The Stack

CSI: Hard Evidence was apparently made using the same development tools as the Sam and Max and Bone games, but it’s a real contrast in style. For that matter, Sam and Max is pretty different from Bone: wisecracking cynicism and urban decay vs. good-natured fantasy, as well as the contrast in puzzle style mentioned previously. But Sam and Max and Bone are both ultimately cartoons, rendered in a cartoony style. CSI, although pretty close to a cartoon in its exaggerated and stylized story content, tries to be realistic in its visual appearance, including human figures. And this, if you ask me, is one of its weak points. The regulars from the show are passable, but per-episode characters — the victim and suspects — live farther down in the uncanny valley. Mouths in particular seem troublesome, and tend to bunch up in odd ways when characters is talk.

More than that, though, Sam and Max and Bone are both based on the Sierra/Lucasarts paradigm: you have an avatar who walks where you click. CSI uses something more like a Myst-style interface. Movement between scenes is handled through a “locations” menu in your PDA (which also holds the inventory, options menu, and case details), but movement within a scene is handled through clickable hotspots. But the scene itself is rendered in 3D, and even without clicking, you can do some limited shifting around by means of the mouse — or, presumably, the right analog stick in the console versions, which seems like a better fit to the mode of interaction here. It’s not quite like any other game I’ve seen: the closest is Myst V in “panning” mode, but there, the panning was always just a matter of changing the camera’s orientation, not its position. Here, you can use the mouse to do things like circle a car and inspect it from all sides, if that’s the motion that’s scripted for that node.

Disclosure: I received this game for free from Telltale Games.

Now that I’ve completed all six episodes of season one, I’m wondering if mine was the best approach. Is it better to actually play the episodes episodically? Playing them as they come out undoubtedly lets you participate more in the Sam and Max fan community, speculating about things to come, even influencing the later content (as Merus points out in comments to my last post). But playing through the season all at once probably makes for a meatier experience. At one point in episode 6 (the last of the season), Max plays a videogame within the game, and complains “It was too short and not hard enough. I want my money back!”, an obvious dig at complaints in the forums. I haven’t followed the forums, but it’s inevtiable that people would make this complaint, as each episode takes just a few hours to play.

But I suspect I wouldn’t share that complaint anyway. I’m accustomed to short adventure games, thanks to the Interactive Fiction community and the annual comp in particular, so these episodes struck me as about the right length. Or possessing about the right amount of content, anyway. The episodes actually take longer to play than a typical comp game, but only because of the time spent walking Sam around from place to place — something I grew impatient with at times, and wished for a faster way to travel. (There’s a “warp drive” checkbox in the options menu, but apparently that’s just Telltale’s version of silly clowns.) So I may be one of the few people who wanted the episodes to take less time.

I wonder how much the folks at Telltale are aware of modern non-commercial IF? The Sam and Max games certainly show an awareness of their text-adventure heritage. Episode 5 features a whole scene set in a text-based environment, with Sam and Max themselves as the only graphical elements — a very stylish effect, I thought. It even uses that perennial only-possible-in-text gimmick, treating abstractions as tangible. Plus, there’s a sly shout-out to Zork in the beginning of Episode 4, subtle enough to pass unnoticed by the uninitiated. But the main influence on these games seems to be the classic Lucasarts games. Which may seem too obvious to point out — the first Sam and Max game was Lucasarts, after all, and Telltale seems to have quite a few Lucasarts refugees on staff. But what I mean here is the little touches, like the way responses to significant actions get shorter on repetition, and the way dialogue is used to provide hints disguised as jokes.

That last point reminds me a little of something John Cleese said about writing Fawlty Towers. The audience of a comedy show, according to Cleese, knows that anything that doesn’t lead into a joke immediately is a setup for a joke later on, and this robs the later joke of some of its impact. So he tried to make sure that all his setup material also yielded immediate humor, so that the viewer would be surprised at what was referenced again later. The principle is similar here, except that the goal isn’t (solely) an unexpected joke, but a moment of realization, when the player suddenly understands something’s significance without it having been shoved in their face.

