SAM & MAX HIT THE ROAD (1993)

You play Sam (a Canine Shamus) and Max (a hyperkinetic rabbity thing), the
freelance police. Travel all over the US on the trail of a sasquatch named Bruno
kidnapped from his place at the Hall of Oddities, and on the way visit locations
like The World's Largest Ball of Twine, The World of Fish, and The Mount Rushmore
Dinosaur Tarpit. You must find the missing Bigfoot and Trixie, the girl with a
giraffe neck, and defeat Conroy Bumpus, the evil country singer! Makes one Hell of
a plot!

The puzzles involve some of the most twisted humor in a Lucasarts adventure game,
and the dialogue including a non-sequitur option goes way over the top. Though the
parental warning on the cover seems a bit much (seemed at first like a joke, but
Lucasarts seems to take it a little to seriously). Sam & Max is not entirely an
adventure game - every once in awhile there'll be an action sequence like Wak-A-
Rat. This was also the first LUCASARTS game featuring the new interface with no
verbs at the bottom but a changable mouse symbol (USE, LOOK, TALK) to innitiate
actions. I found that development towards even more simplicity a step in the wrong
direction. But the system was copied enough by other companies (like Sierra) and
became a standard.

Unlike "Day of the Tentacle" with its one cozy location, "Sam & Max" is mostly
about discovering new locations and then visiting them. The whole game is constant
jumping from one hilarious place to another, and you don't have time to hold your
breath and to look around, because the game continues pushing you forward. This
bizarre world is so complete that even the interface and the famous dialogue
system had to change: you now talk to people without knowing what you are going to
say. The "duck" icon is particularly worthy of notice: you click on it just to
hear one more joke - no, even not joke, but one of those "nonsenses", that are so
typical not only for "Alice", but for English tradition in general.

But there's also enough real American humor in the game. Americans like laughing
when they notice everywhere things they are familiar with. Pop culture references,
slight satire, a bit of parody - this is the healthy American humor that is also
present in "Sam & Max". There are lots of such things in the game - I just
remembered that place with the Vegetables...

The puzzles follow the same style. Forget about anything reminding deduction - use
everything on everything, click till you have no feeling in your index any more,
try, experiment, don't be afraid - you can't die. "Day of the Tentacle" had pretty
crazy puzzles, but upon closer inspection, they could be revealed as quite
logical, in their own way. The puzzles in "Sam & Max" have no logic, no matter
from which angle you look at them. Is this bad? No, because if you agree to enter
this world, you shouldn't expect the puzzles to be of the "use key to open the
door" kind. Like "Day of the Tentacle", this is comedy, 100% comedy, only comedy
and nothing more. And, also like "Day of Tentacle", there is nothing here that
isn't comedy - characters, plot, dialogues, puzzles, and graphics. It is just
bigger and badder than "Day of the Tentacle", and it loses the last drops of
sanity that still remained in that other wacky product.

But the new more simplistic interface in my opinion severed the last connection to
classic IF and that's why SAM & MAX was the last one in line during the golden era
of adventure games. After that LUCASARTS produced other nice games (like The Dig,
Full Throttle or Grim Fandango) but they never managed to reach the same level of
deepness again as in their former products.

THE GAME

WALKTHROUGH

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