The Pros and Cons of Culture Shock

what did you like,what worked, and what would you like to see?
what didn't you like, what would you like improved?
start listing!

the theory of this post is too put all feedback in here instead of having 100 individual posts

I had a few thoughts:

Pros-
-Quite funny
-Puzzles, while not difficult per se, are logical enough that completing them still made me feel clever
-Outstanding music

Cons-
- The lip sync is problematic, which is especially noticeable in close-ups.
- While I agree with the concept of eliminating verbs to make the game more streamlined, the right mouse button now does nothing. Why not have it set up such that the left button is "interact" and the right button is just "look"?

I might come up with more things, but overall I liked it very much, and I feel the urge to replay it just to check out every dialog tree.

The Thing I do not complain about: The voices

The voices are to my expectations for the new installments of Sam and Max. To me, the voices match what Sam and Max would sound like if they had voices.

PRO/CON: Mostly easy and a little hard...

Recently, I have been playing the point and click adventure games on Gametap. Some people may agree with me that in some of those games, in some instances, the puzzles are really in the vein of "WHAT? I cannot begin to understand the thought process needed to complete this! (Or, I am too lazy too...)"

Sam and Max does not have this in the overall scheme of things. Although alot of puzzles seem easy, there were some that probably got a lot of people to think, even me. (posting SAT scores to undermine whatever argument I am trying make is not required[though we all know you lie anyways])

Although, with the logical (sometimes read as: Lucky I tried THAT) approach, I am always awarded with The Funny.

I see Episode One as a begginer course into this style/genre of gaming and perhaps the world of Sam and Max. Perhaps the next episode could be a tad bit harder.

PROS
- music
- voice acting
- clever puzzle design
- animation
- writing(very funny)
- level of detail in the game
- dialogue trees where you answer as sam and max
- length(i'm quite happy with roughly 4 hours a month)
- price


CONS
- delivery of Sam's lines
- few locations
- story could be a lot weirder( in the sam and max sense)
- level of difficulty( if they are aiming for the seasoned adventure gamer..it needs to be harder)
- lack of verbs

[Alucard]

I'd have to agree with the lack of verbs being a con. For the designers it is a pro because it is less work for them. I'm not for going back to the monkey/monkey 2 set up (lots of verbs which made things funny at times)
but I think something like full throttle/ monkey 3 would be nice

Considering how I always considered the voices from Hit the Road to be the definitive voices of Sam and Max, I warmed up to the new voices pretty quickly. I could nitpick, but I give the new guys an 8 out of 10.

Now, I don't know if it's just my computer or not, but the actual sound quality of the voice acting sometimes seems kind of poor... almost as if they're too compressed. Some of it sounds kind of scratchy.

Like I said, maybe it's just my computer. But the dialogue and acting is so strong, it would seem like a shame if the sound quality got in the way of that at all.

It was too short, i mean it took me a week for each episode of Bone, in finished this in 2 days of a few hours...

MORE MORE MORE

And yes, the voices seem different then the ones in some of the previews i saw, they seem closer to the hit the road voices

And yeah i also noticed that at least on the gametap version that the compression was a lil too severe on the voices, since most people have broadband it wouldnt killa to give em a few more khz samples

And while i appreciate the ablity to play windowed and to go up to 1024, since most 19" lcds are 1280 it would have been nice to go up to that, or even better the full unadorned glory of my 24" dell

All i know is I signed up for a year of gametap just to play the game and it was worth it

I loved the game, the animation and oddities (I found a fish flopping in the rat hole?) were sweet. One of the best adventure games I've played (althoughI haven't played many).

One thing that bugged me through the entire game was the mouse though. I feel like I'm swining it around on a 10 foot poll. Perhaps a mouse sensitivity option. Perhaps it's my computer (Gametap said I didn't have a fast enough processor, but I have an AMD Athlon XP 2400 running at 2.0 ghz).

The mouse problem compounded my desire to move faster though text selection. I'd love it if the next episode of Sam and Max allowed you to make speech selections by hotkeys. It seems like most menus have 4 or 5 options so it seems like assigning each option to the numbers 1-5 on my keyboard would be a logical choice.

(Fix the mouse, but add the hotkeys anyway )

[Legolas813]

^ Lower the graphic settings and the mouse will move faster/smoother.

I found I could usually run the game on medium settings, but during certain scenes I had to put it all the way low for the mouse to move at an acceptable rate.

My specs:

1.5 GHz
768 RAM
64 MB video card

I really loved the game. I thought the humor was spot-on, the animation was excellent, the voice acting was great, and there were clever puzzle ideas/scenerios (like the whole dream sequence) that just made the game cool. It was just a blast to play, really, and I really look forward to the next one.

As far as suggestions, I think it definitely could have the difficulty raised a bit. Perhaps you could raise the difficulty more and more every episode? And, God-willing, every season. That way newcomers aren't overwhelmed by the challenging and creative puzzles, because they'll be eased into it. (Maybe that's what's already going to be done?)

