Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: 8-Bit Is Enough

In 8-Bit Is Enough, video games collide with real life, and tons of meta humor and pop culture references ensue. Telltale has covered this ground before with Sam and Max: Reality 2.0, but they do enough differently this time that it doesn't feel like a retread and it still has the feel of the Homestar Runner universe going for it. I'm not sure if it's just me, but to me the game felt like it was easily the most elaborate and involved of the episodes design-wise, as tasks and goals were layered on each other and you always knew what you had to do next, even if you weren't sure how yet. They do seem to go a bit bigger with the last game in a series, and I definitely had a lot of fun with this episode and the games in general. I may actually have to watch more of the web cartoons now.

Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Baddest of the Bands

Humor-wise, the third Strong Bad episode was about as strong as any other, but it felt like a small dip in the gameplay department. I found myself stuck more often than I thought I should have in a game that only takes a couple hours. Some adventure games thrive on keeping the player stuck for a long time, but Telltale's work seems best when stuff comes more or less naturally and you're keeping it moving to the next joke. Also, I like the extra games they insert here and there, and the only one in this episode lasts for a few seconds before something happens that prompts the main conflict. Maybe you can play it for longer in the extended play mode that unlocks when you finish the main game, but I have too many things to play these days to spend a lot of time with something I've beaten. I liked how extremely convoluted Strong Bad's scheme to fix his game system becomes though, and besides the hold ups it was a pretty enjoyable entry in the series.

Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Strong Badia the Free

I enjoyed this episode more than the first, because like the still-superior fourth, it has a strong theme that ties the design in with the story. It's not that the first didn't work, but having an idea like each character declaring themselves ruler of their own little nation and making a world-conquering game out of it was enjoyable, and grabbed me more than my merely casual appreciation for the characters. I again ran into a problem where I was supposed to check something more than once to advance the game without any indication of it, but besides that the puzzles were a good combination of being solvable without getting too obvious. The climax takes place in a minigame outside the normal gameplay, but it was a fun departure from the normal experience rather than annoying. I also like how the earlier episodes tease features and new areas that will appear later, it's a cool way to keep people interested instead of just showing a trailer after the credits. I don't like Strong Bad as much as Sam and Max, but I appreciate the games.

Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Homestar Ruiner

What finally convinced me to buy the rest of the episodes were a couple of deals that together got me them for a mere $13, an offer I really couldn't refuse. The first episode isn't as clever as the fourth that I already played, but I enjoyed it for the couple hours it lasted. It's a bit strange to keep the differences between the two episodes in context, because this is the one that introduces the play style and all the environments, while the fourth puts a twist on the whole thing, dressing everything up like a homemade action movie. Homestar Ruiner follows what appears to be the standard formula for Telltale's adventures; a couple introductory puzzles, the main conflict which has three major parts to it, and then a couple more puzzles in the story's climax. After playing 14 of these it does seem kind of rote, but at the very least the solutions themselves haven't gotten repetitive. It's not as intuitive as some of their other work, with little stumbles like having to check your email again despite getting no indication of it, but it never falls on its face. A pretty funny, enjoyable bit of adventure gaming.

Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective

Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People was the next series of episodic adventures from Telltale Games, the people who made the Sam and Max ones. Not being enough of a fan of Homestar Runner to plop down my hard-earned money for it when it came out, but enough of a Wallace and Gromit fan to preorder their first season of games, I got my hands on the fourth Strong Bad episode as a bonus. It didn't quite convince me to pony up for the rest of them necessarily, but it was a reasonably enjoyable and sometimes funny few hours. Also it's probably the largest ratio of words-in-title to minutes-of-entertainment that I've ever seen.

Dangeresque is apparently a recurring concept from the cartoons, a low-budget series of detective films Strong Bad makes to flatter himself, sort of like everything else he does. The fact that the game is a homemade film within the story is played up throughout the episode, and was a pretty constant source of humor. From what I've seen I've generally appreciated the sense of humor and some of the wacky characters, although it's rarely laugh-out-loud funny and Strong Bad's voice can get really tiring after hearing it for a while. The puzzles weren't too bad, although a bit too easy some of the time, which came to a head when the final confrontation was resolved in a single obvious mouse click. A lot of the design is pretty clever, I just felt like the Sam and Max episodes were a bit more involved in addition to liking the characters more. Still, anyone who really likes these cartoons and clicking on things probably can't go wrong here.