Telltale Games

LOL keep them coming, these are great. Can we please hear some news about the game though? atleast a sign that it's already started in development atleast..

What the hell is going on? Who said the line "Thank god it's royal cockroach neurosurgeon... "?

This better not be the plot of the new game: Cockroaches stealing Sam's brain! Then again, that IS pretty silly!

CONFUSION! DOO DOO!

does this mean there are multiple earwigs or its eggs in Sam's head?

Sam**

lol typo

Pheeph do you really think you are the one being rude

ah wakin' up to S&M. It's a mother's wet dream, brought to feverish post operative life!

I swear I'm gonna die luaghing and die happy. I wonder if this is a clue to what the game plot will be like. Or maybe the plot will be based on the original comics.

Awesome story telling that!

Good to have Sam and Max back, Steve. Are you ever going to do some more of your other stuff like Rusty Razorclam or that one from Hellboy, Toybox?

Detect I the birth of a new villain? That's not a roach, it has those little pincher thingies in the last frame. He's gonna be the midwife for a villain the likes of which have never before been seen!!!

I don't count episodes as another game, BONE is garbage, nuff said. I don't like "1 button does all" attitudes, the game is easy and terribly boring. Unless this chapter two adds things like push take look at etc, and take out the highlighting of objects you can interact with, it's still crappy as the first one.

Just discovered today that Sam & Max is back. I still have my compilation I got forever ago on my shelf - keep up the great work, Steve :)

- Why would the second one be any diferent from the first? They use the same engine and whatenot, BTW minigames don't appeal to me and thats probably abnout the only change -

Because they listened to all the feedback on the first Bone game and made significant changes to the second (minigames, voices, difficulty, length, price...). If you don't want to play it, fair enough. But you really have no right to slag it off, nor to make assumptions on Sam & Max.

"If they're are more than one then maybe I will try it."

WTH?! USE/TAKE/TALK are all there. If you want more commands, go play Universe or something.

There were hundreds of commands in Zork, 20 or so in Monkey Island 1 & Indy Jones & the Last Crusade, 9 or so in MI2 & Fate of Atlantis, Maybe 3 in Monkey island 3 & 4 & Grim fandango.

It's a natural progression.

Most people prefer not to cycle through a large number of commands and have separate icons for open, use, take, push etc. It may make the game more difficult, but also more tedius to the vast majority of players. Sound like all you want is to turn off the context-sensitive cursor (that figures you'd rather open a door than look at it or talk to it) which is fair enough.

You prefer games where the most-likely thing you're trying to do isn't preselected or the default action on the cursor. To each there own, but the things you were saying earlier about the company and their future Sam & Max episodes were over the top.

The BONE games have been clearly marketed to introduce people who may not be familiar with the adventure genre to the joys of such games. Out From Boneville was marked at a 2/6 difficulty level on the website. Cow Race is marked 3/6 difficulty wise. I believe I have read interviews saying that Sam & Max will be much higher on the difficulty rating.

So don't write the company off just yet, and if you haven't already, join the boards an place feedback. Tell them you'd like an option to disable the context-sensitive cursor. They may just grant your request in later releases.

"You just don't get it, they're are 9 commands to say monkey island and Sam and MAx, and thus makes the game dificult."

Actually Sam & Max didn't have more than 4 commands. Use, talk, pick up & examine. Five if you count Walk.

It isn't the commands that make these games hard, it's the items - finding them, combining them, figuring out where to use them.

You don't seem to know what you're talking about to be honest. One thing I agree with you is that there should be more than *one* command. Still, those four mentioned above are enough.

I think that if you believe the amount of verbs that were on the screen had anything to do with what made those classics great, you're way off.

As JP pointed out, the LucasArts adventure game interfaces got increasing more streamlined. The original Maniac Mansion had fifteen verbs, many of which were completely unnecessary. By Monkey Island 1 they had it down to 12, and by Full Throttle there were no verbs at all (at least as such). The interface of The Dig, which is very similar to Telltale's, had you pretty much doing everything with one click, and if you think that made the game any less insanely hard, well, you haven't played The Dig.

You're mistakenly equating the structure of the interface with challenge. You have a problem with Bone being easy, fine. But the idea that the game should be more challenging by making the interface cumbersome and more confusing is terrible design, and the reason those older games had funny responses attached to them was to make fun of an unnecessarily complicated interface, and simplifying it does not close the door to small humorous moments like the ones you described. The challenge of the game should be the puzzles, and Bone had easy puzzles because it was made for a wide audience, including kids and people who have never played a game before (Telltale stated this). It was definitely not made specifically for hardcore adventure gamers, though they were part of the target. From what they've said Sam & Max will be closer to a more traditional adventure game, so maybe you'll find more reason to like it.

My opinion? You don't know what you really liked about the old adventure games and are clinging to outdated ideas to define what made them great. And the answer to what the made them great was the story, the world, the characters, the dialog, the humor. That you think a true adventure needs to be difficult to get into and should not for any reason feature minigames is telling. I find it understandable that you don't like Bone because it's too easy, but there was a reason why it was that way, and it wasn't because the interface was accommodating.