Speaking of disguising your material, I notice that episode 5 keeps the whole business of doing things in threes (despite what I said before about episode 4 breaking the patterns), but tries to hide it by inflating numbers: there’s a group of four machines, of which one is useless, and a quest to obtain five gold coins, of which three are found together.

The threes come back with a vengeance in episode 6, though, with a very satisfying pre-endgame that puts Max in the center of a story. It seems pretty important to me that this happens. Of the two main characters, Max is the more emblematic of what they are, more gleefully chaotic, more disarmingly cute. If you see one of the duo alone in any context, it’s pretty much always Max. But these qualities also make him a difficult player character, and so for most of the story told by these games, he plays the role of Sam’s wacky sidekick. Even after he becomes president of the United States in episode 4, he’s Sam’s wacky sidekick whose wacky features include the presidency. But in episode 6, he becomes for a while the focus of the player’s attention, the thing that the puzzles are about.

By now, I’ve played enough of Sam and Max, Season One to notice some overall patterns. Most obviously, all the episodes share a certain amount of content. There’s always Sam and Max’s office and its neighborhood, including Bosco’s Inconvenience Store and Sybil’s, a storefront that changes in purpose from episode to episode, but always has the same proprietor. Episode 1 takes place almost entirely in this environment, leaving it only at the very end, while the other episodes treat it as a kind of home base that you return to once in a while for help with the puzzles in the episode’s main area. Episode 4 seems at first to break the pattern by starting in a completely new place, but the player returns to the old neighborhood before things are far advanced.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, let me make it clear: re-using content like this is not a bad thing. I’ve written before about how adventure games benefit from establishing a sense of routine, and the same basic idea applies to series. Repetition establishes a theme for specific puzzles to be a variation on, and helps the player to follow the author’s thought processes. Every episode here contains a car chase puzzle of some kind, but no such puzzle is ever repeated. Bosco always has some ridiculously overpriced gadget behind the counter, and the player comes to anticipate discovering how to get the necessary money from the episode’s new content. Even outside of the puzzles, the shared environment is used as a way to illustrate the progress of the plot: the office closet accumulates trophies of every episode, and there are multiple changes to the decor and its descriptions in the aftermath of episode 4.

There are also some less concrete patterns at work. The first few episodes established a very strong pattern of subtasks that come in threes. Most of the time, you have one major obstacle to overcome and three explicitly-enumerated things you need to overcome that obstacle. It’s a strong enough element that when I was told, in episode 3, that there were two tasks Sam needed to perform to infiltrate the Toy Mafia, my first reaction was “Wait, two?” (A third task was added before the conversation was over.) There’s even a threeness in the architecture of the core neighborhood, with its three sub-areas (the office, Bosco’s, and Sybil’s). But this starts breaking down in episode 4: I noticed a three-part task there, but it wasn’t the chapter’s major goal, and the subtasks were far from explicit.

The season has an overarching plot involving hypnotic devices supplied by an unseen mastermind; all the episode villains are either victims of hypnosis or using the devices against others. Each episode links to the next with a little foreshadowing of the next villain at the very end, and links backward with continuity references and a few preserved inventory items. The first three episodes don’t make any large changes to the status quo, and end with Sam and Max in pretty much the position that they started in, but that ends with episode 4. By now, you’re probably noticing a pattern yourself: episode 4 is the point at which the established patterns break, because the escalating wackiness can no longer be constrained.

