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AN ADVENTURE GAME REVIVAL

Adventure video games, which prized exploration, conversation and problem-solving over combat, were among the most popular franchises of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. George Lucas-owned LucasArts published some of the best, including the "Monkey Island" series, "Loom" (Stephen Spielberg's gaming debut) and the "Maniac Mansion" games.

Lately some small development houses have been working to revive the moribund adventure genre. Telltale Games, a developer that boasts several former LucasArts employees, has gone about this in a very clever way: the company releases “episodic” gaming content, framing each game in “seasons”, like a television show, with new episodes released monthly. Each episode contains perhaps three to five hours of gameplay, and each is both self-contained and part of a larger narrative that extends through the entire series.

The company recently collected the first season of its revival of the LucasArts “Sam and Max” series and published all six episodes (available for some time on PCs) as a single title on the Xbox Live Arcade downloadable games service. The game stars Sam, a wry, sardonic, suit-and-tie-wearing anthropomorphic dog, and his buddy Max, a homicidal rabbit. Their profession is “freelance policing”, which seems to be a cross between private detection and Kafkaesque bureaucratic lunacy (at one point, our heroes shoot out a driver’s taillight, then pull him over and fine him $10,000 because it's broken).

Players must solve complicated puzzles that often obey logic unique to adventure games. Figuring them out can be a bit frustrating for anyone new to the genre. On the other hand, some truly clever puzzles help the player participate in the games’ most humorous concepts. For example, our heroes must at one point star in a sitcom about cowboys living in a New York apartment who try to hide their herd from their landlord (who happens to be played by a chicken). In order to provide an acceptable cover story for the cow in the middle of the living room, players must follow sitcom logic (eg, I convinced the chicken that the cow was a chef). The laugh track lets you know if you’ve come up with an appropriate solution.

These games do not require fast reflexes and they employ extremely simple control schemes—aside from the aforementioned logical leaps, they are among the most novice-friendly of all video-game genres.  And while some jokes fall flat, the characters and situations generate real chuckles.

“Sam and Max” is available on Xbox 360’s Live Marketplace downloadable service, and for PC from the Telltale Games website.

~ BRETT MCCALLON