Yay! I loved that they included the cutscenes from the Futurama game on the “Beasts with a Billion Backs” DVD as “Futurama: The Lost Adventure” as a special feature. The game was merely a passable platform-shooting game, but the storyline and cutscenes made up for it. It has some really funny jokes, in fact one joke in particular is probably my favorite one-liner out of all Futurama. The story is fantastic, moving Mom to a new level of evilness, and it ends with a great twist. It’s great to be able to watch it as an episode without having to replay the game.

Strong Badia the Free, the second episode of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive people takes the ball from Homestar Ruiner and runs like crazy. It’s not quite a touch down, but it’s a great step in the right direction.

In Strong Badia the Free, Strong Bad is placed under house arrest after the King of Town places a tax on e-mails. Strong Bad has to find a way to get out of the house, but he has an exploding collar on his neck that will go off the moment he walks out the door. Once escaping imprisonment, he declares that he will create his own, independent nation under the Strong Badian flag. He asks the citizens of Free Country, USA to join him, but they all decide to make nations of their own.

Now Strong Bad must travel to these nations and convince their leaders to join Strong Badia in it’s fight against the municiplality of the King of Town. Since this is the Homestar Runner universe we are talking about, the “nations” all consist of one person (or at the most two people) in their usual stomping grounds. For instance, Marzipan’s house becomes a nation, as does the House of Strong. There are locations that we haven’t seen before in the game’s continuity that should be quite familiar to fans of homestarrunner.com. Every location, including the locations previously seen, is well utilized as a nation. None of the locations get a major overhaul, but are given banners or new objects to show they are now countries. These are exactly the small-fry changes that the characters would make in the flash cartoons, so it’s actually nice to see that Telltale didn’t go overboard with the concept.

The user-placable map from the last episode has been replaced with a map of the nations. In order to enter a nation at the lower portion of the map, Strong Bad has to form an alliance with the adjoining nation so he can have safe passage to the new nation. Strong Bad must play to each character’s personality quirks in order for them to join forces. Each time an alliance is formed, an early-film style newsreel is shown with a narrator telling the viewers the news. This is a nice touch, and adds a lot of polish to the game making meeting the game’s goals seem a lot less tedious than Homestar Ruiner.

To my pleasant surprise, there is actually a great deal of character development here. We get to see one character in particular in a way never before seen. It’s unchartered territory for the Homestar Runner universe, but surprisingly it actually fits in perfectly with the series’ atomosphere. I loved that aspect of this game, and would love to see more of it in future games.

Another thing that I really loved was that the game had Strong Bad going into drawing tangents while reading his e-mail. Strong Bad’s plain reading of the e-mail last time felt a little lacking, so it was nice to see Strong Bad’s trademark illustrations while he was making his point in this e-mail. I’d love to see the game get into some “made-up” territory, as is common with the Strong Bad e-mails, but as things are now I’m still a happy camper when it comes to the e-mail aspect of the games.

One thing that did seem tedious this time around was the trophy quests and the Teen Girl Squad comics. Telltale did try to make things a little fresher by making the Teen Girl Squad comics chalk drawings on rock as “Cave Girl Squad” this time, but the experience still feels a little hollow. I love the Teen Girl Squad comics on homestarrunner.com, and making your own comics sounded like fun when it was announced. However, the experience feels lacking. The comics aren’t exactly being made, but rather connected like a jigsaw puzzle. And, like last time, the better puzzle pieces are hidden throughout the game. This time around though, I just didn’t feel like there was enough incentive towards putting in the effort to finding the pieces of comics and the trophies. It feels like just more of the same-old same-old.

Strong Badia the Free is a much more satisfying game than the last. It has a fairly epic plot and a good deal of character development, but it still fits nicely within the Homestar Runner universe. The quests and comics are starting to feel tired already, but thankfully they aren’t necessary to complete the game.

Fright of the Bumblebees is the first episode of Telltale’s new episodic series based on the misadventures of the inventor Wallace and his faithful dog Gromit. Telltale is quickly becoming the number one developer of licensed games. They now have games for five very different licensed properties (Bone, Sam & Max, CSI, Homestar Runner, and now Wallace & Gromit), and they have managed to bring out the strengths in each property, which brings a slightly unique gaming experience to each of their games.

