While we were all ridiculously pumped for Bionic Commando: Rearmed last week, there was another highly-anticipated downloadable game to tide us over for the first half of the week: Telltale Games' point-and-click WiiWare adventure Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People Episode One: Homestar Ruiner. Odds are good that if you're on the internet you're already somewhat familiar with the world of Homstar Runner and its brash luchador masked star Strong Bad, and, if you're anything like me, you were with them from fhqwhgads and quit right around Cheat Commandos. A quick glance through the Toons section of the site shows that, like The Simpsons and Family Guy, I'm probably better off for having missed the past few years of redundancy. How does this bode for the first official H*R video game?
The good news is the game is really funny. Much like their past efforts with Sam & Max and Bone, the team at Telltale Games has really paid close attention to their source material and delivered easily the funniest and most thoughtful Homestar Runner cartoon in years. The bad news is that this is a game, not a cartoon, and all the parts where you're not just kicking back watching the characters be incredibly rude to each other are... well... less than fun. In traditional point-and-click tradition, you, as Strong Bad, must collect all sorts of objects around town which you will use elsewhere to solve puzzles and progress the story or otherwise goof off. The entire game (episode 1 of 5) takes about two hours to play through, and much of that is wandering about trying collected items on different objects in the chance that it will cause something to happen. That's not to say there aren't a few fun sections of actual gameplay. I was particularly smitten with the goofy "stealth" section, and "The Race To The End Of The Race" was a pleasant blend of problem solving and action minigame, still, there is not much to justify Homstar Ruiner's existance as a game rather than a really well-produced cartoon.
Perhaps what is most troubling is the cost of the game. PC users, Telltale's primary demographic, can pick up each episode for $8US or subscribe to the full season of five for only $35 while Wii owners pay $10 for each episode, though I didn't notice much Wiimote integration. Buying all five will cost the same as a brand-new copy of Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros Brawl or most any other AAA Wii title except without any of the fancy packaging to show it off. Additionally, SBCG4APE1HR takes up more space in the Wii's internal memory than any other WiiWare game to date. Add to this the fact that several players have reported a game-freezing glitch and that I myself noticed numerous graphical glitches and this does not feel worth the price. A $10 downloadable console game these days is Bionic Commando: Rearmed, PixelJunk Eden or Paper Mario. In the past, Telltale has been nice enough to produce a disc version of their Sam & Max seasons for customers who purchased all of the individual episodes and I would feel more inclined to continue supporting this series if I knew SBCG4AP would get a similar treatment for Wii since I'm paying full price already. It's certainly more fun so far than Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law, which itself was little more than an animated movie with occassional breaks for pointing and clicking. It's a shame that none of these new point-and-click Wii adventures are nearly as engaging as Zack & Wiki...
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