I think the graphics look nice, but the intro/outro really made me realize how cool the game would look cell-shaded (obviously not just two-toned). It would maintain the 3Dness but also maintain that cartoony quality of Sam and Max that we've all grown to know and love. Not essential, it would just be cool.

I think more verbs and the ability to combine items would be cool. Even if "more verbs" just means to look and a context-sensitive action (perhaps simply left click/right click). That way they would only need to add a little extra dialogue to the objects you can actually interact with. Combining items is just fun. And it seems Max needs a little more of a part in the story. Having him be an item was a fun element in HTR because Sam often uses Max as an item in the comic series. And usually the results of using Max as an item are hilarious.

I personally had a problem with the graphics being too high. Everything ran smoothly when inside the apartment/Bosco's/etc. but outside it was really sluggish, as well as certain scenes with more animations and characters. I was running on the lowest settings possible. I guess you could just say to me, "get a faster computer," but since this game is meant to appeal to a wide audience, perhaps adding a third option of decreasing the graphics quality even further would help those like me who aren't updating their computers every year. After all, graphics are great, but it's really the actions, dialogue and play control that are important.

I know, a lot of suggestions, but it's only because I loved this game and I want subsequent games to be even better that I'm making them. Thanks for bringing back Sam and Max!

I suggest releasing a demo before the game's release.

Mike, it's essentially shareware, so it will undoubtedly have the same "try before you buy" strategy as Bone.

[Hero1]

keep it going

[baardhimself]

Pros:
Its Sam and Max, finally!
Script is magnificent
Max's voice acting
Graphics are stunning and highly polished

Cons:
$10,000 Puzzle was poor
Sams voice acting
Having to wait for part 2!

[Mikkel]

I love the game.

The one thing I thought could be improved, was the controls. Like people've mentioned; it felt a little weird not having a right-click option; the interface felt a little bit constraining actually, which is not a good thing when you already have a really limited/closed environment (not many locations). The result is what feels like a pretty "small" game.

In addition, I felt the controls were a little "slow". It would be great if you could set the mouse speed manually within the game. I'm used to working with a very high mouse sensitivity and speed, so the control felt kinda sluggish.

But this is nothing. The game was GREAT.

[Erwin]

Hehe, the first thing I did when I played it for the first time was exactly that: Trying to right-click. But I got used to it pretty quickly, and it never bothered me.

--Erwin

[Markusdragon]

It was too short :P

Now what am I going to do for the other 29 days of November? University work?

[JK1985]

Originally Posted by Mikkel

it felt a little weird not having a right-click option; the interface felt a little bit constraining actually, which is not a good thing when you already have a really limited/closed environment (not many locations). The result is what feels like a pretty "small" game....
... The game was GREAT.

I couldn't agree more!

[0renji]

Pros:
-I was laughing a lot. In fact I found the humour in Hit the Road to be kind of gentle in comparison... I don't mean less funny, just sort of a different type of humour. I didn't really laugh out loud with HtR, but I did here.

-For such a short game, SO MUCH STUFF. I was overjoyed being able to click almost everything in the office, although I wish we could have seen the 'back' of the office too (you can see it while Sam/Max are talking sometimes)

-The graphics are fairly amazing. Nothing is blurred, backgroundy stuff; you can read all the text on everything (like the post-it on the calender). Even parts which aren't really seen are that detailed, like the office back.

-References back to HtR. Especially liked the comment about the old car.. I was wondering about it ;D This just made it seem like Telltale were way more involved than LucasArts would have been perhaps. Like a fan game, but, you know, actually good (fan games almost never are, eh!)

-Logic/smart-assery in item combos is rewarded with different lines instead of the standard not-doing-that lines.

-Inventive! I loved the whole psychoanalyis dream part. It was neat. As was the hypnosis dream part.

-Others seem to hate it, but Sam's voice was cool; he was the only break in the high-pitched irritation of Max and the Soda Poppers too. It sounded fairly HtR-ish to me, but I might be an idiot.

Cons:
-I was this close to trying to strangle Max. I feel more instances where Sam says something alone are needed, but that might be because I find Max's voice irritating.

-No seperate look and use buttons, although you could right-click inventory objects to look at them. The inventory would then close just to annoy me. Ack.

-Sometimes if you use an item, then right-click to skip dialogue lines, your cursor will get stuck as that item until you use a different one or go to another place.

-Fairly slow plot, as plots go. Most puzzles were straight-forward too, except one or two I got stuck on. They did turn out to be logical enough, I just wasn't getting them.

-I know this was kind of what I expected, but even for a short episodic game, it felt... SHORT. Maybe due to not much happening in the plot?

-I feel a little animation of Sam TRYING to hit the Soda Poppers wouldn't have gone amiss. Because the first time I saw them run away, I was like "what the hecks just happened?" maybe I'm just dumb. :x I - I mean - if I were Sam I would have hit them while they were doing the run-away pose just before they leave. Y'know.

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I wrote lots. :'( I wrote lots cause I CARE. I seem negative but... for the amount of time the game took (2 and a half hours, for me), awesome overall. Awesome. We heart you Telltale :'D