Thank God LucasArts canceled Sam & Max: Freelance Police
Yep, I'm glad they did! For now I can look forward to a lot more Sam & Max adventures on a regular basis in the future, thanks to the wonderful people at TellTale!
For had LucasArts released Sam & Max: Freelance Police, that would probably have been the only game with S&M content for years to come.
True, it would have been fun, but only for a short period of time.
Now, instead, Sam & Max are coming to me on a regular basis, to satiate my need for cartoony mayhem and critical outlook on the world!
No, I wouldn't want to have it any other way!!!
For had LucasArts released Sam & Max: Freelance Police, that would probably have been the only game with S&M content for years to come.
True, it would have been fun, but only for a short period of time.
Now, instead, Sam & Max are coming to me on a regular basis, to satiate my need for cartoony mayhem and critical outlook on the world!
No, I wouldn't want to have it any other way!!!
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LEC'S FREELANCE POLICE COULDN'T HAVE BEEN BETTER THAN WHAT WE GOT FROM TELLTALE!
I have spend so much fantastic moments with Sam and Max during the last monthes, from the games over the Machinima shorts to the web comics... awesomes. And it just goes on and on and on and on...
And, oh my god, what brilliant music we were offered. Jared's work can definitely keep up with the work of the three former LucasArts music gods, Land, McConnell and Bajakian.
Congratulations Telltale! Keep them coming...
Stupid business decision made the development stop close to the end, but i had absolutely 0 worries, even less (minus 1 worries) seeing the near-final screenshots in magazines the month before the cancellation.
That said, the episode 4 is wonderful, and i think TTG has now the quality of these adventure games of the golden age era 93-97
Out of interest (I never really followed Freelance Police at the time) would it have been point and click, or would it have had the direct control system of Grim Fandango and EFMI?
If it had direct control, that would have been another good reason it was canned.
Still, it would be nice to see what was done.
I don't know how these things work, so I know it's all just a dream really, but as it's already fully worked out with regards to story, puzzles etc, they could make an offer to buy it, re-create it on the Telltale engine and release it as their first full game.
That would be great.
The only problem I can see is if Lucasarts behave like arse-holes about it all.
But this is then further complicated by the fact that the game was developed in an engine proprietary to LucasArts. Even if Telltale Games had the rights to the game itself, they don't have the rights to the engine used to make it (I don't know if it was made with SCUMM or not), and I wouldn't expect Lucasarts to part with that.
And trying to remake it in the telltale engine would probably be like starting over from scratch.
I also enjoy a big game where i got it all so i can set my own pace. I sure dont hope this is becoming a trend. The old facasion way is better, can only hope that after this season tellgames will make 1 big season 2.
I dont see why episodic gaming has to have these limitations you mention. Episodes could simply be in the form of a patch that adds more locations onto a map (HTR style), allowing the gamer to return to previous locations.
What amused me was how often you'd move forward to a new set of locations and be unable to return back to earlier locales - and more often than not often the transitions were accompanied by a major loss of inventory.
This so-called limitation of Episodic Adventures has been in many, many previous classics (Grim Fandango too, with 4 distinct chapters).
(Some) people seem to be forgetting that this approach (limited backtracking to earlier locations and periodic loss of now-useless inventory) is actually pretty common among full length adventure games too.
I love the new Sam & Max-episodes, but can't stop feeling that the episodic approach limits the experience. Or no, it doesn't limit the experience, the experience is great as it is, but it limits the number of different ways of creating an experience. To be honest, I think that the adventure game-title don't really fits the episodic approach. It doesn't feel like an adventure. "Adventure" has a more epic feel to it. In Sam & Max, a trip all around the USA has been reduced to walking around the neighbourhood and visiting some strange location. And there's nothing wrong with that, it just don't feel like an adventure. I love the adventure-feel in games, so I definitely prefer full adventures over self contained episodes.
Episodes with the scale of part 2 in CMI or year 2 in Grim Fandango would've been great. But you know, even if these parts are self contained in a way, they are just pieces of one large story. And even if that's the case in Season 1 too, the episodes are made to be a story in itself. The focus isn't on the surrounding story, the focus is on the single cases in each episode. And that's a huge difference. Like a friends-episode compared to Lost, where you're much more dependent on the previous episodes to understand anything. That's the curse of episodic adventure-games for my part. You have to make it totally understandable for everyone who hasn't played the previous episodes in the season.
