Episode 3..thoughts
I loved the music once again.
I thought the art direction was really good. The casino looked great. Loved the carpet and surroundings. Lots of color.
I liked the story, in fact I think it was better than episode 2. It was more absurd and more in line with Sam & Max's zanyness
I liked how there were more steps within the puzzles, particularly the last puzzle.
Voice acting was great, the guy who does Boris from TTHE is great.
There just wasn't enough inventory items to provide any real challenge.
Seemed like a very short game, was over just as it got going.
I thought the art direction was really good. The casino looked great. Loved the carpet and surroundings. Lots of color.
I liked the story, in fact I think it was better than episode 2. It was more absurd and more in line with Sam & Max's zanyness
I liked how there were more steps within the puzzles, particularly the last puzzle.
Voice acting was great, the guy who does Boris from TTHE is great.
There just wasn't enough inventory items to provide any real challenge.
Seemed like a very short game, was over just as it got going.
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Comments
That was good..particularly what the Don revealed
The Indian Poker puzzle was fine -- perfect level of challenge there.
I think one problem is the hints. I want them to start explicitly marking the hints in the dialogue options. At this point I've finally learned not to talk to Max about specific situations and not to ask "What was that you said about ______ again?", but I wish they'd just put some sort of "hint" symbol there so we'd know that that dialogue option is basically a shortcut. The Sybil puzzle would've taken me longer if I hadn't been told to
The thing about this is that I want to see all the dialogue because it's all so wonderful... also, sometimes I legitimately do want to hear my "mission" restated because I didn't quite get it, yet I don't want that to be taken as an invitation to give me hints.
As for other criticisms, I think the "casino" was a bit underwhelming. Not a lot to do there. It felt much smaller than W.A.R.P. Clearly the time constraint played a part here...
On the plus side, the episodes get funnier and funnier, and this had the best story and climax scene so far. And the best animation, too.
The music, art and writing were all excellent, as in the previous episodes. The story (and writing in general) also seemed more appropriate to Sam and Max than in the previous episodes. You're getting closer and closer to perfection, keep up the good work!
I have to admit though, the game once again felt easier and shorter than the previous episode. This is a trend which you have got to reverse. If you do that and keep up the forward-momentum on the other fronts, I predict that when the season is done I'll commit the blasphemy of calling it better than Hit the Road.
Haven't had a chance to actually get going in the game yet, I'm going to have to install it on my beefy PC.
The climax was about 14.7 times better than both previous episodes put together, and i'm glad they're finally putting in some slightly more meatier puzzles, if only slightly (heh, meatball reference I guess).
One thing that someone's already brought up was a framerate drop. I agree, even in the original levels such as outside S&Ms office, my PC seemed to slouch, and it's still a decent spec by today's standards. I shouldn't really need to cut out anti-aliasing for a game like this, surely?
The simplicity of the puzzles does make me a little bored during the middle of the game. Going through those 3 ridiculously easy tasks was more of a chore than a challenge, there was never one point where I had to think.
Saying all that I still enjoyed the episode as much as the other two.
Overall the series is really good, but not great in my opinion. It falls down too heavy on the lack of locations and inventory items, making the whole thing a breeze.
Also, I found the lack of cheese, slime, poison, dismembered body parts or other comical items somewhat disturbing. Please bring back gross humor in future episodes!
About the frame-rate drop, its definitely a memory leak. With 1GB of ram and 1GB of swap, I exited S&M after completion and found that (a) it had trouble exiting(screen was black until I End Task'd it) and (b) windows had popped up "Virtual Memory Low".
Nice slow-mo scene at the end though.
With all of the episodes I have turned the music down slightly so I can hear the voices better. In episode 3, the levels were fine until
I found that the frame rate was slighter slower than the other two episodes and the game also froze once. Apart from that, everything else was fine!
As for the frame rate problem, check the Support forum. We're talking about it there.
HINT: Delete "prefs.props". You'll lose your basic game settings, but that doesn't take long to do again.
It seems like it's usually pretty clear which of Max's lines will give you hints (ie: most of them), but that's an interesting idea nonetheless. I'll keep it in mind (though at this point you might not see it before the end of the season).
Don't expect more game from the next episodes though.. their development time is the same as that one.. 1 month.. they are pumping em out now.
Actually the GWJ podcast suggests that the development schedules are at around a 3 month pace, Savage Critic indicates that he worked on Episode 3 nearly 5 months ago, and Jake has suggested more than once that the latter episodes seem longer and more difficult.
I'm just going by what adventuregamers.com said- "It is a troubling coincidence that the game with the quickest release turnaround contains the least new material, when the first two episodes with longer development cycles were able to offer more original interactions and characters—especially troubling because the next three episodes will each be only a month apart."
That's fine, but there are 3 direct Telltale sources (and a 4th, contract worker) right in my post to also go by. It's okay if you choose to go by just one source.
But if you're running around telling others that they shouldn't expect more game from the latter episodes, I'm letting people consider what people that have actually seen the episodes think, that speak to both the issues of game amount and development time.
While I know Evan personally and am beyond pleased that he's writing Adventure Gamers' Sam & Max reviews -- Evan hired me as a news writer for Adventure Gamers years ago to cover the just-announced Sam & Max Freelance Police... needless to say, my writing career at AG was short and ended in sorrow
Me too. I was really pleased when I first came across that in the game. Possibly my favorite part of the whole thing, though, was that when it first started, Sam had all of these dialog options available to try and reason with Leonard, but then I noticed that the Max dialog tab had appeared as well (always a treat!). I actually giggled when I clicked on it and saw that
It is pretty clear (by now, anyway), but take this as a compliment -- the dialog in these games is just so wonderful that I try to hear all of it.
Also, to reiterate, I sometimes DO want to hear my mission restated, but I don't expect to get an additional hint when I ask "what was I supposed to do again?" So that's another way I unintentionally get hints.
If this stuff seemed less like "part of the game" I think people would perceive them as being more difficult. And for the people who find that to be a problem, they could just go ahead and use the hints and we'd all be happy.
I agree--I want to hear everything Max says, but many times I know he's going to be providing a hint, so it's often a struggle--many of Sam's leading questions look like nice setups to wacky "Maxisms" (Maxims?) that I'll see the hint anyway... Yet I've also stated that I feel like I an outright hint system ala Bone would encourage people to abuse it--maybe it's a worthy tradeoff, since hint abusers that complain have only themselves to blame. I'm somewhat torn on the issue--it might also depend on what function Max then assumes if said hint system is implemented (I can see Max having both more/fewer functions as equally plausible results of a hint system).
This is a cool idea--reminds me of bumping into pirates on Melee Island in MI:1; the world would feel very alive. I would initially think that making secondary characters have enough things to say so that it wouldn't become repetitive would be hard in a talkie game, but Texas Hold 'Em kinda proves that idle random banter is possible.
Thats a good idea.. It would be fun to meet characters that are funny but have no direct relation to the puzzless.. it would fill the world a bit more too
A simple puzzle like that could increase the playing time and the overall feeling that you're actually doing something.
Secondly I felt some characters, like Sybil did not accordingly (not at all comment what had happened) react to what Sam did in this episode. Also feel that there has been a few real good spots in the episodes where Sam should have been able to use his gun to either arrest, threaten or shoot.
Also perhaps like mentioned, having more "side-characters" that are not directly related to the plot would help with the atmosphere.