Point-and-Click Adventure Game Review: Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - Strong Badia the Free

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.

Final Verdict: 4 out of 5

Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People - Episode 1 review

Strong Bad: Episode 3 review

Point-and-Click Adventure Game Review: Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - Homestar Ruiner

Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People is Telltale Games' new episodic series that follows in the footsteps of their previous hit, Sam & Max. Telltale has always been a company who blazes new territory in the often-forgotten genre of the graphic adventure, so Strong Bad is aiming in a slightly different direction than Sam & Max.

The series is being built with the Wii gamer in mind, although it is available for both Wiiware and Windows platforms. From the moment the first game in the series, Homestar Ruiner, starts up, it's console roots become apparent with the title screen, with its message to click a button to begin. However, even here, the humor in the title is evident. Strong Bad, the series' protaganist and namesake, comments on his surroundings with many humorous quips until the player pushes a button.

Once that is done, the player is taken to a menu that is themed after the menu screen of it's source material, homestarrunner.com. If you have never been there before, I strongly recommend choosing the Toons menu and then checking out some of the Strong Bad Emails. This game is funny enough to stand on its own, but it is full of so many injokes for series fans that even people who have watched just a handful of the cartoons on the site will appreciate it more.

The cast of characters in the game include series regulars Strong Bad, a neer-do-well wearing a mexican wrestler mask and boxing gloves, Homestar Runner, an athlete with no arms and a spech impediment, Marzipan, Homestar's hippy on-again-off-again-girlfriend, Pom Pom, a round ball who is also an athlete of sorts, Bubs, the sketchy concession stand owner, and Coach Z, the coach at the local track who has a penchant for rapping and maintaining poor hygeine.

The game begins with Strong Bad singing a very catchy song about his awesomeness, immediately followed by him checking his email on his Lappy 486. The e-mailer suggests Strong Bad "beat the snot out of Homestar", so after a humorous response to the letter, Strong Bad decides to give Homestar a pummeling. He heads to Coach Z's race track, where he finds out that there is a race and he's not invited to join. Strong Bad comes up with a plan to enter the race, and in the process ends up totally humiliating Homestar in the process. This is where the meat of the story begins.

Homestar decides to move into Strong Bad's house, since he can't show his face in public, and with his warped sense of reality, he views Strong Bad as his only true friend. Now, it's up to Strong Bad to somehow restore Homestar's reputation so Homestar will finally move out of the House of Strong and things can get back to normal for our masked anti-hero.

I have to say that the plot in this episode is very thin. The game is just a long Strong Bad e-mail, but it lacks much of the randomness as well as the funny out-of-character made up stories that are in the best SBEmails. It was a look into a regular day in Free Country USA, and as the email "boring" showed, there's not a whole lot of substance to a normal day here. That said, it does stay true to the source material, and the characters do stay true to their own personal nuiances throughout.

The saving grace of this game though is the humor, which is top notch. Homestar Ruiner is a very funny game. There are so many injokes in this game to please fans, as well as many general jokes that even people who are just vaguely familiar with the source material should find quite funny. Strong Bad, in particular, has many quips throughout the game that truly made me chuckle. His snarkiness truly helped keep the game from feeling too dull.

The game has many side activities, which is part of the game's experiment of adding in more traditional video game console-style elements. There is an Atari 2600 style game available on Strong Bad's Fun Machine in his room called Snake Boxer 5. This game is a simple game where you are a boxer who looks very much like a top down Strong Mad, who fights a Snake. There is no ending, the game just keeps getting faster and harder until you die. It's a fun distraction once or twice, but like the games from the era that it parodies, there isn't a whole lot of substance to it.

The other major mini-game in the game is the ability to make Teen Girl Squad comics. These comics star stereotypical teen girls who are toatally obsessed with boys, die grusome deaths and come back in the next comic, and are voiced by Strongbad in falsetto. The object of the mini game is to combine different objects with different girls to try to get each girl to die a painful, yet humorous death. Strong Bad grades each death based on how humorous he finds it. Througout the Homestar Ruiner game world, there are more pieces of paper with Teen Girl Squad objects to find. Finding these objects and combining them with the proper time girl at the proper time causes a death that Strong Bad finds more humorous.