Ooh, Meché
Regarding the idea of short, standalone, more-or-less independent episodes, I don't think that's necessarily a curse of episodic adventure games--it's just that Telltale believed that Sam and Max (with their history of standalone comic books and TV episodes) would fit well into the mold of a more sitcom-like standalone/independent model. The Bone episodes, for example, definitely feel more like a serial TV show like 24 or Lost, and though I haven't played it yet (maybe never), Myst Online: Uru Live, while episodic (they've added 1 new Myst age per month since starting up) also depends on the player having played the previous episodic deliveries before taking a crack at or understanding the story in the new Age (I might be wrong about this). And with the newly announced Dreamfall Chapters, Ragnar Tornquist has hinted that "Funcom will do to the serialized drama what Telltale did to the standalone sitcom in regards to episodic format."
Did you play (and like) Day of the Tentacle?
OK, how about "Thank Cthulhu LucasArts cancelled Sam & Max: Freelance Police"?
It's a shame that the company that once gave birth to the classic adventure games of yore seems to be turning its back on the genre so blatantly.
Especially if you consider that they are probably making more than enough money on the Star Wars games to run the risk of making not so many $$$ with new adventure games.
I doesn't make me hate the company, for I enjoy their non-adventure games a lot, but I do hope they will come to their senses in the near future and maybe hire TellTale to co-develop more adventures?
And let us not forget that LucasArts is not the only company to abandon the adventure genre. Sierra pretty much did the same!
I miss Roger Wilco!
At least Sierra allows them to be... available, through Gametap and rereleases as collections. Lucasarts seems to be forcing their old games into obscurity.
However, i would love to see freelance police be released one day.:rolleyes:
Yup, I did play it, and I loved it. You got a point. But you know, it still kinda had that adventure feel, that the S&M-episodes miss to an extent. It was a huge mansion x 3, and you got the feeling of new worlds by "unlocking" the past and the present, and exploring the different eras. It was an original concept too, and done well.
Yea, I didn't think about the Bone-episodes when I thought about the adventure part of a story, and seeing new places. Maybe that's more my cup of tea (as long as the world you are exploring is big enough to get a feeling of adventure). But I have no doubt that Sam & Max totally fit the sitcom-ish format too. It has never been that epic to begin with, but more plain fun
Let's add DOTT, Secret Files of Tunguska, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Toonstruck and a great deal of other adventure games to the list.
Well, not if we don't let them!
Ha!
Maybe we should invade the LucasArts forums! Ah yes, a siege that will make the horrors of Stalingrad and the D-Day landings of 1944 look like a picnic!
I think we should make use of my army of atomic supermutants!
MWOOOHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!
1st click
2nd click
3rd click
4th click
5th click
6th click and on
The Sierra collections are horrid though. I am happy to be able to buy games I never got the chance to play but they don't even give us manuals. Just the Adobe file. In fairness Lucasarts has done that with my copies of Sam and Max, Full Throttle, and The Dig but atleast they allow them to be played straight from the disk.
yes, I think that's the work of Activision. At least it's only re-released by Activision.
Do you really need a manual for those games? The interface was pretty standardized. I personally find them great, though I only have the Kings/Space Quest
I wish they'd do Gabriel Knight, and I'm still wondering why they didn't put KQ8 on the KQ collection
They still have to wait 4 weeks though.
But that's not my biggest issue when I buy a re-release of a game. What's most important is that the game runs fine in XP. From what I hear the Sierra games only has a copy of DOSBox on the cd as their "XP fix", while the Lucas Arts games has are re-written to run fine in XP. I rather want a game that is re-written to work natively on my modern PC(without damaging the original quality of the original game, of course).
Where did you hear that? Lucas has never and will never re-write any of their games for XP compat, it even says on their website that they can't ensure compatibility for their older titles on XP.
I for one am glad Lucas cancelled Sam & Max: FP, purley cause the shots I viewed from it didn't look all that good, and plus then we wouldnt of got yet more masterpieces from Telltale.