icon at the bottom of your screen, and he handles most of the dialogue trees and action. It’s the classic, time-proven setup, the dependable slogger and the insane yet eventually brilliant sidekick. Every other mystery novel in the world uses this trope one way or another, and Purcell has adapted it to his own purposes.

Telltale had the good sense to start this series out on familiar territory instead of a Club Med or the Louvre, and for most of this short game, eight hours more or less, we stay close to the fort.  You move Sam around via mouse clicks, and Max follows in erratic Max fashion. They lope from their gorgeously rendered office to their perfectly preserved street corner, in and out of mechanically minded Bosco’s garish Inconvenience Store and back to the office.  Sometimes they go for drives in their vintage DeSoto when the neighborhood is in need of a little auto-redecorating. There are plenty of hot spots to explore and ponder, though there is little to actually pick up and carry away.

There is also a girl named Sybil. Resplendent in cat eyeglasses and a Cheshire-cat grin, she is the friendly neighborhood multiple personality, a psychotherapist/tattoo artist/appendage piercer/etc., with an office across the street. She’s a sort of cross between the Monkey Island series’ Voodoo Queen and that great receptionist in Grim Fandango whose name I can never remember. Sybil’s decor rivals Sam and Max’s in outlandish panache, though she leans more toward tiki, tattoo art and sinister-looking couches than rat holes and crumbling plaster. The multitalented Sybil and the paranoid, mechanically minded Bosco are Sam and Max’s allies in the struggle against the Soda Poppers. The Soda Poppers are a trio of stunted yet aged child stars with 4 o’clock shadows and bald spots named, respectively, Peepers, Whizzer and Specs. They are balloon-headed twerps and spend most of the game under the spell of the slightly evil mastermind cum puppeteer, Brady Culture. Most of Episode One features this less-than-epic confrontation between our ageless cartoon duo and their aging, deluded nemesis and his three minions.

All of these characters are highly individualized and unmistakably themselves. The characterizations here are on par with the original.  The voice acting is top-notch, and, yes, Sam and Max are voiced differently than in the first game, and, yes, this works. Bottom line: Telltale has given us the Sam and Max world, but they haven’t been overly precious about it. They have hopped on and taken the reins, as they well should. Loving homage is one thing. Mindless parroting is something else entirely, and Telltale has chosen the former. They have a lot of Sam and Max ahead of them, and it’s important that they make the game theirs right out of the chute.

If you played Hit the Road, you might remember the minigames Lucas Arts tossed into the mix. These games weren’t really there to advance the plot but functioned as timewasters or thinking devices, things to do while pondering the occasionally insidious puzzles.  This new version features a single minigame, a cartoon parody of a certain driving-around-the-hood-and-shooting-shit-up game you might have heard of. It’s fun, it’s mostly superfluous and it’s right on the money, because, if you think about it, Sam and Max are either thugs masquerading as police or police masquerading as thugs. It’s never been really clear, this whole freelance police thing, but that’s the point, the blurred line, the ambiguous moral code, the blending of black and white into shades of gray. Superfluous isn’t the best word to use here, because nothing is wasted in Episode One. Everything is there for a reason, and though it might not become clear for a while, everything is eventually used. Take nothing for granted. Well, almost nothing.

It pays to pay attention in adventure games, and Sam and Max Episode One: Culture Shock is no different. The puzzles are more moderate than in the original, not too easy and not too hard.  Telltale always plays fair, though, and you get the feeling they want you to win. They are rooting for you to solve the puzzles, and, though they aren’t about to give you the solutions, if you watch what is happening and listen closely, you soon find yourself having one eureka moment after another. These moments, the real payoff in any well-done adventure game, come when they should, in other words, when you are still having fun. One of the great failing of adventure games is the lag times between solving puzzles, the arid deserts of frustration and boredom that send the hardiest of gamers to the nearest online walkthrough. Telltale has overcome this flaw by never letting you become bored or overly frustrated.  Even when you should be irritated, hell, even when you are irritated, you are somehow always having fun. Not discounting the great writing and design, this is has much to do with the dark and edgy presence of Max and his insane, surreal banter. Take Max from the equation and you would have a very different and probably less enjoyable game. The genius of Sam and Max is that Max is basically an NPC, yet somehow the player inhabits his character as much as Sam’s. And, believe me, nothing is ever boring in Max-time. I admit to getting the tiniest bit frustrated at the last puzzle, but just when I thought the devs had finally dropped a stitch, I found the thread, followed it and “wrapped things up,” to coin a Sam-ism. You end up feeling good about the game and yourself.

