Publisher: The Adventure Company
Developer: Telltale Games
System: PC
Minimum requirements: 1.5GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, 32 MB 3D accelerated video card, Windows XP/Vista
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Jason Pitruzzello

When I first received news from my editor that I’d be reviewing Sam and Max Season One, I couldn’t understand his casual smiley in the email indicating this was a fun assignment. Somehow, I missed Sam and Max Hit the Road when it came out for DOS in 1993, so I had no idea what to expect as I installed the game and began to play. What I encountered had my jaw dropping at first, before waves of laughter overcame my normally grim gaming personality.

I won’t go into significant detail about the history of the series, as knowing it isn’t necessary to playing and enjoying this title. Suffice to say, “Sam and Max” was a comic book created by Steve Purcell in 1987. Sam is a six foot tall anthropomorphic dog dressed like a stereotypical detective; Max is a hyperactive, almost psychotic, white rabbit. They are private investigators, but they refer to themselves with the term “freelance police.” They pursue a life of busting criminals; however, as becomes readily apparent in Sam and Max Season One, the criminals they pursue make Dr. Evil of Austin Powers fame look like a well adjusted human being. Villains such as former child stars, Mafioso dressed like characters from a sinister version of Chuck E. Cheese’s, and a robotic marble statue of Abraham Lincoln all require the duo’s crime fighting attention.

As the name implies, Sam and Max Season One isn’t a single game; rather, it is a compilation of six smaller offerings, episodes one through six, which Telltale Games released episodically beginning on Oct. 17, 2006 with episode one, titled Culture Shock. Their re-release as Season One has retained the episodic format. Upon clicking the desktop icon, you choose an episode to play, and it whisks you off to do just that. There are no carryover effects from one episode to the next, so there’s no restriction to playing them out of order. Furthermore, the stories, while having an overall arc, are self-contained and you won’t be lost if you play them out of sequence. However, no one should be put off by its episodic structure. Given the nature of the characters and the story, the format works very well, even when all of the episodes are packaged together on the same CD.

Sam and Max Season One is structured as an adventure title. All of the usual game elements we’ve come to expect from adventure titles are there, including collecting and using inventory items in creative ways to solve problems and conversing with characters to learn new things and advance the plot. A good portion of the game also consists of interacting with the environment in which the characters are placed. Whether it’s Bosco’s paranoid security systems at the local store or the War Room at the White House, there’s almost no end to the clicking and the interacting and the resulting zany humor.