Richard's Online Journal
[12/08/08] Strong Bad’s Yadda Yadda
I like Telltale Games a lot, but goodness, they know how to pick nightmare licenses. With Bone, it was retelling a story that could largely be self-spoiled via Wikipedia. Sam and Max - a series I always look forward to new episodes of - wasn’t just going up against the original Lucasarts game, but at least three pairs of rose-tinted glasses on the noses of everyone who ever played it. What next? Lego The Bible? Bacon: The Game? Oooh! That long-awaited episodic Planescape / Day of the Tentacle / System Shock crossover? As far as I know, they’ve not ruled it out.
That means there is Hope.
I wonder if there’s an alternate universe where Homestar Runner remained the star of his own cartoon? Hope not.
With Strong Bad’s Awesome Game For Cool People, they’ve done it again. For all the simple graphics and effortless humour of the website, this is a pretty challenging license. As such, what really interested me while playing through my review copy wasn’t how well it played - and it plays great - but how it handled some of the pretty unique challenges in converting the free online shorts into a standalone commercial gig.
With the assumption that you find the H*R crowd entertaining in the first place firmly in mind - you’re obviously not going to get much out of this one if you don’t, and to get my bias out of the way now, I’ve got the Strong Bad E-Mails DVD on my shelf - let’s take a closer look. Or not. Your call, really.
Oh. You’ve decided to? Drat. That means I have to type more stuff. Okay…
Okay. What do I mean by challenges? Ignoring the obvious ones like ‘making games is hard’, it’s down to the source material. For all its good stuff, HSR isn’t an easy universe to turn into a game. The actual world is little more than a handful of empty backgrounds for the characters to stand on. The humour is primarily built on zany non-sequiturs and in-jokes that would leave your head spinning if the Brothers Chaps didn’t have a terrifying knack for dragging you along with the flow.
In addition, unlike Sam and Max and Bone, there’s no content vacuum to be filled. Homestar fans get at least one fix every week for free, and not just cartoons. The main site offers a ridiculous archive of toons, toys, gimmicks, interactive bits, Easter eggs, and even full games, from the Videlectrix retro parodies to bigger offerings like Peasant Quest, Thy Dungeonman, or Stinkoman.
That’s American McGee’s Snake Boxer 5 to you.
The games are a particular problem, because while they parody and subvert the hell out of their different genres, Strong Bad’s Ageless Faceless Gender-Neutral Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person is… pretty much your standard adventure game. Not a problem in itself; a good adventure is a thing of beauty, even if Penny Arcade Adventures is relentlessly atrocious. It’s just odd. I was expecting something that played much faster and looser than this. Strong Bad is a great main character, and there are some wonderful moments. However, so much of HSR is built on character interplay from the ensemble cast’s shared insanity, switching to simple sarky quips and two-man dialogues can’t help but feel a little… not bad, definitely not bad, but lonely.
The main loss is one of pacing. With the player in the driving seat, the flow doesn’t always flow that well. It’s A Strong Bad Adventure Game before it’s A Strong Bad Game Which Happens To Be An Adventure - the design seemingly locked to what Telltale knew it could do rather than the boundaries of the license itself. Compared to a Strong Bad E-Mail, this first episode feels extremely slow, with far too much wandering around not really doing a whole crap of a lot - especially if you get waylaid by the puzzles.
When it’s in full flow, no problem. The writing’s great, the voices as perfect as you’d expect, and things like the fully customisable map and very well converted 3D graphics convey the feel brilliantly. I’d spoil a few of the moments just to demonstrate this, but that would be mean. Episodic games like this really need to be allowed to unfurl on your screen, even if they leave you tapping your toes at times.
The graphics couldn’t be closer to the original cartoons if they were re-used in Limbo of the Lost II.
