Telltale Games has proven two things with its on-going Sam & Max adventure game series. One, it’s one of the few developers able to produce serialized game content with enough regularity that it actually qualifies as episodic. Two, traditional adventure games–the kind that most people have declared to be dead, myself included–can still be plenty of fun, so long as they’re real, real funny.
Telltale will be bringing both of these proficiencies to bear in Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, an episodic adventure series based on the long-running Strong Bad Email cartoons found on Homestarrunner.com. Telltale will be bringing Strong Bad to both the PC and WiiWare, and I got a hands-on look the latter at Nintendo’s recent media summit.
While playable, there’s not much to say about the underlying mechanics of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. From what we saw, this is a straightforward point-and-click adventure game, which makes the Wii-based controls a real natural fit. You’ll get missions via email on your Lappy 486, interact with characters, travel to different locations, collect and combine items, and so on. The real strength seems to be a capacity for capturing the humor of the Homestar Runner universe and its characters, and the funniest parts of the demo were apropos of nothing. I played quick round of Snake Boxer 5, a video game that bears a striking resemblance to Boxing for the Atari 2600, except for, you know, with snakes. Having found Homestar Runner’s Sonny-Crockett-style cell-phone in the kitchen, I had Strong Bad call himself, which led to an awkward crank call on his own answering machine.
I could go on, but there are few things less funny than someone trying to describe something that’s actually funny. Suffice it to say, there were a few chuckles in what I saw, and with the capable Telltale writers working closely with the Chapman brothers–the creators of Strong Bad–I expect there to be many more. Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People will consist of five monthly episodes that will kick off this June.