For all that the characters of Sam and Max are emblems of the later point-and-click adventure, they’re not a terribly natural fit to the genre. If Steve Purcell (the creator of Sam and Max) hadn’t been doing art for Lucasarts at the right time, I doubt that anyone would have seriously considered them as potential adventure heroes. The original comics are driven by randomness and non-sequiturs. True, adventure games can and do get away with this sort of thing in the situations they present to the player. But the actions of the player character have to make some kind of sense if the game is to be solvable by any means other than exhaustive guesswork, whereas Sam and Max in the comics were just as unpredictable as their surroundings, and seldom did anything that could be expected to help their situation. Coming up with situations that let Sam and Max act like Sam and Max but still provide motivations for the player must have been a challenge. Some of the puzzles in the 1993 game were criticized for being too arbitrary, which is to say, for being too close to the spirit of the comics and not adapting to the new medium enough.

Season One has fared better so far. To the extent that it keeps the protagonists zany, it does so in ways that don’t require player involvement. For example, at the beginning of the first episode, Max has filled a closet with cheese, for no reason other than “you can never have too much cheese”. This is something that happened before the game starts, so it’s part of the premise, something that the player reacts to. But it’s also something that a player character did, and revealed in response to a player action (opening the closet), so the effect is similar to a player-initiated non-sequitur.

The dialogue is another big risk for an adventure adaptations. A lot of the humor of Sam and Max comes from the off-kilter tone of the dialogue, and the contrast between the the plush-toy appearance of the title characters and the casual and cheerful way they discuss horrors and mayhem. Examining an electric fan, Sam comments “Max almost lost a finger in a fan like that once,” and Max replies “Yeah, but it wasn’t my own finger.” This would cross a line if it were depicted visually. We know that Max is a furry little psychopath, and Sam isn’t much better — for all that they’re “freelance police”, they recognize no law beyond their own whims, and there are puzzles that hinge on this. But mainly we know it from their words, not their actions.

The reason this is a risk is that it’s all too easy for reliance on dialogue to hurt gameplay. Far too many adventure games and RPGs devolve into click-on-everything-in-the-conversation-menu for large chunks of the experience. Breaking a large text dump into a bunch of menu options doesn’t make it less of a large text dump, and that’s not what people play adventures for. Fortunately, the folks at Telltale seem to be fairly sensitive to this, and keep the menus fairly trim and mostly optional, as well as using them for an unusually large number of actual dialogue-based puzzles, rather than just infodumps. In fact, most of the trademark Sam and Max dialogue doesn’t come from the conversation menus at all, but from responses to examining things, as in the electric fan example above. This is a point where having a sidekick unexpectedly helps: Max is an independent observer who can argue with Sam’s descriptions and comment on his actions even if you never talk to him explicitly.

Ah, Sam and Max: absurd and grotesque, snappy and cynical. Their humor is always at least partly grounded in their horribleness. I’m a fan of theirs from way back, even from before their first adventure game in 1993, or their cameos in various other Lucasarts titles. Back when they were an obscure indie comic book.

So you might think I’d be among the first to snap up the newer episodic Sam and Max games. But I didn’t, because I was wary of Telltale Games. I had played Telltale’s first adventure, an adaptation of the comic book Bone, and found it disappointing. The adventure content was minimal, as was the interactive detail: the bulk of the player’s time was spent on a series of lame mini-games shoehorned onto a story that didn’t really want them. And when I say “series of lame mini-games”, the part that bothers me the most isn’t the “lame”, but the “series”: the game was very linear, following the source material very closely. Most of the time, there was only one thing to do.

But the Sam and Max games aren’t adaptations of existing Sam and Max stories, and thus avoid a lot of the difficulties of adaptation. (Even the 1993 game, Sam and Max Hit the Road, which took a lot of its ideas from the “Surfing the Highway” comic, has an original story.) I’ve played through the first episode by now, and it’s got classical adventure game structure: after a brief prologue in a constrained area, it sets the player loose in the main game area with three major goals to pursue simultaneously and independently, followed by another, smaller set of three goals, followed by an endgame. And some of those subgoals provide good “Aha!” moments.

So, currently, I’m pleased. I’ll see if I can get through episode 2 tomorrow and try to spot common patterns. It really seems like each episode wants to be completed in a single sitting.