Gameology 2.0

Review Of

Clarke, Sean. Sam and Max Hit the Road. San Francisco, CA: LucasArts, 1993.

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I can't imagine how much fun it must have been back in 1993 to fire this game up for the first time. This is a terrifically funny and polished performance, even for Lucas Arts. I hadn't played this game before last week, and I feel like I missed out on something really special. By far the biggest draw here is the incredibly sharp wit of the developers. My wife and I had a great time just "examining" every object and hearing Sam and Max's witty repertoire of jokes and puns. The player characters here are not just passive automatons who mindlessly do your bidding. Instead, they constantly converse with the player, the non-player characters, and each other. Unlike the often boring dialogue of Fun Com's The Longest Journey, the dialogue here is almost always worth listening to, whether just to enjoy the banter or to read-between-the-lines for hints. I played the CD "talkie" version, which I would highly recommend. The voices (much like those in Loom) are wonderful. The quality of the voices and sometimes the graphics even surpasses that found in many commercial cartoons, particularly those of Hanna Barbara.

It would take a long time to list all the features and elements I liked about Sam & Max. It'd be much easier to talk about what I didn't like, since that list is much shorter. Let's nitpick. For S&M, the developers rejected the on-screen button interface of the first Monkey Island game and opted for a model in which the player hits the right mouse button to switch the mouse pointer to various modes: Go, Examine, Pick Up, Talk to, and Use. I'm not so happy with this decision. While it frees up the screen of some clutter, it's a pain sometimes always clicking that right mouse button to go through the options. I longed for the ability to use my mouse wheel for the purpose. There may have been some keyboard shortcuts to make it easier, but all the mode-switching got irritating after awhile, especially when I accidentally missed the mode I wanted and had to scroll through them again. A little intelligence (for instance, to automatically switch to GO when I was pointing at a door) would have made this better. Another caveat is that some of the puzzles are obtuse enough to stump even seasoned adventurers. Well, let me rephrase that. It's not that the puzzles are hard; it's that some of the screens are setup poorly so that it's not clear where you can exit. This is a real problem in one of the last rooms—you have to click a small area in the lower right corner to access an area located at the top-middle of the screen. It's VERY non-intuitive, and I was upset when I discovered this on a hint site. When you get really stumped, it's nice to know that it was for a good reason, not just that the exit location was oddly placed. There's at least one puzzle that is so non-intuitive I'm not sure anyone could reasonably be expected to solve it. Looking back, I can see where the developers had placed some clues, but I had to use a hint-book to get me through it. There's another really difficult spot early in the game (The Tunnel of Love), but the developers gave the player enough hints to get one through it. It's still tricky, but reasonably difficult. The only other spots that really stumped were two "mini-games," if you will. One was a sort of Frogger-inspired alligator lining-up game that I couldn’t figure out; the other was a spinning-restaurant game that I didn't know how to manipulate. I knew it must be important, but I didn't realize that the coin return lever could be manipulated (and it had to be to solve the puzzle).

To make a long story short, I had to consult a hint site at least four times to get through the game, and I never felt bad about doing it. I feel bad about looking at a hint site if I discover that the answer could have been solved by paying more attention to the game, or making a reasonable deduction from the available clues. If the dilemma turns out to be related to the interface or simply something I didn't notice (like an object I didn't realize could be manipulated), I don't feel as bad. Sometimes I do have to admit that games like The Sentinel, which are very clear about what objects players can manipulate, have their advantages.

These annoyances didn't diminish my enthusiasm for the game. Though some dull person might complain that the graphics aren't up to today's standards, I evaluate a game's graphics not by comparing them to photorealism or Doom III, but rather how consistent they are with their own context. A certain arrangement of blocks might represent a hammer, a sword, or a fork—as long as I can clearly distinguish it from another object and don’t have to struggle mightily to remember what's what, I'm happy with the graphics. With a game like S&M, I'm more concerned about the few pre-rendered scenes that look less "cartoony" than the rest. For instance, there is a helicopter and a tram that are animated in a different style than the rest of the game. Though some might think these animations were superior, the fact that they throw off the continuity irks me. I'd rather see the same "quality of animation" throughout. I'm not up on my art terminology enough to really know how to describe what I mean, but let's just say I really appreciate how different artists can put together a game, cartoon, or comic and end up with a very coherent "style." I might encounter an object, say, a flashlight, in three different games with different styles—maybe S&M, The Longest Journey, and Myst, and I'd expect those objects to look quite distinct from one another. I wouldn't say one was "better" than the other, only that they were ripped from different contexts, and as long as they were coherent within these contexts, I have no problem with them. If I encountered a photorealistic flashlight in S&M, I'd want to know why.

Anyway, to get back to the game at hand—S&M triumphs on many levels. I'd direct your attention to a few particularly interesting moments. One is a "surreal" room complete with melting clocks and stairway optical illusions. The developers are obviously having some fun with art, and it's neat to traverse these weird realms without them taking themselves too seriously. Another great moment occurs when the characters are tossing quarters into a wishing well. Sam wishes, "I wish this game were over," and the screen darkens and the words THE END appear on the screen. A moment later, the screen comes back, and Max announces it's a gag (the game is not really over). I wish I knew the right term to use to describe this technique whereby, for a moment, the game draws attention both to itself as a game and to the player as a player. There must be some groovy post-moderny term for that. If you know it, please tell me! I remember reading about something like it in McCloud's book on comics. Maybe that little gem is ready for another read...