 Review By: Jared Black |
Developer: | Telltale Games |
| Publisher: | Telltale Games | |
| Genre: | Adventure | |
| ESRB: | Teen | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | OS: Windows XP / Vista Processor: 1.5GHz RAM: 256MB (512MB recommended) Video card: 32MB 3D-accelerated video card (64MB recommended) DirectX 9 |
After critical and commercial success with the Sam & Max franchise, deciding the next episodic series to launch was an important decision for Telltale. In selecting the Homestar Runner franchise and partnering with The Brothers Chaps, the company chose a brand that’s already well-known for having the same offbeat sense of humor, and whose format is already virtually episodic with weekly updates on Homestarrunner.com. The first episode in this new partnership, Homestar Ruiner, shows that this partnership is definitely a good match.
Despite the name of the website, for years the true star of the cartoons on Homestarrunner.com has been Strong Bad. Modeled after a wrestler in Data East’s horrible NES game Tag Team Wrestling (which featured a team known as the “Strong Bads”), this luchador mask and boxing glove wearing, shirtless, sarcastic “wrestleman” is Homestar’s arch-nemesis…or would be anyway if Homestar wasn’t mostly oblivious to the rivalry. In addition to regularly appearing in cartoons on the site, Strong Bad also “draws” the Teen Girl Squad series and answers weekly emails in severely long and drawn-out fashion, heckling his loyal fans’ poor spelling and general stupidity along the way. So yeah, Strong Bad is a bad guy, but a loveable one.
The actual storyline in this game is fairly simple, but you can tell that (much like the Sam & Max franchise) Telltale is using the first episode to build up to something bigger. Strong Bad hears about Homestar’s participation in the Tri-Annual Race to the End of the Race, and vows to crush Homestar’s hopes and dreams of victory via a good old-fashioned pummeling. Plans change, certain events backfire, Strong Bad does some scheming, and eventually Homestar ends up crashing at Strong Bad’s place. This of course means that Strong Bad’s new mission in life is to get Homestar to leave by any means necessary, and those means are often less than legal.
It’s obvious that Telltale worked closely with The Brothers Chaps throughout development, as Homestar Ruiner contains plenty of in-jokes and utilizes virtually all of the major characters fans would want to see in the game. That being said, the storyline is told so that it doesn’t exclude gamers that aren’t currently fans of Homestar Runner, for example none of the game’s puzzles require prior knowledge of the franchise to solve. The locales look exactly like they do in the Flash-based website as well, and of course all of the original voices are used (which boils down to Matt Chapman voicing every character but Marzipan, which is done by brother Mike’s wife Melissa Palmer).
Much like the Sam & Max series before it, gameplay in Homestar Ruiner involves classic point ‘n click adventuring. As Strong Bad the player will explore many popular areas throughout Free Country, USA, including the House of Strong (which serves as a central hub for the game), Bub’s Concession Stand, Marzipan’s house, The Field, The Track, and more. These are easily accessed via the map at any time, which cleverly allows the player to imagine how Strong Bad’s world looks to them and place each new location on the map wherever they please. This also allows the developers to get around actually mapping out the world, which means fervent fans will continue to obsessively piece together every little mundane detail in an attempt to form a legitimate map. I was a little disappointed that seemingly no new locations were used relative to what’s already found on the website, but I expected that since the first episode needs to establish Strong Bad’s world before branching out in later episodes.
Posted: 2008-08-11 05:26:36 PST