Sam & Max: Season 1 tries to continue what LucasArts stopped doing
a decade ago, namely being a point&click adventure in the very
classical sense. The interface is for most part what you expect, you
have an inventory as usual, classic dialog trees and control your
character by good old point&click. The interface however got
simplified in that you no longer have any verbs left, actions are
automatically triggered by simply clicking on things. While the world
is presented in 3D this time instead of 2D, you are working with a
fixed camera position, so the navigation stays pretty much exactly the
same as in the 2D days, but suffers from a few glitches in path finding
and the moving camera angle, which makes it hard to click on things
while your character is walking. The game also lacks a double-click
triggered run-function, which causes some walking to feel more tedious
then it should be.
The background graphics themselves are ok,
but nothing special. Cell-shading is non-existant and many textures
look uninteresting, so things look rather simplistic and bland and lack
the style that the old 2D games had. The animation in the cutscenes and
characters on the other side is quite well done. The graphics however
are rather demanding, on a Athlon1800XP with a Geforce5200fx they
barely work, its playable, but in some scenes the framerate goes below
what is tolerable (Note: this might or might not be due to running
under Linux in Wine).
Season 1 bundles six seperate episodes,
which causes some annoyances in that you have to deal with six seperate
executables, instead of a single one. This in turn also means that
savegames for all episodes are seperate and that the graphics settings
are seperate as well. So you have to configure each episode again and
can't quickly switch from one episode to the other. In terms of
configuration the game also lacks some options, there is no support for
widescreen monitors and the resolutions are fixed to 800x600, 1024x768
or 1280x960, so if you have a 1280x1024 monitor you either have to
stretch the image or live with black bars. There is also a lack of
scroll wheel support which could have been useful for dialog and
inventory navigation. While the game comes in quite a few languages, it
doesn't offer any way to switch the language in the game, you have to
reinstall the game to get a different language, which is annoying.
The
game works fine under Linux in Wine once one has installed the correct
No-CD cracks, without them it won't function. In older versions of Wine
the thumbnails for savegames won't work, but that seems to be fixed in
current versions.
Now to the game itself. The humor is good and
works fine for most part, it however often feels a little stuck in the
old days, since it makes to many references to old games and thus
sometimes doesn't feel like it can't stand on its own. The story per
episode are ok too, but due to their shortness lack depth and repeat
quite a bit, since most episodes follow a very similar pattern. The
game is also rather short on locations, per episode you basically only
have two locations to go to, one is the street where your office is
located and the other is something specific to the episode. You have to
move between those a lot to solve the puzzles so it gets a little
boring to revisit the office over and over again in each episode trying
to spot some tiny things that have changed and could be used in a
puzzle. Some more variation or episodes playing completly outside of
the office would have been nice. The overall story arc is sadly rather
non-existant, while there is always a tiny cliffhanger at the end of an
episode, it does little to give the overall Season 1 much meaning, you
are basically doing what you are supposed to be doing in an episode,
without thinking much how it would arc over the whole season. The game
tries a little to hard to be episodic, I would have preferred it if
they would have done a full adventure and then simply broke it into
chapters, then having six mini-adventures which don't really connect
much.
Anyway, all that nitpicking aside Sam & Max: Season 1
is a solid fun game. It can't quite match the adventures of the good
old days and has a few problems that could have been avoided, but what
it does it does well enough to be entertaining. It is no revolution to
the adventure genre and doesn't try to be one and while that annoys a
little bit, its also good to have an adventure game that simply tries
to be an adventure game and nothing else. It is simply good old
point&click fun, nothing more, nothing less.
