...my opinion about episode 3
Okay, episode 3 is another enjoyable adventure and more or less comes with the same strengths and infirmities as the other episodes before.
It's kind of short and too easy. I only got stuck for a while in the beginning when
You feel this lack of challenge and depth even more as you already got through e1 and e2 and so are more experienced by now. Take for instance the final scene were you have to
I really wonder what's wrong with my brain that this is so plain easy...
Contrary to e2 and the in my opinion unfunny and displaced cow the appearance of Leonard was nice as i accidentaly played Texas Hold'Em the day before and Boris Krinkle was a character i really enjoyed - old banana head! :O)
Beside of Leonard i couldn't enjoy the characters of e3 as much as the ones of e2. The characters in e2 were great! In e3 they were somehow steril and i didn't find them interesting.
There were some really good animations in e3.
The music was nice as always but despite how much i liked the song number ten i found it displaced for the scene and the mood there. I'm not sure if this comes because i've been listing to the song before but i guess even if not i would have choosen another one there. And again in this room, there would be so much to explore and use for riddles but nothing nada zero zip, so much artwork and it's not beeing used!
Technically i had some issues that the game was jerking from time to time. This also showed up in old scenes like for instance when Sam&Max walked along the office street. I didn't experience this before. Also with the sound i noticed that Sam was sometimes speaking more silent and louder in the same dialogue - in the gambling room for instance.
All in all i would give it one point less than the other episodes before as it still lacks what i'm waiting for, so i would give it a 7 out of 10. I'm really looking forward to e4 and the hopefully improvements on this one!
Thanks,
taumel
It's kind of short and too easy. I only got stuck for a while in the beginning when
i had to deal with Leonard because i didn't examine the room good enough and so missed the big shiny nose which also was a little bit of a problem due to the camera/steering in this room.
But beside of this it was more like a movie were you had to click a few times in order to keep the movie playing. Mostly you know already what to do and just wait for the characters to do so.You feel this lack of challenge and depth even more as you already got through e1 and e2 and so are more experienced by now. Take for instance the final scene were you have to
defeat the don and manufacture the toy in order to hypnotize him beeing on fire.
You get the idea, do it and that's it, over. In old skool adventures you would think of the obvious but then *oops surprising* there would be a hurdle or two in between so that it's actually a challenge for which after you've solved it get a reward in the form that the game is going on. I'm really missing this. I sometimes felt like the game doesn't need me at all. Really improve the puzzles difficulty, inventory puzzles, insert misleading things, add some more depth puzzles with some hurldes in between. Not every puzzle has to be a harder one of course. The mix is the key.I really wonder what's wrong with my brain that this is so plain easy...
Contrary to e2 and the in my opinion unfunny and displaced cow the appearance of Leonard was nice as i accidentaly played Texas Hold'Em the day before and Boris Krinkle was a character i really enjoyed - old banana head! :O)
But speaking of Leonard the part were you have to squeeze something out of him was a dissapointment as the options weren't funny at all and again it was way too easy. If you implement something like a Monkey Island Sword fight then why don't you do it right? Funny options and challenging in a way that each time you choose something wrong he relaxes one step again, so that you need three or four right insults in a row to beat him. You know in Monkey Island you also would have to look for where to learn the right insults first - i miss such things.
The other mini game the "whack a rat" also was too easy. Why not decreasing the score if you hit a wrong one accidently? But hey i loved the sapceship door! :O) But i missed some more detail on the flower at the entrance, a little bit swinging or a normal map, she looked so sad.
The other mini game the "whack a rat" also was too easy. Why not decreasing the score if you hit a wrong one accidently? But hey i loved the sapceship door! :O) But i missed some more detail on the flower at the entrance, a little bit swinging or a normal map, she looked so sad.
Beside of Leonard i couldn't enjoy the characters of e3 as much as the ones of e2. The characters in e2 were great! In e3 they were somehow steril and i didn't find them interesting.
There were some really good animations in e3.
I enjoyed the ending scene with the robot arms, the pumping pipelins and the nice animations of Sam&Max. Really well done!
A thing i'm not sure about are the mimics of Sam&Max. Each time they show up it more looks like somekind of polygon cancer to me. And also if it would be done well, i don't know if they would be needed due to that part of the humour of Sam&Max to me comes out of the fact that they say different weird things with stoic faces.The music was nice as always but despite how much i liked the song number ten i found it displaced for the scene and the mood there. I'm not sure if this comes because i've been listing to the song before but i guess even if not i would have choosen another one there. And again in this room, there would be so much to explore and use for riddles but nothing nada zero zip, so much artwork and it's not beeing used!
