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Feb 25, 2008

Review: Sam and Max Ep. 203: Night of the Raving Zombies



Telltale Games, GameTap
Available now for PC download

Welcome back the dog and hyperkinetic rabbity thing!

Sam and Max, once a cult PC game that seemed destined to collect dust in bargain bin shelves, has finally been resurrected with several sequels, to once again take over the world one PC at a time. The LucasArts point and click adventure game has been renewed and redone for a new generation by game company, Telltale Games and fans, old and new are loving the new incarnation of the 1993 game.

Over 11 episodes have created for the Sam and Max series and Telltale games plans to keep them coming as long as the fans continue download them. The newest episode in the series is Night of the Raving Dead and that’s raving as in rave dance as oppose to raving mad. In this episode, Sam and Max find their neighbour over run by zombies and must defeat the emo vampire master, Jurgen who behind their resurrection. Jurgen owns a dark castle turned trendy night club for zombies, which is where the raving part in the title comes from.



The humour from the original game is alive and well in this sequel and will have everyone laughing at the clever banter between characters and all the inside jokes. The original theme song is still in use, but the graphics have been updated with a new 3D cartoon look. The characters sound pretty close to the original 1993 game’s voice actors, but I was disappointed to see that the voices sometimes didn’t match the lip movements on the characters.

Load times between different scenes are a little slow and the general pausing is confusing at first, because it looks like your computer freezes. A loading icon or something would have been nice to avoid unnecessary reboots. The game controls are easy to pick up since it’s just “point and click” to move, pick up and interact with objects and people. Some puzzles come easy while others may have you running between screens for hours. You can adjust the amount of hints Max throws at you during the game though, which can help out the slow people.

With such a cheap price, and easy “purchase and download” delivery system, there is no reason why you shouldn’t download all of Season 1 & 2 of Sam and Max. You can download directly from the Telltale website or Gametap.com, or you can even pick up Season 1 in stores. Join Sam and Max, the Freelance Police today or we’ll sick Max on you. He bites … a lot.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Buy it!

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