The humour in Wallace & Gromit is much more subdued than in Sam & Max and Homestar Runner, and even more so than Bone. Much of the comedy in the Wallace & Gromit films comes through facial expressions. The expressions and movements of the characters in the Telltale Tool have seemed kind of wooden in previous installments, so I was worried if Telltale’s engine could handle it. Thankfully, the movements and expressions are just as expressive in Fright of the Bumblebees as they are in the films. This game is the best looking game Telltale has released to date, and it comes with slightly higher system requirements. I am using an older Radeon on a computer with only 512MB of RAM. I encountered graphical glitches when I first played the game, but this was remedied by playing the game as soon as I started my computer with nothing else running, and playing on the lowest graphic setting in the options menu.

In order to set up a more cinematic framing of characters, Telltale has changed the traditional control scheme of pointing and clicking with a mouse, to a control scheme that gives players direct control of the characters. There are three options available for control on the PC. The default option is using a keyboard and mouse. The arrow keys (or WASD) on the keyboard controls the character, and the mouse selects a hotspot. The next option is to use just the keyboard, and play similar to how LucasArts’ last two adventure games, Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island, played. The third option is using a gamepad, but only Logitech and corded Microsoft Xbox 360 controllers are supported. My gamepad wasn’t supported, so I could only play the game with a keyboard and mouse, but I found this option very comfortable and easy to use.

The plot of this first episode follows the Wallace & Gromit formula to a tee. Wallace has just invented a machine that will harvest honey from bees in a mechanical hive. He starts a new business, “From Bee to You”, to sell honey to the residents of his town. Of course, Wallace being Wallace, things don’t go exactly as planned.

Both Wallace and Gromit are playable at different points in the game. Wallace talks a lot more than he ever did in the films, as he comments on everything that is clickable. Gromit doesn’t talk at all, but he will make facial expressions when you click on clickable items. I have always enjoyed Gromit’s expressions in the film, so I found myself clicking on different objects as Gromit just to see how he would react.

The music is once again wonderfully composed by Jared Emerson-Johnson. The Wallace & Gromit theme is present, of course, but there is an all new arrangement used in the game. The other music is completely new, and fits the series perfectly. Andrew Langley and Jared Emerson-Johnson worked to add a engine controlled music changing feature to the Telltale Tool. This can be experienced while in the town square. The music will change as the character walks around. It helps add to the cinematic feel of the game.

The voices are well done as well. Wallace isn’t voiced by his regular actor, Peter Sallis, but instead is voiced by Aardman Animation’s official back up voice actor who has done the role before for merchandise and television commercials. The change in actors is slightly noticable, but if I hadn’t known it wasn’t Peter Sallis I would never had guessed. The voice is slightly deeper, so I would probably have thought the change in tone was due to Peter Sallis’ age much like Mel Blanc in his later years. The voice really is that close. The other voices are well done as well, and are all performed by British actors. I particularly enjoyed the voice of the woman who ran the news stand.

If the game can be faulted for anything, it would have to be the lack of separate volume controls for voice and music. I started the game without subtitles, but had to turn them on since the music seemed to drown out the speech. I couldn’t understand what the characters were saying at times. Telltale stated on their forum after the feedback of the demo that they are looking into this issue. I hope it is rectified by the second episode, as it slightly detracts from an otherwise excellent gaming experience.

Fans of the films will enjoy this episode. It is Telltale’s most cinematic adventure to date, and captures the look and feel of the Wallace & Gromit films perfectly. The control scheme will take most gamers some time to get used to, but with three options for control it should please everyone except those most resistant to change. The lack of separate volume controls for voice and music is certainly a bummer, but with subtitles on it shouldn’t prove too much of a nuisance. If Telltale can keep up this level of quality and fix the volume control problem, they’ll have a real winner on their hands with this series.

The second episode of Sam & Max Season One continues right where the last one left off, and feels a little bit like deja-vu in the process.

In Situation: Comedy, Sam & Max find out that talk show hostess Myra Stump has been holding her audience hostage while she films her show non-stop 24 hours a day. They have to get their 15 minutes of fame at the WARP television studios in order to be let into the set of the show, so they can stop Myra and free her captive audience.

The episode starts out great. The owner of the inconvenience store, Bosco, is even more paranoid than ever, and has resorted to disguising himself in order to throw the people that he is sure are watching him off his tracks. I won’t spoil the fun here, but I’ll just say that Bosco’s disguise is hilarious. I went through all the dialog options with him just to hear what he’d say next. The sign outside Sybil’s in Culture Shock showing that she has had many different jobs comes into play here. She is no longer a licensed psycho-therapist. Now she runs a tabloid magazine. I’m really starting to enjoy Sybil as a character. It’s a lot of fun watching her become passionate about something, only to do something new the next month. She must be doing fairly well too, considering she still has enough money to pay for her office. In a way, she’s living the life that I’d love to be able to live myself.