Still, those puzzles are a bit of an issue. Most of them revolve around Strong Bad doing naughty things, as it should be. The catch is that when said naughtiness is part of a puzzle solution, the spontaneity of it gets lost. An adventure game puzzle needs a strand of obvious logic that the cartoons routinely replaces with a can of sardines. You end up doing Thing X because Problem Y is in your way, not because of the Laws of Awesomenessitudity. There’s tons and tons of dialogue to cover your actions, but little in the way of cut-scenes and twists, and moments where you give an instruction that seems pretty reasonable and see Strong Bad spinning it off in some fantastically fantastical direction that only the Brothers Chaps could possibly make work.
Take one of the big set-pieces – rigging a race. Everyone loves watching Dick Dastardly deploy a deadly trap. This section is closer to watching him pore over blueprints, shop around online for parts, assemble the equipment, perform a brief Heath and Safety check… and then watching it work perfectly and win him the Wacky Race. By the rules of traditional adventures, anything else would effectively be stealing the victory out from under your nose rather than Strong Bad’s. It’s not as funny when it happens to you. Likewise, the pacing of retrying the race, of object-hunting for everything you need, all the other stuff that would normally be handled in a jump-cut… it doesn’t fit.
(Slipping into armchair designer mode, it’s a scene that would almost certainly have felt better either without inventory elements, or with confirmed objects in hand - had it been a simpler puzzle built around environmental factors and slapstick puzzle solutions. Still, there’s a fun twist at the end, and it’s a pretty easy puzzle.)
Overall though, it’s a well designed little adventure. It’s funny and well written. The puzzles are fun without being desperately exciting, but if you like the cartoons, it does an admirable job of matching the style. If you don’t, well, sucks to be you. One moment in particular is a major exception to the critical path naughtiness issue, and it works brilliantly.The plot anticipates your immediate reaction to a situation, gives you something you’re going to do regardless of whether or not it’s important, and promptly builds the second act around the repercussions of it.
I’d say more, but it would kill the gag. So I won’t.
See? This is me being silent.
Not one word passing my fingers.
CAPTIONED!
Like the cartoons, the basic adventure is packed with all kinds of extras. Four or five kinds, anyway. There’s one of Strong Bad’s intentionally crap retro games, Snake Boxer 5, with a bonus mode available if you collect all the manual scattered around the game. There’s an odd dimensional-shifting photo booth, where you can take pictures of Strong Bad in different costumes. Bit weird, that one. Cutting up hedges gives weird and wonderful bits of HSR themed topiary. Oh, and you get to make a Teen Girl Squad comic, where the puzzle is trying to kill off the characters in true SHAKESPEARED! style. It’s a perfect bit of HSR fun, with the only downside being that you can ‘finish’ it without actually being able to win. Still, my third favourite bit - the others being a bit of gratuitious nudity (but not the kind you want to see) and the word “FOOTSTEP!”.
It makes semi-sense in context, I promise.
Like the cartoons, most of the best bits come from the smaller stuff. A raid on the King of Town’s castle throws up great gag after great gag after great gag, and you can’t not grin at Strong Bad interrupting random background chatter with “Shut up!” at the start of each conversation. I’m not sure how much non-fans are going to get out of it, but ironically I think the danger is them thinking that they’re missing out on more than they actually are. It’ll be interesting to see. But probably not as much fun as Episode 2 in a month’s time. Mmm. Actual episodic gaming…
Clearly, he doesn’t type with boxing gloves on. It’s text to speech software. I aveneue sorbet the mist eerie!
(“What would you have done with the HSR license, Richard?” you don’t ask. Probably something very meta, I ponder to myself. Think Muppet Babies. Each episode pastiching a particular recognisable genre/game, with the characters taking on roles within the fantasy. A PI episode themed around Dangeresque for instance could be a parody of noir stories, with puzzles built around world bending. For instance, if Strong Bad gets thrown into jail, he can escape by stepping back into the ‘real world’ and just picking up the cardboard box. Or getting rid of Homestar Mob Hitman by phoning Marzipan.