There are games that manage to pull that off in other genres, great level designs in shooters and sneakers and cunningly crafted and organic quests in RPGs. The idea is to keep you going no matter what, to always entertain regardless of the challenge before you.  Alongside an obviously talented staff and a keen sense of solid franchise acquisition, the third weapon in Telltale’s arsenal is the T3 Tool engine created specifically for the adventure style of gameplay. As Kevin Bruner, the driving force behind this engine, wrote in a recent Adventure Gamers developer chat, “… the tool treats the world more like a movie set than a ‘level’. Multiple cameras, blocking, etc. …” This allows for rapid generation of story-driven content within a curiously addicting gameplay experience, at least in this case. Adventures are becoming more and more an acquired taste, but with Sam and Max Episode One: Culture Shock, Telltale has proven they can deliver with the best of them.

About the only thing this game has going against it is the length.  It’s pretty short. As I mentioned earlier, I estimate it took me about eight hours to complete, maybe even less. Maybe six. That’s not a whole lot of gameplay, and this is something Telltale has been trying to sell for a while: Short, tight doses of gaming in downloadable form at an affordable price that will, by the way, run on almost any setup. I played on a pretty nice system with dual ATI 1900 GPUs, a Crossfire motherboard, a beefy AMD X2 4400+ CPU, 2 gigs of RAM and a 20-inch widescreen LCD monitor. This is more a rig configured for Oblivion (it was, actually …) than for a cartoon adventure game, but Episode One performed flawlessly and looked, sounded and played stupendously. Still, short is short, so be prepared.  Telltale’s Bone series is also spooned out in small courses, and though it’s day and night between these games theme-wise, in both there is always the sense that the end might be around the next corner. I’m getting used to the idea, but your mileage may vary. Sam and Max wrapped it up pretty well, though, and when the credits rolled I wasn’t left wondering WTF. I don’t know and I’m not asking, but I assume that Sam and Max’s next installment will be more of the same and yet something completely different, as perhaps hinted at by a single teaser shot at the very end.

There are several more installments to go, and then Telltale says there will be a “boxed” version available for the shelf.  ‘Til then, you can download each episode from their website as it’s released or take advantage of their partnership with GameTap and get the episodes through a general subscription that also opens the entire GameTap library to your grubby little fingers. (You know, I’m starting to think Bosco is onto something with this conspiracy thing. …) One way or the other, if you have a glimmer of an iota of a flicker of adventure love left in that congealed lump of moldering paté you call a heart, you owe it to yourself to check this one out. This game only slightly suffers from being too short and otherwise easily bunny hops into gold star adventure game territory. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Telltale Games Publisher: Telltale Games/Gametap Release Date: October 17, 2006

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (2000/XP only for GameTap) DirectX 8.1 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended) 32 MB 3D-capable video card 1 GHz processor (1.5 GHz for video cards that do not support hardware T&L) (800 MHz for GameTap) Minimum 384 kbps broadband (GameTap) 5 GB available storage (for GameTap application) OpenGL 1.1 (GameTap)

Where to Find It

Telltale Games

GameTap

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14 Responses to Fear Factor

  • Fear Factor | Tap-Repeatedly.com | Reality Topics Blog

    […] nobody@flickr.com (graftedno1) wrote a very interesting post today.   Here’s a quick excerpt:My greatest fear is to be trapped alone in a confined space with a blind human, in total darkness. They have a heightened sense of smell and hearing, and. […]

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Lewis, you made me think of the scariest moments I’ve experienced in gaming, and we’re very similar people.