There are a few new characters here, but one new character in particular is a lot of fun. Hugh Bliss is a former magician turned author who wrote a book called Emetics, which is a set of principles for a happy life based around colors. I enjoyed his excessive happiness, and the way Max seemed to be drawn to happiness himself around him. The interchange between the two characters, along with Sam’s contrasting serious attidude was a lot of fun.

The first television show that the duo are a part of to get their 15 minutes of fame was a blast. This was a great parody of American sitcoms, showing that the plotlines are so hollow that Sam & Max simply adlibbed through it. The guest star of the sitcom in particular was very funny. He had a different personality on and off the set, and both were very funny to watch.

However, the rest of the television shows in the studio didn’t match the humor of the first. One show featured all three soda poppers, and they seemed even more annoying than before. Spec’s voice is bearable, and Whizzer is at least humourous as a character. I did enjoy the subtle play on his catch phrase in one puzzle. But Peeper’s voice really grated my nerves. It was bad in Culture Shock, but he seems even whinier now.

The biggest disappointment though was that the previously visited locations haven’t changed at all since the last game. Sam & Max’s office is still decorated the same, except for a funny souvenir of their last case in the closet. In adventure games, a lot of fun comes from clicking on the objects and hearing what the characters have to say about them. However, the quips that Sam makes about the objects is exactly the same as the last episode. They were funny once, but the jokes feel stale the second time around.

Situation: Comedy is a fun game, but it’s not quite up to the level of Culture Shock. It is still worth playing despite it’s shortcomings. There are a lot of funny moments here, especially in the first half of the game. With a little more variation, and either fine tuning the Soda Poppers or dropping them altogether, the rest of Season One could be a blast.

With Sam & Max Season One finally getting released for the Wii this past October, it’s a good time to take a look at the six episodes available on the disc. Culture Shock is the first episode of Season One, and starts things off with a bang.

Sam & Max must investigate a case of hypnotism, where a group of former child stars from a hit television show in the 1970’s have been brainwashed to promote the maker of a self-help video. The three former child stars are raising a ruckus on the city street that is home to the office of Sam & Max Freelance Police. Fans of LucasArts’ Sam & Max Hit the Road will be happy to see that the street is very familiar, with Bosco’s grocery store and the cafe that sells bad food still on the corner. The cafe is not open for business, but we finally get to set foot into Bosco’s and even get to meet the man himself.

Bosco is a very interesting character. He is an ultra-paranoid individual who seems to run his grocery store only to finance his various dubious BoscoTech inventions. Bosco’s Inconvenience Store is littered with security cameras and various BoscoTech inventions that are present to keep people from stealing from the store. The other store owner on the block is Sybil Pandemic, licensed therapist, well at least this week. Her sign outside of her shop shows her to have had at least 3 previous jobs. The characters are all full of quirks and personality, and as the game progresses, these quirks become even more evident.

Humor has always been Sam & Max’s main selling point, ever since the first comic featuring the duo appeared way back in 1987. Here, the humor is top notch. The humor is quirky, containing plenty of one-liners, especially from Max.

I’m not a big fan of action sequences in adventure games, so it must be said that there are two action sequences in the game in the form of car chases. It’s very reminiscent of the chase scene in Out From Boneville, in that the DeSoto is moved across the screen and there is debris on the road that slows you down. This time around though, since it is a Sam & Max chase, Sam’s gun can be used at any time during the chase, and a bullhorn can be used by Max to shout at other drivers.

The voicework in Culture Shock is very good, with three notable exceptions which I will get to at the bottom of this paragraph. Max’s voice actor does a great job portraying the character, falling somewhere between the voice of Max in Hit the Road and Max in the animated series. Sam’s voice actor chose to stay fairly true to the film noir feel of Sam’s voice from Hit the Road rather than the gruff portrayal of Sam found in the animated series. Both voices sound really good, with Max as the standout as his voice is full of energy. Sam’s voice actor does a remarkable job with the voice throughout most of the game, but sometimes his portrayal seems a bit stiff and lacking of emotion. All in all though, both main character’s voices are great. Telltale had a tall order to fill to keep fans happy with the voices, and they managed to succeed in my opinion. The supporting characters also mostly have nice voices, with Bosco’s gruff voice and Sybil’s mid-range voice fitting their characters perfectly. The former child stars known as the Soda Poppers, on the other hand are quite grating. Their personalities are interesting, but their voices are much too falsetto to be enjoyable. I know exactly where Telltale was going with this, with the grown men trying to keep sounding like the little kids they used to be on TV much like Screech from Saved by the Bell. However, the characters are triplets, and each one of them sound this way. This gives them a lot of screen time, and their voices quickly become tiresome before the game is over.