To Udvarnoky, the Dig blew in my opinion, too boring, no interactivity and no explanation to the puzzles, just fiddle with nobs until you win.

Maniac mansion is on of the best and hardest adventure games, as for monkey island, the first and second are the best, whereas the last two were good but not great.

I don't see anything complicated about an interface with a few commands. Here my veiw of bone. Imagine mario, without the pipes, without the enmies, without the cliffs, and without any obstacle in your way, and to top it off theres only one level. That's bone. You can slowely remove thing's and adventualy what do you have? Nothing. Personnaly I aslo like Sierra adventure games where you type better than lucasarts games.

Adventure game companies are getting lazy in my opinion it's easy to program one command on a few select objects rather than 9 commands or so on EVERY object, including the walls in some areas. Bone everything stands out and shout's I"M OVER HERE.

Here's the thing, I don't give a rat's ass about story in ANY game, I've played plenty of games I find fun but don't like the story. As for humor you may be right, but it's still a small part of the game. Indianna Jones wasn't humorous and it was fun, the story was meh and the dificulty was at a great level.

I KNOW what I like and what I hate. I hate Bone because it might as well be a movie like I've stated. Really I find the characters ok the story seems good, but the game BLOOOOWS.

Games are made for Gameplay and dificulty, frankly story comes last.

^ can be to

Ah, glorious randomness. Sam and Max. Woo.

If a game has bad gameplay, it isn't fun therefore it's a terrible game nuff said. Interactivity is important and it is gameplay, Bone has little to no interactivity and therefore bombs.

Like I said above Bone is an adventure game stripped down until you can hardly call it an adventure game. Like mario without obstacles, an rpg without battle, a stratagy game without an opponent, etc.

Pushing one button from time to time isn't interactivity, a dunking bird could replace you.

Having only played the Bone demo, I can't really make much of an informed comment, but it seemed like it was not geared towards the sort of puzzling gameplay that games like the original Sam & Max, Monkey Island, Discworld Noir (to name a non-LucasArts title) sported. I expect this would make the more 'hardcore' adventure game fans feel that the 'revival of the adventure game genre' was a little anti-climactical, but I wouldn't necessarily say it lacked or had bad gameplay. Gameplay is far to vague and subjective a thing.

Bone was also Telltale's first foray into this type of genre as well as this format of distribution. I expect that by the time Sam & Max rolls around, there'll be a little more experience with the dynamics of eposodically released adventure games. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to look into The Great Cow Race. I'd be interested to see how it compares with Out From Boneville given that the community response (as I read it) was that it was too easy and too short.

All that said, Out From Boneville did well enough not to destroy Telltale or its Bone franchise, so it can't have been that bad.

There's a McGruff banner ad at the bottom of the page. That's pretty funny.

I liked Monkey Island 3 and Grim Fandago just as well as the earlier games. But I agree with Bonemasher on a couple of points - if there's too little interactivity in an adventure game I have little to no interest "playing" it. I want it to feel like it's me doing all the things as the character, not the whole thing playing out by itself because I click something.

I tried out Paradise today - from the looks of it, it's a terrible game. The mouse icon sucks bigtime and everything just seems so random - I don't feel like I'm acting as the main character, rather what I said above; I click on things when the icon changes and things happen. I don't need to think about anything. Dialogue is good, but this seems to have useless filler that's really uninteresting, it turns me off bigtime.

I'm going to try out the Bone Act 2 demo and see how much I like it.

This is awesome.

- Jesus Christ

I know it's my opinion, but I think it's pretty stupid to play a game for it's story, why not watch a movie? Or read a book, so you don't have the gameplay in the way. I play games for games, I don't understand how you could do otherwise really.

Honestly, I play sam and max hit the road, not because it's sam and max, in fdact whenh I first played the game I had no idea who the hell they were. The story of the game was decent so I decided to read the comics. The comics storys are better than the game, so to me I can't see why anyone would play the game for the story when you could just read the comics.

Also if you do play games for the story, WHY do people keep saying Bone is a good game? Say it's got a good story. Theres no game there, so don't pretend there is.

Sometimes games provide an atmosphere that movies, comics, and books can't. The level of interactivity keeps you actively paying attention no matter what. That's something that the comics can't offer. And just because you don't like the gameplay doesn't mean the rest of us don't. To each their own.

But yeah, the old comics rocked so hard. I'm glad to see them back.

wait... hook for foot-- well played

Extremely too much time between comics, this website is going off my favorites list.

What happened? I was loving this comic even though it was hard for me to wait a month between installments...but now I'd be grateful for even THAT. I've been patiently waiting for the next installment for a long, long time...

I just looked up ethylene glycol, the chemical the doctor mentions in the first panel. It's a component of antifreeze and is toxic in small doses. Hahaha.