The Teen Girl Squad score is added to your awesomeness factor, a rating by Strong Bad that also factors in other activities in the game such as annoying people or creating tree sculptures. Unlike most adventure games, this does give Homestar Ruiner some replay value. Completing the game doesn't end the collection either, as Telltale created what they call "Extended Play". Here, players can keep trying to raise their awesomeness factor as well as talk to the game's characters to hear their final thoughts on the events of the game.

It's nice to see Telltale continuing to experiment with taking their games in new directions, much as they did with Sam & Max Season One. That series picked up momentum as the season went on, so I have high hopes that Telltale will do the same with Strong Bad. At this point, Strong Bad Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner is a fun game, light on plot, but heavy in humor. The mini-games and console-style collect everything side quests do help with replay value somewhat, but at this point they don't seem to add much for those who aren't completists. The ability to hear from characters in Extended Play after the story ends, however, is a very welcome feature.

Final Verdict:

3½ out of 5

Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Episode 2 review

Strong Badia the Free Released!

Today is the day! The second episode of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People has been released. Help Strong Bad reject the "fat-thority" of the King of Town and unite rebel factions in Strong Badia the Free.

Get it for Wiiware from the Wii Shop on your Nintendo Wii console or head to the website of Telltale Games to get the PC version.

As with Homestar Ruiner, the game contains a trailer for the next episode. The name of the next episode is Baddest of the Bands, and according to the IGN preview mentioned below of Strong Badia the Free, it deals with metal music. Hopefully Strong Mad will feature strongly in this episode, as he's a metal head. I love that big lug.

Flight of the Amazon Queen Updated

I'm going to use the LucasArts SCUMM defense again to make this post relevant. :) And for those who missed it that time, the defense is that this game now runs on a program originally designed to run LucasArts adventure games, so it somehow fits the criteria of Telltale (and the games previously made by Telltale employees) that this blog covers. :)

The freeware release Flight of the Amazon Queen, my second favorite free game currently supported for the 2D adventure game program ScummVM, has been updated to 1.1.

This version re-compresses the sound with the latest ScummVM tools so that any clicks at the beginning of speech should be fixed, as well as any problems with speech playing too slow. Although the slow speech problem has a work around in ScummVM 0.12.0, so you might not even notice that problem.

You can download the game for free from the ScummVM download page, and while you're at it pick up the latest version of ScummVM to play the game too. :)

Homestar Ruiner is out now!

Homestar Ruiner, the first episode of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, is available to purchase today. The PC version is available now worldwide, and can be purchased at Telltale's site.

US Wii owners can buy the Wiiware version from the Wii Shop Channel today. The European Wiiware release will be happening this Friday.

I have played through the game and absolutely love it. I'll post my review of the game soon. Be sure to check out the preview for the next game, Strong Badia the Free, from the menu of Homestar Ruiner (it also plays automatically after you beat the game). It's brilliant.

Wallace & Gromit Cinematic Teaser and other goodies

Telltale's Wallace & Gromit page has been updated with the fantastic cinematic teaser trailer from Comic Con so we can all have a chance to watch it now.

There are also renders, screenshots, concept art, and answers to frequently asked questions about the series.

I'm really looking forward to this one. Wallace & Gromit seem perfectly suited towards episodic gaming.

Wallace & Gromit and Strong Badia the Free

Telltale has announced their mystery game: Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventures, based on UK based Aardman Animation's Wallace & Gromit claymation short cartoons and movie.

In other news, although the first episode of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, Homestar Ruiner, isn't out yet, IGN has a preview of the second episode from Telltale's presentation at Comic Con. The episode is called Strong Badia the Free, and without spoiling too much, has a plot that involves Strong Bad in a struggle against the King of Town.

On the subject of this site, as you can tell, I have decided to do something to stand Telltale Fan out from the crowd a bit. I don't have the inclination to do frequent news. The International House of Mojo and Telltale's own blog are better sources for that stuff. Instead, I'll just be covering the big stuff, and each post will have a weird fan image created by me. :)

I'll also probably have some more fan stuff created by myself up at a later time. I have a lot of ideas, and a lot of enthusiasm for Telltale, so I'm sure I'll have a lot of neat stuff up here at some point. :D