The music in the game is great. The jazz intro is wonderful, very reminiscent of the Cheesy Understated Credit Sequence from Hit the Road, but unique enough to stand on it’s own. The music that plays during car chase sequences is also very catchy. A sountrack CD is available for Season One, and I recommend purchasing it wholeheartedly. Each subsequent episode has music as good or better than this one, and it really does makes for some great listening pleasure.

Culture Shock is a fine return to form for the crime fighting (and causing) duo. With the exception of the voices of the Soda Poppers, there’s not too much that I can say that can count against the quality of the game. Even with the grating characters though, it’s still well worth the purchase for the game’s many other redeeming qualities. It’s really funny, the duo themselves are voiced well, and the music is wonderful.

I was a Nintendo fanatic when I was a little girl, ever since I first got an NES for Christmas. I had to see The Wizard, mostly because I loved Fred Savage :), but also because of the Nintendo product placements that they showed in the commercial. The Wizard made me really want to go to the Nintendo World Championships, and my dad did take my sister and myself to them at the Meadowlands arena in New Jersey.

And, of course, I read Nintendo Power every month. The magazine’s previews of the Super Nintendo made me really excited for the system. The year that it came out, I bugged my parents to get me one for Christmas. I’m really glad that they did get it for me, because I loved just about every game that I played for that system.

It introduced the Mario Kart franchise with Super Mario Kart, which is still one of my favorite game series. RPGs are now one of my favorite genres, and I was introduced to my first RPG on the system with Super Mario RPG.

Nintendo also seemed to be a lot more generous with their games at this time, remaking some of their NES games with updated graphics and bundling them together on one cartridge, rather than releasing the remakes separately like they do today.

I’ve played a lot of different video game systems over the years, but the Super Nintendo is probably my favorite out of the bunch. The system has a lot of my favorite games, and also a lot of my fondest video game-related memories.

All video games in the 1980s were based on programmed patterns, but the laserdisc arcade games were the most obvious. You can’t control the character directly, but instead have to wait for a specific time between the animation to push the right button or you’ll die.

That made for very frustrating gameplay, and meant that you’ll see the death scenes a lot. Thankfully, in Dragon’s Lair, the death scenes are just as beautifully animated as the scenes that progress the story. I’m pretty horrible at games like this, so thankfully the laserdisc emulator Daphne lets you play the Digital Leisure DVD of Dragon’s Lair with the option to have unlimited continues.

It is animated by Don Bluth, who was a former Disney animator who went on to form his own animation studio with The Secret of NIMH as their feature film debut. The Disney influence is very evident here, as the animation is truly beautiful.

The voice acting does not fare as well as the animation, but thankfully the narrator is excellent. His is the only voice you’ll hear often, with the exception of the hero Dirk’s grunts, groans and screams which aren’t too jarring to listen to. Princess Daphne on the other hand, has a very grating voice. Throughout most of the game, you don’t hear a lot from her, except for a “Help! Save me!” occasionally in some scenes. In the final scene in the Dragon’s Lair however, she has a speech telling Dirk how to defeat the dragon. Her voice is very high pitched in an over-exaggerated “air-headed blonde” type of voice. I died a lot trying to figure out the right buttons to press to finally defeat the dragon, and I quickly grew tired of hearing that speech over and over again.

Thankfully, other than the part I mentioned above, the rest of the game is very enjoyable. With unlimited continues, I found the game to be a lot of fun.

I love The Curse of Monkey Island. It’s hard for me to decide whether this matches or tops the original two because it’s so different. It’s plain to see that this was made with a different team from the moment you start the game, but that’s no problem for me since it’s such a great game.