Technically i had some issues that the game was jerking from time to time. This also showed up in old scenes like for instance when Sam&Max walked along the office street. I didn't experience this before. Also with the sound i noticed that Sam was sometimes speaking more silent and louder in the same dialogue - in the gambling room for instance.
All in all i would give it one point less than the other episodes before as it still lacks what i'm waiting for, so i would give it a 7 out of 10. I'm really looking forward to e4 and the hopefully improvements on this one!
Thanks,
taumel
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Comments
As for the rest of the game, I loved it. My only gripe is that one of the bears sounded exactly like Bosco, but that's the only thing. Bosco himself was great. As was the game.
Oh yeah, and the memory leak thing sucked a bit, but I'm sure you guys can find a solution to that in episode 4, right?
As for the puzzles: Yes they are logic but they're too easy.
We all want longer games... but your thread is just aother "about the difficulty..." answer.
And about
I really love this episode, the ambiance was so great, mafioso with teddy bears, so unpersonnal, as puppets. I love the music, a very great work about lightning, a better animation (and facial animation, like max's mouth or even his face, which is not for me ugly or something), It's the best for me, there is many improvements in it, the only deceiving thing is that it's too short... but now it's in 4/3 even if your display is on 16/10, they even cut the intro of street music ! very great
By the way i'm curious when Bosco will enter his german phase. If you need some help i'm german...bavarian! :O)
I just finished the game and found it to be the shortest and easiest to date. The nose puzzle wasnt hard at all, especially since the camera points right at it when you pass the entrance....
Just three new rooms was a little small.
Hope the games will be harder in the future.
Despite all of that, I am still happy those games exist.
Cheerio!
Sam and Max has the best shot of bringing adventure back into the mainstream by keeping things accessible and focused on the story and writing and bringing more potential fans into the fold that might not even know what an adventure game is.
I only can speak for myself and the people i've talked about this and the only reason not to buy each adventure anymore is simply because they've released a lot of crap. Take for instance the last Broken Sword Title. What a brilliant first title and then everything got worse. I bought part 1,2 and 3 but not the last one anymore as it simply wasn't working for me in many aspects anymore and so did others.
Regarding the puzzle's difficulty i wonder why the majority on this list as well as the majority of the gamemags i've read exactly say this: That it's too easy and lacks some depth?!
A good game isn't strong in only one aspect. It has to be good on several ones and as for adventures games this strongly involves puzzles!
But there's the evidence that at least one combining puzzle might make it's way into the game as
Same with Sybil. Does it feel logic to take her cup of coffee away right in fornt of her without distracting her or finding a reason for her to give the cup away?
So...
There were quite a lot of adventure games beeing released the last years especially from german companies but they do all lack in the quality aspect somewhere. May it be the puzzles, the characters, dull dialogues, too short and so on.
Personally i really would prefer having one very good adventure game (a 9 or a 10) instead of dozens of okayish adventures and that's something i haven't seen since a long long time.
The solutions to puzzles are to logical and therefore to easy, and there's so little new places with so little things to click, you have to have the memory of a 2-year old to not realize what to do.
Even more, all the characters point out what you have to do (spoiler: you see leonard look up behind you towards the nose), and everything is right there where you need it(spoiler:the screwdriver is laying right next to the broken one-armed bandit, the ketchup is at bosco's since ep 1 so you know it's there.
Overall, entertaining? yes. funny? wellll, somewhat maybe. Getting very close to being to short/easy for even the small amount of money it costs? definetly.
I totally agree with your speech about "half enigmas", if we take Monkey Island or Broken Sword, we have to find always a wat to distract or influence people to obtain what we want.
But I think things are getting harder in next episode.
And about a single one adventure, well... the problem is that when I have one, I finish it in three days, here it's just like playing a good game every month. But only a good game, that's true, not more... a single adventure let have something I love : useless people and inventory objects. In episodic format, every single character has a role, just like it was an articulation of the mainline. But there is no really distracting and funny useless people like we have in a broken sword for example ^^
Yes, a great single adventure would be fine also... but waiting two or three years for thre days of playing... it's hard
Sacrebleu! I'm french and I don't speak like that! Sons of a cordon bleu!
Ouh lala! I've really enjoyed the jokes about french peoples, you've got a funny thought of us
Aurevoir, chers américains! (Et habitants d'autres pays!)
Sorry, but unless you have some sources I am unaware of, you are only ASSUMING why adventure games fell out of favor. There were plenty of games with logical puzzles. Why couldn't it have fallen out of favor because of better graphics and the coming of FPS popularity, online games, better graphics on consoles, etc?