That kind of jazz, anyway. Recognisable setting, fresh context, borrowing themes from the regular episodes but giving them a depth that a short cartoon can’t easily handle or abridge. I’d also have put in a screen half way through inviting players to send money to my secret PO box on the promise of something wonderful happening. It’d be true. I’d be over in the States eating Ghiradelli banana splits by the end of the week.
What? Sounds wonderful to me...)
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Heh. There are others - ask Mike Channell on PC Format. Penny Arcade Adventures is dreadful though. Not funny, a silly setting to base a series on (one episode, sure), with terrible, badly thought out combat (I particularly like it when speech bubbles obscured the start of fights) and just general blah. Terrible game. I shun it completely.
I played the PC version of Strong Bad, but from what I can tell, they’re going to be the same. I’d want to play it on PC just to keep my arms from aching off. The really stunning thing is that John Walker enjoyed it too (we disagree on Sam and Max - I say it’s a fun, if not as funny as it should be series, again largely due to pacing issues more than the actual lines, he says DEATH TO THE INFIDELS! and runs off waving a machete or something). I really didn’t like it the first time I played it. Too much trying to work out what was part of a puzzle and what was a bonus, with the problems above really annoying me. When I came back to finish it off, I warmed to it quite a bit.
And yep, I’ve had a copy of Braid for a while. It’s a really, really clever game. It reminds me a lot of Psychonauts, in that neither is a particularly good platformer, but to smack it too hard for that is utterly missing the point. It’s probably the last real time-bending game we’ll see for a while, but a damn good send-off. I hope Blow does really well out of it.
Posted by Richard on Tuesday 12th August
“It’s a really, really clever game. It reminds me a lot of Psychonauts, in that neither is a particularly good platformer, but to smack it too hard for that is utterly missing the point.”
Your impeccable brevity and precision are reasons you, sir, are a proper scribe, and I am a mere fan of yours.
As far as your criticism of pacing in S&M;, I’m afraid that I have to agree with that despite really loving both seasons. However, just to make sure: are you referring to the pacing issues due to “reboots” in-between episodes, or within any given one? (I can certainly see both causing an issue, though.)
P.S. You’re the man for teaching me sesquipedalian. That word is like an onomatopoeia, except with its own meaning.
Posted by MarioColbert on Tuesday 12th August
As far as your criticism of pacing in S&M;, I’m afraid that I have to agree with that despite really loving both seasons. However, just to make sure: are you referring to the pacing issues due to “reboots” in-between episodes, or within any given one? (I can certainly see both causing an issue, though.
Mostly the latter. Comic timing, the flow of the stories, the handling of the big moments… The series handles the minute by minute “Heh” level comedy pretty well (dialogue, wacky characters, item descriptions etc.). It’s not so hot at escalating that to milk-out-of-nose levels of laughter when the major set-pieces and grander comic moments turn up. If you chart a standard comedy, you’ll see peaks and troughs everywhere. Do it with Sam and Max, and it’s pretty much a straight ripple from start to finish, with the odd spike here and there for a particularly good bit, but rarely anything that hits a serious high. It’s missing much of the stuff that sets up the gag and makes them more than the few seconds of action that ends up on the screen, like giving characters dignity to be removed in pratfalls, exploring the effects of things that happen (take the incredibly weak zombie section of Ravers, for instance) and otherwise building the foundations for the big whammy.
(It’s more a problem with the first series and the first half of series 2, mind. Abe Lincoln, Beelzebub and Chariots all pull it off much, much better. And it’s a problem many comedy games face for various reasons; definitely not something unique to S&M)
Posted by Richard on Tuesday 12th August
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I just want to thank you for calling the Penny Arcade game “atrocious.” It seems that nobody actually bothered to criticize that title for any of its shortcomings… Thank you, I’m glad I have you in my Google Reader. :)
I’m looking forward to pay day, so I can buy this. Did you play the PC version or the Wii version?
And have you played Braid yet? :D
Posted by MarioColbert on Tuesday 12th August