Sam & Max - Episode 03

!!!!Attention!!!! la critique qui suit est en anglais et en tant que telle, elle risque de ne pas être comprise par des lecteurs qui pense que pwned est un mot valide dans la langue de Shakespeare. Elle risque d'irriter à valeur égale tous les anglophone de naissance, ma maîtrise de la langue, bien qu'exceptionnelle lorsqu'il s'agit de chanter le bridge de Façon Sexe,n' étant pas parfaite.
J'aurais bien fait une traduction, mais la flemme m'en empêche, vous aurez donc droit à un copié/collé custom d'un post que j'ai fait sur les forums d'Idle Thumbs

Telltale is going to pull off a major thing when the team releases the 6th episode of the Sam & Max series in a few months : they are going to be THE FIRST studio ever to release a truely episodic game. So, in a way, these guys are pioneers, and because they are, it was kinda expected that they were going to make mistakes. Not deadly mistakes but ones that would serve the format and the genre on the long run. It is what I kept reminding myself while playing the first episode, trying to be prepared to see room for improvement and tweaking. The thing is that Culture Shock turned out to be great and Situation : Comedy even surpassed it in every way and that, for a while, really convinced me that Telltale was going to pull it off without making a single mistake.

Episode 3 kinda broke this idea.
The disappointment doesn't lie in this episode short length - quality doesn't come from quantity, yadayada - or its unsurprising plot. The issue here is that I feel that Telltale is making mistake they managed to avoid making in the first two episodes with great intelligence ... and I can't see why, they failed on this one.

New Times Same Shit

Take the balance between old stuff and new stuff, for instance. This was my main concern before the second episode was released : was it going to look cheap, were the constraints on budget and time really going to show ? Situation : Comedy blew these doubts away : they did use what was already existing but they always put a smart,not-lazy-for-a-penny twist that made these assets look as if they'd been expanded for the new episode.
In The Mole, The Mob and The Meatball, all well known locations and characters are back but, unfortunately, they are presented the same way than before : same camera angle, same tone, same time of the day... changing the settings or providing alternate camera angle and camera tracks for the office and the street wouldn't have hurt. It was already the case in episode 2, but with the third installment, it's already growing old, which is q bad news as we're only mid-season.
It's like seeing the same establishing shot on the spaceship in Battlestar Galactica over and over again.

The recurring characters fall in the same trend : Bosco's paranoia, disguise and behind-the-counter supply were surprising thus funny in Situation : Comedy. Meanwhile, Sybil was great too : she had changed of job and her personality grew a bit thanks to that. In the third episode, Bosco and Sybil witness changes that follow the same pattern, and its isn't as compelling as before : more than anything else it makes them look as if they have been functiunalized. From the starting point, it feels like a recipe as been applied : you know that Bosco's obsession will be revealed to be true, you know that you will need him to give his behind-the-counter supply and you know that, Sybil's new job is going to be the key to a puzzle. Doing that, the designers and writers fall to a what I thought was a most renown weakness of episodic comedy : giving all recurring characters the same mechanisms of comedy twist and personality development. Of course, you can write one character to have the same routine over and over again, this is the base recurring humor; but it feels a bit cheap when both of the recurring characters are written this way.

And the new stuff ? There are few new locations, with less charm than the ones in Situation: Comedy, but with several environment animation that should compensate the loss. I say should because most of the camera angles don't put these location in a great light : most of the animations are out of frame and the camera makes amm location look empty. You'd never find a Casino as empty as the one from the toy mafia. The new characters ? Most of them are given the same model - I know it's an important point of the plot, but it wouldn't have hurt to give each mafioso a particular identity by giving it a distinctive animation.

Telltale, why have thou forgotten thee wisdom?

This kind of mistakes brings back the problem of the underlying skeleton of the adventure genre restraining storytelling and character development : once this bits of dialog feels like it's been written only to give the player clues or once a character seems written so that he offers skills that will solve the player's problem, you know there's something wrong. Well, pretty much everything in Episode 03 feels this way : you won't find a lot of assets that don't answer to some needs in terms of puzzle solving.
I find it weird because Telltale really showed the skills to ignore this deviation of the genre for the better : to this point, the characters in Sam & Max were fleshed out more than what was needed to solve the puzzle. The set-up of the story and the puzzles were designed so that the player was driven by curiosity and enjoyment for the task primarly, understanding only later how it fit into a bigger plan. Failure was always something you were going through willingly, knowing it would always be fun and would always construct the characters and the story a little more.
All of that is mysteriously lacking in the last episode : you go from one puzzle to another never managing to shake out the impression that you're solving puzzles and not playing the roles of Sam & Max. For the first time in the serie, you're reminded that you're in a game. This finds its pick in the final : a non-charismatic villain, mundane actions, no interesting failure ... it's really anti-climatic.

I thought over this a long time because I can't imagine how they could end up like, knowing that, Jake, who nailed the issues mentioned above in a fantastic thread on AdventureGamers, worked on this episode.

Sell game : a bit broken, but still very enjoyable

Is a game a pain in the ass while playing ? No, god, no : the tremendous writing and some shining yet marginal ideas ('Yo mamma's jokes' sequence, for instance) make playing the game an enjoyable experience, but not as surprising or as fulfilling as Situation Comedy was. I'd like to think that this is due to this being an episode of transition : the über-plot is changing in scope - from local conspiracy to a conspiracy involving national agents - but so was Situation : Comedy (from neighborhood to local) and it didn't prevent it from being a brilliant game. Overall, The Mole, The Mob and The Meatball is a bit infuriating in that it makes mistakes regarding trivial stuff, not while trying risky game designs.

Here, I'm done.