Last I checked, at least 5 adventure games come out each year, which is still more than pc rpgs.
Your whole argument is based on the fallacy that you alone know why adventure games fell out of popularity.
If the future of adventure gaming is based on super easy 6 item puzzles, then I want nothing to do with it.
Btw, why has myst been so successful(1-5 which was released JUST LAST YEAR)? It is anything but simple...
Syberia brought people back to adventure games... Sam and Max(super easy and super short) is very unlikely to.
Plenty of great logical adventure games have come out since the decline in 1999 or so-
The longest journey, syberia 1-2, barrow hill, dark fall 1 and 2, runaway, return to mysterious island, voyage, agon, myst 4 and 5 etc. None of these were easy or simple or short. All did well.
The knock on effect of this is that the episodes become very short, only taking one or two hours to complete tops.
The number of Characters and objects in the game are way too few, this radically decreases the number of possible combinations of objects/people to complete a puzzle.
I hope to see more from the last 3 episodes, it seems obvious that there is much grander plot going on, I hope that the last episode contains all the locations from all the previous episodes with at least one main puzzle in each so the final episode is longer and harder.
I still like the series because I've paid for all the episodes, and I'm a great lover of the original, but should there be a 2nd series I think i'd avoid it unless there was the promis of much more difficult puzzles.
Also going to add Keepsake, Al Emmo, Ankh, Scratches, Samorost 2, The Moment of Silence, Still life, Broken sword 3 and 4, myst 3, Faust...
None of these were easy or simple or short.
How could you say there is a decline in adventure gaming with 20+ titles released with good reviews in the last 5 years or so!? Name 20+ pc rpgs with good reviews in the same time... I don't see anyone complaining about the death of them! Adventure gaming has experienced a revival and it hasn't been because of super easy gaming.
As for the idea that these games need to be this easy to be mainstream, I do think the reviews have disproven that theory. Almost every reviewer thinks the games are too easy and (therefore) too short, and that's not something that will encourage people to spend money on the episodes, is it?
Hooray. We're repeating ourselves... :rolleyes:
Oh, and here's a point for you...
The Myst series has been so widely popular not because it's hard (in fact, the hardest game, Myst 4, is one of the least popular, for that very reason), but because it has, by and large, appealed to an extremely large population of people... Young, old, male, female, rich, poor, any race you like, the list goes on...
And although I really don't expect you to believe me, but that's pretty much exactly what Telltale is doing by making their games maybe a little simpler than you'd like.
Actually, no.
2 things:
1. Name one super easy 6 item puzzle (yes, I realize that the context is hyperbole, sarcasm and exaggeration--but have you ever realized that those are generally frowned upon debate tactics?)
2. Assuming said "super easy 6 item puzzles" are indicative of Sam and Max: Season One and you want nothing to do with it, then why are you here?
---edit:
Ok, I've just thought about this and I feel that my issue is just the way you say things; while many people qualify their opinions with "In my opinion, 'I believe,' or 'I have a different opinion,' you go and say things very definitively--you will say things like "Sorry, you're just wrong," or "Such an opinion is ridiculous and unworthy of a response," "Who in their right mind would think/feel that way?" and "Don't expect the future episodes to offer any more game." Along with the point that these are opinionated statements that come off sounding like hard-set facts, such tones are also both presumptious and condescending--even worse when coupled with hyperbole--and in my opinion, it is a major reason why people respond to you the way that they do.
Noooooooooooooo, I can't believe it!
That was sooooo funny^^ Oops, excusez moi, les enfants, je suis hors-sujet^^
On that note, what do the quasi-French words that Bosco say translate to?
Sam and Max 1 and 2 both have about 6-9 items... therefore limited possibilities which make the games easy.
I have already answered the second question about 10 times now(all within the last week for sure). Feel free to look them up. They are not hidden. They have also been answered by others here in posts within the last 3 days. Additionally, the answer is obvious and logical. I know it is not a sam and max type puzzle, but it isn't hard either.
Using an opinion piece does nothing to prove me wrong other than providing another opinion.
I know--you've said that you are here and that you criticize in hopes of things getting better, but there is at least one post where somebody had the same sentiments (IE, I hope and expect the future episodes to be more difficult and offer more game) and you responded with something akin to "You shouldn't expect more game from later episodes."
In effect, you were actively discouraging people from expecting better. Why would somebody do that? In hopes of expecting better? That seems contradictory to me.
So you admit to asking a question you knew my answer to...
The next quote was taken out of context.. if you give the full quote, including the context, I will gladly clarify it for you.