    Bioshock had two moments – the dentist and the flooded room filled with mannequins.

    Thief had Return to the Cathedral, which was terrifying to me. Thief 3 had Shalebridge Cradle, which is so scary it ought to be fined.

    System Shock 2 kept me on the edge of my seat, but it was more lonely panic than true fear.

    Korsakovia was so scary that I uninstalled it.

    And STALKER. Oh, god, the haunted labs in STALKER. The latter two games don’t have scares like that. Few games do.

    It’s especially rare for a game to have more than mere “moments” – for a game to be scary from beginning to end, that’s a triumph.

    Wonderful article. As if Gregg’s review wasn’t enough to convince me that Penumbra is not something I have the courage to play!

  • DPenn

    I’m with you Lewis … I’m a bit of a puss. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of dread as entertainment.

    Still, I’m drawn to dark stories when they have something interesting to say, whether it’s a game like Thief or a film like, say, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. So I’ll push through, sometimes peering through my fingers.

    The trouble with games, though, is that if you look through your fingers, you’re probably just going to have to play through the scenario again. :~)

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    I wanted to play this game. I downloaded the demo but the controls were just too wonky for me to get my head around. I liked the atmospheric vibe a lot. I think I’m a bit desensitized from an overdose of horror movies in my youth so I don’t so much get the dread thing from these games as a nice creepy vibration. If only the controls were better…

  • Lewis B

    @ Mike, what’s wrong with the controls bud? As someone who despises poor control schemes, Penumbra’s is just like any other FPS, except to examine things you right click on them.  To use things you left click.  I’m not sure that can be considered difficult 🙂

  • Gregg B

    @Steerpike: Yeah my greatest shit-scared moments were with those games too. A few spoilers below people, so beware.

    Bioshock – Haha, I remember the dentist. I didn’t really find the game that scary overall but the bit where you go into the wine cellar and notice a mannequin facing the wall and after upgrading your weapon it’s stood directly behind you motionless and quiet just for a moment before attacking you. I shat a brick. I also missed that bit originally until Lew told me about it.

    System Shock 2 – same as you really, more unremitting tension all the way through rather than specific terrifying moments. Oh actually, theres a bit where you call a lift and it breaks then you realise a service droid is coming to fix it… I do remember having sleep issues after my first encounter with the cyborg ninjas though.

    Thief: The Dark Project – The Sword and Return to the Cathedral and Down in the Bonehoard and well, loads of them. The Sword made me break out into goosebumps though because there was a bit where you could hear this creepy giggling which seemed like it was following me about then it suddenly changed to this horrible throaty noise. What made matters worse was that the EAX (bless you Creative) made my foot steps sound like somebody else was there with me. That level was incredible, a bit too incredible as it seems I missed great chunks of it because I was so eager to leave.

    Thief II: The Metal Age – Trail of Blood where you end up in that opening with those damn tree beasts. God the first time I saw one of those hurtling towards me I actually died shortly afterward. Do you remember that Mechanist child walking around on one of the levels? That was a little creepy.

    Then there’s Penumbra: Overture – quite a few bits but I’m not mentioning them here.

    Oh and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The brain scorcher lab just because it was so damn quiet. My imagination seriously got the better of me there. Those stuffed animals and heads I’d seen in various buildings led me to believe that those creatures were lurking somewhere in the Zone, specifically that lab.

    @Mike: My control setup was perfect after some tweaking (as well as the simple weapon swing fix). If you ever fancy giving it another go, give me a shout and I’ll let you know my setup.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not sure why guys, but one of my starting paragraphs had gone missing, even though I copied it straight from the original source, and It was fine earlier. 

    Incase you missed it due to some technical issue you might want to re-read just after “Well no she wouldn’t in truth, but in Penumbra: Overture you don’t want to move anyway.” at the very start for those who’ve already read the article. Apologies 🙂

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Lewis, it was the weapon swing. It had this terrible, unresponsive feel to it, like trying to hit through molasses. I couldn’t stand using it. I tried the .ini fix as mentioned in the review but it didn’t seem to help. Of course this was the demo…but that shouldn’t have made any difference. I might try the second game instead as I guess they did away with the weapons thing.

