WiiWare Roundup Review

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Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner

• Developer: Telltale Games
• Publisher: Telltale Games
• Wii Points: 1000
• In Real Money: GBP 7.00 / EUR 10.00 (approx)

Point-and-click adventures are making a comeback. If you're a follower of the genre, this won't come as a revelation, and you may even argue that they never really went away. My own response to this revival has been muted, and I've been accused many times of being some lunk-headed FPS addict for my less than ecstatic response to some recent examples.

If I'm tough on adventure games, it's a tough love - born of a desire to see the genre not only return, but to thrive and evolve and make the same forwards strides that other vintage genres have managed over the last decade or so. For all my affection towards the episodic Sam & Max series, I could never shake the feeling that it represented something of a creative cul-de-sac - familiar, comfortable, predictable. Preaching to the choir, in other words, by playing on nostalgic affection for a particular control scheme rather than taking a step back and seeing how things could be made more accessible for those who didn't grow up in an era when LucasArts meant innovation.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that with Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, Telltale Games has finally delivered on the promise of their Sam & Max episodes. This is a point-and-click adventure - a very good point-and-click adventure - but it also feels refreshingly free of the restrictions of The Way Things Have Always Been Done.

Do you think this strangely placed pile of candy coupons might prove handy?

If you don't know anything about Strong Bad, or his do-gooder nemesis Homestar Runner, then you're going to be at a disadvantage since the game makes little to no effort to ease players into the bizarre world these webtoon characters inhabit. If that's you, head over to www.homestarrunner.com and get yourself acquainted. Suffice to say that Strong Bad is an arrogant, delusional buffoon and your goal in this introductory episode is to humiliate Homestar Runner to the best of your ability by defeating him in The Race To The End Of The Race. This ignoble quest has unforeseen consequences, and the second half of the episode deals with your efforts to set things right.

Obviously it's not difficult to recreate the visual style of the original animations, so what you get is essentially an interactive cartoon that looks and sounds just like the real thing. More than once I was reminded of the old Don Priestley ZX Spectrum adventures, with their enormous colourful characters and cheeky humour. Control is as you'd expect, with the Wii remote highlighting the things you want to examine or interact with, and the A button acting as a mouse-click. New locations can be added to the map - you even get to choose where to place them - and you can leap from place to place with a single click.

Telltale's scaling hint system remains from Sam & Max, allowing players to decide how many nudges in the right direction they want to receive. None of the puzzles are terribly tricky, mostly the expected array of inventory quests triggered by talking to the right characters, but it's a definite boon to those who do get stuck. Where the game earns additional praise is in its slightly non-linear construction - there are multiple tasks to be getting on with, and the game happily lets you advance each one piece by piece, in whatever order you fancy. There are also a host of hidden items, bonus trophies and other secrets to uncover, all squirreled away in the scenery, as well as mini arcade games to play (Snake Boxer 5!) and prank phone calls to make.

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