In the off chance that it was the entire context, it would mean that episode 3 was already reviewed and was unanimously declared to be even shorter. Not referring to games that haven't been released yet.
Yes, because I feel it is contradictory.
Here is the quote, I think that it does refer to unreleased games.
Regardless of whether or not the development time has been corrected from 1 month to 3, your key point, that "their development time is the same as that one" is true, since Jake pointed out that "Minor details aside, episode two's production cycle was no different than three's, which will be no different than four's."
Therefore, expectation that there won't be "more game" in future installments due to the same production time as Episode 3.
QED: You are actively discouraging people from expecting better. Yet you say that you're purpose here and your reason for critiquing is so that you can expect better. But I feel that the evidence is contradictory, so I asked, not so that you can refer me to previous posts, but so that you can explain this apparent contradiction.
Geez... did you read the posts after that quote? Do so and come back...
Do you really want to play this game (again)? First off, how does it not refer to later games, which you insist?
Secondly, my original post already acknowledges that what happened afterward (correction of presumed development time from 1 month to 3) is tangential to your main point, that people should not expect more game because the latter episodes have the same development times as the 3rd episode, which remains true, whether or not it is 1 or 3 months.
Sorry, not going to play this game again.
I corrected my statement in that thread, therefore if you want to keep reading it with ignoring my correction, feel free, but I won't be responding.
If ep 4 is double the length of 1 or 2, I'll be back in the game rather quickly.. but if they are making money at a short length, they have no motivation to make it longer.. they'll just make the same.. but still hoping!
I'm trying not to feed him, but it is hard to resist. Remember- trolls=smearing people with other opinions/passive aggressive way to attack other members here.
Really? That's what you thought I meant?
I felt this episode was probably the easiest so far, and also felt like the shortest. Almost none of the puzzles seemed "deep" enough, and the phone call at the beginning felt like a cop-out - explaining things that should have required some exploration and discovery.
I haven't really laughed at much in the last three episodes - the humor just isn't as incisive as I expect from the furry duo. There have been a few moments that were chuckle-worthy (most related to Bosco - who alternates between being the funniest and most irritatingly un-funny character in the series so far), but nothing really notably funny.
One of the more glaring problems for me is the duo's (particularly Sam's) repetitive animations. I understand that they're probably necessary to keep the budget reigned in and churn out the episodes at the promised rate, but it just gets tedious watching Sam make the exact same movements over and over. The old sprite-based characters had a nifty unique animation for nearly everything you did, but the repetitive nature of their 3D avatars is such that for me the highlight of Ep 3 was watching Sam clutch his hat at the end.
However, the overall issue I take with the series is likely a result of the episodic nature, and something I alluded to earlier - there just doesn't seem to be enough "depth" to any of the puzzles.
Sure, the items in the closet will probably need to be combined in one of the final episodes to solve a puzzle, but the inability to carry items or puzzles over from one episode to the next really limits the complexity, and therefore the challenge and sense of accomplishment associated with any of the puzzles.
It might be nice to have a few items (or changes to the environment) carry over from episode to episode in order to add a little meat to the puzzles as the series progresses. For instance, why didn't I need to find (or acquire) some item at the abandoned(?) television studio in order to complete a puzzle in the current episode? (There were a lot of then-useless props in that first studio set when we last visited...) It's not like it would require the production of many additional assets to re-use the location.
Or what if, in order to obtain Bosco's latest "ingenious invention", you had to acquire for him some random knob or knick-knack that you would find incorporated into his next invention in the following episode. ("Why exactly do you need us to bring you a vacuum cleaner, Bosco?" "It's a secret, but I can tell you this: it's going to suck!")
Obviously, those aren't specific requests, but just examples of the type of things that could at least add the illusion of depth and continuity to the puzzle aspects of the game.
(Ok, so we did have one item from Ep 1 - the "Tear Gas Grenade Launcher" - at the start of Ep 2.)
Since I bought the entire season, each episode will probably be worth the $6 I paid for it, but I just don't feel like the series is living up to the reputation that the Sam and Max title deserves.
True, but they could add more locations and more items if each episode were 5-7 hours. It isn't the standalone that's hurting them as much as the fact that they want to pump them out. Raise the price a few bucks and double(triple) the length I say.
Telltale stated people can jump in an any point in the series, and while strictly true, it's pretty clear that anyone who does so is missing out on the overarching plotline.
And what do you mean the series is being held back from building each episode? Are you playing the same games as everyone else?
Plus, didn't the tear-gun thing carry over from Episode 1 to Episode 2?