Monkey Island 2 ended on such a strange note (which I loved by the way) that I wasn’t sure how the Curse crew was going to handle it for the sequel. Strangely, they decided not to put any plot details up front, but just started the storyline fresh. Fans did get an explanation, but that came at the end of the game. I remember a lot of reviews criticizing LeChuck’s long winded speech containing all the plot points at the end of the game, instead of weaving it into the game. But, honestly, it all worked great for me. I had no problem with Guybrush writing in his memoirs in a bumper car as the only up front connection between the second and third game. And I definitely had no problem with LeChuck’s tirade at the end of the game. It worked great as a spoof of villains giving away the plot to the hero before they send them off to their doom.

I enjoyed the voices of this game. Dominic Armato gave the right amount of naivity in his portrayal of Guybrush, Earl Boen was the perfect voice for LeChuck, and I enjoyed the English-accented voice of Alexandra Boyd as Elaine, but I think I prefer Elaine’s American-accented voice in Escape from Monkey Island. The only voice I didn’t like too much was Stan’s. It was too slow, and really didn’t match the frentic pace of which Stan moves.

The music was great as always, and the puzzles were among my favorites in all of the LucasArts games. The puzzle where Guybrush was swallowed by a snake was definitely one of the most absurd puzzles I’ve ever played, but it was also one of the most fun.

About the only thing that disappointed me about this game was the features that I read were cut from the game due to budget constraints. I really would have loved to have seen Elaine’s fight that culminated in her shooting the track switch to save Guybrush from becoming an undead pirate. She was too much like a damsel in distress in this game, (although her punching Guybrush showed a bit of her previous personality).

The “Plank of Love” song that was supposed to play over the credits at the end also sounded like it would have been a lot of fun. I loved the Pirate Song (and especially the way they worked it into an interactive puzzle!), and I would have loved to have more music with lyrics to enjoy.

Still, even with the cuts, it is still one of the best games LucasArts made in my opinion. It’s near-Disney quality animation make it the LucasArts adventure game that stands the test of time the best visually too.

Super Mario RPG was the first RPG I ever played. When I was a little girl I remember thinking how much like an adventure game it was, and for a long time I used to confuse the terms RPGs and adventures. I since found out that RPGs and adventures both evolved from the same place: the text adventures on the mainframe computers of the 1970’s. So, now I can see that my confusion was quite natural. :)

Super Mario RPG features the biggest change in storyline a Mario game has ever seen. The game starts off as usual, with Mario fighting King Koopa to rescue Princess Peach. But, when King Koopa’s castle is taken over by a powerful force, Mario and Bowser actually team up to stop it.

That’s right, you can actually play as Bowser, King of the Koopas in this game! Princess Toadstool is also playable for the first time since Super Mario Bros. 2. Out of all of the Mario RPGs I’ve played over the years, the first one still has the most interesting cast of characters that become part of Mario’s party. There’s Mallow, a marshmallow-like little guy who was raised by frogs. And, Geno, a being who is as mysterious as he is powerful.

In this game, Mario doesn’t talk at all, and pantomimes everything that he says. This leads to some really cute and memorable animations as Mario relates the unfolding story to the people that he meets along the way.

The storyline starts the continuity that has been standard in Mario RPGs ever since. Star spirits live in Star Road and grant wishes to those who wish upon the stars. In this game, the Star Road has been broken into seven fragments by Smithy, the powerful entity that took over Bowser’s castle. Mario and his team mates have to find all seven pieces, defeat Smithy, and use the seven fragments to restore the Star Road.

The game is really cute, the music is great, and there’s some neat jokes along the way. My favorite involves a wall in Booster’s castle. I won’t spoil it, but it was classic Mario in a big way. :) I remember that the game was really hard, and that it took me a long time to beat Smithy when I was a little girl. Replaying it again, I now see that since RPGs were so new to me when I first played this, since it was my first ever, I wasn’t used to the concept of “leveling up”. I must have gotten to the last boss at a really low level. Looking back, it’s amazing I ever finished it at all back then. :)

I have always loved sloppy joes ever since I was a little girl. Sloppy Joe days in the school cafeteria were always my favorite.

I love everything about them, except for the fact that I always seem to drop some onto my top, and I’m never wearing an old T-shirt when I do. You think I’d learn by now, especially considering it’s name. :)

My dad was friends with professional golfer Joey Sindelar, who used to own a steak house. When we went there, I would often order the “sloppy joeys”. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember too much about that restaurant besides the sloppy joeys, well those and the cowboy motif of the restaurant’s decoration. Western restaurants aren’t exactly common in upstate New York. :)