Most of the graphical and gameplay features from the first game can be found in SBtF. The tutorial has been copied exactly into the new episode, and players who are new to the series should check out this brief sequence to get familiar with character movement, conversation and inventory manipulation. All of the locations from the first game are there to be visited, including the Photo Booth, where you can dress Strong Bad up in wardrobe items found in the environment and take screenshots of him that can be saved to your hard drive.

As similar as the first two episodes are, setting-wise, there are also several new locations to explore. Pom Pom (the character Strong Bad framed for being on steroids in Homestar Ruiner) has a disco in his territory, which he rules as its shogun, complete with a samurai sword hanging on the wall. Homsar, a regular web-comic cast member making his debut in the game series, is a floating character who speaks in strangely constructed sentences with a goofy southern accent—until you visit his country and solve a puzzle that normalizes his voice. Additionally, Strong Bad’s bulbous, whiny brother, Strong Sad, who was mostly relegated to the tutorial in the first story, gets his own sliver of land, most of which is inside the house he shares with Strong Bad.

The player’s mission in SBtF is simple: visit an adjoining territory and solve a puzzle that convinces the local ruler to merge with Strong Badia in the fight against The King of Town. As each new land is annexed, a brief cut scene in the form of an old-fashioned newsreel describes the merger, and the next adjacent areas are made available to conquer. Once Strong Bad has acquired most of the spaces on the map, his assault on the King’s castle begins. There are also three minigames in the new episode. The Teen Girl Squad from Episode 1 returns (the vapid high-school girls go back to the prehistoric era in search of boys, and your job, as before, is to kill them off before the comic ends). There’s another eight-bit console game—Math Kickers, in which you control kung-fu fighters to solve algebra problems, and finally, there’s Maps and Minions, a board-game simulation in which you try to shepherd chess-style pieces from one side of the board to the other.

The first episode of the series, Homestar Ruiner, featured a simple design and a colorful graphic style that complemented a seriously funny script, and has become one of the hottest properties for the recently launched Wiiware service for the Nintendo console. Does Strong Badia the Free keep the momentum going, or does it make the series take a giant step backward? On to the numbers…