At one point in Sam & Max: Season One, an adventure game from Telltale Games, the player has the option to have Sam say to Max, “random but innocuous comment.” Sam promptly replies, “irreverent reply that hints at mental instability,” thus summing up in one brief exchange the fundamental characteristics of the game’s titular heroes.
A Smooth Transition from PC to Wii
Originally serialized in monthly installments for the PC, the first season of Sam & Max has come to the Wii in one fell swoop, and it is wonderful to see how seamless the transition has been. Sam and Max, the trench coat-wearing hound and sociopathic rabbit who work as “freelance police,” investigating crime for profit, are just as funny and bizarre on the Wii as they were on the PC, and the gameplay is just as engaging.
Old-fashioned point-and-click PC adventure games have never been a good fit for traditional game consoles, as there has simply never been a convenient way to point and select individual objects on screen, but the Wii remote works just as well for that as a PC mouse, and Season One is a dream come true for adventure game fans who want to play their adventures lolling on the couch instead of propped up in a desk chair.
A Video Game with a Situation Comedy Mindset
Season One consists of six episodes. Each episode is complete in itself, but a story arc connects them. Like a TV sitcom, the Sam & Max series contains whacky next door neighbors and peripheral characters that show up in different capacities in each episode. The neighbors are Sybil, who keeps changing occupations (psychotherapist, beta tester, Queen of Canada), and Bosco, the paranoid proprietor of Bosco’s Inconvenience, who begins wearing a series of disguises in Episode 2 as a precaution against “them.”
Season One is full of funny dialogue (Max looks at a cup of green coffee and says “I take my coffee green, like my men), wacky signs (what looks like a wet floor sign in Bosco’s says “caution: landmines”), in-jokes (Max describes the game Tic Tac Doom! as “too short and not hard enough,” a reference to criticism aimed at the first couple of Season One’s episodes) and bizarre bad guys, like a talk show host who takes her audience hostage or the gangster proprietors of “Ted E. Bear’s Mafia-Free Playland and Casino.
Fun Puzzles in Between Laughs
Season One is so much fun to watch that one can almost forget that it is also a game, but there are a number of very clever puzzles. In the early episodes, puzzles are often more clever than they are difficult, as when Sam must use controlled dreaming convince psychotherapist Sybil he has a specific disorder or Sam and Max have to give the right lines as sitcom guest stars, but the difficulty does ramp up a little as the game progresses. Episode 5 is particularly weird and brilliant, as Sam and Max explore virtual reality and later find themselves in an old-fashioned text adventure game (essentially a game within a game within a game).
While Sam & Max has come to the Wii later than it has to the PC, this is one of the few cases of a cool game has been ported to the Wii ahead of the other consoles, which may or may not every host the crime fighting animals. As a result, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 gamers are missing out on one of the funniest and cleverest games ever made. So if you own a Wii, and anyone ever claims that the other consoles are better, you have every right to make an irreverent reply, even if it does hint at mental instability.