    I’m see your first paragraph just fine. It’s the dialogue, right?

  • jdeuel

    I like the argument that weapons can remove fear, but even loaded to the teeth with ammo in AVP’99 the Marine missions were frightful because the enemy was anywhere at any time.

    As for Penumbra Overture, if the controls are anything like the original Penumbra they need to hack in some Wii-Remote 3d controls. I did not like using my mouse for 3d movements.

  • Gregg B

    @Mike: I’ve read that many people avoided conflict altogether in Overture which incidentally is something forced upon you in Black Plague. As somebody who has been renovating a house over the last 6 months with no DIY experience I can safely say that swinging a hammer is significantly easier in real life than it is in Overture without the fix. The fix balanced that for me.

    I’d highly recommend completing the first Penumbra because it’s one big build up to Black Plague which spoils the ending to Overture in the intro. And it’s a great ending too. Just so you know!

  • Lewis B

    @ Steerpike, those moments you mention are all my worst too!!  Do you remember the Robot labs in SS2? Absolutely terrifying, waiting for robots to burst out on you! 🙁 oh and have you ever player Condemned?

    @ Mike, The use of weapons in Penumbra is different to say HL2, where the player is physically holding the weapon, as in Penumbra it floats slightly infront of you.  However, if you change the control method to normal weapon swing, it’s no different!  Speak to Greggi and he’ll tell you what to do 🙂

    @ jdeuel, AVP the original and its sequal were scary however what type of fear do you think it is? I don’t think it’s anything more than sheer tension.  Having a Smart Gun makes you feel incredibly powerful.  I can honestly say in Penumbra the fear is sheer unrivalled terror, where you actually have to force yourself to play on.  It genuinly is that scary! 🙂

  • Jason Dobry

    It’s so true, an arsenal of weapons and ammo rapidly deflates any sense of horror or uneasiness in any game for reasons you already mentioned. Sakey, I thought Bioshock was more “lonely panic,” while I was pretty much always terrified in System Shock 2. I really, really, REALLY did not want to enter The Many’s nursery, and my weapons were so unreliable and ammo so scarce that I never felt safe.

    Silent Hill was terrifying for the same reasons. Ammo was rare and I frequently had to rely on my pipe for self-defense.  Even when I had ammo, the game mechanics prevented my character from being anything other than marginal with any firearm.

    Fear had one moment for me: I was climbing up a ladder, and as I reached the upper platform, my guy briefly looked down as he climbed off. As my perspective looked up again, that Ring-esque little girl was RIGHT THERE, reaching for me. I screamed and she was gone.

    What else…the original Aliens vs. Predator sent me into a locker room and I could only hear the facehuggers scurrying about somewhere within. I had to go in there. I advanced about three steps before the damn thing screamed and filled up my screen with its repulsive underside as it implanted me with its spawn. My roommate made fun of me for weeks for screaming like a girl child.

    Korsakovia–meh.  I was too annoyed and frustrated by the box rearrangement/jumping puzzles to be scared. I uninstalled it after an hour of play, I think. Maybe the scary parts were later, but I doubt it.

    As for Penumbra, I did play through about half of it before other games distracted me. I remember unease and creepiness, but no sweaty fear. I think I’m to blame here, or, more precisely, my daughter, who was still an infant at the time and generally allowed me only to play during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I was denied total immersion and the fear effect suffered. Maybe I should give it another go after I finish Call of Pripyat since she sleeps through the night now. With any luck, Penumbra will keep me from doing the same.

  • Gregg B

    I played the demo of F.E.A.R. but that ladder scare is the only bit I remember. Christ, that made me jump. I’m not too good with cat scares.

    Also I felt exactly the same about Korsakovia. It was creepy at first but then it began to irritate me far too much and it just soured the experience. I stopped playing as a result. Not to mention, when I realised I could bash those smoke-things with my crowbar they didn’t bother me nearly as much.

  • Online Up

    Great article. I look forward to reading more in the future.

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